by M. K. Hume
Unkind whispers were not the worst of it, for Lydia could laugh off the suggestion that she hid a lascivious nature under a skin of feigned piety. When the gossip implied that she had been seduced because her husband had traded her body for a gambling debt, Lydia felt her heart begin to break. She had borne four living sons for Petronius. All were married advantageously and settled outside Italia, but her waist was still tiny, her feet and hands were delicate and her face was still unlined. The clean lines of her features and the perfection of her thick, white skin had defied time, and many men still watched Gallica Lydia with hot, lascivious intentions.
But Lydia had loved her older husband, although he was often foolish and hasty in his decisions, and responded with his emotions rather than with his reason. Even if he had been ignorant of the use to which Valentinian put his family ring, Petronius had not left the court when his wife became the subject of vulgar gossip. He had said nothing in answer to her critics, and continued to bow low to the emperor to maintain his position at court.
Her husband’s apparent indifference to the destruction of her good name was the most painful cross she had to bear. Petronius must not love her, so she had based her pride on the shifting quicksand of an unrequited devotion.
The misunderstandings that exist between husband and wife are commonplace in any marriage, but the tragedy for Gallica Lydia lay with her inability to broach her feelings with Petronius Maximus. Dumb as she was with misery, her husband knew that something was seriously amiss with his wife, but his natural reserve with women made any confessions of guilty feelings quite impossible to repeat to her. Just as he brought no hint of his many frustrations at the emperor’s court home to Lydia, he did not expect to be confronted with her hurt feelings and shame. And so the silence festered between them.
Eventually, Lydia could cry no more and she rarely left her rooms, preferring solitude to the looks of pity or amusement in the eyes of her staff. She became pale and silent, a shadow of her previous self without the animation that had kept old age at bay. Hopelessness was her constant companion and silence became her lover.
For two months, Gallica Lydia withered. Desperate to avoid her dark, wounded and accusing eyes, Petronius began his campaign to poison the emperor’s mind against Flavius Aetius. With a fixed and implacable determination, Petronius used subtlety rather than warnings, by innuendo and apology rather than by character assassination. In short, he praised Aetius constantly and spoke with respect and reverence of the general’s strategic gifts, his capacity to survive all his commanders and his intelligence in marrying his children to useful allies. In particular, Petronius expressed admiration for Aetius’s cleverness in binding the Romanised Hun nobility to his person through the marriage of his youngest daughter, Flavia.
‘It would be easy, my darling,’ he explained to Lydia as he shared a simple evening meal with her in her rooms, ‘and it would be foolish to make disparaging remarks about the marriage of Valentinian’s daughter to Aetius’s son. The emperor would see any such warnings as spite. He knows how close Aetius stands to the throne, so I don’t need to belabour the point. But, puss, when I remind the emperor that Aetius also has a son-in-law who is wealthy, and a Hun, then Valentinian will start to wonder.’
‘Good!’ Lydia murmured tiredly, and Petronius scanned her pallid face with real concern.
He was increasingly worried over the health of his frail but still lovely wife, which perhaps was the reason for quitting a game of chance early to return to his villa with its red-tiled roof and crisp white walls. As the afternoon shadows barred the forecourt with deep blue stripes, the bare poplars rattled their skeletal branches in the winter breeze coming in from the sea. A tang of salty air caught in the back of his nose and reminded him again of the sea journey to Ostia in company with Aetius’s daughter and her chaperon, and once again he relived the feelings of impatience that he had experienced at the realisation that he was being used as an escort for a spoiled girl who lacked even the distinction of patrician birth. Petronius should have been fighting the Hun, but he had been reduced to performing the insulting duties of a tame watchdog, not to mention fulfilling the role of a spy. At the time, Aetius had been distracted by Attila’s advance southward, but in spite of the urgency of the situation the general had also been obsessed with the whereabouts of a Celtic healer and his followers. The man, named in his heathen way after their sun god, Myrddion, had been interesting for any man of action, for the healer had confined himself to treating any sailors who were ill and watching the shorelines along the route of the voyage. Petronius had scorned to mention the Celt to Aetius, forswearing the role of eavesdropper.
