Fire and Sacrifice

by Victoria Collins

  Partway through the evening Cornelia happened our way, checking the contents of a row of jugs waiting the next round of service. We both sides seized opportunity to speak.

  ‘Your mother was too ill to join us, Aemilia?’ Cornelia asked.

  ‘She declares herself still in mourning for Papa,’ said Aemilia, surprisingly bold.

  ‘She ought to take some country air, perhaps,’ Cornelia pushed on.

  ‘She would be touched by your concern. She’d avoid the frosts by the coast, certainly. The beauty would do her spirits good.’ Aemilia gave her warmest smile.

  ‘You are a wonder, dear Aemilia. Quaranta stays with her, though?’

  ‘As always.’

  The small talk stalled; that was as far we’d get for now. Growl.

  Aemilia turned to Terentia. ‘Mother, perhaps it’s time we begin.’

  As we moved to ready the altar, a most deliberate movement from the other side of the room caught our attention. Caecilia, Dalmaticus’s flamboyant sister, stepped into the centre of the room, tossed the dregs of her wine into the fire (which flared dramatically as she passed) and presented her empty goblet to a servant. She wore shimmering emerald, and a multicoloured embroidered wrap declared her free spirit, along with the semiprecious stones that lined her sandals.

  ‘You rob me of my sport tonight, Aemilia. I am quite put out.’ She circled us like a she wolf and leaned in to make a show of whispering, though she barely lowered her voice. ‘Usually I am subject of the greatest scandals!’

  Caecilia was known for several rather public affairs. What she must put dear bear Dalmaticus through!

  ‘Caecilia!’ Aemilia kept her smile open and warm. She did like Caecilia. So did I but we ought not be too bold tonight. Respectful and responsible, Aemilia and Licinia had promised. ‘You look glorious, as always.’

  Caecilia opened and re-adjusted the gorgeous wrap. ‘Don’t you love it? It’s Arabian.’

  Aemilia and Terentia both stiffened.

  Oh sweet figlets and cheese no. She knew. Did she know? Would Dalmaticus have confided in his sister, might he have sought the advice of a woman versed in infidelity?

  Caecilia leaned in again. This time a true whisper. ‘You are doing well, my dear. You have at least half the room with you, stay strong.’

  The quiet was getting conspicuous. ‘I believe we now have a thing in common, Caecilia, since this year Dalmaticus became Pontifex,’ I babbled. I don’t know where I was going except fishing for help. ‘Now we both have the brave Dalmaticus looking over us. Your big brother is honour incarnate, is he not?’

  ‘Unyielding,’ she said. ‘Utterly infuriating.’ And with that she pushed off.

  Terentia sacrificed the pig. We promised Dalmaticus that Aemilia and Licinia would remove themselves from the official bits. It wasn’t a clean kill. Thank the gods Terentia hid it from the rest but I saw and gods help me I prayed again purely for myself that Aemilia would stay so I never have to wield the knife myself. I won’t say here precisely the events of the rites. We don’t speak of those things, not just for Bona Dea. We learn early that to speak of a ritual act is to hold onto it, when it must be released wholly and in absolute faith to the goddess. To discuss is to question.

  Something shifted with the offerings, though. As each woman shared her offering, she shared with the group her wish and her trouble: a healthy birth, an improved marriage, peace for the soul of a lost child, a new husband, health for an ill husband, a affair that needs be kept secret, solution to a troublesome servant . . . The wine kept flowing and the women talked as women do. Poor Aurelia who was about to burst with child was counselled to take rosehip tea to induce labour. Someone else suggested liquorice. Another, peppers, and then they said best to get her husband to do it from behind in the way of beasts every two hours. Oh my! ‘Get that delicious Nubian slave of yours to take over if your husband can’t keep up!’

  Alarmed, Aemilia grabbed us and pulled us away from the circle at that one, out into the evening air.

  I repeat it only because the wickedness of it shows the mood. It did not seem to matter then whether some already judged us guilty. Extraordinarily, it helped, as though our public guilt offered companion to their private guilts, and out came all the stories of wickedness! We were one of them like never before.

