Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  A short distance farther down the black waters of the Danuvius were the arches of the famous stone bridge Trajan had built in this wilderness—the longest span on earth. It seized him in one moment as some ponderous concrete foot of man, brutishly imposed over struggling nature—and then as a disciplined beauty keeping at bay all that was wild, a portal to tranquil order. Wooden signal towers erected along the river were accompanied by log piles constructed of stout timbers, for bonfires that would light up the waters if the Dacians attempted a night crossing. To the north, darkly mottled with firs, were mountains marked Transilvania Alpina on his maps—their sinister profile seemed deflated beneath the weight of an ashy sky. Protected within their heart was the unknown Dacian enemy, a people counted barbarous by his countrymen in spite of their thriving towns, their trade networks that exported pottery prized at Rome—a judgment not improved by the ghastly tales filtering into Trajan’s camp of the exotic tortures the Dacian women inflicted on captured legionaries. The wind seemed to carry their cries.

  To the south, camped in unending rows as though the stars of the heavens made to align themselves in good order, was Rome’s massive army of invasion—over fifty thousand men of war settled in to wait out the winter. The sight of such a multitude of men drawn together for one purpose caused him to think, Here is yet another wonder of the world, no less than the Pyramids, the lighthouse at Pharos, if one doesn’t count it inferior because of its impermanence. Here were the full legions of the provinces of Moesia and Pannonia augmented by nine thousand Praetorian Guards from Rome, and an array of auxiliary forces bearing traditional weaponry—slingers from the Balearic islands, Palmyrene archers, Arab bowmen, Germanic natives who fought on horseback. Along with them were the engineers who maintained the engines for breaching fortifications, the scouts, interrogators, and craftsmen; here, too, were the Emperor’s staff, High Council, and friends. The capital of the world had shifted to this waste. At snowmelt, when the first green shoots provided fodder for cavalry horses and pack animals, Trajan would send this prodigious force across the river, to close in upon the mountain stronghold of the rebellious Dacian king.

  A small cavalry escort met Julianus as he debarked. His party rode between two tall stone guard houses, then began a quarter-hour journey down the wide central avenue of the Via Praetoria. They passed the tents of the regular legions, positioned round the camp’s perimeter because they were counted more trustworthy than the foreign troops. Then came the hospital tents, a veterinarium for ailing horses, the grander tents of the legates and tribunes. The wind was raw with a penetrating cold that could best many layers of woolen tunics. As soon as he was assigned to quarters in the tents reserved for visiting dignitaries, he sent his request for an audience with the Emperor. An imperial freedman returned within the hour, informing him that his audience was set for three days’ time, the Nones of December, at the eleventh hour of day. He got no succor from the swiftness of the reply; it was the Emperor’s habit to discharge immediately any task he judged difficult or unpleasant.

  Tellingly soon afterward, he received a request for a meeting from Lappius Blaesus, dispatched from the lavishly appointed tents housing the men of the Imperial Council. A suit for peace? A lure into ambush? He must be in a fever of speculation, trying to calculate just how high I’ve traced that attempt on my life. If I do succeed in turning matters in my favor, doubtless, he’s surmising someone highly placed must be sacrificed.

  Julianus sent Blaesus no reply.

  Almost simultaneously came a summary command to report to the tent of Livianus, praefect of the Praetorian Guard. This, too, he carefully ignored, surmising that here was yet another man who knew entirely too much about a bungled murder attempt at an aurochs hunt. His spies got wind of my death-bed interview of my would-be assassin—as I knew they would. Julianus might have found it humorous but for the danger that obviously pressed close. He resolved to touch no food except that which was prepared by his own servants, and to go nowhere without a guard.

  On the Nones of December, at the eleventh hour, Marcus Julianus pulled his mount to a halt before the great tent that was, temporarily, the center of the world. This was the Praetorium, which served as the Emperor’s living quarters and place of council. A storm birthed deep within the mountain fastnesses was noisily invading the camp, heralded by errant wind-blasts of evil force. From behind him on the Via Praetoria came a momentary clamor of shouts, hollow bells, and lowing beasts, as slaves dragged to a more sheltered pen a complaining collection of boars, rams, and bulls reserved in camp for sacrifice to Mars. In this season night reached far into afternoon, and wintry darkness had already overtaken the camp. Resin torches whipped about in a bitter wind. Two Praetorian Guards in gold parade armor flanked the tent’s entrance. Julianus dropped from his mount. One began a quick search for weapons, required of anyone admitted to the imperial presence in time of war.