Aetius had used him whenever they had met and, unpardonably, the general had used Petronius’s sweet and gentle wife nearly as terribly as had Valentinian, the man who raped her. Aetius was a pestilence, an evil that must be eradicated if Petronius was ever to sleep easily.
So Petronius was quietly angry when he tossed off his toga with its narrow bands that indicated his pedigree. His steward rescued the fine wool from the tiled floor of the colonnade as Petronius strode towards the mistress’s rooms to assure her that he would be home to dine with her. When he knocked at her door, he heard no answer. Even with his ear against the heavy timber, Petronius could hear nothing in the stultifying silence.
He opened the door carefully in case Lydia should be sleeping, and wasn’t surprised to discover her curled like a weary child under the fine bleached-wool coverlet. Frightened in case he should disturb her, he almost tiptoed away, but something about her stillness and the quiet of the dim room made the hair rise on his arms.
‘Lydia?’ he called softly. The silence was eerie and he realised that her small dog lay curled around her feet. The little creature looked up at him with piteous eyes.
‘Lydia? Wake up, Lydia,’ he exclaimed, his voice rising as her stillness chilled his skin. When he gripped her thin shoulders to shake her to wakefulness, her flesh was icy.
Petronius let her corpse fall back upon the cushions on her bed. Her open hand, with the blue veins pathetically exposed at her wrist, filled his heart with pity, loss and a growing wave of hot, scarfing loneliness. Against his volition, a sob escaped from his tight throat so that the delicate, liver-spotted dog howled thinly in his own poignant misery. The small glass bottle that had held something very poisonous rolled off the sleeping couch and smashed to splinters on the tiled floor, releasing and giving voice to his misery. As man and dog howled in unendurable pain, the running servants could not tell which cry was human, so that they held their hands over their ears lest the gods forsake them.
In the heavy darkness, the senator wailed inconsolably behind the door he had locked to ensure that his wife could not be taken from him. The entreaties of his desperate steward were ignored by the suffering Petronius, whose cries swirled through the villa and set the teeth of all the servants who dwelled within it on edge.
As Flavius Petronius Maximus gave voice to his pain, far away in the City of the Seven Hills Myrddion Emrys started and dropped the bowl of hot stew that he had been holding, so that the searing liquid splashed his feet and burned his flesh. Six pairs of eyes swivelled to watch him, shocked and staring.
Both Finn and Cadoc had seen those open, sightless eyes before, but Willa screamed shrilly and Bridie moaned once in shock and fear.
Myrddion stood up like a man in a trance and walked towards the windows, opening the rickety wooden shutters to their full extent. With eyes that saw a different world from the shadows of the dark city, Myrddion moaned . . . then began to speak.
‘Woe is come to you, City of the Romans, and you will burn before five years have passed. For fourteen days and fifteen agonising nights, the wild men will rip your fine old flesh apart before you crumble into ash.
‘Woe to your children, dead in their beds, for there is nowhere else for your people to flee.
‘Woe to your women who will be raped and enslaved, whether they be patrician, plebeian or slave. T
he barbarians will not care whether you suffer or die.
‘Your roads will lead to scattered hills of corpses and your aqueducts will shatter and run dry. Cursed are these hills when the last vulture has fled, for no Roman will ever wear the crown of Empire again. As slaves you will know the travails of defeat, people of Rome, and suffer the pain that you have inflicted on so many other enslaved peoples for more than twelve hundred years.
‘Carthage sings in its salt-sown ruins. Rome is dead! Greece rejoices in the memory of its greatness that you are on your knees. Gaul is free to tear itself into bloody rags, while Hispania shivers in the darkness, waiting for the warriors of the crescent to cross the Middle Sea and enslave its people anew.
