Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Burned alive.

  No. He is too great a spirit to be so easily consumed. He would fight his way out—he always has. He defied and outlived two tyrants. Surely a mere hired assassin could not get the better of him. Everyone is mistaken.

  No. There were too many witnesses. There can be no mistake. The thought taunted, again and again, in moments separate and horrific as sword thrusts. Hammer blows of grief nearly struck her to her knees; she wanted to melt to the ground and mingle with mute earth.

  Cocreator of a kingdom with no king, beloved companion in all I do. We are a potion of minds, twin forces never meant to be separate in this life. My love is a fierce and adamant beast. It belongs to the wild, not to this civilized world.

  And if I have a seeress’s powers, why did I not foresee this?

  Two of the humbler carriages from Julianus’s returning train had found their way home, and their teams of two horses hitched abreast were advancing down the wide carriageway at a swift trot, hooves crunching noisily in gravel. Avenahar and Arria, all enmity forgotten, tucked themselves beneath Auriane’s arms so that mother and daughters seemed fused into one monument to grief. Auriane felt a harsh remorse for having sent Arria off, and clung more tightly to her younger daughter than to Avenahar, lest the girl fear she’d lost a mother as well as a father.

  Numbly, Auriane was aware that their guest from Rome, the aged scholar Gaius Asinius Marcellinus, had emerged from his suite of rooms and was standing beside her, urgently seeking her ear. “My good Aurinia,” he was saying, and she was drawn to the concern in his voice, seeing but not seeing fleshy, ink-stained fingers, the smooth dome of his head, a deeply furrowed brow. “I’ll send out a letter at once, and secure protection for you. As you know, my son is powerful at home in the Court of Inheritance. I will do all I can to see the estate’s not seized.”

  “You are most kind. But . . .” She paused, quietening, feeling caught, then, in the unseen currents, and when she spoke, it was as though an alien certainty inserted itself into her, from possession by some spirit larger than her own. “Wait with your letter. It might not be necessary.”

  “I assure you, it is. False heirs are likely to come forward in the settling of any estate grand as this one, and as this one’s now in the hands of a—a woman foreign born, they certainly will.”

  “My situation would be dire—were Julianus truly dead.”

  “But . . . madam . . . all say he is!” Now he regarded her with unease, wondering if the loss of Julianus had taken her mind.

  Arria Juliana heard none of this, and silently cried. But Avenahar was very still, watching Auriane with acute interest.

  Auriane’s attention was diverted by the second carriage, which should have followed the first onto the connecting gravel road that led to the stables; instead, its driver kept it on the wide roadway that led directly to the main house. An outraged groom chased it for a time, shouting, “Halt! Where are you going? Turn about!” The carriageman calmly ignored him.

  While all looked on, baffled, Auriane began walking, then running, to meet the carriage, not certain herself what propelled her forward.

  He always has outwitted his enemies.

  The driver pulled the horses to a halt before her. The black-curtained door of the reda swung open. And then, looking none the worse for wear, his tunic and travelling cloak hardly singed, Marcus Julianus dropped lightly to the gravel walk, looking mildly impatient, and full of his usual trust the world was in order.

  The household, after a short, startled pause, erupted into loud clapping, as if at the happy climax of a theater performance.

  Auriane stood mute and still, tears streaming from her eyes. For a suspended moment she feasted on the sight of him, marveling at the machinery of the Fates. Great Fria be praised. It’s unsettling to know how necessary he has become. Somewhere within, her trust in the power of her knowings settled, and began to root.

  “You clever rogue!” she said hoarsely, feeling like a sacrificial beast snatched, almost too late, from beneath the mallet of a priest.

  “Nemesis! You did not know!” he said softly, as he swiftly closed the distance between them, and seized her shoulders in a fierce grip, horror and pity in his face. He realized then that the official messenger from Victorinus bearing news of his death must have made it through the roiling throng—but not his private messenger with news of the truth. “This is dreadful!”

  She crushed herself against him, laughing, while he buried a hand in her braided hair. “You nearly sent me to the ancestors,” she mumbled into his cloak. Warmth returned haltingly to her limbs as she fed, like one half-starved, on the closeness of him. “No matter, it’s all come out well, praise to Sun and Moon.”

