Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  The tribune found her cooly authoritative manner an irritant—he didn’t understand her and didn’t want to; she was the sort of woman who belonged nowhere in his world. However, he’d once known a man who died from the spells of an Etruscan witch, and so he watched her with some wariness.

  As for Marcus Julianus, he was seized with the surprise of his life. Before a word had escaped her mouth, he knew he looked upon someone of unusual attainments. At first, he read it as evidence of the fiercest Stoic will he had ever encountered: She made herself impregnable to Fortune’s storms, through the practice of some philosophical regimen unknown. She had forged her strength through a long lifetime. But how? From where came that brilliant silence? He was astounded to realize she’d done no more than utter a brief greeting, and yet the very air in the vast chamber seemed softly luminous, and many in the room looked as if they had just arisen from gentle sleep. He judged that everything this woman did was conscious, not because she was desirous of others’ surrender but for obscure reasons, having to do with her gods. He had seen a tranquillity so potent only once before, as a youth: in the face of his old Cynic teacher Isodorus, that wise, babbling madman living under bridges, on the eve before Nero had him thrown to the wild dogs. Is this the one who “lives as in the days of Saturn, when all ate at one board,” as foretold by Isodorus in his last madness? I should have known to expect much of this woman, he chided himself. I should have taken on faith that Auriane wouldn’t have expended her reverence lightly.

  The Governor addressed her first. “I trust your journey was well.”

  A bare smile came to her face—a slight brightening of the moon. “It was smooth, as river journeys usually are. And how very many fine new villas you have built along the banks! What industry your people show. There were not half so many, just forty summers ago.”

  Maximus nodded faintly, with no lessening of his reserve. Marcus Julianus suppressed a small smile of amusement; she spoke of Rome’s achievements as the works of precocious children.

  “That would have been,” Ramis continued thoughtfully in that sharp, clear voice, “in the time of your father.” She looked directly at Julianus. “Marcus Arrius Julianus the Elder.”

  The Governor heard: I treated with your father, Julianus. I was busily arranging the world you enjoy today when all of you were still babes. But Julianus heard it only as a pleasant reminder of his father’s connection with this unusual woman.

  Ramis seemed to have selected Julianus out, bypassing the other two men as if they held lesser significance—the Governor possessing some, the tribune, none. “He was an able man, your father,” she said, plucking words from a void with great deliberation. She had some trick of making every word count for three. “I have here a written copy in your Latin tongue of my last treaty with him.” She produced from her robes a slender bronze canister with silver chasing, and held it up for them to see.

  The Governor frowned in annoyance and shifted in his seat. That treaty had been broken many times by Rome—and the conniving woman knew it, he thought. Even to have brought it here was an insolent act. Marcus Julianus felt only admiration for her boldness. In the humble seats, the young chief Sigibert grinned broadly once, caught himself, and resumed his look of fierce quiet.

  Julianus rushed in before the Governor could utter a tart reply. “And he spoke well of you, Lady. He said you were sensible and fair, and of penetrating judgment—” The Governor half turned to Julianus, his irritation visible. What in the name of Nemesis are you doing? Flattering her into even greater willfulness?

  “—and that you never failed to keep your sworn word,” Julianus finished.

  Maximus remembered, then, that the old treaty stipulated she was not to give priestly judgments within the imperium—the lands within Roman control—and relaxed slightly as he realized what Julianus’s purpose was.

  She smiled, and faintly nodded. “I try to keep to it, gentlemen. Your soldier who desecrated our lake was in the Aldermeadow, a place which does, indeed, lie within Chattian lands.”

  “You are wrong,” the Governor said. “That is imperial land, since Domitian’s Chattian campaign.”

  She held up the bronze canister. “A war that violated this very treaty, Julianus the Elder’s last with me. Rome, by what’s promised here, sits there wrongfully. It seems your people write treaties on waste paper.”

  “Insolence and trickery will not serve you, madam.” The tribune spoke for the first time. But his anger was a damp torch that would not ignite—her strange calm unnerved him, caused him to feel kingdom and cosmos were shimmering, preparing to melt into a new shape.

