Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  As the Horse Guardsman rose, he studied Milo, that elven nightmare with close-crimped black curls. And Milo, with that wide, guileless, man-boy face, looked back; there was no emotion there, no knowledge of how deeply he had offended. Would the little wasp pen an epigram about this? Or perhaps this debacle was worthy of a more lengthy work, which would circulate in every great house, every tavern in Rome? I’ll see he never gets a chance.

  And I’ll see that this ridiculous household, the curse of normal society, of all decent men, pays for its crime.

  “I shall take your offer,” he replied. If he would silence Milo, he’d have to linger about the villa for a while. It wouldn’t be murder. He was only protecting the honor of one of the Empire’s most venerable institutions, the Horse Guard.

  THE COMPANY BEGAN to rise and drift off, some seeking horses, others meaning to walk. Auriane broke the seal on the imperial letter, face flushed from the bout, mind still afire from the exhilaration of single battle. Avenahar lingered behind the small group; she’d taken up Auriane’s discarded wooden sword and was striking ardently at air, imitating strokes she’d seen her mother make; since the incident with the fugitive sailors, Avenahar had been practice-sparring from dawn until noon, every day. Then she dropped the wooden sword and bounded after them, burrowing beneath Auriane’s arm.

  Avenahar kept her voice as low as she was able, in her excitement. “What was that maneuver you finished him with? That upward blow was uncanny. There was more than your own strength in that. You’ll show me how you did it?”

  “Yes, Avenahar, but not now . . . tomorrow. That fellow over there bears watching.” She nodded toward the Horse Guardsman, who walked at a measured distance from the rest of the company. “He’s hungry for something. There’s much about him I don’t like. Besides, better than half these Horse Guardsmen are informers.”

  “But all say Trajan allows no informers.”

  “That’s a pretty tale for the commons. This one just knows how to use them discreetly and not offend. If he wants to keep his seat, he’ll have informers. Avenahar—!”

  Avenahar had snatched the letter from her mother and was rapidly reading. “This is dreadful—”

  “Give that to me!”

  “I read faster.”

  “So read something else! I can’t believe I raised so unmannerly a daughter.”

  After moments of tortured progress through the letter, Auriane said, “It’s what we feared. That cursed war that’s coming, in Dacia . . . Marcus is commanded to go, to be on the Emperor’s staff of inner advisors. Our best hope for keeping him home, I suppose, will be if Rome runs out of nations to steal in our lifetimes.”

  “No, there’s plenty more world to snatch—beyond the lands of Parthia lie the mysterious lands of—”

  “I need no pert tutor in geography to tell me Dacia’s at the ends of the earth. Curses on all life. And Marcus, being Marcus, won’t refuse. He’ll fear dishonoring his father. This will take him from us for a year. Don’t react to this, dearest, that horrible man is looking at you.”

  The guardsman was watching them carefully, not with simple hatred, as Auriane might have expected, but more with a look of horror and disgust, as of one who opens the stores and finds them crawling with maggots. “That man raises gooseflesh. By the law of guest-friendship we must feed and keep him tonight, but by Hel I want him gone on the morrow, and that’s early on the morrow. I’ll tell the grooms to have his horse and attendants readied by the gate at dawn.”

  THE DINNER WAS humble—Auriane ordered from the villa’s kitchens a first course of saffron quail’s eggs, a second of sweet-and-sour turnips seasoned with rue. This was to be followed by a main course of chickens stuffed with olive relish and braised in thyme honey, accompanied by leek and onion tarts; then finally, roast apples filled with almonds. The diners slowly assembled, and had completed the first course while Auriane was still immersed in the daily tasks of the villa—going over the accounts with Demaratos, hearing the household’s complaints. In the dark of the library, Auriane listened to another report from the warehouseman Aprossius, who insisted he was so close to Lurio now, he could smell the fish-stink on the fugitive sailor. The sausage vendors of Confluentes had had numerous sightings—mostly of Lurio’s back as he sprinted off with their goods. Aprossius then demanded more money of her. Though Auriane suspected she was being milked like a goat, she paid. At least Lurio hadn’t presented himself before the magistrate—but Auriane wasn’t much encouraged; her deeper senses warned her Lurio wasn’t of a nature to let such a fine chance to enrich himself go unexploited.

