Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  These were the bitterest core of the Chattian tribe’s heart, men, and several women, who had deserted home village and kin to live as outlaws. The Chattian Assembly, forced by the war into grudging cooperation with Rome, disavowed all Witgern’s acts in the presence of imperial observers. But when the chieftains of the Assembly returned to their villages, they sent out to Witgern’s rebel band whatever meat, drink, or hides their families could spare. Witgern had forsaken hoe and plow when he left his clan, and was dependent on this secret largesse.

  Witgern had drawn his men into the “swine’s head” formation, a long, single rank with the most seasoned wolves at its center. He was seized with a fierce sadness as he gazed upon the fort. So many beloved friends had left him through death in battle, or through capture, that for years now he’d felt a stronger attraction to the netherworld than to this bright middle world of tumult and sorrow. When scarce more than a boy, he had been a companion of the immortal chieftain Baldemar, who held off Rome for a generation, and then of his daughter, Auriane, when she took his band at his death. He counted those the finest days of his life. Now he wanted only for the ghost of Baldemar to let him sleep.

  Witgern had learned that Firmius Speratus hoarded within that fort the living relic most cherished by his people.

  SPERATUS RUSHED INTO his own quarters, intent on performing one last act. He knew he must accept the likelihood that the fort might be burned.

  He hurriedly gathered up all the official documents—stacks of thin wooden sheets on which the year’s expense accounts were inscribed in neat, inked lines; his men’s service records and the papers stating their time of release; a journal of daily events; letters from the high command at Mogontiacum; and a treasured commendation on vellum he’d received from the Emperor Trajan himself. Hastily he crushed all these into an iron strongbox, feeling in one moment that he singlehandedly preserved a world, a small civilization known only to himself and a few isolated others immured within these frontier forts.

  Then he took from its wall mount a gem-encrusted barbarian sword that he’d carried about from camp to camp for years, always believing it brought him good fortune. He’d purchased it in Rome, during the auction of the spoils of the Chattian War. Rough-cut gemstones round its hilt flashed colors of sky, water, and blood. The auctioneer had assured the crowd it once belonged to the most notorious of all Chattian chiefs, Baldemar. Speratus was half-inclined to believe the auctioneer a lying mountebank. But once, in Rome, he’d taken the sword to a naturalist learned in the ways of the northern tribes, who had insisted that such a weapon would only have belonged to a chieftain of highest rank. And Speratus had personally spoken to a soldier who’d been present in the field during the Chattian War’s final assault. This man told him that Baldemar’s strange, Amazonian daughter, Auriane, who’d taken possession of the sword at her father’s death, had lost it on the battlefield when she was captured and taken prisoner. When Firmius Speratus was first posted on the Limes, he’d shown the sword to a Chattian battle-seeress, who had broken into tears, begging him to let her have it so she could return it to her people. The savage signs round the hilt, she claimed, spelled out Baldemar’s name in runic glyphs, and below this were letters that signified the mountain cat, from which the Chattian tribe took its name. To Firmius Speratus, the longsword was more than a fine war trophy. He believed it a thing of potent mystery that kept the fort from harm.

  Until now.

  At the back of his quarters was a small pit intended for burying the silver plate. Into this he placed the sword, then he hastily covered it over with earth.

  WITGERN MUTTERED A prayer to the land spirits.

  “Old Ones, we are your paws. Old Ones, we are your eyes. We are a proud pack. We feed on victory. Let our blood run strong as we strike in the name of the groves.”

  “All glory to Sun and Moon,” came a whispered response from his men.

  “Aid us as we strike in the name of Baldemar, great breaker of rings. Be with us as we strike in the name of Wodan, who brings us every bright gift . . .”

  “All glory to Sun and Moon.”

  Witgern made no effort to check an unwolflike tear that started down a soot-blackened cheek.

  “. . . aid us as we strike in the name of our living shield, Auriane.”

