by Неизвестный
When Saraid reached the Romans, the ravens harrying the men scattered to let her pass. She jumped straightaway onto the centurion’s back, biting him on the neck as though she were become a wild creature of the woods. Yowling, the centurion spun and reached back to grab Saraid, yanking her over his shoulder and slamming her to the earth. No sooner did she touch ground than she bounced back up, hissing through her exposed teeth. The centurion swung his short sword at her, a heavy downward swipe. Naked, Saraid had nothing to ward herself from the blow, which took off the left side of her face and the top of one shoulder. The blow should have felled her like a spring lamb beneath the bludgeon, but there was little enough of blood for such a wound, and only a groan from her slack throat as she threw herself back toward her attacker.
The Roman brought his sword up, and Saraid gored herself on it so its tip jutted from the small of her back. Still she kept on, pulling herself up along the blade’s length with her hands until face to face with the centurion. She snaked her arms around the back of the man’s neck and leaned in as if to kiss him. Her head dipped and rose over and again, great red flowers blooming on his face wherever her mouth touched him.
Alene put a hand to her own mouth and gasped. She’s . . . eating him.
Soon the centurion’s screams drowned in a gargling wetness as his own blood filled his throat. He fell back, Saraid still atop him. In spite of herself, Alene felt a satisfied smile stretch her lips.
“Mother.” Brianne was sobbing beside her. “Mother!”
No. What is happening? No. Saraid! At last Alene tore her gaze from her impossibly risen daughter to take in the rest of the hilltop. The madness had spread. Hirelgdas had awoken too, eyes torn from his sockets by the ravens but still able to see. Soldiers struggled to take him down as her old uncle fought with an inhuman strength. In a circle around him, Romans lay dead, looking for all the world as if they had been savaged by wolves.
“Come!” Alene said to her daughter. “We must help . . . him.” She had almost said it rather than him. She shoved aside such thoughts.
“Mother, no,” Brianne said, tugging her arm. “We should run. Get away from here. This is all wrong.”
“The Romans are wrong! They should not be here! I was wrong to appease them! Boudicca has shown me that now!” She pointed across the hilltop as she shouted, and even as Hirelgdas was at last overwhelmed and swarmed by his Roman foes, a woeful sound rose from the ranks standing beyond them. The neat lines melted into chaos, and as the bodies parted, Alene’s knees buckled at what she saw.
“Prastog?” she breathed. What was left of her husband after weeks rotting in the grave had emerged from among the trees. His face was a rotten grisliness clotted with lumps of muddy earth, but she knew him from the cloak they had buried him in, from the golden bands on his gray and weeping arms, from all the finery with which she had adorned him before putting him into the stone barrow with the wheels of his war wain. With him came those men who had been laid in the earth around the barrow mound, his fellow warriors in death, bound to ward him in the hereafter and now returned with him to the world of the living.
All around the dead Iceni, the air was alive with black feathers and sharp claws; the ravens embraced the risen dead as kin, as flock. On Prastog’s own shoulder, a singularly large, grub-white raven perched, and Alene knew it was the one she had insisted be put into the barrow alive with her husband to help speed him to his next life. The bird cocked its head as Prastog strode across the hilltop, pecking some little morsel from Prastog’s socket, from which it had already eaten most of whatever had been left of a jellied eye.
What is this? What’s happening? Again Alene retched, but she had nothing but bile to bring up.
What came next was not the accustomed clangor of battle; only a wet sound of rending flesh and the dull thunk of Roman blades hacking through putrid meat drifted across the hilltop. An eager roar went up from among the living Iceni witnessing the slaughter. Alene watched them join the risen dead to lay waste to the invaders. Her queasiness gave way to a queen’s angry pride. She threw herself forward and took up a fallen spear. Screaming against the ache in her bleeding shoulders, she swiped at her foes.
One after another Roman came before her only to be struck down. She knew nothing else but the red death her spear brought and the black cloud of wings everywhere in between.
Only when the last scriba lay dead upon the ground, still clutching bloodstained wax tablets, did Alene stop to rest, to breathe.
The ravens began the grim work of eating him. A Roman feast was laid out for them.