  Lastly, she took a thanksgiving gift to the wooden image of Fria she’d set up by the river, in gratitude for saving Arria’s life. After offering one of Arria’s jointed wooden dolls to the ever-moving water, she saw that Grimo, rower on the wineship Isis, still had left her no sign. Always, he tied a white cloth to the old willow there, to let her know all was well. Now he’d not done so for a quarter course of the moon. It troubled her greatly. The red cloth she had tied there—a second attempt to warn him to desist—hung sadly, rotting off the tree from the assault of the rains.

  When Auriane finally joined the diners in the grand triclinium—the dining hall reserved for guests—she found Milo putting everyone on edge; her guests savored his mean jokes like delicacies until one struck too close to their own doors. Because he was famous they fought for his attention—a favor hard to grasp as smoke, and as easily lost, until the moment you uttered something you never, never wanted repeated. Auriane had assigned Milo a place on the couch farthest from the Horse Guardsman, stationing herself strategically in between, but Milo respected no couch-order; he was flowing about the room as he acted verses he’d written about a boy-prostitute of the Circus stalls who mortified the high-born in Rome by disguising himself in fashionable stola and wig and invading some tedious, solemn matron’s religious rite forbidden to men. Milo’s long white hands were graceful as swan’s necks as they laced round that sweet, sinuous voice in the gathering dusk. Auriane watched with alert sadness, numbed by the number of things turning to ill of late, seized with a sense that a dark wind blew round this still and beautiful world. She touched Ramis’s earth amulet for strength, but suddenly thought it a living thing, and a clever enemy.

  THENIMBLE-TONGUED wretch would need to go to the latrina sometime soon, the guardsman judged, given the way he was swilling down Julianus’s best wine. He himself had touched scarcely a swallow. One cupful he’d dashed into the chased-silver ice-bowl that chilled the mixing water, so his determination to avoid drunkenness would prick no suspicions. Milo, however, was getting sloppy. Mars and Epona aided him there. The creatures he was forced to dine with reinforced his belief this was a household of madmen: Some appeared to be students from the town who showed signs of desperate poverty, judging from the condition of their shoes, stacked carefully by the door, and by the fact that they came with no slaves. Others appeared to be town tradesmen. Yet they reclined familiarly with a distinguished guest or two from Rome; he recognized the old scholar Marcellinus, of Senatorial rank, who was here, he’d heard somewhere, to complete his twenty-volume work on natural history. Auriane, Matrona from Hades, presided over it all not as a decent woman would, but rather like some barbarous chief on a high-seat. She shared in the coarse country jests and passed round cups of some vile, foaming drink—mead, they called it—and once, raised a battle-scarred arm to make toasts. It’s a fatal weakness in Julianus, the guardsman judged, to allow this woman such indecencies. The comely black-haired daughter—Avenahar was the coarse name she’d been given—was sneaking unwatered wine while her mother wasn’t looking, and the girl’s skill at this rivaled her mother’s at swordfighting, for this mother had a keen eye for most things. The poor creature has no chance, he thought. That maid might have been groomed to be a great beauty, had Juno given her decent parents. The food he found just fair; the chicken was, after all, a humble bird; a man with Julianus’s fortune could dine on peacock brain
s every night. The house slaves were pert, addressing the mistress without leave. And it seemed no one in all the northern provinces knew how to make an edible olive relish.

  Finally, Milo gushed some nonsense in verse about bravely rising to nature’s call, legs wobbling like a foal’s as he was hoisted up by one of his boy-slaves. The guardsman did not follow immediately after; that surely would have prompted Auriane to investigate. Instead, his groom approached him, as the man had been instructed to earlier, and whispered urgent words in his master’s ear. The guardsman excused himself, announcing that he needed to attend to a matter outside. One of his horses had an inflamed pastern and might need to be traded for another. The diners accepted it. But Auriane looked at him as though he’d tried to give her short weight on a bale of wool. He’d have to move quickly.