  Just above the rising trill of wind, Julianus heard the Guard say to him, “You are a dead man.”

  “Tell your master not to celebrate too quickly,” Julianus replied.

  I suppose I’d better make certain this interview goes well.

  A loose portion of the closed tent-flap rattled urgently in the wintry gusts.

  As the Guard opened the tent to admit Julianus, there came a rogue gust of wind. Within the tent, the lamps were snuffed out with one mighty breath.

  He heard someone within muttering into the astonished silence, “Tartarus, who took the light?”—then came the placating whispers of servants, and a crash, as something ponderous—a map table?—overturned, prompting a chorus of servile apologies. Julianus fought to think it amusing, to banish a near-irresistable thought that it was an omen of ill, for how he might fare in this audience.

  Lamps snuffed out as I enter. The wiliest augur could work nothing good from that.

  Within, someone of the Emperor’s staff commanded the Council members to depart. With more caution this time, the guardsman opened the tent, and five disgruntled members of the Imperial Council spilled out into the cold; their gazes raked over Julianus with sharp curiosity. Among them was a Dacian prince called Bikilis, striding along briskly as a camel, in a great hurry to get off; he was a figure outlandish to Roman eyes in a conical felt cap, full-legged black woolen trousers embroidered with serpents around the hems, a beard trained into a neat row of coiled locks to create an effect as intricate as any woman’s coiffure. His cryptic gaze flicked fleetingly toward Julianus, who recoiled within; in the man’s eyes he saw that same fathomless deadness he’d seen in the young Aelianus’s, and it struck him cold. This disaffected prince had, Julianus knew, brought to Trajan’s high council a map painted on sheepskin that purported to show the true location of the Dacian king’s hastily stowed golden treasure. Trajan’s ministers had long suspected that this golden hoard, if only they could find it, would pay the full cost of this war. The council members had the look of men who’d received a rough tongue-lashing, and Julianus surmised it because Trajan’s chief mapmaker, needed to examine Bikilis’s odd skin map for accuracy, was said to be hiding somewhere, sleeping off a carouse.

  Flames materialized within as servants hurried to restore light. A debilitating desolation swept over Julianus then, not for his own predicament, which seemed secondary then, but for Auriane’s, for whom sorrow pierced him through like a lance. As he groped for solace he was surprised to find himself calling up the stark face of that strangely disruptive woman he’d questioned in the Principia at Mogontiacum. Something he couldn’t capture or name in the presence of Ramis brought a profounder peace than all the neatly reasoned discourses of Epictetus, or a hundred proofs of logic; her consolation was a sea.

  Julianus stepped into close, pleasant-scented gloom, thick with smells of leather, oils, and resins. He discerned first, the Dacian’s sheepskin treasure map, which was laid out in the best light, and was seduced into studying it for a moment, having freshly immersed himself in close geographical studies of this region during th
e long journey. Something in that painted pathway to gold urgently begged his attention, like a petitioner pulling at a cloak. But he had no leisure to consider it, for rising just beyond was the muscular form of Hercules, tall as a living man; the god’s golden chest seemed to heave gently with his breathing, in the guttering lamp-glow. The image was draped in the pelt of a fresh-caught lynx that exuded a rank scent. The smoke of some burnt offering drifted magisterially past that cold, voluptuous face.

  The altar of the golden god was meant to dominate the tent, but did not, because of the proud man quietly seated beside it.

