The King in the Wood
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain.
– Thomas Babington Macauley
It was the press of beggars that told her she was nearly there. The stones of the Via Appia were set so closely and evenly that Valeria’s mule-drawn carriage hardly rattled as it drew her out of Rome, but as the road reached the long climb up the skirts of Mons Albanus the flags were cemented more roughly in order to give the laboring draft-animals some purchase, and the slow lurch of the wheels over each cobble roused her from her reverie on the cushions. She sat up, pulled open the wooden shutter to see what her surroundings were, and then slammed it hastily shut again. Outside, the way was flanked with beggars, and at the sight of her face in the little window several hurried forward from their positions among the roadside tombs with hands out. For a few moments she heard them knocking at the carriage, their muffled voices wheedling.
“Domina! Kind Domina! A few sestertii for a widow with children to raise!”
“Domina, I took these wounds in Illyricum, fighting for Rome!”
And then came a curse from the driver and a shout from the guards behind the carriage and the beggars gave up.
Brigit, the only female slave she’d brought with her on this journey, woke with a snort and looked around. “Are we there, Domina?” she asked. Brigit was a Briton or a Gaul or somesuch from the far north; she was fat and middle-aged and, beneath her complacency, fearlessly loyal. Valeria had brought her along for comfort as much as for propriety.
“Soon, I think.”
“Good.” She settled back into the cushions with a snore.
They must be close to the sanctuary of Diana, Valeria thought. Beggars always congregated around temples, hoping that those seeking the charity of the gods would be generous themselves. Valeria opened her purse to see how many brass coins she had, but it was no more than a distraction for her fingers; her mind was elsewhere.
Because Valeria Prisca Secunda sorely needed the charity of the gods. She’d been married to Quintus Didius Messor for four years, and she hadn’t fallen with child yet. She liked her husband very much; he might be more than twice her age and of common blood but he was liberal and kindly, and she wanted to stay married to him. If she didn’t quicken with child soon though, she was afraid he’d divorce her—reluctantly, she thought, for he seemed very fond of her, but he wouldn’t have that much choice. He was growing old and he needed an heir, for although he was of the plebeian class his wealth was considerable. That was the very fact that had persuaded her own patrician family to contract the marriage alliance. Valeria had to give him a son or both sides would be let down.
It was hardly an unusual problem among the women of Rome of course, and there were ways around it. Many women would have resorted to taking a lover or bedding one of their household slaves, but that was a risky strategy as slaves were all too prone to gossip. There were alternatives. There were places, sacred places, where a Roman matron might go and beg a child of the gods, conceiving with a little help from their earthly representatives. It didn’t count as adultery. It wasn’t much spoken of. But they were there, these temples. Juno Lucina or Tellus Mater would have helped her.
But Valeria had chosen to go to Diana, keeper of the mountains and virgin of the Lake of Nemi. While Quintus Didius Messor was away at their country estate she was taking a carriage-ride from their house in the city, with only six guards trudging behind the vehicle and a woman to accompany her. She intended to be away from home overnight.
And why Nemi? Because, she admitted to herself with a flush of shame, there’s a faint chance that Thoas might be there. At that thought something inside her belly twisted—almost painful, but not quite. A little flip of the stomach.
Four years ago she’d been sixteen, and betrothed to Quintus Didius, but she was still living in her father’s house on the day that he, Lucius Valerius Priscus, had died.
Four years ago she’d been in love with a Greek slave, her father’s personal doctor. Oh—she knew now—it had been a silly girlish green love, as full of sap and as easy to snap as the stem of a narcissus. Thoas had been a darkly handsome man, well-educated and thoughtful—and with time to spare for conversation with an inquisitive and lonely girl whose elder sister had left to marry and whose brothers took no notice of her existence. And of course she’d never confessed her feelings to him. If anyone in the household had suspected her passion he’d have likely ended up sold or sent back to the army or just dead. The virgin daughters of the gens Valerius bore a heavy weight of honor.