  Once through the vestibule, guardsman and groom walked swiftly along the entrance colonnade; he meant to melt off into the labyrinth of graveled walkways through the peristyle garden, and so, on to the latrina, positioned behind the villa’s south wing. They passed a chamber off the kitchens where Julianus’s servants were gathered about the evening meal, and a quick glance within gave him another surprise: It appeared they were laying into the same fare the guests were enjoying. In a normal household, slaves got the best dishes only at family sacrifices, when all gathered to make offerings to the household gods.

  His groom kept pace with him for a time, speaking in a covered voice.

  “We’ve ferreted out an interesting thing or two,” the groom said, “though I don’t know if it’s of much use: I found a cowering native woman stashed in the barn, with a collar reading, ‘If I run off, return me to Volusius Victorinus’s—”

  “That’s the most senior of the town magistrates, isn’t it? At Confluentes?”

  “Right, my lord. He’s a man of some importance.”

  “So, Auriane’s helping the magistrate’s rightful property alienate itself from him. Not respectable behavior, but not near enough to sink a man like Julianus. You’ll have to do better. I want you to stay on a few days here so you’ll have more time to root about—feign an illness, a stomach ailment or something, Mercury knows, the food’s bad enough. Let them put you up in the barn. But be careful, the woman’s suspicious. Has Argaippo brought the horses round?”

  “He has.”

  “Off with you, then. Tell the others, I will meet them at the Confluentes gate at dawn.”

  The Horse Guardsman halted at the end of the colonnade and paused in a drape of shadow; before him was the latrina, a massive, boxlike windowless structure detached from the main house. Within, it was dimly lit by lamps suspended from wrought-iron chains. He faintly discerned two of four marble seats set in a row. Someone exited; it wasn’t Milo. He could only assume the elfin versifier was still lurking within.

  Just as he made to approach it, he heard light footsteps and women’s laughter from the gardens; he was only partly concealed by the rich hangings between the columns of the peristyle. Fine time for a clutch of housemaids to come by. He fell back into an adjacent doorway of the main house and was surprised when the thick oaken door easily gave way. Intrigued, he looked about. What was this room? It seemed to be attached to the villa’s library, but that door was closed and locked. Documents were strewn everywhere, some spilling onto the floor. It seemed an intensely private place, one, perhaps, that servants never entered, a room for thinking and writing. A place to hoard questionable books, embarrassing letters, texts of damaging speeches, perhaps?

  The maids still chattered like jays, just outside the door; he’d be a fool not to see what he could find while he was trapped in here. Hurriedly he took up one bookroll, then another, holding them to the fading light issuing from a single glazed window, growing increasingly frustrated as he waded through texts of lectures designed to send a regular man straight to Morpheus—who could give a fig about Demonax’s belief in the rightness of abandoning wealth to live in philosophical poverty? In another, he scanned quickly through, “Seek not that the things which befall you should happen as you wish, but wish the things that happen to be as they are, and you will find tranquillity” . . . but Julianus didn’t even write it; someone named Epictetus did. He threw it down in disgust. This was leading nowhere.

  But he’d met a man in Rome who had been advertising for some time that he’d pay a fine price for any damaging material about Marcus Julianus. He was said to be the agent of the Senator Lappius Blaesus, so the guardsman knew there was good money behind him. He continued to search.

  Just as he was ready to give it up, he found his emerald-in-the-straw. He felt a jump of excitement as he came upon a diatribe against all wars of conquest. “. . . how damaging to the commons,” he read, “how vain before the ancient philosophers, how hateful in the sight of Providence . . .” He rushed ahead, and realized this, too, was a lecture, given by Julianus at the academy he founded at Confluentes: “. . . In truth, even this coming Dacian campaign, which seems necessary because our territories are attacked by a rebellious king, can be shown to be no more right than theft of a neighbor’s house, if one but traces this war back to our republican beginnings, and our seizure of country after country in a path that has finally brought us to Dacia. Think of Illyricum in times of old, said to be ‘harboring our enemies,’ and conquered by Augustus for reasons that would sound distressingly modern and familiar to our ears . . . where, finally, will peace be made? Off the ends of the earth?”

