Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  “You’re a faithless man. And I’ll be dead. Why would I trust you to grant what I ask?”

  Julianus felt a start of anger, but stifled it. “My word’s been good enough for four Emperors, Aelianus—it will have to be good enough for you. And I haven’t heard of anyone else making you such an offer.”

  The young man’s expression altered then, softening somewhat, like a reflection gently blurred when water is disturbed. “That was a balm,” he said wonderingly. He apparently had not spit all of the mixture out.

  “Of course. I said it was.”

  Aelianus was silent, still reluctant to speak of things private and close. But the draught was separating him from his wrath while it roused an appetite for conversation. “I have a son, newborn . . .” he said finally, “gotten on a freedwoman. I was sending them money. I’ve no family left—you’ve seen to that. My son and this freedwoman, they’ll be beggars, left on the mercy of the countryside when I’m gone. I wouldn’t ask a murderer like you to send them a sesterce. But if you could see that they’re informed of my death. I have some clothing and slaves and horse gear that could be turned into cash for them.”

  Marcus Julianus struggled against his old enemy—incapacitating remorse. This man, enemy or no, is my victim, he thought; in planning Domitian’s death and opening the way for a new ruler, I set in motion the events that crushed him . . .

  Julianus was silent for a time, doing calculations in his mind. “Tell me where they live. I’ll send my man to the bank at Lugdunum. There, mother and son will find a sum of sixteen million set aside for them—one for each year the boy lives, until he comes of age.”

  “You must think me a fool. No man does this for an enemy.”

  “Perhaps I do it for justice. Enemy or no, you were caught up in a chain of actions originated by me. I do not know how to convince you, beyond what I have already said. But know this—I’ve done as much for the families of my fellow conspirators, who suffered so much for doing my bidding.”

  Aelianus was silent for too long, a stubborn, armored quiet that could not be breached.

  “I’ll waste no more of your final moments, then.” Julianus paused to retrieve a woolen coverlet that had fallen to the floor and replaced it over the young man’s feet. Then he rose to go.

  “Wait,” came a whisper. “What was that cursed question, again?”

  Julianus sat down again on the bench. “Who paid your passage from Lugdunum?”

  “There was a supposed legacy . . . from a freedman of my father’s, a man emancipated many years ago, when I was a babe. For some reason I had to come here to claim it. That was strange—and indeed, you would have thought he believed me dead, after the shipwreck; he’d no way to know I survived. But the sum was desperately needed, so I took it.”

  “And the post? Maximus got a letter recommending you, from the Governor’s staff at Lugdunum in Gaul; it bore a seal you couldn’t have duplicated. You have influential friends. How and where did you acquire them?”

  “Perhaps our murdered Lord was better loved than you know.”

  “Enough of that. Every man who might have been involved in this counts Domitian a bald-headed Nero. You’re getting aid not for your political beliefs—which you share with a dozen others in the world, none of them in important posts—but because of your means to your end. Someone who laughs at your opinions but loves your methods. What of the horses you recently acquired? Who provided them?”

  “I won them at dice at the Bacchus tavern, at one of the post stops on the way, Dumnissus, I believe it was.”

  “That did not seem odd to you?”

  “They’re serious about dice at that tavern. Fine beasts, but they eat a lot. My own horse had been stolen at the last mansio. I was lucky to get them. You’re looking for something that’s not there, Julianus. Now I’ve answered your questions—does my son still get the money?”

  “Your horse is stolen on your journey here to murder me. And almost immediately, you’re supplied with two more. It’s hard to believe that wouldn’t make you wonder. You won them from the tavern owner?”

  “No, the praefect of the posting station.”

  “The imperial post? Not the town station?”

  “Yes.” Wariness came into his eye. “I tell you too much. You’ll cheat me, I’ll get nothing for this.”

  “Shall I call a notary to this room, now, and write out a statement for the sum of sixteen million?”

  But Aelianus’s spirit seemed to have slipped off to another place, as if testing its readiness to fly off from its mortal housing. When sight returned to his eyes, he almost seemed to have forgotten who Marcus Julianus was, and now he spoke without reserve.

  “There’s much about all this that’s been odd . . . the hooded men who come to me, who know so much . . . but I never know their names, so I’ve none to give you—”

  Hooded men? Julianus felt a sharp chill.

