Fire and Sacrifice

by Victoria Collins

  Why do they abandon me? You know my family! Wasn’t I good? I was so good.

  Oh my Pet. She let out a single sob, and I felt the silent call, saw it in her eyes: Where is my daddy?

  FIRE

  Ember

  16 December 114 BC

  She ran right past the temple as though the things inside there meant to tie her down or put her back in chains, she ran past it and the oak and out the gate and round the back. I think she wanted the sacred spring but the crowds still filled the street, blocking her way, so she scooted along the back wall in the dark gap between the the house and the hill and into the secluded garden to collapse at the base of the lemon tree.

  I followed her, and held her.

  EARTH

  Fragments

  Leonhard Schmitz in William Smith (ed.), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities p. 941.

  As regards the jurisdiction of the pontiffs, magistrates and priests as well as private individuals were bound to submit to their sentence, provided it had the sanction of three members of the college (Cic. De Harusp. Resp. 6) . . . In regard to the Vestal virgins and the persons who committed incest with them, the pontiffs had criminal jurisdiction and might pronounce the sentence of death (Dionys. IX.40; Liv. XXII.57; Fest. S.v. Probum). A man who had violated a Vestal virgin was according to an ancient law scourged to death by the pontifex maximus in the comitium, and it appears that originally neither the Vestal virgins nor the male offenders in such a case had any right of appeal.

  Chapter 10

  WATER

  Pompeia

  16 December 114 BC

  Elian came in the night. He stole round the back of the shops and through the garden in darkness to whisper over the wall. We were at Ember’s fire. We all heard it.

  Aemilia shot a look at Terentia. Still the good girl, still looking for permission. We had three days before the trials of Marcia and Licinia – the city stops tomorrow for Saturnalia festival, and we would have to wait while the city danced, oblivious to our torture. Aemilia still had responsibilities.

  All I wanted was to see her run into his arms. I sent Terentia a pleading look. Aemilia needs him. Now when she is so lost, she needs the one who could find her deep within the stone. What a beautiful thing for a man to say to her.

  Terentia was heavy with our wanting and our questions; our mother who could not protect us and who must watch as we are wrenched away.

  ‘Aemilia, please, no,’ Terentia rasped, but Urgulania stayed her with a hand.

  ‘She has three days to live,’ Licinia said. ‘What would you do?’

  ‘Hold you all as tight as I could. Give us time,’ Mother pleaded. ‘Give us time to plan something that will be safe. Tomorrow. Fetch Cor, tell him: tomorrow.’

  Aemilia bit her lip.

  I could not until then work out why Pet’s trial was held first and the other two later, except that it made perfect sense to all of us that Aemilia would be first and singular. Then I remembered Saturnalia, tomorrow. Every year the festival shut down the city, including the courts. They would not have time to try three in one day. One had to be separate, and as soon as possible. I clung to the hope that Dalmaticus had perhaps designed it thus: separating the girls, and thereby the verdicts.

  Saturnalia tomorrow would be torture, hearing the revelry round us as the city partied. I loved the idea of Aemilia spending her last day and night in wild abandon, but I knew my Pet too well.

  When Cor came back he carried Elian’s marble statue into our square, shrouded in a sheet, and set it down before us without a word.

  ‘Not here!’ Terentia hissed. ‘Into the house, quickly.’

  We couldn’t bring ourselves to unshroud it at first. There was something so very final about it, as though to unveil it would bring our end.

  ‘Do it, Aemilia.’

  Aemilia’s truth, the truth inside the stone. Dare we look upon also the truth in it of Elian’s loving hand?

  He hadn’t had time to paint it so it was a pure white marble thing, like a ghost of her. Aemilia the stone that doesn’t bleed. But somehow even the bare stone breathed pleasure and sadness and soul. Every gentle dip of the skin on her arms and neck, stone flesh that somehow pulsed, laid gently over cheekbone, clavicle, hip and plumped by watery abdomen and healthy cheek. White stone fabric hung cotton-light over her shoulders and breasts, pulled over the round of buttock by a heavy hem.