So she had carried the ache hidden inside her, like a child that could not be born, and the day that Lucius Valerius Priscus died was the last time she’d seen Thoas.
She’d helped her father back in from the garden when he began to spit blood and clutch his belly. He’d been pale and unsteady for some days, not his usual domineering self at all, but he hadn’t mentioned that he was in pain. Complaint wasn’t the way of a patrician of Rome and ex-officer of the legions, and she’d only guessed at the agony he was in from the look on his gray and sweating face.
“Fetch Thoas!” she’d called, supporting her father under the arm as he groped his way back to his own chamber. When the doctor ran in he’d taken one look and sent the other slaves out at once, and begun to prepare a tincture of opium in wine. She’d fetched a bowl and a cloth herself from the shelf, as if she were a servant, for her father to spit the blood into and mop his lips. But it had been like building a mud dam across the Tiber—quite suddenly Lucius Valerius Priscus had leaned over the edge of the bed and vomited blood in a bright gush, then fallen limp. His eyes were fixed and staring in death by the time they rolled him over.
Valeria’s memories of the moments that followed were blurred. She was certain that she didn’t scream; her father had added the philosophical precepts of the Stoics to the dignity of the patrician class and he’d brought his children up likewise. She’d just stared and stared. She’d been nervous of her stern father all her life, and now she didn’t know how to react. Looking back on the scene from four years on, she was fairly sure she’d said nothing at all until she asked, “Was he poisoned?”
“No,” Thoas had said. His voice was heavy. “The pain in his guts … he’s had it for years. I’ve seen it before. There was a hole in his stomach, I think, and he bled from his entrails out through that.”
“I should send for my stepmother.” Valeria hadn’t been able to tear her eyes from her father’s still face. “She’s sacrificing at the shrine of Juno Pronuba. For my wedding.”
“Yes. Of course. She will want to know. Everything. She’ll want to be sure.”
There’d been something so horrible in his voice that she’d turned at last to look at him. He’d been sitting down on an ornately carved chest—which was forbidden—with his elbows on his knees, and was holding his head between his hands. He was wearing a brief tunic which left his arms and legs bare, displaying the strong frame he’d built while serving as an army doctor when her father was an officer—and Valeria had wondered with one small part of her mind why it was that she could still admire that at a time like this. But under his neat dark hair his face had been absolutely ashen.
“What …?” she’d croaked eventually.
He’d met her eyes briefly. “He died vomiting blood, Domina, with his doctor in attendance. It’ll look like poison to most people.”
“Oh,” she’d said, slowly seeing what was only too obvious to him. “They’ll …”
“Torture me for a confession, yes.”
Of course, she’d realized, they’d have to find out whether Lucius Valerius had been murdered. Freeborn Romans took no chances when it came to the question of slave insurrection. And the word of a slave was not legally admissible in court, unless extracted und
er torture. “Oh,” she’d said weakly, looking down at her blood-speckled hands and feeling sick. “Oh no. They can’t …”
“They can. They will.”
“I’ll speak up for you.”
“That won’t help.”
“Then you’ll have to run away.”
He’d lifted his face to hers again, as if seeing her for the first time, and for a long moment there was silence between them. Valeria had realized that she’d just promised not to betray him, and her heart had clenched.
“Yes,” he’d said softly, “I’ll have to. Though I doubt I’ll get far.” He’d touched his face, his fingertip brushing the old vertical scar that bisected his right eyebrow and ran down across his cheekbone: another souvenir of his military days. “A Greek with a scarred face—that won’t be too hard for the slave-catchers to spot. Still, it’s a chance, isn’t it?”
“Go to Nemi,” she’d said.
“What?”
“The temple of Diana the Huntress. You’ll be able to claim sanctuary there. It’s only a day from the walls of Rome, straight down the Appian Way.”
“They give sanctuary to escaped slaves? Why’ve I not heard of that before?”