  All at once shy of her audience, she broke away from him and together they walked toward the main house, but her hand found his within the secrecy of the folds of their cloaks, and he clasped it in a tight, sustaining grip.

  “Don’t praise Sun and Moon too highly,” he said, “for there is a tragedy here—to our good poet Peregrinus, who’s lost a thousand volumes of his newest works.”

  “You had his books in your carriage—”

  “Yes, and right now they’re a blackened heap of ashes that look rather as his critics would have them look. I’ll have to have them all recopied. He’ll never find another patron—no one but me seems to be able to see his occasional flights of lyric brilliance.”

  “Then you knew you were being hunted.”

  He responded with a look of bare acknowledgment, but made no reply.

  “What have you not told me?” Auriane said quietly, looking straight ahead.

  “Ah, much has passed, and many urgent matters have come up that I’d like your opinion on . . .”

  “You aren’t going to answer me, are you?”

  He maintained a neutral expression as they walked past Gaius Marcellinus, whose initial grin of amazement and delight at finding Julianus alive had faded off; he studied Auriane with penetrating curiosity. Somehow this strange foreign woman had known Julianus was alive.

  “How is our dear Gaius Asinius?” Marcus said affably. “He looks like he has indigestion. Has Avenahar burned down the barn yet?”

  “You’re determined not to answer me.”

  Arria had, with a mouse-quick dodge-and-run maneuver, escaped her nurse; she captured her father’s other arm and was happily trying to climb him like a tree. She was his child through all her soul—as Avenahar was Auriane’s own. Marcus got to one knee, ardently gathered the child close, then produced from his cloak fresh copies of the Acta Inepta. Arria ran off with them, suddenly content.

  Then he enclosed Auriane’s hands in both of his, and said only, “Wait while I dismiss everyone and meet me in the north dining hall—no, the south library alcove, it’s more private.”

  “MY GREATEST ENEMY is alive,” Marcus Julianus said when they were alone in the library alcove. He was seated on an ivory-footed lectus, a small bed with a carved frame of terebinth wood inset with tortoiseshell, and held untouched a chased silver cup filled with a well-watered sample of the pale local wine. Auriane slowly paced, head down, her own cup held distractedly as she closely followed his words. Servants had left an oval platter of delicacies—small bites of hare-liver pâté formed in the shape of fish, figpeckers in coriander sauce; despite the clever presentation, the sight of it made her stomach feel like a shivering aspic.

  “But we know all your enemies are alive,” she said. “Livianus of the Praetorian Guard, and that brute Lappius Blaesus, and all those horned bulls who are pushing so hard for the war in Dacia—they’re flourishing and well.”

  “I’m not speaking of this toothless crop. It takes a tyrant to breed real enemies. To the credit of our lord Trajan, men today scarcely know what enemies are. I mean a man from another time.”

  A hush of dread came to her voice. “One of the partisans of Domitian?”

  “Yes. I mean Domitian’s old fanatic-loyalist Praetorian Guards’ praefect, Casper
ius Aelianus—”

  Auriane stopped so abruptly she sloshed amber wine drops onto the travertine floor. A long-sealed cellar door creaked open and out billowed a fetid gust; she sensed something hideous slithering toward them in the dark. “Gods below,” she whispered, “the man who commanded the cruel torture and execution of the conspirators who carried out your orders . . .”

  For so long, they’d believed no one was left alive to avenge Domitian’s assassination.

  “Yes, that Aelianus, but to be precise, I mean his equally fanatic son of the same name.”