  “Let us return to these horses.”

  “I won them early in the eve, and strangely, this station praefect showed no interest in playing more, after that. You’d think he’d be eager to try to win them back. Next morning he said he had ownership papers to give me. He left the room once, and while he was gone, I saw something. My name on a document. My true name. That roused me.”

  Julianus tensed, sensing the truth was close.

  “All I managed to read, before he came back, was a signature. It was ‘Nabis’—written in a clear and simple hand, like a child’s.”

  This struck Julianus like a bolt. But he somehow preserved his neutral mien. “You’re quite certain of that?”

  “It was writ large, with a flourish. I’m certain.” The name would have meant little except to one privy to the secret workings of the government. Nabis was the secretary to the centurion of the Imperial Couriers, a body of specially-trained legionary soldiers stationed at the Castra Peregrina in Rome, who acted as messengers between the provincial Governors and the capital. Most thought their duties confined to securing grain requisitions for the army, but they were in truth the Emperor’s internal security force, directly beneath the control of Livianus, praefect of the Praetorian Guard. Julianus had seen documents this secretary had signed; his hand was clear, the letters formed with childish care.

  The Couriers—and Livianus—could not have moved against him without the Emperor’s approval.

  Aelianus was an arrow in a bow pulled by the Emperor himself.

  In the light of day it seemed impossible. But this, surely, was something fomented in the dark.

  Marcus Julianus rose to his feet. “The payments will be made, Aelianus, whether you’ve faith in me or not. Give me the names of mother and child, and their town and district.”

  When Julianus had copied the names onto a wax tablet, the young man said, “Why do you not despise me, Marcus Julianus?”

  Julianus thought on this for a moment, and then replied, “Because when a man hates something, he stops seeing that thing. I’ve had a lifelong aversion to all unalloyed sentiments; they’ve always seemed so—oversimple. For life then becomes one thing, instead of many things. We stop knowing the glories of the variousness of creation. That is all. Die in peace, Aelianus.”

  Aelianus’s spirit fled off.

  And Marcus Julianus was alone with the knowledge that the most powerful man on earth plotted his death.

  Chapter 18

  Red-gold afternoon sun turned the Rhenus into a brazen highway, comfortably wide, a golden route by which the prophetess would come. On this day’s eve, the Governor would interrogate Ramis. Already, a mass of local tribal folk gathered along the riverbank in a great, pacific sea, each hoping to be first to sight the single-oared merchant’s galley bearing the revered high seeress.

  “Auriane, you must flee, or perish. You cannot tarry here any longer.” The words were Marcus Julianus’s. Auriane stood in the tapestried doorway of a guest chamber that opened onto the Mogontiacum Fortress’s courtyard garden, with its maze of close-clipped box hedges
. From somewhere beyond the courtyard, the sternly resonant blows of an armorer’s hammer sectioned off each moment in slow-march time, a reminder that this verdant pocket of close-managed beauty was an island of incongruity within a vast military outpost where over six thousand legionary soldiers were quartered.

  “I will not leave this fortress before Avenahar is found,” she replied.

  She was bound in a despairing silence that unnerved him. Her eyes were a place of cold ash. The search Maximus launched for Avenahar was in its second day. They’d learned nothing.

  Avenahar might have vanished off the earth.

  “Within ten days,” he tried again, “given favorable winds, the confessions Victorinus extracted against you will be the talk of the Consilium. I must see you safely off before I go.”

  Her eyes glistened, and he thought, That’s at least some sort of response. Encouraged, he gently shook her shoulders, as if to rouse her to life again. “You’ve another child at home who needs you alive!” As they spoke, the barge that would take her down river delayed its departure, awaiting her; from there, a galley would take her over the dark Western Sea to the far place of many tribes, only recently discovered to be an island—Britannia, from where she would travel overland to wild Caledonia, the traditional place of refuge.

  “Your Maximus pushes me aside like a housemaid. I am Avenahar’s blood-kin. To be chief over those who search is my right.”

  “You cannot expect them to tolerate a woman of rank riding among them like a soldier—it too greatly violates custom.”