  A CONTINENT OF clouds drifted over the moon, snuffing out its light. In the sudden darkness Witgern’s men surged forward almost soundlessly over moist fallen leaves, scenting the freshly dug ditch, and flowing around it. A river of wolves rushed toward the fort. The men on the rampart walk heard them before they saw them, alerted to a soft, fast, percussive sound that might have been mistaken for sudden rain. Speratus signaled to the tubicen, who gave a single, urgent blast on his long trumpet, and the first round of javelins arced into the void. A dozen of Witgern’s men were struck, but most were not, for at that moment the band split like a stream, half seeking the west gate, and half, the east. The cornicen’s curved horn gave a deep, hollow moan, calling the men’s attention to the standards. They were to fall around to the west and east gates, where Witgern’s men were massing like wasps in the double ditches about the fort. The western contingent of Wolf Coats ignited torches and tossed tied bundles of burning straw onto the sentry walk, successfully engaging a quarter of Speratus’s men in a frenzied effort to put out the blaze. Simultaneously, the eastern contingent quietly converged on the opposite gate, and pressed against the iron-bound outer door, with its oak planks thick as a man’s arm. Their confederate within the fort did not fail them: It fell away, for its heavy crossbar had been removed. Wolf-men collected in the space between the doors, awaiting the sound of a stout iron bolt moving against wood, the signal that the crossbar of the inner door was sliding back.

  The Wolf Coats poured in. Witgern was aided by the legionaries’ terror as they were confronted with fur-clad Chattian warriors swinging swords like scythes, eyes brilliant with the fire of the draughts, faces and bodies darkened with soot and ash; half engaged them, but great numbers of the untried Ubian auxiliaries dropped from the palisade and fled off into the forest, certain they faced not men, but some deathless spawn of the northern bogs. In less time than it would have taken the soldiers to bring a cauldron of spelt porridge to boil, the fort belonged to Witgern.

  FIRMIUS SPERATUS WAS awakened by impossible heat on his face. Was the sun coursing too close to the earth? He lay on his back in his own quarters, bathed in a moist warmth that was comforting until he realized it was his own blood. Slaughterhouse smells, grisly silence—how well he knew these things. It meant a battle was lost.

  The barracks blocks were aflame. He knew the direction of the wind.

  He would be burned alive.

  The doorway filled with a shaggy silhouette, and a near-naked Chattian warrior stepped almost tentatively into Firmius Speratus’s quarters. A profusion of hides sprouted from his shoulders like some outlandish dangling mane; about his waist was the fabled wolfskin belt the Chattians believed had the power to transform man into loping beast.

  Nemesis. One of the murdering swine stayed behind. Stop hesitating, you stinking brute. Send me quickly to Hades.

  Speratus saw the man’s face and stifled a scream. In the next instant he realized the warrior was wearing a wolf mask; the leering animal face was painted on crudely carved wood.

  The centurion lay utterly still, waiting for death. But the Wolf Coat expressed no interest in him. He removed the mask and crossed at once to the corner of the barracks room, found the place where the earth was freshly disturbed, and began digging with a broken potsherd. Speratus, feeling death pressing close, felt little inclination to wonder how the savage knew precisely where to go. The Wolf warrior half-turned once, while brushing a rope of matted hair from his forehead, and Speratus saw the man’s face by the light of the flames that were consuming his fort. It must have once been possessed of some beauty, but was now pitted like stone battered by the elements, and transformed into a Cyclopean horror: Where an eye should have
been was a collapsed place; there, the blackened flesh was fisted closed. His good eye was charged with a sad, soulful brilliance. Witgern. Legend held he’d put out the eye himself, long ago, when his countrywoman Auriane betrayed him in the matter of a marriage.

  Witgern lifted the jeweled sword from its earthen cradle, held it aloft, and began to mutter the words of some savage prayer.

  A fresh gust of heat swept in, and Speratus felt like raw dough thrust into a baker’s oven. Soon his flesh would crackle and start to rise.

  Witgern was weeping over the sword.

  Take your loot and get out, you whimpering beast, so I’ll have a chance at crawling out of here alive.

  Witgern turned about, and the gazes of centurion and barbarian met.

  For an oddly long moment Witgern did not move. Speratus saw much in that single eye—mourning tangled about hope, a love of song, the sorrow of one who shouldered on his back the burden of doomed thousands . . . but no, this was an unlettered brute. His fevered mind was conjuring qualities that were not there.