  By Mars’s grace, Julianus even mentioned the war by name. In a lecture. And if he wasn’t mistaken, his enemies might be able to toss an extra log on the fire by adding a charge of defaming the genius of the divine Augustus, as well.

  In an ivory canister he found two more copies of the same lecture. He removed one, then found a rolled document in the wall niches, roughly equal in size and thickness, and put this one into the canister so that it would seem nothing was disturbed.

  He stuffed his prize into a fold of his tunic and waited as, finally, the carousing housemaids moved on. As he crept toward the latrina he saw no sign of Milo. Silently, he cursed. Then he heard the vile versifier’s unmistakable laugh, muffled within. Had he tarried to scribble obscene verses on the walls, so all the world would know the great Milo had been there?

  A Cupid-faced boy with clothing in disarray stumbled from the latrina, to scurry off furtively as vermin when a torch is thrust into a dark room—a household slave, the guardsman realized. Dalliance. So that was what detained the elfin wretch. The guardsman edged into the narrow doorway of the latrina and nearly collided with Milo.

  The guardsman gave him a brutal shove. Milo careened backward into the gloom of the latrina; his head struck a hanging iron lamp. Hot oil splattered over them both. The poet let out a series of melodious shrieks. His cries echoed hideously off the concrete walls, sounding like a water organ pounded upon by a man who’d come unhinged. Greedily, the guardsman got his big hands about Milo’s thin neck. Then he felt a hot, fierce pain in his arm. The wretch had a razor. Soon his hands were slipping in some horrid mixture of hot oil and his own blood. He lost his grip. An oily Milo slithered down to the floor and managed to wriggle between the guardsman’s legs, all the while continuing his ear-shredding shouts, “Murder! Murder!” He continued his squealing cry, even though he was out in the garden now and past all danger. He was rousing the whole household to arms.

  The guardsman felt for the stolen letter containing the text of the lecture—yes, it was safely in place.

  Then he bolted from the latrina, sprinting through a plum orchard, where young Argaippo waited on his nervous black gelding, holding the guardsman’s Hispanian stallion, its chest and breech straps flashing with medallions of gold. He was forced to flee like a house thief while that rodent Milo lived on to spread an even worse tale about him. His one hope for keeping his good name was to thoroughly discredit this household, so that no one associated with this den of madmen would ever be believed on any matter, or counted worthy of commanding the respe
ct of decent men.

  He put a hand round one of the saddle’s four wooden horns and painfully hauled himself up; he was beginning to stiffen up from the blows inflicted by that sword-wielding harpy. Behind him, the household was stirred to great activity: Hounds barked enthusiastically. Shadowed figures gathered in clusters, while others darted through the gardens with torches. His stallion erupted into a gallop. With Argaippo a length behind, the Horse Guardsman set a course for the forest, and a woodcutter’s path he’d noticed earlier in the day.

  Chapter 5

  “There is a stench about the place,” Auriane wrote the next day to Marcus, “since that Horse Guardsman has gone. Evil will come of him. I have it from poor Milo’s own lips that the man tried to murder him. Hurry your return. You are dearer to me than my own life.”

  On the following eve, long past the snuffing of the lamps, Auriane was roused from sleep by a tumultuous wind. When she stepped out into the colonnade she saw it again, just as she had the night before—beyond the peristyle gardens, lingering in the somber deeps by the river, was a softly glowing light.

  She caught her breath. Last night she’d convinced herself it was the lamp of some merchant craft on the Mosella. Tonight it was clearly something else—steadily it ascended the bank, seeming almost inquisitive as it brushed the ground then arced up to man-height, demanding human attention.

  Nothing living would be abroad on this night. But she continued down the colonnade, drawn into the mystery of that phantasmal light. Her nightclothes billowed like a sail. The wind was an outlaw, toppling an urn in the garden, rioting through the orchard, boxing the alders, unleashing ghosts. She sensed legions of the dead clamoring overhead on bloodless horses; on such a night, the wild hunt led by her people’s god Wodan would unfurl across the sky.