“They …” She’d hesitated. “It’s only to one slave at a time. The King of the Grove there, he’s an escaped slave. He dedicates himself to Diana by killing the incumbent King and taking his place. You’d have to do that.”
“Kill the King of the Grove?”
“You could do that. You were in the army, weren’t you?”
“I was a battlefield surgeon,” he’d said, shaking his head. “Not a soldier.”
“But you learned to fight. And you’re young enough and strong enough, more than most slaves. You’ve got a chance.”
Hesitating, he’d nodded. A smile—acknowledgment, not mirth—had pulled at the corner of his mouth. Then he’d stood. “Half a chance, perhaps. More out there than I have here. My respects to your father and all the manes of your house, Domina.” Then without another word he’d left, slipping out through the garden door. She didn’t watch him go. She’d just sat there with her father’s body and waited for the tears to come.
Now, four years later, Valeria had no more idea than that day what had happened to Thoas. She didn’t know if he’d made it to the sanctuary at Nemi or even tried to, whether he could have triumphed in combat there or how long the reign of a slave-King usually lasted. Perhaps there were new contestants for the sylvan crown every day. All she knew was that he wasn’t captured and returned during the time she remained in her father’s house. And that now she was here, at Nemi, because of the wisp of a chance that he might be too.
♦♦♦
Lake Nemi, the Mirror of Diana, lay cupped in a deep hollow on the wooded flanks of Mons Albanus, close to the Via Appia but not visible from it. What could be seen was the complex of temple buildings on the lip of that bowl, with hostelries and inns and stables all waiting to cater for supplicants, and the droves of peddlers and guides and beggars waiting to greet them.
Lore had it that the goddess came to admire her reflection in the little lake on nights of the full moon, and that within the grove there was an even holier sanctum that none but the priests entered, where she was attended by her King. But entry to the grove in the hollow was strictly controlled. Behind the public temple was a wall of dressed stone that cut off from view everything but the treetops. In that wall was a low door with a single priest guarding it, and suspended on the wall over the doorway a bare branch, gilded so that its twigs shone. No worshipers seemed to be entering by that door; instead they all mounted the broad steps to the pillared portico of the temple. Valeria, after staring at the modest doorway and its idle keeper for a long moment, drew a fold of her mantle over her head and followed all the rest within.
Diana, she thought as she stood over the brazier of charcoal and watched a priest cast incense and olive oil and hemp seed upon the coals, was a perplexing goddess, as mysterious as the moon that invoked her. A huntress in a land of cultivated fields and proud cities: a virgin to whom women prayed for conception and for a safe easy birth, and who kept a consort imprisoned here in the sacred grove. A goddess to be found on the earth and in the heavens and in the underworld.
Even her marble statue here in the public temple was a contradiction. Wreathed in rising smoke, the image depicted the goddess wearing a dress as short as a man’s tunic, revealing her smooth legs and boots upon her feet. With one hand she caressed the head of a stag. She looked both beautiful and kindly; her face was serene. But, Valeria thought, she was the goddess of the hunt. The stag she petted so tenderly was to be her victim—pierced by arrows or torn apart by hounds.
Valeria bowed her head as she listened to the priest’s prayers, and wondered whether it was truly a good thing to be heard by the gods.
“I have a further request to make of Diana,” she murmured as she paid the priest for the ewe that would be sacrificed in her name. “I need to ask the intercession of her priesthood in the conceiving of a child.”
The priest looked her up and down, and she didn’t like his expression at all. “Perhaps I might be the one to intercede on your behalf,” he suggested, and Valeria forced herself not to recoil: he was almost as old as her husband and had wet, droopy lips.
“I’ve come to see the Rex Nemorensis,” she whispered.
His eyebrow rose. “Of course. If you think you’re up to that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Only that such a meeting is considered an … ordeal … by some. Things could be arranged much more swiftly and simply if, say, I were to pray with you instead.”