  Terentia decided it was time we left. We always addressed the room before departing – we were so conspicuous we had no hope of doing otherwise. The room quieted as we gathered in a line near the door. We sprinkled sacred oil over the entry to the house and bowed to the room.

  ‘May we all enjoy the blessing of the Good Goddess for another year,’ Terentia said, warmed by the womanly camaraderie. ‘Tonight as we come together as women we embody the sacred feminine: bringer of life, guardian of the mysteries of love, keeper of the home and hearth; the one so often feared by those who do not understand her. Honour the sacred feminine in each of you, our friends.’

  It was a bold move that left the room uncomfortably silent, but oh she was clever sometimes.

  Cornelia followed us to the door, with Pomponia’s lot watching intently, marking the time we left. There would be reports. Caecilia followed us, and Licinia’s huddle, who would not let go of her until they must.

  Cornelia closed the door behind them. ‘There are rumours of a lawsuit to be brought against my husband,’ she blurted, as though the only way to get it past her lips was to launch it. ‘He is to be accused of misconduct. An abhorrent falsehood. Lies! I cannot say if you are guilty or not, priestess, but I do know that the courts of law can be used to disguise the power plays of those who would remove us from their paths.’

  I refused to believe the trial was all politics. Romans lean on politics for a thing they can control and understand. They do not have access to the gods’ minds but they do their senators. Personally I preferred to talk to the gods. Urgulania’s Dis-ease certainly said to me there was far more to this.

  ‘How so?’

  Caecilia, coming up behind, answered for her. ‘Look at you. Aemilia, Marcia and Licinia: the three of you are of some of Rome’s most powerful patrician names. The naming of your brothers as accomplices surely seals the suspicion that they are after the families. Unless you’ve something to tell us?’ She muttered the last with a seductive grin. The woman cannot help herself.

  ‘Well clearly it’s a set-up,’ said Licinia’s mother. ‘If Licinia had a choice she could surely do better!’ Awkward silence.

  Cinny giggled. ‘No offense, Aemilia, but, well, it’s true!’

  For all her ghastliness, she made a good point in our favour and I thanked her for it with all my heart. Silently. Perhaps we had the allies we needed if it came to that, which it wouldn’t, of course.

  ‘My lady, if you have knowledge that would help us . . ?’ Terentia said.

  Caecilia shook her head. ’They will hide among their numbers, but it will be those who would also see we Metelli back in the hills we came from! And our allies with us.’

  ‘What have the Metelli to do with the omen?’ I asked stupidly. I wished I hadn’t. It gave me a sick feeling before I even heard the answer.

  ‘Not to brag, dear priestess, but everything.’

  Cornelia explained with chilling flatness. ‘A Metelli will be consul next year – again. A Metelli is Pontifex Maximus, another an augur, and so on it goes. If you want to take down a new-blood family yet they continue to rise around you, your next tactic is to take down the Old Family that is their crux, their ticket into aristocratic Rome. That, Aemilia, is yours. The great Aemilii Lepidi are already withdrawn, my dear, from the public arena, and now with the passing of your lovely father, the family is a lame beast.’

  ‘I am strengthened to hear that your presumption is our innocence,’ said Terentia.

  ‘The point is,’ said Cornelia, ‘I fear innocence may have little to do with it.’

  ***

  ‘You should offer your hand in marriage, now, for when your service is up.’ Licinia fl
opped heavily on the lounge, deliberately disturbing Marcia from her tapestry.

  I stopped at the door to listen.

  ‘What, and buy protection? Don’t be ridiculous, I am a Marcii.’ She turned back to her needlework. ‘And I am a priestess, I do not barter with my body.’

  Licinia shrugged. ‘It’s a good deal for the right rising magistrate or whatnot. You are worth the wait.’

  ‘Offer yourself!’ Marcia threw her tapestry to the ground and stormed out past me.

  ‘Cousin Licinius will argue for me. I’ll be fine.’ She said it to an empty room.

  EARTH

  Fragments

  Cassius Dio Coceianus, Roman History, with a translation by Herbert Baldwin Foster (in Fragments of Book 26), p. 435.