  She regarded him with boredom, then returned her gaze to the Governor. “Not that it matters, overmuch, in my world,” she said, making a graceful dismissive gesture. “You’re here, you’re there, it’s the nature of your people to push others off their lands, a habit I don’t soon expect you to break.” Her voice rose up powerfully, filling the gallery. “But because you can separate men from their own soil does not mean you can do the same with gods. I am the guardian of sacred law, gentlemen. And in the end, I did not judge him: I left his sentence to the Fates.”

  “This ‘judgment’ was criminal and impious,” the Governor retorted. “You threw him on the mercy of the forest and he perished of cold and attacks of animals. No citizen of Rome should be used so. You had no authority to chastise him. You—a non-citizen, a woman of a subdued tribe—have no rights in this matter. This is what you fail to comprehend.”

  She interrupted him with a soft clucking sound, as if chiding a child. “But my dear Maximus, our worlds don’t touch. You’re hurling javelins into the sea. Calm yourself . . . What lies beneath? . . . golden stillness, only golden stillness . . .” She cast the words out like a net that flared, settled, and softened; Marcus Julianus would not have believed it, were he not here to witness—had she henbane on the voice? “. . . anyway, you should love my sentence,” she continued, “for it was markedly similar to your august Trajan’s own, when he put the evildoers who served Domitian on that rudderless ship and let Neptune work out their fates.”

  “I warn you, you’re tumbling into a pit!” This touched the Governor’s favorite wound, one he aggravated and nursed. “You dare compare yourself to a civilized ruler of a world larger than you will ever know, a man before whom even Greece with all its accumulated wisdom bows, even Egypt with all its venerable history—a man who sits alongside the Capitoline gods!”

  “Yes.” It was said with modest surprise that he would think it a thing to wonder over. “We were both born of woman. We both speak for many peoples.” Her eyes became less gentle. “And we both make laws.”

  In a controlled fury, the Governor snatched a tablet handed him by one of his recorders. “One year ago you were commanded to elevate the loyal Sigibert, here today with us, above the other Chattian chiefs, by means of delivering to your people favorable oracles concerning him. You have failed to do so.”

  Marcus Julianus briefly shut his eyes in embarrassment. Maximus had not told him he would frame the charge that way. Astonishment showed in the face of Sigibert on his distant bench, but he mastered it quickly.

  “People believe my oracles come from the elder gods,” Ramis said. “How disappointed they would be to know they only come from Maximus.”

  “I warn you to hew to the solemnity of this discussion!” Maximus responded. “Don’t tell me that’s not, in truth, what you do—produce expedient pronouncements accompanied by incense and music, in a voice well-timbred for theatrical effect. You tell your listeners whatever you consider most politic. If I’m wrong surely you could manage it, once. If you wished.” He leaned forward slightly. “To refuse to do so is to use your great influence against us.”

  She smiled at this, and Marcus Julianus alone saw it was the smile of a mother at the charming deceits of a child.

  The smile vanished. “Speak your purpose, my lord Governor. You want me to promote this man,” she nodded toward Sigibert, “abov
e other Chattian chiefs because a troublesome tribe is simpler to control if you have but a single neck to yoke.”

  “Lady, I would advise you not to—”

  “You are creating overlords among us, through the seduction of your gifts. In my youth, there was one such; now, because of Rome’s constant meddling in our affairs, they are much more common. Witness this Cheruscan called Chariomer, growing like a canker on the body of our tribe. I see this leading us, several generations hence, straight into what my people have never had before—hereditary nobles. Like you. Your most heinous weapon against us is not the ballista or catapult, but your art in leading us into imitating you.” Firelight played off her brass-bound staff, the silver circlet, her eyes; she glimmered like a night sky. “No, I won’t help you. You want one leader; I insist on many. Anyway, the Veleda does not promote chiefs; this is a Roman thought, believed only because it has been repeated so many times. My good man, I only promote sight.”

  Maximus nodded curtly to the judicial recorders. “We duly record another act of insubordination.”