A great cheer went up. Prastog and his risen dead did not join in the yelling—they had gathered around two soldiers, crouched over the bodies to feed like the carrion birds.
Alene looked away from the sickening scene.
The living Iceni raised arms to hail her. None among them had slain as many of their enemy as she. Their queen had become a whirling, shrieking death-bringer—a legend come to life—a goddess for whom the dead themselves fought. Standing tall and proud like a great oak, she called out their victory. “We are slaves no more!”
The Iceni chanted her name and the name of Boudicca . . . and did both not refer to her? Brianne came to Alene’s side, reached out one arm toward her, but then dropped trembling to her knees at what her mother had become. Alene opened her mouth to shout again, words to take away her daughter’s fear and put a wild battle-joy in its place. The sound died on her lips.
Saraid stood just beyond Brianne’s shoulders, her straight, dark hair matted with blood, face torn and awful, empty sockets fixed on them both. She took a tottering step forward, then leapt onto her sister’s back, teeth flashing at Brianne’s bared neck.
“No!” Alene’s cry came too late. A great spray of Brianne’s blood filled the air before she toppled over beneath Saraid.
And the shout, one of pain and fear, disturbed the restless dead from their meal. Prastog and the others no longer crouched over the slain Romans. They turned on their kin.
“Stop! They are your own!”
The gorging ravens cawed as the bodies beneath them twitched and shuddered. The birds took flight as one empty-eyed and mauled militus and scriba after another rose. Their jaws were slack, open, no doubt hungry for warm flesh.
We are done for. Alene backed away as Saraid lifted her gore-stained face from Brianne’s corpse and then returned to devouring her sister.
Alene turned to flee, and behind her stood the centurion, whose name she had never even learned, his face a ragged mess from Saraid’s teeth and nails, his missing eyes down some raven’s gullet. He stalked her, his dreadful empty gaze sapping the strength she had possessed only moments before.
At the last moment she scrambled to snatch up a nearby Roman sword—perhaps the centurion’s own—and she swung at him as he lunged for her. Alene took off his right hand at the wrist, just below the metal gauntlet with which he’d earlier struck her.
His left hand came up and clawed at her, tearing an edge of her cloak. The centurion’s breath was in her face then, hot and bloody, teeth snapping and flashing, tongue stiff as he hissed. Alene brought the blade up again, mashing the hilt into his mouth, shoving him away. He stumbled, righted himself, and threw himself toward her. She swung, the blow clumsy but strong, and it nearly decapitated him; his head lolled backward, dangling by a scrap of skin and sinew so it lay between his shoulder blades. Still he stumbled toward her.
She ran past him. A clear path opened up along a line of trees leading to the road that would take her down the hill to safety. Alene made it to the hilltop’s edge and stopped.
A weird laugh overcame her. From here she could see far out across the surrounding fields, filling now with dozens—hundreds—of lurching shapes. Unearthed Iceni slaughtered by the Romans over the past weeks coming singly and in groups of two or three. The skies above them teemed with ravens, and all of them—birds and risen dead alike—streamed toward the hill.
Again Alene laughed
, though her heart felt sick. There’s nowhere to go.
She knew what had to be done. Boudicca had answered her prayers for help, for vengeance. And a most terrible vengeance had been wrought, one only a goddess swallowed by Roman fires could beget.
This was why the goddess had released her as a maiden, had let Hirelgdas pull her back from the brink.
Boudicca in her wisdom had waited for the Romans to come, to burn the groves, to slay Her druids.
A goddess of victory must be murdered for her to rise as a goddess of vengeance.
Could any less be asked of a queen? I must die as well. Alene looked back over her shoulder at the madness spreading over her homestead. Better the land become a feast hall for the risen dead than a slave pen for the living.
She sat in the roadway. Across her lap lay the Roman sword. “As my daughters serve you, Lady, so do I.” She brought the blade up and drew it across the left side of her neck, opening the wellspring just beneath the skin.
Alene fell back, taking in one last glimpse of the surrounding lands, red in the setting sun’s light, awash in blood. Lying on the ground, her gaze dwelt upon an overhanging tree branch thick with ravens. Their eyes glittered in her waning sight.
Her breath rasped in her throat, her limbs cramping and stiffening as though she had suddenly aged to become a feeble crone.
