Priestess of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Tiring of his play, Crispus came running up to climb into my lap, and the dogs, panting, flopped down beside us. I popped a candied fig from the painted plate on the bench beside me into the boy's mouth, and cuddled him against my breast.

  For the first time in my life I had no need to practise economy, and I had servants in plenty to do the actual work of the imperial household. I was free to spend most of my time with Crispus, who had all his father's brilliance, and, as it seemed to me, even more sweetness, though that may have been the partiality of a grandmother, who can afford to love her grandchildren more openly because their success or failure does not so directly reflect upon her own.

  "Tell me a story about when Pater was a little boy!" mumbled Crispus through the fig.

  "Well—" I thought a moment, "when he was your age, he loved figs, just like you. At that time we lived in Naissus, and we had a neighbour who was very proud of the fig tree in his garden. Now we also had a dog called Hylas who loved fruit, and would even climb trees to get at it. So Constantine made a muzzle for Hylas, and very early one morning he dropped him over the wall into the neighbour's garden and encouraged him to climb the fig tree and knock the ripe figs down. Then he nipped into the garden with a basket and gathered them up and took them into the playhouse he had built in our garden to eat."

  "Did he eat them all?" asked Crispus. "Didn't he give the doggie even one?"

  "Oh yes, and smeared fig around Hylas's muzzle as well, and when the neighbour discovered his loss and came over, shaking his fist and demanding that we punish our son, Constantine pointed to the dog and swore by Apollo that Hylas had done the deed, which was, of course, true. When the man didn't believe him, he insisted on going to the fig tree and letting Hylas climb it again, and this time of course he was not muzzled, and managed to grab one of the figs he had missed before."

  "What did the neighbour say?"

  "Well, first he wanted us to destroy the dog, but he settled for a promise that the animal would be prevented from ever getting into his garden again. So we swore by Apollo as well, and paid the man the worth of the figs in silver, and he went home."

  "I'm glad the dog was safe," said Crispus. "But didn't Pater get in trouble?"

  "Oh yes, because, you see, Hylas had been trained not to climb that wall. Constantine thought he had been very clever, until we explained the difference between being truthful and being honest, and made him help our gardener dig the flowerbeds until he had worked off the price we paid."

  I saw the child's eyes grow round as he contemplated the idea that his father had once been less than perfect. In recent years, Constantine had developed a distinct taste for splendour, and I thought it would do Crispus no harm to realize that his father was human too.

  If I had a worry, it was the continued political turmoil as Constantine struggled with his competitors for supremacy. I had no real doubts that he would eventually triumph, for was he not the Child of Prophecy? Still, I waited eagerly for my son's letters, and finding in his mother his safest confidante, Constantine wrote to me often.

  When Crispus jumped down to go and play with the dogs some more, I took out the latest letter, sent from somewhere near Massilia. After the wedding, Maximian had quarrelled with his son and for a time taken refuge with us. Galerius, having failed to rectify the situation by force, had made another treaty and installed a man called Licinius to replace Severus, whom Maxentius had executed.

  And now Maximian, who in my opinion was showing signs of senility, had seized the treasury and dug himself in at Massilia, after first having written a letter to Fausta proclaiming that soon he would be the sole ruler of the West once more.

  Constantine was at that point reviewing troops on the Rhenus, and Fausta, who idolized him, had promptly written to inform him of what was going on. By now, Constantine might be fighting his father-in-law. We had received no word since this letter, written from the temple of Apollo at Grannum, where Constantine had stayed three nights before.

  "Grannum was on our way, and so I took the opportunity to sleep overnight in the shrine there. And the god gave me a dream. Apollo himself came to me, attended by Victory, and offered me four laurel wreaths. Perhaps you will know how to interpret this portent better than I, but I believe that each one represents a span of years during which I will reign. The Almighty Sun has always favoured our family, and so I claim His protection. If Apollo gives me victory in the coming conflict, I will inscribe "soli invicto comiti" on my next issue of coinage in His name. Pray for me, mother, that I have dreamed true, and will indeed gain the victory…"

  A sound, like the distant murmur of trees in a storm, caught my attention, but there was no wind—the sound was coming from the city. The gardens attached to the palace were extensive. If I could hear noise from the street beyond our gates, where the new basilica rose above the trees, it had to be loud. I felt my gut tensing as I rose to my feet, but I folded Constantine's letter carefully and slid it into the bosom of my gown where it bloused over the waist cord.