  Slowly, she sat beside him. “But Marcus, that isn’t possible—unless he assumed dolphin shape. He’s dead. He drowned, along with all the others.” The son of the loyalist Praetorian praefect Casperius Aelianus, along with a hundred of the tyrant Domitian’s most notorious informers—men who had, for years, misused their power, bringing false charges that sent men to cruel deaths—had been punished by the Emperor Trajan as soon as the new ruler ascended the throne: First Trajan ordered them exhibited like common brigands before the populace in the Great Amphitheater, so their victims’ families could shout abuse at them. All expected Trajan would give them to the wild beasts. But Trajan punished the criminals in a novel way; their new Emperor was a blunt and plain-spoken man, but because of this, many said this proved his poetry was in his acts: He ordered the informers taken down to the Tiber, where they were put on a rudderless ship that was towed far out to sea then left to drift, until the craft was dashed apart by the fury of ocean storms. Trajan let the gods of wind and water slay them, while his own hands remained clean of their blood.

  “Casperius Aelianus the Younger lives on, Auriane. Neptune neglected to gulp this one man down. Perhaps he clung to broken-up timbers and drifted ashore, who knows? My own belief is that he washed onto land at Sicily, because there, my agents learned he murdered a caretaker of a great seaside estate, threatened the slaves and enriched himself off the farm, before the owner, who didn’t live there and didn’t know, could set the authorities on him. We’ve evidence, too, that he visited his ancestral estate in Apulia, which was shut up and awaiting auction, and took only such things as a son would take—personal letters of his father’s, family portraits, a seal ring, bills of sale, and the like. He was far too clever to try to reclaim his father’s wealth, however. He then made his way north, to our neighbor-province of Gallia Belgica, where he took a false name and used his stolen wealth to establish an estate near Augusta Treverorum. He has prospered well. He’s alive, Auriane—the man who believes I murdered Domitian, his patron and god, and slew his own father, and made him a hated outcast. Alive and living for no other purpose but the chance to punish me for murdering his beloved Master and God.”

  “You’ve known of this for some time, Marcus. Am I a child, that you kept this from me?” Soon as she said it, the irony of these words stung her like the cut of a whip. And who am I to accuse him? I, who can’t tell him I have been, for years, secretly shifting his money across the frontier?

  “Utter nonsense!” He put down his cup and clamped his hands protectively about her shoulders. “All I wanted was for your life here not be shadowed by this. I wanted to see how you’d flourish in tranquillity, if given the haven you so richly merited.”

  “I’m sorry for that; I should not have said it. You tried, with great good will, and if you couldn’t do it, none could have.” Our tranquillity was doomed from the start, came words she couldn’t speak. I brought the high winds and storm with me. Then came a quick image of Witgern huddled in the snow, while she was nestled in warmth. Of her aged mother, Athelinda, facing the invading Cheruscan chief called Chariomer—while I linger over hare-liver pâté in the shape of fish. How could any daughter of my people have acted otherwise?

  “How did you know this son of Aelianus would strike now?” she asked.

  “He sold the estate quite suddenly, and disappeared from the sight of my spies. As you know, there’s no better time to strike at a man than when he’s travelling.”

  “By now, he knows he didn’t succeed.” She looked at him. “He’ll try again.”

  “At least he’s shown his hand. We will just have to move about with care, and always under guard.”

  “Always under guard? When Avenahar and I go hunting, or visiting the town?”

  “I fear so, Auriane. He’ll continue to strike at me. He has a madman’s determination crossed with an athlete’s skill and endurance, and he’s disturbingly careless of his own life. And worse: Because of the hatred he’s nursed for so many years, he’s as likely to strike at you.”

  After a moment drawn into thought, he added, “Because of this, I’ll have to refuse Trajan’s summons to go to Dacia. I can’t abandon you here to this.”

  At this, she was pricked by an obscure alarm. “Marcus, can such a request be refused? Is it not, despite its mild language, really a command that must be obeyed?”

  “You are right. It won’t endear me to the ruler of the known world. But I fear it must be so.”

  “And we came here to live a plain, unfettered life, and raise happy children, well off from the horrors of tyrants and wars.”

  “Madness, I know, but life isn’t a wall painting. It’s more a swift river of clouds, constantly changing shape. Perhaps I sowed my doom in Rome. ‘Assassination’ is a word that manages to sound cleaner and grander than ‘murder. ’ I did cause a man’s death. And worse, others were punished for it, not I . . . and punished horribly. Perhaps only now, after eight years, has Nemesis found me for retribution.”