  Marcus Julianus was disturbed by the increasingly hostile nature of the interview. At the same time, he found himself more and more ignited with curiosity about her. In Ramis, he sensed a critical volume unread, a living storehouse of surprising connections between obscure points of knowledge, a mind that might link, underground, the divergent philosophies he’d investigated all his life. Maximus was beginning to look like a man who dug through nuggets of gold to get to a bale of straw.

  Marcus Julianus raised a hand to silence Maximus, and said, “Tell me, Lady, what you meant by the last words you spoke?”

  Again, Ramis regarded Marcus Julianus with great attention, as if he were the only man present with whom it was possible to have meaningful speech.

  “That is what ‘Veleda’ means: the ‘one who sees’—through walls of earth and stone thickened with centuries of belief, straight through to the true nature of earthly life. How astonished you would be, good man, confronted by the civilization of the unseen! What seems fixed before you is, in fact, infinitely various. The very bedrock on which this fortress sits is not solid. It is alive. Your deathless spirit, in truth, lacks nothing. This is why all pursuits bring grief—and why I counsel abandoning them. You knew these things in the blood before you grew out of tender childhood, and got caught up in the narrower and narrower passages of your world’s labyrinths . . . and you can know them again.”

  The tribune looked elaborately bored; idly he stroked a stylus he held against his chin. Maximus’s eyes had become hard and blank as an executioner’s.

  But Marcus Julianus regarded Ramis so intently, he appeared to have gone into a light trance.

  “To the matter at hand,” Maximus said then. “Ramis of the Chattians, you are also accused of—”

  “Just one moment, good man!” Her words cut him off cleanly as a sword stroke. Julianus reflected, she gets off with that only because she has no fixed place in Maximus’s hierarchy of persons; she haunts the spaces in between. “I have something to say, just to Julianus.”

  Ramis quietly returned her gaze to Julianus’s.

  “I know you,” she said in a voice that came like music to the beat of a drum, as though the oracular state were beginning to drift over her. “You have worked so very hard, all your life, to determine what wisdom is. As if it were a thing hidden from you somewhere. And you could discover it by reaping and storing more and yet more knowledge in that fine and noble mind of yours. Poor man, you could have the whole of the Library of Alexandria in your head and still not have wisdom. Consider that when a man has a nightmare, or a powerful dream . . . does another know its power from having it described to him in words?” She pointed a long, slender finger at him. “Wisdom cannot be taught. It can only be remembered.”

  Julianus’s face was solemn with amazement. “Lady,” he whispered. “Those last words. They are from Socrates.”

  “Well, yes . . . but they’re not just his, though he used them to good effect. Forget whose words they are. Just keep them near.”

  “But how in the name of the gods do you know of—”

  Maximus loudly cleared his throat. “Might I have my courtroom back? I’ve heard enough philosophy to last me to the end of this reign. Ramis, we commanded you to halt the criminal activities of the rebel Witgern—and you made no effort to do so.”

  “Why would I ask Witgern to throw his wolf coat into the fire,” she replied, “when you only want him quiet so you’re free to go off and commit mayhem elsewhere? You wish me to bring peace here, so you can plunder that far-off land. Dacia, I believe it is called? Why would you think I feel less for the Dacians than I do for you?” Her gaze settled on him mildly, and with kindness. “A pity no one ever informed you that I will not do such things.”

  Maximus scarcely seemed to hear this; he sat forward, keenly focused on her as if she were the target of a javelin throw.

  “Today your long life of undermining us comes to an end. You, Ramis of the Chattians, are accused of supplying money to the Chattians for the purchase of arms—”

  The air seemed to rush from the room.

  “—which you saw transported across the frontier of the Empire into Chattian lands, in contradiction of law, where your confederates put these weapons of iron into the hands of enemy chiefs. This is an offense capital in nature, and subject to the supreme penalty.”

  Marcus Julianus required a moment to believe it. Maximus had told him nothing of any plan to lay this long-unsolved crime at Ramis’s door.

  The chief called Sigibert leapt to his feet.