  The priestesses bore the chief punishment and shame themselves, but they proved the source of great evils to various others as well, while the entire city was agitated on their account. For the people, considering that what was immaculate by law and sacred by religion and decent through fear of punishment had been polluted, were ready to believe that anything most shameful and unholy might be done. For this reason they visited punishment, not only on the convicted, but also on all the rest who had been accused, to show their hatred of what had occurred. Hence the whole affair in which the women were concerned seemed now to have been due not so much to feminine incontinence as to the wrath of some god.

  FIRE

  Ember

  December 114 BC

  There was a tiny portico at the top of the steps into the Temple of Vesta and the priestesses had all squidged onto it to see over the crowd to the Rostra, the speakers’ stage, where a man had been dragged and strung between crisscrossed beams. Soldiers in shiny armour and capes had tied him with his back to us, his wrists taking the weight of his body as his knees crumbled underneath him. His head flopped forward, out of view.

  None of us spoke the thought this might be related to us, a flogging wasn’t so uncommon, but it was a vice around our lungs and spines. Cor and Urgulania whisked Helvi away out the back.

  The crowd fell silent with the same questions but for a small group right at the front who seemed to be taking credit for the man’s capture and glee in spreading their secrets.

  Tristan and me made for the street to push through the crowd to the front but someone yanked us back. I was about to take a swing, but it was Dalmaticus with that dead serious look in his eye. ‘You are too recognisable,’ he said.

  I was rattled to see he had his lictors around him for the first time I’d ever witnessed.

  The first crack of the whip against the man’s back was so loud it felt like it split open the ground from the Rostra all the way back to us.

  Dalmaticus dropped us and charged toward the Rostra, his lictors almost jogging to keep line in front of him. ‘Stay back!’ he commanded us over his shoulder.

  We climbed onto the roof of a shop near the end of the forum but the furthest street from the Rostra fast as we could as we heard more lashes, in relentless succession, pausing just enough between to make you think there might be reprieve before the next one belted through you. Now we could hear the centurion’s voice.

  Another wallop and a sound that flesh is just not meant to make.

  ‘Did you or did you not defile the priestess of Vesta?’

  The man took a deep, shuddering breath and threw his breaking voice for the crowd – ‘No!’– clearly through swollen and bloody lips.

  Tristan flashed a look of dawning understanding and relief. So it is about us. But whoever this poor sod is, he’s not dropping us in it. Yet.

  Crack.

  ‘Did you or did you not defile the priestess of Vesta?’

  ‘No!’

  Three cracks in quick succession and a sickening lip of skin the width of the broad back curled out, and even from where we sat we could make out the glistening of meat which seemed to pulsate with pain and sudden exposure to the cool air. The centurion was losing patience already.

  ‘Her brother?’ I mouthed to Tristan, hoping to Jupiter above us it wouldn’t be that one possibility that would devastate Aemilia the most.

  Tristan couldn’t tell except for the dark hair at the nape, like Aemilia’s.

  ‘You took her, didn’t you?’

  Crack.

  ‘No.’

  The centurion circled the bleeding man and delivered a sickening uppercut to his chin that snapped the head backward without any resistance, flopping forward unnaturally loose.

  Tristan was trying not to vomit.

  Just then, Dalmaticus lunged onto the Rostra, several strides ahead of his lictors, and caught the centurion’s arm mid-swing. ‘Enough! The man has answered you.’ The centurion looked utterly shocked for a moment but yielded almost immediately to Dalmaticus, who turned to address the crowd. ‘He has answered you.’

  Dalmaticus summoned his lictors to untie the man and carry him, slumped like dough between their shoulders, down off the Rostra. The crowd parted quietly for them, Dalmaticus in the lead, and Tristan and I scrambled down and sprinted along the back of the shops, behind the Temple of Castor and Pollux, up the grove, past the priestesses to settle beside the temple steps, desperate to get far enough ahead to watch Dalmaticus and the man coming up the Sacred Way.

  Pompeia clutched Aemilia, sniffing.

  Up near our part of the forum the buildings came right up to the street leaving no room for a mob to gather, forcing it back. Mostly clear of the crowd, Dalmaticus turned and bent to lift the man over his own shoulder like a sack of barley, taking the man’s whole weight on one shoulder with just one arm gently round the legs, and a look of devastation on his face.