  Crispus and the dogs were still chasing each other around the garden. If it was good news, I told myself, I could wait to hear it, and I had no need to hurry sorrow if it was bad.

  Yet it was not some dust-coated military messenger, but Fausta who came running out of the palace as if the furies were at her heels. The cramping in my belly tightened as I saw her face contorted and her cheeks smeared with tears.

  "Mater! Mater! He killed himself, and it is my fault!"

  Abruptly my own terror eased. My son believed in his destiny too strongly to take his own life whatever disaster might befall. I took the girl in my arms and held her until her sobbing eased.

  "Who, Fausta? What has happened?"

  "My father—" she wailed. "They caught him at Massilia and now he is dead, and it is all because I told Constantine what he wrote to me!"

  "Your duty was to your husband, you know that," I murmured, patting her, "and Constantine would have found out soon in any case, and the end would have been the same." It was a very convenient suicide, I observed silently, wondering if Maximian had been given assistance in expiating his crime. Gradually, Fausta's sniffles ceased.

  "Mourn for your father, Fausta, for in his day he was a great man, and he would have hated to live until he was feeble and old. Wear white for him, but do not let your eyes be red and puffy with weeping when Constantine comes home."

  She nodded. Constantine liked to have everyone happy around him. I wondered sometimes if the uncertainties of his childhood had given him this desire for a perfect family, or whether he simply believed it necessary if he was properly to fulfil his role as Emperor.

  When Constantine was at home, it was his custom to sit with me for an hour at the end of the evening. We would speak sometimes of the family, and sometimes of the Empire. I suppose that I was the only advisor whom he could trust absolutely, but even to me he rarely opened his mind completely. I regretted sometimes the loss of the open-hearted boy he had been before he went to Diocletian's court, but I knew that innocence would never have survived the dangers and intrigues that surrounded an emperor.

  I had a small sitting room between my bedchamber and the gardens, with doors that could be opened in the heat of summer, and a hearth in the British fashion for the days of winter and autumnal chill. Now, at the end of summer, I sat by the fire with my spinning. The work was no longer the necessity it had been at Avalon, but I found it focused and calmed the mind.

  "How do you make the thread so fine and even, Mother? No matter how long I watch you, when I try the wool always breaks in my clumsy hands!" Constantine sat with his long legs stretched out to the fire, his deep-set eyes half-closed as he watched the spindle turn.

  "It is a good thing, then, that you were not born a girl," I answered, catching the spindle with my foot as I paid out more wool from the distaff and adjusted the tension. Then a deft twist set it spinning again.

  "Oh yes," he laughed. "But the fates, who have laid out my course from the cradle,
would not have erred in so fundamental a matter. I was born to be Emperor."

  I raised one eyebrow. There was something a little disturbing about such certainty, but I could not dispute what I also believed to be true.

  "And to father a dynasty? Crispus is growing to be a fine lad, but one son is not much of a family. Fausta is nineteen now, and ripe to be bedded. She will get into mischief if you do not give her children."

  "Has she been complaining?" He laughed. "You are right, of course, but I will sire no more offspring until I can be sure of being at home often enough to supervise their upbringing. The death of Galerius has upset the balance of power. I have reason to believe that Maximin Daia has made an alliance with Maxentius. I myself have been in communication with Licinius, who also claims the East, and offered him the hand of my sister Constantia."

  He gave me a quick glance, as if wondering how I would take this mention of his half-sister, but I had long ago accepted the fact that Constantius had asked Constantine to watch over the children of Theodora. Her birth might have been better than mine, but it was my son who was Emperor.