  “This is treachery! This was not the charge! You tricked her here!”

  He did not even know he was shouting in his own Germanic tongue; the Governor regarded him blankly. “Take that man off,” he commanded.

  Four of the Governor’s Grooms fell out of their rank and began half prodding, half dragging Sigibert toward the courtyard while he hammered the air with shouts that echoed grotesquely in the vast stone gallery.

  When silence returned, Maximus said, “Do you admit to guilt or do you say you are innocent?”

  “Your purpose is not justice but to rid yourself of a burr under your saddles. Long as I live, I mean to make it impossible for you to have one chief who can be tucked into the folds of your togas.”

  Maximus planned this from the first, Julianus realized suddenly. In fact, the entire afternoon parley—in which he conceded nothing to the Chattians, and which could have been accomplished through messages—was, no doubt, a ruse to get her here. He couldn’t tell me of his intentions because he knew I would never approve of her arrest.

  And, he’s wrong. But I can’t prove it to him without destroying Auriane.

  Auriane, who, through foul fortune, is still here, within the Fortress.

  Marcus Julianus leaned toward the Governor and said in a low voice, “We must recess. I want to look at your evidence.”

  Maximus ignored him. “Do you admit guilt or deny it?”

  “Neither.” She spoke the word as if she moved an unimportant piece one square forward on a game board. It caused Julianus a fresh seizure of horror. Surely she knows she is fighting for her life?

  Perhaps she does not care.

  I must help her.

  “My Lady,” Marcus Julianus addressed her, “last month we apprehended a man called Anniolus, who confessed to having been the man who drove the sacred carts in which the arms were concealed. He claims you mean to make arguments to secure his release.”

  Ramis realized Julianus made a roughly-patched-together attempt to exonerate her, by demonstrating to Maximus that she did not know this critical link in the chain died under interrogation shortly after his apprehension. Appreciation glimmered in her eyes.

  “My dear Julianus, there would be no use in that unless the Fates raised him from the dead.”

  Julianus was saddened and alarmed; she would not let him aid her. He hurriedly scratched a note on a wax tablet and passed
it to Maximus—

  We must recess. She is martyring herself. This woman lives in near-poverty. The person we seek has vast resources.

  But Maximus was proud of his case, and its solution promised him release from the mounting pressures put on him by the Palace to root out this famous malefactor. He scratched a note in reply: Hear me through.

  “We believe that you, Ramis, did encourage the women of the Potters’ Guild of the town of Colonia Agrippinensis to collect donations of silver for your purpose, in the amount of . . .” He talked on into the horrible silence, each word miring the Chattian delegation in greater dismay. When he came to: “. . . and they employed one Eppia Silvana, freedwoman of Chattian birth, to requisition carts for transport . . .” Julianus, now visibly losing patience, vigorously shook his head and wrote—No. I questioned this woman and dismissed her. She is a notorious fabricator who claims to have committed crimes for the sake of the disturbance it causes.

  This time Maximus pushed the tablet aside without reading it, irritated that it was apparent to all that Marcus Julianus was raising objections. Maximus had hoped Julianus would greet his findings with admiration. What errant spasm of eccentricity drove his exasperating mentor to undo all his labors?

  “. . . who has confessed under expert interrogation,” Maximus continued, “that these weapons were to be disbursed to Chattian chiefs, including Witgern, who has turned them upon us already, when he laid waste to our fort under the command of Firmius Speratus.”

  Julianus, frustrated, furious, made a final try, and hurriedly scribbled, writing half-legibly now:

  This is a holy woman who cannot touch iron. She would have nothing to do with its transport. Someone has given you false information. We must recess.

  “—AND SHE IS to die.” The youth, a son of one of Julianus’s grooms, finished his tale just as his heaving breaths began to slow. The lithe-limbed boy had sprinted the gravelled distance from the Principia to the Governor’s residence, where Auriane awaited him; earlier she’d dispatched him to the tribunal to glean what he could. The boy told it feveredly and all out of order; twice she’d had to stop him, calm him, and get him to start again.