  Aemilia made no sound as she took in the beautiful thing before her, as though she’d never met that person before. It was the truth of herself, pure and not exactly perfect, but the most beautiful, flawless thing imaginable, and on her face, with chin held high, the tiniest hint of a warm and knowing grin.

  Terentia wanted it smashed to a thousand pieces. I felt the thought escape from her. There could be no evidence of a loving hand. But the idea would crush Aemilia, and Elian would never agree.

  I could feel Elian, slumped against the outside of the wall, in the rhubarb and oleander, waiting while we inspected his work. ‘Do you like it?’ he whispered.

  And Aemilia was there to answer, ‘We love it, my darling.’ She caressed the wall. ‘Tomorrow.’

  AIR

  Tristan

  17 December 114 BC

  I’d already been out before breakfast that day. Having seen Marcia and then Pompeia go out, something seemed amiss.

  When I got back I went straight to Ember and Urgulania in the kitchen, bursting to tell but smart enough not to tell the priestesses.

  Ember saw the look on my face ‘What’s the whisper?’

  I put on my most solemn voice. ‘The Vestal Marcia was seen to make a haunting figure, standing alone at the bridge over the Tiber in the dark of the early morning. Her melancholy demeanour has witnesses wondering about the fragile priestess’s state of mind. According to sources, the Vestal Pompeia appeared to coax the troubled girl away from the raging waters.’

  Urgulania didn’t seem surprised.

  FIRE

  Ember

  17 December 114 BC

  Tristan told me. He sprinted back into the sacred square at midday, blurted the news, then threw up on his feet.

  I was to be returned to House Peducaeus. Aemilia’s pardon for me was being revoked. Cheap hit.

  So they will take me. After they take her.

  I would be executed after all.

  It made sense that this should come now Aemilia is collapsed. She was the one who held the sky up.

  The gods had spared me a few months to help Aemilia, but now I was useless.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Tristan said.

  ‘On whose authority?’ Terentia fairly boomed. Aemilia and Pompeia appeared, opening the temple door to the noise.

  ‘Stay there!’ Terentia shot at them. Everyone else had scurried out at the sight of Tristan running.

  ‘Hide her!’ said Flavia, her hands in knots in her robes.

  My gut was to stay and fight. I was ready to kick and thrash and make it as hard as possible. Here we go again . . .

  ‘In my room,’ Terentia said. ‘Put her in my room and close the door.’ She turned back to Tristan. No one had said a word to me. ‘What did you hear? Exactly.’

  ‘“What the Vestal Aemilia has enacted while in a polluted state cannot be considered sacred.” The praetor Sextus Iulius, fortified by Peducaeus, of course.’

  ‘Oh no they won’t. Not one more of my girls. Not one more!’

  I was one of her girls.

  Terentia turned and narrowed her eyes at the waiting gate. ‘You lot, into the temple. No, Flavia, you stay. Where is Dalmaticus?’

  ‘Back at the basilica.’ Tristan was about to burst. ‘Go! They’re coming!’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ (Marcia, I think. I couldn’t see anymore.)

  Terentia’s room was not what I’d expected. There were cushions and blankets and a half-finished needlework scene of a stag in a forest, and little figurines on her dresser of she bears with cubs, and a mountain lion with a cub, and a
little bottle of the olive and almond oil with lavender that I had made for the priestesses’ skin.

  I sat on the bed and waited.

  I heard the scuffle of the men reaching the gate. Scrape of feet as though they reached it at speed and had to pull themselves up.

  I don’t think they came all the way into the sacred square, because the voices stayed low. Terentia would have blocked them, without appearing to, of course.

  There were mumbles and messes of voices and behind it all the revelling in the streets of Saturnalia, happy music and laughter and exclamations of I couldn’t think what. Gods I hated Saturnalia that day.

  ‘Not today.’ I heard Terentia’s voice.

  ‘Matron?’

  ‘You will not take her today.’

  Terentia’s voice again. ‘Sextus Iulius, a word, if you will.’ The voices got closer to my hiding place.