  The roof caught fire.

  Witgern moved toward Firmius Speratus. Now I’ll die by the blade of my own cursed war relic. He closed his eyes and prayed to the shade of his dead mother.

  But Witgern seized him roughly by his legs—at first he thought the savage wanted his boots. Then the old Wolf warrior dragged him out to the safety of the yard. Witgern left him there, and moments afterward, Speratus heard a crash of timbers as the roof fell in, and the fire, greatest of wolves, swallowed his quarters whole. Then he heard a furious clatter of hooves rapidly retreating through the east gate. Witgern had stolen a horse and was gone, leaving Speratus wondering in his wake—was this a plain act of compassion, or did the famous rebel hope to win mercy for himself, were he ever captured? Did Witgern merely want someone of rank left alive to tell the tale? Or was it because Speratus had long been guardian of what Witgern counted sacred treasure? When he tried to puzzle it out, he felt he peered into a fathomless night sky.

  “IT WAS A night of folly,” Firmius Speratus found himself saying three days later, before doubtful-looking members of the Imperial Consilium assembled to investigate the fall of his fort to Witgern. Speratus had made his way back to the Fortress of Mogontiacum on the Rhenus with but a handful of his men. Now he faced an inquisition of dour noblemen in a smoky, windowless accounts room off a colonnaded central courtyard with its geometric graveled walks framing close-clipped box-hedge gardens. All lay within the vast stone fortress that was home to the six thousand men of Legio XXII Primigenia Pia Fidelis—the Twenty-second Legion.

  He felt like hapless prey dragged back to a bear’s cave to be torn in pieces. He knew the governor, Valerius Maximus, would take no particular pleasure in his destruction. Those eyes, set in a doughy face that spoke of contented middle age, were wholly benign, and seemed focused vaguely elsewhere—it was commonly said Maximus regarded his official duties as but irritating stretches between his beloved aurochs hunts with his noble friends. But his two colleagues showed signs of being excited by the scent of a common soldier’s blood. One was the young Pomponius Fabatus, barely off mother’s milk, ablaze with ambition tempered with no experience, who had gotten his place on the Consilium as a favor to a father who’d detected a conspiracy against the throne. The other was the squat, gnomish Lappius Blaesus, loudest of the “war party” urging the Emperor to invade distant Dacia and bring it under the ever-lengthening wing of empire—that jellied form, Speratus surmised, would roll off onto the ground if you sat him on a cavalry mount. At some point Speratus had begun half-listening, aware only of the horse-sized teeth of the young Fabatus, and how he whinnied when excited—it was easy for him to mentally add ears and make him into a mule. The Mule and the Gnome. These two had, for the last hour, been batting him about like a ball. Two army recorders sat nearby, reed pens scratching over papyrus as they took down every response in camp shorthand. Behind them on a slender pedestal was a heroic bust of Trajan in bronze. The Emperor seemed to be looking straight over all their heads to his new Dacian frontier, emphasizing Speratus’s sense of his own extreme unimportance in the grander schemes of empire. He had been charged with keeping the Rhenus frontier quiet, so that greater men than he could prepare to conquer elsewhere. He had failed.

  “From the start, all was against us,” Speratus spoke on in a monotone. “My half-trained Ubians lost their wits and did nothing but get in our way.” The praefect knew, in saying this, he’d ruined the career of the man who’d trained them, but this was a ritual that demanded a sacrifice. Anyway, this man had once tried to ruin him. “They’ve such a superstitious fear of these wolf-men, that the effect was to triple Witgern’s numbers, and so—”

  “Wolf-men?” the young Fabatus interrupted. That metallic voice was boring into Speratus’s brain like a worm screw. “Explain this.”

  “They work themselves into a murderous state before battle, howling and dancing and guzzling down mead spiked with wild rosemary,” Speratus explained dully. “They believe they are wolves. Those I saw, however, though exceedingly hairy, were yet men.”

  This brought tightly controlled smiles of amusement from Blaesus and Fabatus. It was not flattering. Speratus knew they found his country-bred simpleness amusing.