  The Emperor Trajan was watching him with a look that combined shrewdness, aggression, and openness. His long frame was folded onto a cross-legged chair too small for him, as most chairs were, and he sat with an easy grace Hercules might have adopted while on earth—while simultaneously seeming as trained on his purpose as the arrow poised to flash from the bow. Julianus had not seen the Emperor Trajan since the days of the citywide celebrations in Rome at his accession. That lean, bony face had changed little, though he did see signs of soft corrosion that were the work of wine: Beneath high cheekbones the flesh had begun to gently inflate, forming the beginnings of jowls. And that overbearing nose—the one part of him that seemed a mistake; surely the gods intended it for someone else—was flushed an angry scarlet. But such pleasures as this man took never blunted his vigilance; the lamplight glanced off eyes like polished steel. Here was a man most comfortable and alive in a war camp, content to bide here all winter, considering his prey, ready to spring on it at snowmelt. It was not surprising, Julianus had often thought, that the one blur of impracticality in that supremely practical mind was of a military nature—Trajan’s Alexandrian passion of conquering the world. All had begun to suspect the Emperor would not stop at Dacia—Parthia, even distant India, beckoned.

  Close by the Emperor was a silver wine service set on a table draped with a captured Dacian battle standard—a wind-sock of striped cloth; its gold-and-vermilion dragon with gaped mouth was a fierce beast, limp in defeat.

  “Julianus!” the Emperor called out in that sturdy, all-embracing voice. “Come! Sit! What a pleasant surprise!”

  Julianus inclined his head and began the formal greeting, alert to signs this was in fact an unpleasant surprise. But he discerned only solicitous reserve in the face of this man who ordered—or assented to—his death. He counted himself adept at reading men, but Trajan he had always found ultimately confounding, a difficult volume ever sealed in its bronze canister, showing to the world only a smooth, gleaming, outer shell.

  “—and you only grow in greatness and esteem with each passing year.” Julianus concluded the greeting as he settled himself on a chair swung into place by a nimble Egyptian youth he hadn’t seen as he entered. More troubled thoughts intruded, just then, of the sheepskin map—Nemesis, a land feature is missing, an important one—but he disciplined himself to put them aside.

  “Let me be the first to say, Marcus Julianus, we all thank Providence you are well!” Trajan’s voice rang out convivially. “We heard a distressing tale of an accident at an aurochs hunt. We are relieved you are fully recovered from your injuries.”

  The brazen maneuver struck him like a thunderclap. Julianus carefully suppressed his amazement. He’s telling me he knows that I know. But what’s his purpose—to startle me off a path of further investigation? Or to tell me he disowns the shameful way the act was carried out?

  “It was no accident, my Lord,” Julianus said, alert to the smallest shift in those metallic eyes. “A junior officer of the Fortress attacked me, and was himself fatally gored by the aurochs.”

  Julianus saw a minor disturbance there. It was not surprise.

  “Truly? This was not known to me,” Trajan said dismissively. “It was a day of prodigies then, of odd but remarkable things—a man goes unaccountably mad and attacks you. A woman takes the mantle of Hercules, and slays the beast. Thank the gods every day is not like that! Let us drink to your good fortune. This is from a forty-year-old vintage,” he said as he took up a slender glass wine jar from the table and expertly opened it with a small knife, “from my own estates in Hispania.” He poured the shining garnet liquid right to the brim of a chased silver cup—he had no plans to mix it with water. The tales, then, were true; in the field, he drank wine neat, like a gladiator or a Scythian tribesman.

  Julianus fought to keep his voice even. “The man lived for a day,” he pressed on. “I was able to interrogate him myself.”

  The Emperor halted a little too suddenly in pouring out the wine. That, apparently, he didn’t know, Julianus realized. Which indicates he was kept somewhat distanced from the act.

  “How fortunate.” Trajan’s faint emphasis on each word was a reprimand, suggesting Julianus should be better aware of the decent moment to let a matter drop. In a chill tone of challenge, he added, “Did you learn anything of worth?”

  “In fact, yes. The man was, as it proved, a partisan of Domitian.”

  Julianus perceived a sudden, quiet attentiveness in the Emperor’s face. Kept somewhat distanced, perhaps . . . but he knew the plan, in outline.

  “Indeed?” the Emperor said carefully. “The tentacles of the tyrant are long, to wrap round his quarry so long after his death.”

  “Fanaticism never sleeps, it seems—or reasons, or forgets—even after so many years. It was the son of Casperius Aelianus.”