The ravens opened their wings and pounced.
She never felt their claws, their beaks. Rather, Alene found herself adrift in their black-feathered cloud. She looked down upon the sight of frenzied feeding on her flesh. My vision . . . as a girl . . . not the goddess surrounded by wings . . . but myself. My dead self.
As her corpse rose below her, Alene spread her wings to join her dark sisters. She opened her new mouth and gave voice, the sound harsh, inhuman, and hungry.
The Wedding of Osiris
Adam Morrow
It was a plain, simple meal, a soldiers’ supper as the emperor preferred, but the wine was strong and good, unwatered, and they ate reclining like the most luxurious of patricians on the deck of a gilded barge moored in the shallows across the river from Hermopolis, upstream of Besa. That morning they had visited the great temple of ibis-headed Thoth-Hermes in His city on the west bank and walked through the precincts Ozymandias had built a thousand years before for the eight gods of creation. Then they crossed the Father of Rivers and climbed the hill of Besa to consult the goddess’s oracle. At every turn, the import of the younger man’s dreams had been confirmed. Displaying no awe at the advent of the Augustus’s party, the elderly priest of Besa ignored his emperor and spoke solely to the youth Antinous: “It is tonight, Lord. It can only be tonight. It must be tonight.” Lowering himself to his knees, he touched his brow to the stone floor at the youth’s feet. He had sent his chief acolyte down the hill with them.
After the oracle, the Augustus and his eromenos crossed the river again, leaving the acolyte of Besa to prepare for the night’s ceremonies. The emperor was pensive, his beloved exalted, but they worked off their moods wrestling in the palaestra of the Greek gymnasium. The younger threw the elder and laughed seeing the emperor’s surprise. Streaming with sweat, dirtied by the arena’s sands, Antinous raised his fists in triumph, lifted his incomparable face to the hot Egyptian sun, and defeated Hadrian knew the boy was no longer his but he, Caesar and Augustus of Rome, was forever the boy’s. He crawled across the sands and kissed the young god’s feet.
In the baths, they were cleansed and pampered. The beard of the elder was oiled, combed, curled, the younger’s scant stubble shaved close, both men richly perfumed. In separate chambers, they were attired and adorned, and then borne in separate boats back to the barge, forbidden to see one another.
When at dusk they were brought together again, each marvelled at the other. Hadrian found the pleated gown of an antique queen constricting and knew it fit clumsily a weathered soldier of fifty-four years—callused fingers caught and pulled at the threads of tissue-thin linen, spoiling its pleats. The collar of gold and gems weighed on his chest, making it difficult to fill his lungs, while Hathor’s tall crown and the heavy wig with its infinite number of plaits and turquoise, ivory, lapis lazuli, and gold beads had already caused his head to ache. Yet Antinous saw before him Isis of the Ten Thousand Names, yielding, obliging, ferocious: his queen.
For the young Bithynian had assumed the aspect of King Osiris bearing crook and flail, Pharaoh’s false golden beard fixed to his chin, his fair skin powdered green with verdigris, lips reddened with cinnabar, eyes lined black with kohl. Even had he been permitted to speak, Hadrian should have been struck dumb by the majesty and beauty of his young beloved.
They stood on the barge’s deck before the acolyte of Besa, who unrolled and consulted a scroll that appeared ancient. A drop of sweat formed on his shaved scalp as he moved a stylus from one column to another, trickled down his brow, fell to the papyrus. With a frown, the acolyte brushed it away and looked up. Nodding, he began to recite the words of the hierogamy, first in Greek so groom and bride would comprehend their gravity, then the harsh syllables of the gods’ ancient tongue. The priest’s spells bound the two in a fashion they felt as physical, chains of iron and bronze bringing them together. It seemed to Hadrian these sacral, magical bonds were no stronger than the ties of affection and passion long between them—but a restatement, a revision, for before this instant he, Hadrian, had been the king, the husband . . . the man.