  “Let us return to the treacherous envoy who opened the gates,” Fabatus pressed on, a jump of militant intensity in his eye. A war-mule, head lowered to trample him. “Firmius Speratus, had you been diligent in following every procedure for securing the fort, this breach would have been impossible.”

  Speratus was grateful for the poppy juice the fortress’s physician had given him for the pain of his wounds; it left him feeling embalmed in a liquid calm, enabling him to stifle a retort that might have cost him his life.

  “I swear by the ghost of my father,” Speratus said patiently, “that I honored every procedure, and that I . . .”

  He was forced to pause when a fourth member of this board of inquiry entered the chamber. Speratus’s gaze drifted to him with little interest, then was jolted back for a second look. Who was this man? Everything in his manner suggested might and means held in reserve. He looked as Speratus supposed—in boyhood, at least, before adult cynicism gained sway—a senator would look: a man of elegant presentation and uncommon resolve, with the demeanor of one who saw every mundane event in relation to the long sweep of history. His toga appeared as if it had never been worn, and his manners were impeccable as he formally greeted each man in turn. His dark hair was lightly dusted with iron gray. The man’s entry had an immediate effect on Speratus’s questioners. It was as though someone subtly shifted a balance on a scale, upsetting a relationship between weight and counterweight. Speratus sensed strategies being hastily revised. They sat straighter on their chairs. The august newcomer was hastily provided with a copy of the recorder’s transcript of the proceedings thus far, and all waited with taut expectation while he read it. Speratus picked out a name among the muttered words of greeting: Marcus Arrius Julianus.

  A little tardily, the name and the man before him came together in Speratus’s mind like a thunderclap. He had to stop himself from staring, mouth agape. So this was Marcus Arrius Julianus, of whom he’d heard tales since he was a boy—who had been, for over a generation, the gadfly in the government, who had published banned books in the days of Nero, who openly patronized philosophers who called for the elimination of rulers. Like Hercules, he had battled giants—first, the mad Nero, then the murderous Domitian, as he fought to temper these tyrants’ excesses with philosophy. Now he sat upon a misty Olympian peak along with a very few of the Emperor’s most acclaimed advisors, and was called the conscience of Trajan’s Consilium; Julianus’s was the lone voice raised against the coming Dacian war. This must be counted a grave matter indeed, he thought, if Julianus was called to witness.

  When Marcus Julianus had finished reading, he, and not the governor, nodded for Speratus to continue. The governor seemed relieved to be quietly handing over the reins
to this man.

  “—and you may be certain I neglected nothing, my lords,” Speratus continued. “I ordered the digging of an additional defensive ditch. I changed the passwords every eve and dawn, and saw to it myself the sentries never neglected to demand it, and I—”

  “Then how did one of Witgern’s Wolf Coats get mistaken for a lawful envoy from the Chattian assembly?” Fabatus was putting on a fine show now, for Marcus Julianus’s benefit. Perhaps, Speratus surmised, the Mule thinks he’s seized a chance to hitch a ride on the back of a powerful sponsor and be carried over a few annoying, unnecessary steps in his senatorial career. “We’ve five other men to cross-check with. I’d consider well the lie you’re hatching; you might be astonished at how swiftly a death sentence can be obtained for giving false information to the Consilium.”

  “I believe Witgern’s spies ambushed our regular envoys and forced the passwords from them,” Speratus responded evenly. “I hold this is the only explanation that would satisfy a rational man.”

  Marcus Julianus raised a hand to stop Fabatus before the young man fired his next bolt.

  “I believe you acted well, Firmius Speratus.” He had a voice that seized them with a powerful calm; though tempered and brought to fullness in expensive rhetorical schools, it was devoid of the gusty, sonorous self-importance typical of such men. “In reviewing what I see here, I judge you mounted a courageous defense. I do not think you betrayed us; rather, I believe Fortune betrayed you. To rectify that, I’ll see that Fortune honors you. The post of praefect of the fort at Aquae Mattiaci has been recently vacated. I’m recommending you be transferred there, as soon as your battle wounds have healed.”