‘Look down from your heights, Holy City, and know that the glory is all fled . . . and will never return, although untold centuries wash over you, rebuilding and destroying, until the end of all things.
‘Woe to you, Flavius Aetius! For you will die at your master’s hands.
‘Woe to you, Valentinian! You have cut off your own strong hand and now you await the assassin’s knife. Beware the Field of Mars.
‘Mourn, Petronius Maximus, emperor for three score days before the mob tears you limb from limb and, later, no man will care to speak your name.
‘A river of blood has been shed in your name, whore city, but now you will drown in the tides that you have loosed.
‘And woe to you, Myrddion Emrys, for you will lose what you valued, to hold that which you sought.’
Then Myrddion turned and would have spoken, but his eyes rolled upward in his head and he collapsed like the boneless straw men that are used to frighten away the crows that gorge on the wheat fields.
For one agonised moment, his own face loomed over him in his inner darkness and pointed to a bloody child. Then the infant lifted a long, steel sword and stabbed his heart.
MYRDDION’S CHART OF THE ROUTE FROM ROME TO RAVENNA
CHAPTER XVII
A ROSE-RED WOUND
‘Every man slaughters his true desires by trying to hold them too closely,’ Myrddion cried out as he woke to a grey morning. His head thudded with an insistent headache that threatened to cause it to explode. As he opened his eyes to dim, rain-drenched light, he imagined that his brain was leaking out of his ears, eyes and nose. He vomited weakly over the edge of his pallet.
‘Master? Praise the gods, you live!’ Finn called out. ‘Cadoc, come quickly! The master is awake – he’s sick, but awake.’
Over the agonised pounding in his ears, Myrddion recognised the rich, deep voice of Rhedyn, now high-pitched with distress. He closed his eyes to lessen the pain and experienced a corona of dancing, jerking, coloured starbursts behind his eyes. Trying to move his agonised head as little as possible, he vomited again into the bowl that the widow held to his mouth.
‘What can we do to help you, master?’ Finn pleaded, but his voice had a far-away sound.
‘Are you a spirit, Finn?’ Myrddion asked, his mind dazed in childlike confusion. He frowned as the weak light struck at his senses, so he closed his eyes once more and the world went away for a few minutes.
In response to an insistent hand shaking his shoulder, Myrddion dragged his eyes open with an enormous effort of will, and there were Finn and Rhedyn standing before him as they tried to support his shaking shoulders.
‘I’m ill,’ Myrddion explained unnecessarily, as if to backward children. Nothing made any sense, as if his flesh and his spirit were dislocated and he couldn’t reassemble the shattered pieces.
‘Drink, master,’ Cadoc ordered, his face looming out of the darkness at the edges of Myrddion’s vision. ‘Open your mouth and don’t force me to pinch your nose shut.’
‘Would you poison me, my friend?’ Myrddion whispered, so Cadoc took the opportunity to force the bitter liquid down his master’s throat. Choking and protesting, he tried to shrug his apprentice away, but his arms refused to respond to the orders from his brain. He felt himself flailing at the air like an invalid.
‘I’ll not poison you, master, trust me,’ Cadoc pleaded as he forced the cup against Myrddion’s teeth until the healer submitted and swallowed the last of the soporific draught with a choking cough.
As a roaring, echoing darkness carried him away, Myrddion felt the inner part of himself release its rigid hold on his mind and body. Then, in a long, slow wave, he felt his senses slip away. Mercifully, that cruel inner vision let him be.
Ravenna was shocked, titillated and thrilled by the suicide of the noble Gallica Lydia. For the first time in many months, the older, more distinguished citizens of the second City of God spoke of her with affection and nostalgia for the old days of the Republic. The gossip was pointed in its change of public opinion. Petronius’s wife had been pure and noble, so she could not bear to live with the shame of her rape. Perversely, the old women nodded over their watered, warmed wines and agreed. Only a decent and self-respecting woman would kill herself out of shame, therefore Gallica Lydia must have been innocent.