  An awful, unformed scream escaped Aemilia, a thing tied down in the dark for so long it had become an animal charging for freedom. Licinia clapped a hand over Aemilia’s mouth and pulled her backward into the temple. It would not be good to show love for any man accused.

  Dalmaticus came past me and I got a fleeting view of the slack, swollen face.

  Elian.

  AIR

  Tristan

  December 114 BC

  Dalmaticus chose to ignore my presence while I fluffed about the Regia with the priestesses’ gifts, even though it was embarrassingly obvious I was spying for them to find out where Elian had been taken. We never did find out. Dalmaticus’s own villa, it was rumoured.

  The priestesses sent me across with gifts of gratitude: a big platter of fruit and bread, wine, and salves from Urgulania for Elian’s back. I was to bring Dalmaticus a new stack of dry wood for his brazier, which would take me two or three trips, but I couldn’t leave yet or I’d miss something.

  ‘Why was I not told?’ Dalmaticus kicked a stool from under the table, sending it spinning end-on-end across the room. I thought he might throw the whole table but he spared the priestesses’ platter and wine.

  Scaurus didn’t flinch. ‘You would have stopped it. That would have looked bad.’

  ‘It already looks bad! The man was working with Aemilia here. The Regia!’ He couldn’t get a rise out of Scaurus. ‘You did know they had him then.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Scaurus didn’t answer. He took a piece of fruit from the platter and chewed slowly. ‘This may well work in the priestesses’ favour.’

  ‘You’re a cold prick, you know that?’

  Scaurus smiled. ‘First, the man didn’t confess even under all that. That certainly looks good for you all. Second, it was a show of action, which is exactly what the people are braying for. It might calm them, maybe even be enough.’ He took another morsel from the platter, on a roll now.

  I was ridiculous in the length of time I took to lay the wood. Find something to do you fool, don’t annoy them now.

  ‘Third, the Arab takes the issue right away from anything to do with the Families and the knights and all the rest of it.’

  ‘You have anything to do with that?’ Dalmaticus had stilled, but had the air of an assassin. I stopped moving.

  �
��No.’ Scaurus did not take offence.

  ‘The senate?’

  ‘I wish people would stop using that term as though it’s one thing. Almost two thousand senators will never be of one mind, and will never all know what the other is about. Gods know we barely manage a basic majority often enough. No. The Arab –’

  ‘Elian,’ Dalmaticus corrected.

  ‘– had some questionable friends in questionable places, who were happy enough to give him up as a likely amour. It didn’t help him to be a foreigner in a city suddenly afraid of them.’

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Dalmaticus muttered. He gave in to a stool. ‘I’m being kept in the dark, aren’t I? The college thinks I’m too close.’

  ‘You are. Look at it this way: you will be the magistrate presiding. It is best you are able to be objective. You have a duty to the law, my friend, wherever this has come from.’

  Dalmaticus’s dark quiet unsettled us both. I decided to quietly sweep around the brazier with my hands.

  ‘Come. You are a military man at heart – rules and laws are your world order, no?’ Scaurus ventured.

  Suddenly I was very glad to have brought gifts for Dalmaticus.

  He shook his head, resigned. ‘And so it comes down to the rule of the vote. They will do their will and put my name on it.’

  ‘You could resign.’

  ‘And leave the girls in greater danger? Licinia and Marcia’s trials will be yet to come.’

  I decided to go for the next lot of wood then. Suddenly I had to get away from there, suddenly there was no safety anywhere but my wood collecting and the horses. I heard on my way out: ‘You have allies in there. Scaevola and Caepio for certain, to begin.’

  ‘It takes only three votes to convict.’

  WATER

  Pompeia

  December 114 BC

  Aemilia was a woman on a spent battleground. Around her every brick seemed discoloured and dull. Little violets that squeezed through the mortar and once brought delight now threatened to bring down the walls. She went to the orchard where the air was freshest and the colours brightest but the cold had stifled the perfume and the smells of rotting betrayal cowered in the mud underfoot.