  “I do not want rank then,” she said, voice rising with passion and hurt, “if it means sitting in a house while others do battle for you. I’ll wear no palla—” She tore off her matron’s cloak and threw it to the floor.

  “Auriane!”

  “—and I’ll not be called Domina. I’ll never be a sheep in a pen, no matter how ‘honorable’ your people call it. I would give insult to my family.”

  “You see injury where none is meant,” he said, starting to feel helpless before her agony. “Maximus has done much. He’s assigned men to this search he can’t really spare.”

  “Your people don’t know our forests, while I was born to them. I’ve survived in our hills without food, and under siege. Yet your Governor would have me sit idle in a chamber, while his men-marching-all-together blunder out into a country they don’t understand, to search for a girl who means nothing to them, who’s run away because she fears she’s one of them!”

  “Well, it does sound absurd, put like that! But you forget, we’re in the grip of more than one plight!”

  “I no longer care if your people try me and condemn me.”

  “I care. It would be akin to being rent apart on the rack!”

  At this, all that was brittle and braced within her broke apart. She saw him again, and their spirits touched. And he saw straight within her—to her vulnerability, her terror. Like one lifting an injured lamb, he gathered her close.

  “They will find her,” he whispered fervently into her hair.

  “But will they find her alive?”

  “Stop this! Whatever spirit enabled you to slay an aurochs, it lives in her, too.” He tightened his embrace, then bent his head and kissed her on the mouth with such delicate care that a carnal wanting edged with a burn of desperation welled up in her. Both seized on one thought—but neither drew the other toward the bed, content to merely bask in Eros’s shadow; it granted a fleeting grace that quelled thoughts of future days.

  “Most likely she’s hiding somewhere,” he said, “terrified to come home because she fears you’re angry with her. Some kindly farm wife is spooning gruel into her mouth as we speak.”

  “What will you say to the Emperor when you get to that far place?” she asked after a doleful silence.

  “I sow my doom if I let on I know his was the hand that struck. I must help him disguise his role, while at the same time, I reclaim his faith in me—when I don’t know why he lost that faith to begin with. I suspect the involvement of Blaesus, but I cannot prove it.”

  “You’ll not win clemency for me, no matter what you tell him.”

  “Auriane, I must try. I’ll be entering a victorious Roman camp. It doesn’t require an augur to see which way this war will go; Dacia’s a barbarian empire that does not even possess a standing army. I’ll arrive to laurel-draped javelins. In the celebratory air, he’ll be inclined to mercy.”

  “Marcus, the Fates get irritated with us when we stop fearing them.”

  He smiled companionably at this. “There’s something odd, I forgot to tell you. The hooves and horns of that great aurochs? Someone stole them.”

  “Stole them?”

  “It’s believed one of the Chattian hunters spirited them off.”

  “This is ill, that aurochs had a powerful ghost. And I am now part of its fate. Harmful magic can be worked against me with its remains.”

  “Philosophy’s the best cure for that,” he responded amiably. “Read Lucretius, he puts forth how the wonders of nature can be taken for conjurations of gods, if—”

  A soft rapping at the corridor entrance to their quarters brought them to silence. “My lord.” The grimly apologetic face of Maximus’s Greek chamberlain appeared in the dark void of the doorway. “A quarter-hour ago, the prophetess’s boat was sighted passing Bingium. You’re asked to make ready.”

  Marcus nodded; the chamberlain vanished.

  Ramis, Auriane thought. Dark mother who’s stalked me my whole life. She felt the fluttering and noise of an obscure excitement, as of bats rushing up at the flinging open of a long-shut-up passage of the mind. The time when Ramis had wanted her as apprentice seemed distant as Caledonia.

  “Remember all I’ve ever told you of her, Marcus. Don’t let the Governor try to stand between her and her gods, and it will go well.”

  He answered her with, “In the morn, whether Avenahar’s found or no, you board that boat and go.”

  WHEN MARCUS HAD departed, Auriane waited until she could no longer hear his footsteps. Then she called softly to Brico.

  Brico bounded from her alcove, light as a squirrel. Her face was ruddy with vigorous life; she counted this a rare adventure. With a keen-bladed determination that contrasted with her luxuriously cushioned softness, the maidservant pulled from a trunk a long-sleeved woolen tunic, thick woolen breeches, and a leather shoulder-cape that fastened down the front with thin thongs. Swiftly Auriane put them on. The cape came only to the hips; its peaked hood could be pulled forward to hide the face. This was the common costume of the Gallic farmer; its humble silhouette rendered its wearer almost invisible.