Valentinian heard the whispers and the rumours that were circulating behind his back and experienced a frisson of anxiety, which was made more keen by the ritual hand-washing of Flavius Aetius, who now loudly proclaimed that his family had written to the beleaguered woman to offer her their sympathies, prayers and support. Valentinian watched the tide of positive public opinion turn against him and settle upon the ever-willing shoulders of Flavius Aetius.
After the inhumation of Gallica Lydia and the prescribed period of mourning, Petronius Maximus returned to Valentinian’s court. He was a changed man, for the superfluous flesh on his jaw, his shoulders and his belly had melted away, leaving him leaner and harder. Those courtiers who could meet his eyes discovered that Petronius viewed them all with a hollowed, tortured gaze that spoke eloquently of his loss. With Lydia’s suffering always in the back of his mind, contempt flared in Petronius’s face when noble citizens expressed their sympathy or pressed his hands encouragingly. Even Gaudentius refrained from making jokes or leering in the senator’s direction, reading something stark and deadly in the set of Petronius’s lips. Nervously, the young epicure lowered his eyes whenever the senator passed.
Heraclius was uncomfortable in the presence of the newly silent, introverted senator. Petronius was far too brooding to be predictable, and for the first time the eunuch wondered if he had been wise to embroil himself with a man who was so inexplicably volatile. Had Heraclius realised that Petronius actually loved his wife, he would not have approached the senator so blithely with his treasonous plot.
‘Romans don’t usually care for their wives overmuch,’ he explained to his lover that first evening of Petronius’s return to the court. ‘Marriage is more about treaties, the size of the dowry and the purity of the bloodlines than affection. I’d swear that the senator was half mad with grief – dangerously so, in fact.’
‘My dear, Romans don’t think like rational men and women,’ his partner responded casually. ‘Who’d be foolish enough to kill themselves over a sexual misadventure? Those who serve the throne in menial matters know that shame can be survived, but death is final. Instead of being treated like a fool, Lady Lydia is now praised. It’s ironic, my darling boy. Yet earlier, at a time when sympathy would have helped her, she was castigated by her own kind. And it all happened because she was raped. Better to serve barbarians than belong to Romans.’
Heraclius’s hirsute lover kissed the eunuch’s shoulder until the Greek grew impatient and pushed him away. The strapping young man pouted and stalked out of Heraclius’s private bedchamber.
Can I control Petronius? Heraclius wondered. What will Valentinian do when he is forced by proximity to meet the senator? By the gods, I wish I had left well enough alone.’
Meanwhile, Valentinian tossed in his luxurious bed. He had ordered his wife to leave him, preferring to sleep alone as was his custom. Part of his need for privacy was driven by fear – of assassination and of having to comply with the needs of others – but it
was also motivated by his burning desire to be invisible in a world where nothing and no one was ever solitary. From his earliest memories, Valentinian had been conscious of having to share every aspect of his privileged life with others. His adored mother had belonged to the empire rather than to himself, and something of that small boy still endured in his desire to be free of the bonds of his position.
Poor Valentinian! Like the possessions of all weak men, his Empire had come to resemble his own inner qualities. In the wake of Attila’s invasion, the Empire was weak and dependent on the strength of ambitious and clever acolytes who were more able than he was, causing him to become terrified of the world that existed outside his luxurious apartments. But now Valentinian had cause to fear the powerful family that hovered on the very edge of his throne, especially its paterfamilias, Aetius, who was the direst emergent threat to Valentinian’s continued trouble-free existence.
‘Can I trust my guard to rid me of Flavius Aetius? Would the Praetorians obey me? Not a chance! Many of the guard are barbarians and those ruffians love the old fox, damn his eyes. So who can I trust to serve my needs?’
Valentinian’s voice rasped harshly in the silent room, even though he whispered in the darkness so that the guard outside his door should not hear the words he shared with the night. To speak his internal anxieties aloud gave strength to his thoughts. One after another, he discarded possible assassins who could be trusted with the task of murdering the greatest general in the Western Empire.