Valeria’s heart thumped. Ordeal did not sound like Thoas. He’d always been courteous and mild when she knew him. Of course, then he’d been a domestic slave. Here—if he was here, if the priest-King were not some stranger, some rough laborer or bodyguard or miner who’d escaped from a life of brute toil—here he was the consort of the goddess, and a murderer. She bit her lip. “I will see the King,” she said, in a voice so low the priest had to incline his head to hear it.
“As you wish. Follow this way.”
♦♦♦
She made a substantial donation to the temple for the privilege of being washed—by priestesses, she was relieved to find—and dressed in a short linen stolla that came only to her knees, in the style of Diana the Huntress. Prayers were said over her head and incense burnt, and then she was left for an hour to pray in a tiny shrine all alone, preparing herself for the touch of divine grace. Valeria was mortified at the prospect of appearing in public dressed so immodestly, but when they came to fetch her she was led through private corridors to the back of the temple. A gray-haired priestess took her hand at the door.
“Whenever you knock here you’ll be readmitted to the temple.”
Valeria nodded, her throat dry. She could feel her empty stomach churning. Brigit, who was hovering at her heels, whispered, “Domina—are you sure?”
“Shush, Brigit! I am under the protection of the goddess now. Don’t be such a coward!” Telling the slave off made her feel a little braver.
Then they let her out through the door, into the sacred grove beyond the great wall, and suddenly she was alone—alone as she never was at home where there were always slaves in attendance, alone as she hadn’t been in years. Since, perhaps, the day of her father’s death when she’d sat on his bed and wept. Valeria had to grit her teeth to stop herself shrinking back into the porch. She was a Roman, she told herself, and she wouldn’t show fear.
It was harder still to admit that under her chill nervousness there was a bubbling pool of heat. That her vulva was soft and swollen, fluttering with anticipation; that the fear and uncertainty did not diminish that ache, but inflamed it. Her heart raced beneath breasts that tingled, the nipples standing up stiff against her borrowed linen despite the warmth of the day.
&nbs
p; She’d led such a sheltered life; her body’s reaction to this risk surprised her. But then she’d been that way four years ago, whenever she was around Thoas: half-melting with desire despite the terrible consequences of her passion being discovered. She’d had to hide her hungry glances under cool lashes and disguise the quiver of her limbs with studied gestures.
Her own stepmother had been no better; worse, in fact. Thoas was after all an unusually handsome slave. But out of fear of Lucius Valerius Priscus—who most certainly would not have tolerated the slightest infidelity on the part of his wife—Drusilla had been too sensible to do anything other than cultivate an inventive list of ailments that required the physician to examine her at regular intervals. Always with her slaves present, of course.
The trees pressed up close to the buildings. Valeria had never been in a wood before either; she was used only to the tame trees of gardens and orchards and olive groves, and to the dark verticals of the cypresses that grew beside the roads. These were close-grown, gnarled, tangled trees whose canopies cast the ground into shadow, their leaves in full summer flush. She recognized green acorns on the branches of some, and there were spiky seed-cases littering the ground at her feet that got caught in her sandals and made her hobble as she picked them out. Although the air was fairly still down here, a breeze hissed in the high branches, masking even the distant hubbub from the crowds over the wall.
Nor was there any obvious road, just little spidery paths that wandered between the trees in no particular direction, though all sloped downhill. She supposed they descended toward the famous lake. Shivering, she set off. Her footfalls rustled in the dead leaves of a hundred previous winters.
Her stepmother, she recalled, had made Thoas perform for her amusement. She’d made him have congress with various slave-girls of the household while she watched, smirking but untouchable. Valeria had only been a direct witness once. That was when Drusilla had decided that since her stepdaughter was approaching marriage she needed to see what she was expected to do to a man. She’d summoned Thoas to the corner of their walled garden where stepmother and daughter were reclining under the pergola, one hot afternoon. Two or three slaves had stood in attendance too. Thoas, Valeria thought, had looked wary.
Fierce Enchantments Page 5