If he was no longer Augustus he could not remain the Augusta’s husband. In Rome, Vibia Sabina had long ago broken her own marriage vows, so that Hadrian never regretted being apart from her, but now the priest of Besa formally dissolved the attachment. With that former marriage also vanished into nothingness all the weight of empire and history. For a moment Hadrian believed himself the careless youth he had never been, a love-struck maid. Gazing into the great eyes of Antinous-Osiris, he saw devotion, adoration, and for moments forgot the story they must enact, only knew he was chosen.
The priest spoke the final prayer, final spell, final curse. He bowed himself away.
Wife and husband—queen and king—Isis and Lord Osiris, they settled themselves on their couches to dine. For the first little while they drank the same wine from the same cup, but when the meal was consumed slaves brought new wine in separate jars and two new cups. The bride’s was glass, blown and carved, through which red wine gleamed like fresh blood—the groom’s hammered gold. Antinous’s expression altered strangely when he sipped, for the king’s wine was bitter, but then he drank deep, and set the cup aside, and rose to his feet, holding out his hands.
Somehow afraid, Hadrian swallowed his own honeyed wine. It contained a small amount of poppy’s tears, he knew, their bitterness subsumed within the honey’s sweet. With heavy hands, he lifted the ox-horn crown of Hathor from his own head. Moonlight and starlight gleamed on the golden sun disk between the horns, on the enamel eyes of the cobra encircling the disk. He laid the crown on the barge’s deck but kept the heavy wig, and then he stood.
No words were spoken. Bride reverently divested groom of the white atef crown. When he went to remove his husband’s false beard, he discovered the thing was made in the form of a golden phallus, and his fingers trembled as he untied the ribbons that held it on. Smudges of verdigris stained his fingers. Because this aspect of the god was not yet dead, Hadrian was not required to unwind yard after yard of waxed, spiced linen bandage from his lover’s body. Indeed, Antinous-Osiris was already more naked than any decent Roman, wearing only the antique shendyt-kilt with its starched apron. It was the work of a moment to unfasten it and release the god’s true phallus. Hadrian was briefly disconcerted that it was not tinted green.
And then Osiris’s hands were on his bride’s body, finding the pins and brooches that held the gown together, impatiently casting them aside. Hadrian-Isis’s phallus stood up before it was unveiled, the emperor excited by his lover’s unaccustomed mastery. Antinous did not remove his queen’s golden collar, merely turned
him brusquely and reached for the oil.
Long before Antinous’s birth, as a boy in Hispania Hadrian had been for some while the eromenos of an older youth. He remembered the nearly shameful physical pleasure in being another man’s woman—he had not imagined it might ever happen again, least of all that the man taking him should be his own youthful, yielding eromenos or a god—he had forgotten the initial pain. Isis cried out aloud.
When Antinous-Osiris had pleasured and bred his bride, he tenderly unfastened Isis’s collar of jewelled gold and placed it around his own neck. Then, not in triumph or shame but exaltation, he moved away. Lifting green-streaked hands to the Nile of stars spread across the heavens, he uttered a wordless paean, and then, as his own dreams and the prophecies of oracles and priests uncounted required, Antinous cast himself over the barge’s side into the Nile of waters.
He had expected it, dreaded it, but when the Augustus Hadrian heard the splash his lover’s body made he cried out. The acolyte of Besa and the slaves and legionaries aboard the imperial barge were ready. As if he were once again tribune of the soldiers, Hadrian issued commands and, though he stood dishevelled, naked but for a woman’s wig, his skin stained with smears of verdigris, and all knew his shameful subjugation, the commands were obeyed.
It was not long—and yet far too long—before the divine corpse was raised from the waters and laid upon the deck. Isis’s collar still ringed Antinous’s neck: it had dragged him under headfirst and the drugged wine or his own destiny had prevented him from struggling against the river’s cool embrace. Weeping, bellowing, Hadrian bent over the body of his beloved, arms outstretched like the wings of a mourning kite. Abashed, soldiers and slaves withdrew, but the priest remained, watchful, knowing.
Dead, the Bithynian ephebe was as lovely as he had ever been alive. Father Nile had washed away the painted complexion of the god, leaving the youth’s skin as pale and fine as unpainted marble. His own eyes streaming, Hadrian tenderly brushed his lover’s eyelids shut, knuckled wet hair off the white brow. He kissed perfect lips that were already chill, that tasted and smelled of Nile water and Egyptian mud.