  “‘Caused a man’s death’?! Marcus, any sensible man would say you brought justice to a murderer. A murderer of many! Nemesis worked through you—and she would not slaughter her own! Your remorse is a demon that over the years has fed and gotten fat on your kindly nature. I will not listen to this!”

  He laughed softly. “I believe your lack of tolerance for my remorse has kept me from becoming a madman.”

  He cradled her face in his hands and the world drifted to a dulcet halt. “How would I have thrived all these years, without that still flame in your eyes drawing me back to what’s true?”

  In the gardens beyond the glazed window’s gauzy glow a stable boy idled with a shepherd’s pipe; it sounded like a life lived beneath endless sunset. Or something grand, gently unraveling. She moved with those descending notes as she collapsed against him in a great soul-exhaustion, her head nestled beneath his chin. Most naturally, most knowingly, he began kissing the back of her neck, each press of the lips more insistent than the one before, reaching deeper into her—until she felt her flesh begin to melt off, and there was nothing left of her but a shivering puddle, a sensitized yearning shot through with that need that was so welcome, so incapacitating. Tears pooled in her eyes as he released the pins of her tunica. The fine cloth slid down and collected round her hips, leaving her half naked like some sturdy Venus in pale Luna marble. She struggled to get his woolen tunic off him, and then they were pressed heart to heart, skin to skin, and every part of her flashed open. Even now she felt a spark of the illicit when they lay abed entwined, as if they were lovers married to others, seeking one another in a darkened colonnade. It might have been because the whole of his world, from the aristocracy of Rome to neighboring farm folk, disapproved of the high place she occupied in his life. It made her feel she swam a rough river to get to him.

  Through this, he managed to draw closed the heavy curtain that draped the alcove. Moving in time with the woeful pipe, they caved back together onto the lectus, and all the fury beyond the walls was gone. But as they gratefully joined, no exquisite playing on the skin, no worshipful touch, no mingling of the deepest waters was enough to banish her sense of being prey to encroaching darkness. Hunted like game, she thought. Both of us.

  A POST RIDER cantered up the graveled walk to the villa of Marcus Julianus, soon as Flora’s festival was done. As was Demaratos’s habit, he turned over the day’s correspondence to Auriane.

  At the bottom
of a neat stack of folded and tied wax tablets was one that shot her into cold darkness. The wax seal placed over the knotted string tied about the tablet was stamped with the imprint of Volusius Victorinus’s signet-ring.

  She broke the seal and unfolded the tablet’s three wooden leaves. It was a summons, ordering her to appear in Victorinus’s court in the town of Confluentes, at noon on the morrow.

  Lurio. Aprossius has failed me. The fugitive sailor’s gone to the magistrate—why else would Victorinus summon me?

  I must go, and contrive some way to keep Victorinus silent about this. Which means I’ll need to concoct a false reason to give to Marcus, for the journey into the town. I grow ever more enmeshed in my own web.

  And now, a spider is roused to my struggles.

  ON THAT SAME eve, Auriane came upon Avenahar unexpectedly in the forest amphitheater, sparring with one of the grooms.

  Avenahar whipped about, alarmed as one caught carrying out a forbidden rite; the groom shot through her defense and she got a blow on the thigh with the flat of his wooden blade. The frightened groom backed off, ready to flee when he saw Auriane. Auriane did not know what she was seeing; Avenahar seemed to wield a column of light.

  Auriane felt a melting terror, thinking it another unwanted vision—this one, fine and precise as a fever dream. Is this, then, my daughter’s future?

  Avenahar had a short sword in hand; the steel blade hoarded the reddening sun so that it glowed like the heart of a furnace.

  “Avenahar,” Auriane said, “where did you get that?”

  Defiance warred in Avenahar’s face with a many-shaded sadness; she was woman-grown, then, but unknown—someone else’s child, another country’s daughter, all that tamped-down determination disturbingly visible.

  “It’s the fugitive sailor’s sword,” Avenahar said in an alto voice Auriane scarce knew. “I threw a log in the river that day—not the sword.” She added, with a belligerent lift of the head, “So now you know. Punish me.”