  A man: ‘My lady, I do not see anything to gain from postponing what will be.’

  Terentia: ‘Allow my girls to live in disbelief until their fatal moment. You would do well to be mindful, praetor, that at least one of them yet faces her own execution. Parade before them the execution of a beloved and their own fates become vivid in the extreme. You will break them too early.’ Her words got severe and sharp as she went. ‘Instead of your dignified procession to the Colline Gate you will have a whole cult of wailing screeching women in the streets. Do you honestly think the college and its allies can come out of that appearing anything less than monstrous? You need some semblance of status quo now, I assure you.’

  Pause.

  ‘The girl will not leave her precious Aemilia in this time, I assure you.’

  ‘Where is she now then?’

  ‘On an errand for me. She is no danger.’

  ‘Three days,’ snarled the male voice. ‘First the priestess. Then the slave.’

  She left me sitting on her bed, cuddling the little she bear with the cub, for what felt like hours - Terentia knew they’d be circling. I had plenty long enough to think about what was to come. Peducaeus would want to parade me through the forum again. In front of the Vestals. But what if he was too angry or humiliated? They’d beat me to death at the house, toss me on the kitchen fire maybe and watch me burn, invite their friends to have at me, together, seeing as they failed the first time . . .

  By the time she came to get me the afternoon shadows were lengthening, and Caecilia had just arrived at our gate.

  ***

  Caecilia stood in the gateway, poised like a hunter’s bow. One hip cocked, she paused for dramatic effect. I didn’t know yet who she was but it was clear she was here to stir things up.

  She pushed off the archway and sauntered into our square to greet Terentia, passing me in a riot of spices as though a crowd of exotic guests had already danced with her.

  ‘Caecilia!’ Terentia rushed to embrace her.

  ‘My dear.’ Caecilia stroked Terentia’s hair, then turned to Aemilia, shaking a parcel wrapped in red fabric. ‘I come with a gift for Aemilia.’

  My mind raced to the blue dress and I wished with all my heart this was it.

  It was a slave’s tunic.

  ‘You’d be surprised how much fun you can have as a slave,’ Caecilia said wryly. ‘No one notices you!’ Tristan told me on the night of Bona Dea that Caecilia was infamous for indiscretions with her male slaves, among others.

  A wry smile dawned over Aemilia’s face.

  ‘It is the second last night of your life, girl. Do you intend to simper it away or do you intend to live it?’ She threw her arms theatrically wide. ‘It’s Saturnalia! There’s a party outside! A whole day and night of dancing, drinking and feasting on intriguing strangers – in any order you wish.’

  ‘Caecilia,’ Terentia warned, glancing nervously round the vantage points from the streets above and behind.

  ‘But how?’ Aemilia fumbled.

  Curiously, it was Terentia who spoke. ‘It is the custom at Saturnalia for servants to take a turn in their masters’ place.’

  ‘I couldn’t!’ Aemilia said, not entirely convincingly.

  Caecilia sauntered over to me then. ‘So this is the famous girl.’ She stood too close and looked me deliberately up and down. ‘Fabulous,’ she said. ‘You are glorious, aren’t you?’ She spun to Aemilia. ‘And just the right build, take a few inches. Close enough! She can wear that.’ Caecilia gestured to the whites Aemilia was wearing.

  I sucked in a breath. Was I really going to get to wear the priestesses’ whites?

  Aemilia struggled with the proposal, clearly wanted it, but what if . . . If she was caught it would be the end for Licinia and Marcia. She glanced from Caecilia to Terentia and back, and back again.

  ‘Dalmaticus? You are too close,’ Terentia said.

  ‘My darling brother has learned not to ask me.’

  Caecilia pulled stools over for herself and Aemilia, sat too close in front of her and put her hand on Aemilia’s knee. ‘You like the girl because, I hear, she won’t be told what kind of girl she should be. She does not conform. Like me.’

  Oh, I adored Caecilia!