  "So, the lines have been drawn…"

  "Maxentius has defaced my statues. He says it is in response to my treatment of the images of his father Maximian, but Maximian died a rebel, whereas I am supposed to be Maxentius's brother-emperor. I will have to go against him, and soon, before snow closes the Alpine passes. It is as good an excuse as any."

  "If the rumours that I have heard are true, the Senate will applaud you. He has made free with too many patrician wives and daughters, and imposed too many taxes. But do you have the forces to match the men he has added to the Praetorian Guard, and the troops brought over from Africa?"

  "In quality—" he grinned whitely. "In quantity? No, but I am the better general. Superior numbers will not matter if they are not led well."

  "May the blessing of all the gods be with you," I said, frowning.

  The last of the laughter left his face. "If I knew which god could guarantee me victory I would promise him a temple—I would make his cult first in the Empire. I must fight Maxentius, and it must be done now, but you are right in thinking that the result will hang upon the favour of heaven. Pray for me, Mother—you have the ear of the gods!"

  "You are always in my thoughts and in my prayers," I answered when the silence threatened to go on for too long. I loved Constantine. He was the centre of my life. But there were times when he seemed to need more than I understood how to give to him.

  The next day he was gone, to gather his faithful troops from the Rhenus, I assumed, though no announcement had been made that might warn his enemy. Later I was to learn that Maxentius, anticipating some move from Constantine, had entrusted the defence of the north to Ruricius Pompeianus, staying in Rome himself in case Lieinius should finish dealing with the Persians in time to attack him. But at the time I was unable to appreciate even what news we had, for Crispus had taken some illness from the gardener's children, and though he recovered quickly, I, who had been nursing him, contracted it myself.

  First came the red rash, and then the fever, that seemed to burn in my very bones. If this was a disease we had in Britannia, my upbringing on Avalon had sheltered me from it. And as often happens when an adult catches a childhood disease, I became far more ill than Crispus had been.

  I lay in alternating stupor and delirium as the month of October drew to its end. In my moments of clarity I heard the names of cities: Segusio, Taurinorum, Mediolanum, and later, Verona, Brixia, Aquileia, Mutina. Afterward, I was to learn that they were the towns Constantine had taken. By refusing to allow his soldiers to plunder the first of them, he had won the swift surrender of those that followed. But I was fighting my own battle, and as the days passed, I sensed that I was losing.

  Events around me passed like a troubled dream, but in that in-between state in which I hovered, neither the world of humankind or the spirit world, I sensed the tides of the seasons swinging onwards towards Samhain, when the Britons hold that the old year ends and the gestation of the new begins. There comes a moment, then, when a doorway opens between the worlds and the dead return.

  A good time, I thought dimly, for my own passing. I regretted only that I had no chance to say farewell to Constantine. Yet it was not my life, but an era, that was ending, though it was to be many years before I clearly understood the signficance of that Samhain-tide.

  A day came when the fever rose once more, and my spirit, freed from a weakening body, fared forth between the worlds. I seemed to see the land laid out below me, and love carried me eastwards where my son was about to come to grips with his enemy. I saw a great city beside a river which I knew must be Rome. But Maxentius's forces had crossed the Tiber upstream from the city, and were drawn up in formation, facing the smaller number of troops led by Constantine. Winter was coming early, and in the crisp air the sun seemed to shatter, sending a refraction across the horizon that rayed out in a cross of light.

  Constantine's forces charged the enemy, his Gallic cavalry evading the more heavily armed Italian horse and overwhelming the lightly-armed Numidians. I could see Constantine in his golden armour, and his bodyguard, all with a Greek Chi Rho painted for luck upon their shields.

  Maxentius's Praetorians died where they stood, and the remainder broke and ran. The bridge cracked beneath the sudden weight, spilling men and horses into the swift grey waters. The attackers swarmed after them, repairing the damage, and by sunset they were entering Rome.