  This was the safest way to move among an unruly throng at night.

  Auriane then inclined her head before the rough-carved image of Fria she’d set in an alcove, feeling she gave herself over to the intelligent winds, the cunning forces flowing underground. “Great Lady of the moon and mountains,” she ended her short plea, “let Ramis look on me with kindness.”

  Throughout this Brico stood solemn as a soldier, but about her mouth were signs of a barely-contained grin. Journeying away from the villa had already restored her vigor, Auriane saw. Brico had arrived at the Fortress only yesterday. She’d lost the child she carried by Demaratos through a malicious accident: As the pair rode round the estate in a wagon, inspecting the fields, the children of Victorinus’s tenant farmers had hurled stones at them, calling them “slaves of a barbarian whore.” The pony bolted; the wagon overturned in a ditch; Brico’s babe was delivered dead. As no balms had eased her melancholia, Demaratos thought a journey might cure her, and sent her here to attend Auriane.

  “Now, douse the lamps,” Auriane said.

  Brico began snuffing out the myriad flames of an iron candelabrum. “Do you think she’ll help us?” she asked, squirrel-bright eyes on Auriane.

  “With Ramis it’s a throw of the dice. She was midwife to Avenahar’s birth. But I know for certain, she won’t unless I ask her.” They entered t
he portico with its long march of alcoves inhabited by stone gods.

  “She doesn’t give you shivers?” Brico gave Auriane a grave look from beneath her hood. “I heard she once imprisoned a man in a tree. Just yesterday you said Avenahar’s running off was probably because of her curse.”

  “Forget my words of yesterday, I was half mad. You can stay here, Brico, if you’d rather not come.”

  “Never! I’ve dreamt of seeing Ramis ever since I was this tall”—she extended a hand—“and heard that tale of how she called a wolf to swallow the moon.”

  AURIANE AND BRICO left the Mogontiacum Fortress through the gate used by merchants, and followed the road that arched down to the docks. The pair passed a shipwright’s yard, where the frame of an unfinished hull loomed above them like giants’ bones. The bleeding sun held to its final moments of dominion, then surrendered, and the sky’s vault of mystic violet transformed the river into a spirit road into another world as it held the last of the light. Never had Auriane been so aware of how full of potent mystery was the dusk; she felt the brush of ghosts across her face. Corridors hovered open between the worlds of flesh and spirit; there lay horror; there also lay hope.

  The throng was thickest around the stone quay where Ramis’s boat would dock. The crowd was remarkable for its silence. It proved a mingling of women and men of many subject tribes, some of whom had travelled far. Thousands of the Aresaces, the Celtic people who dwelled in the shadow of the Fortress, stood shoulder to shoulder with Germanic Ubians and Mattiacans from across the river, and a scattering of her own Chattian countrymen. Even among the Romanized tribes dwelling west of the great river, the old prophetess carried great authority, and was thought by some to be a living deity.

  Foreign smells lay on the air, gentle and strong: The women of the Aresaces prized Mediterranean luxuries; the nard and cinnamon in their perfumes made her feel she’d entered a southern garden. Auriane looked far down the river, but saw nothing but silvered water teeming with every sort of craft—the swift and beautiful double-oared liburnians of the Roman Navy, passenger ferries with their linen squaresails unfurled, merchant ships with their stems carved into animal heads, their hulls painted in bold bands of red, yellow, and blue. Two warships of the imperial fleet, the Pax and the Armata, rocked gently at the docks; they’d been ordered to stand by, in case the throng became unmanageable. A detachment from the Twenty-second Legion lined the way Ramis would walk, strengthened by a century of the Governor’s own Batavian Horse Guards, and one hundred mounted archers. There was no hint of rebellion in the people’s eyes, but she supposed it was their numbers the Governor found troubling, coupled with a suspicion that on this night the people were under Ramis’s control, not Rome’s: A nod from her, and these long-docile tribespeople might toss off a generation of friendship and bend down to pick up stones from the bank.