  ‘Why did you free her, Aemilia, do you even know? I’ll tell you: because you knew the moment you saw her she was all that, and you wanted to live all that through her. You wanted for once in your life to piss people off, defy it all and do something shocking! Back then, you could wrap it all up in the guise of doing something good and saving a poor slave. Tonight you can simply do it. And so my question.’ She laid the slave’s tunic on Aemilia’s knee. ‘Will you continue to be told, Pet, what kind of woman you are? Or will you choose?’

  FIRE

  Ember

  17 December 114 BC

  And so it was that Aemilia became a free woman in a slave’s tunic, and I became a priestess.

  My hair was already half braided. The rest was easily hidden under the veil.

  I sat still for most of the night, afraid to tend my fire or cook and mark the whites. They were the best Egyptian linen; you never felt a thing so divine to wear.

  I sat there on a stool outside the temple, sewing, which I used to hate, back near the oak, obvious but not too close, so everybody saw me and nobody saw me. I sat there hoping that Aemilia was having the time of her life. I hoped she danced. And drank wine. And spilled it down her front and laughed at it. I hoped that Elian found her out there – or that Caecilia had arranged for it. I hoped everybody glanced at the girl with the beautiful smile, but nobody remembered.

  And I swore to myself I would never ask her.

  Let nobody anymore look into the places she preferred were private.

  I happily sat there the entire night, just being in those whites.

  I sat there appearing to mend the hem of Aemilia’s tunic until the light left me, and I moved to my kitchen fire to finish, and wait.

  I sat there at my fire realising that this was all I could do: to be here in the centre of it all, ready for her to come home, to warm her and feed her.

  I sat there sewing clumps of poison – belladonna and oleander mixed – into her hem, as Elian had asked (‘A desert dweller knows the torture of thirst and starvation’), and which could be found in the dark of the tomb and shorten the suffering.

  It is clear that we are chosen, we of the temples, to live at the feet of the gods, to take them into ourselves and be their flesh, and so we are bound to accept lives akin to the gods, whose lives so dramatic, so elemental and so light-filled that we are destined for stories of devastation, ecstasy, madness, swarms and thunder, and where mortal acts take on the scale of the sky, and where desire and punishment are our eternal tragedies.

  So be it.

  EARTH

  Fragments

  George Sale, George Psalmanazar, Archibald Bower, George Shelvocke, John Campbell and John Swinton, The Roman History, An Universal History: From the earliest accounts to the present time, part 1, volume 11, C. Bathurst, London, 1779, p. 159.

  The intrigue was begun by L Betucius Barrus, a
Roman knight, but a professed debauchee, who gloried in corrupting women of the greatest families and best characters. He carried on an amour with a Vestal named Aemilia, who seduced two others, Licinia and Marcia, into the like irregularities. Upon the accusation of a slave, Betucius and Aemilia were condemned to the usual punishment; but Licinia and Marcia, though no less guilty, were acquitted; the pontifices being afraid, lest the condemning of so many criminals at once might bring the whole sacerdotal order into disrepute.

  Michael Charles Alexander, 1990, Trials in the Late Roman Republic, 149 BC to 50 BC, pp. 20–21.

  Date: 114, acquitted XIII Kal. Ian*

  charge: incestum, apud pontifices

  defendant: Licinia (181)

  informer: slave (perhaps named Manius of T Betucius Barrus (Betitius 1)

  outcome: A (acquitted)

  Date: Dec 114

  charge: incestum, apud pontifices

  defendant: Marcia (114)

  informer: slave (perhaps named Manius of T Betucius Barrus (Betitius 1)

  outcome: A (acquitted)

  * 13 days inclusive before the Kalends (the first) of Ianuarius (January), or 18 December (the ancient December having only 29 days)

  FIRE

  Ember

  18 December 114 BC

  They sang for her that night. They came in the warm light of dusk, each holding a single candle. Somehow that angry mob had been eaten by its own guilt and transformed into this gentle river of people trickling all the way from the barber shop up the street, along our temple walls, up the steps to the street above, crammed into the little intersection past the Regia, and along the steps of Castor and Pollux and beyond, so the whole forum was dressed in flickering little dots of fire.