  As shadow swept across the land I also fell into darkness. The disease had run its course, but I was dreadfully weakened. I would eat and drink when they roused me, but most of the time I slept. Sometimes, half-conscious, I would hear conversation around me.

  "She grows no better," came the voice of the Greek physician. "The Emperor must be told."

  "We dare not distract him. If Constantine is defeated, none of our lives will be worth a denarius. Maxentius will treat us as Maximian did the wife and daughter of Galerius." That was Vitellia. She sounded as if she had been weeping. I wanted to tell her that Constantine had triumphed, but I could not make my body do my will.

  "Even if we sent a message now, my lord could not come in time," said Fausta. She was Maxentius's sister, and might expect to be spared if he triumphed, unless he blamed her for the death of their father. The early emperors had not hesitated to kill their own kin. Why should I fight my way back to life in a world where such things could be?

  But by the next morning a messenger had come to confirm my vision, and in the general rejoicing, little Crispus slipped into my chamber, and as he hugged me, laughing for joy at the news and weeping to see me so thin and pale, I felt a pulse of strength leap from his strong young body to mine, and knew that the gods were not going to take me this Samhain after all.

  It was past the feast of Saturnalia when Constantine returned to Treveri. By that time I was recovering my strength, with only an occasional shortness of breath to remind me of my fight to breathe, but my hair, which until now had shown only a few strands of grey, had gone white in the course of my illness. I trusted that it would distract him from noting any other changes, for I had not allowed them to tell him how close to death I had come.

  I chose to receive him in my sitting room, where the reflected light from my red-painted walls would give me a healthier colour. Even so, I was glad to be sitting when he came to me, for the aura of power that blazed out around him was like the blast of heat from a roaring fire.

  "Hail Sol Invictus! You are surely the sun in his splendour now!"

  I lifted a hand, in welcome, or perhaps to ward him away, for in that moment he was a giant, dwarfing all else in the room. Later, when I saw the statue that he had commissioned in Rome, whose head alone was the height of a tall man, I realized that the sculptor had sensed the same quality of something beyond the scale of humanity as I.

  Constantine grinned, bent to kiss me, and then began to pace around the room, as if the power that filled him would not let
him sit still. He did not comment on my appearance; perhaps he was still too transfixed by his visions to really focus on the outer world.

  "Oh Mother, I wish you had been there, for surely the God of Light was with me on that day!" He took another turn around the room and came to my side once more.

  "I have heard there were many signs and wonders. What happened, Constantine? What did you see?"

  "Oh yes, now they are all saying how my victory was foretold, but at the time the prophets on both sides were predicting their sides would win. The Sibylline Books prophesied that an enemy of Rome would perish on the day of the battle, and of course Maxentius said it must be me, and the astrologers were muttering darkly about a conjunction of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus in Capricorn. But I am the Child of Prophecy, and I knew how to make even my enemies serve me!"

  I gazed at him in wonder. Constantine had always been confident, but now he spoke with the fervour of a priest in trance.

  "Maxentius had become a tyrant, and Rome was bound to see me as a liberator. He was on the bridge when it collapsed, and the weight of his armour drew him down into the mud and he drowned. As for the stars, the night before the battle I dreamed that a shining figure showed me a scroll with the Greek letters that the scribes use to signify a passage that is good, and told me that was the Sign by which I should conquer. When I woke, I told the fabricators to affix the Chi and Rho to a military standard, and my guard, to draw the Sign on their shields, and then the sun rose and divided in a cross of light, and I knew I would have the victory. Sopater believes that I saw Apollo, but Bishop Ossius assures me that my vision was given by the Christos."

  "And what do you believe?" I asked him then.

  "The Jewish Jesus, whom we crucified, is a god for slaves," said Constantine. "But the great Father whom the Christians worship, the King and Creator of all the world, is the same as the god of the philosophers, and worthy to be patron to an emperor. I do not think it matters what name folk use for Him, so long as they recognize that One God is supreme in the heavens and on the earth, one Emperor."