  Beautifully managed surprise came into the Emperor’s face. Once again, Julianus felt he had slipped off that smooth, polished surface, and nearly found himself seduced into believing it true surprise.

  “I learned something most distressing in that interview,” Julianus pressed on, “that I thought must be brought to your attention.”

  The Emperor sat still as the golden image of Hercules. The wine was forgotten.

  “The young fanatic had powerful friends, it seems,” Julianus continued, “in . . . surprising places. He was but an arrow in a bow drawn by another.”

  Nothing moved but the smoke drifting languorously off the altar.

  “Do continue.”

  It’s gotten chill enough for frostbite in here, Julianus thought.

  “He’d been provided with all he needed—lodgings, transportation by carriage, even a position at the Fortress—”

  “Indeed? Disgraceful. Appalling! You should have come to me at once.” The Emperor looked penetratingly into Julianus’s eyes. “I shall start an investigation.”

  “That will be difficult . . . and somewhat awkward. I really think we had best let it go.”

  Trajan’s eyes glittered darkly as obsidian.

  “You speak as if this were a time of tyrants,” the Emperor said with soft wrath. The Egyptian boy’s eyes grew round with alarm. “I will not hear anyone speak so. This reign is dedicated to justice, and light, and openness. There will be no secret dealings, and the powerful are not exempt. Name the man, or men, and they will be put on trial.”

  Julianus was intrigued; there was something magnificent in the audacity of that leap into the fray. It’s almost as though he means to clear out any present darkness in the kingdom by sheer force of will, he thought.

  Shall I name him? It is almost as if he wishes me to. . . . It probably did not take much to turn him against me: I’m the author of one emperor’s fall. He who opens the way to the throne must live out his life beneath a cloud of distrust.

  “The dying Aelianus named higher accomplices, which enabled me to trace the act straight to . . .” I have my answer. There’s little to be gained by cornering the man with what he already knows I know.

  Time to ruin another, then. Why waste such a fine opportunity? “. . . Lappius Blaesus, my Lord.”

  The obsidian-glitter faded from the Emperor’s eyes.

  “—who has long been my enemy,” Julianus continued, “and has spent many years harassing me in court, ever since, twenty years ago, I prosecuted him for setting brigands on Roman citizens in the province he was trusted to
govern, after he’d squandered away his treasury—I’m sure you remember that case. I hesitated because it pained me to name a man who is your friend.”

  “You need not have, on that account! There is no immunity for my friends. I will look into the matter. Blaesus must know, the world must know: I refuse to allow such shameful plots in the dark. I’ll aid you, if you wish to bring him to trial. But in truth, just between us, Blaesus has so many good family connections, the sentence the Senate will give him will be light, if he’s convicted.

  “Can we drink now to your coming,” the Emperor said then, “regretfully delayed, as it is?” Trajan’s smile was spare, ironic—and decidedly unamicable. “We all know this campaign is not a cause you believe in.”

  Bare civility, Julianus noted dispiritedly. Often the herald of a man’s ruin.

  I can’t say this is going well.

  Both men reached, at last, for their wine cups. Julianus’s hand stopped as if seized in mid-air. The sight of the Emperor poised to take a deep draught of the wine prompted a realization, born of a quick summing-up of all he’d seen and heard in the last quarter-hour, a fast calculation from the back of the mind, yielding up a total that was wrong: The lamps blown out. The Dacian prince, left unobserved in total darkness. The sheepskin treasure map, with a critical land feature missing. The nearness of their wine cups to the map table.

  His next act was that of a madman.

  He lunged from his seat and knocked the wine cup from the Emperor’s hand.

  What followed was as calm as a tavern brawl. The Egyptian boy shrieked words in his native tongue. The forecourt filled with armored men. Lamplight glanced off unsheathed steel. The plank floor resounded with booted feet. Two Praetorian guardsmen seized Julianus and thrust him, facedown, on the floor, pinning his arms behind his back. More Guards pressed in from outside, even though there was no more room; the lamp flames struggled at a brave horizontal. Imperial slaves edged in from the tent’s inner chambers, their faces blank with amazement.