A Villa Far From Rome

by Sheila Finch

  “Please?” Lucia begged.

  Valentinus fastened his gladius, the sword glinting in the wintry sunlight streaming in from the garden. “There might be time on my way back, after I’ve delivered my message.”

  He strode out without another word, leaving the door open. Cold air blew into the room, carrying the scent of smoke from the furnace where one of the servants had just stoked the hypocaust.

  Lucia burst into tears. “Ma! He promised!”

  “Well,” she began, but she didn’t have a good solution to offer. “In any case, Lucia, Niko will be looking for you to do your lessons soon.”

  “Niko gave us a day to play because my uncle was here.”

  “Go find Catuarus. And Beech. They’ll play with you.”

  “Catu’s going out on the boat fishing with his uncle today. And you forbade me to go anywhere near the water again.” Lucia’s cheeks were smudged with tears.

  “Certainly not in winter!”

  She wanted time to herself, time to think about this change in her brother and what that meant. But the child’s unhappiness touched her. Her brother’s presence had brought back memories she’d long forgotten, of being small and disappointed because adults broke their promises, or when Julius cut her out of their games because she was too young. It was cruel of Valentinus to treat Lucia that way, no matter how important his message. Nero was long dead now. What difference would a couple of hours pleasing a child have made?

  She knelt down and put her arms around her daughter, drawing her close. The floor was slowly warming as hot air from the hypocaust circulated beneath it.

  “We’ll find something to do, Lucia. Perhaps I could play with you?”

  How oddly right it felt, to have the child in her arms! It had never been Lucia’s fault that her mother’s own childhood had been so abruptly ended by her birth. The family’s declining fortunes were not Lucia’s responsibility either. That had all been caused by Nero’s desire to ruin her father, a man he’d seen as an adversary in the senate. It had taken her a very long time to acknowledge this, years of pain and resentment, and the loneliness of exile. Her small daughter had paid the price because she hadn’t been able to love her the way a mother should. Hadn’t Niko told her Lucia was suffering? She hadn’t believed him. Surely it wasn’t too late? It couldn’t be too late. But what if it wasn’t in her to be the mother Lucia needed?

  The little girl’s sobs were turning into hiccups. “What would we play, Ma? Do you know any games?”

  “Certainly I do.”

  But at that moment she couldn’t remember one. The realization was uncomfortable. She felt as if she stood on a lonely path, facing a crossroads. Neither option invited her with shelter or good weather. But she must go forward.

  “Nobody wants us here, do they?” the child said suddenly. “Nobody has time for us. Except Catu. And he doesn’t have time today either.”

  Aghast, she held Lucia at arm’s length and gazed at her tear-stained face, seeing for the first time the signs the child was growing into girlhood, no longer the innocent, carefree infant she’d been when they’d left Pyrgi. “That’s not true, Lucia. Niko likes us – ”

  “Niko doesn’t count. He has to like us.”

  “Tiber is good to us too –”

  ”But he’s not here!” the child objected.

  “No more of these tears. I know what we’ll do. Let’s dress warmly and go down to the sea. We can ask Old Nev to give us some bread and cheese to take with us. Would you like that?”

  “Yes! I like the sea. But what will we do when we get there?”

  She hugged her daughter tightly again and kissed her tear-stained cheek. What would they do?

  “We’ll look for dolphins, of course.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  He woke from hours of troubled sleep to find a plan in his mind. The weather was bitter cold. He sat up and laced up his boots.

  The decurios were rousing the men, preparing them to march out, their breath steaming in the air. He didn’t eat with them, instead stuffing a hunk of bread into his saddlebag and throwing it over Warrior – the name he’d chosen hadn’t had the desired effect, the horse was skittish in battle – and left the camp before sunup.

  Two hours fast riding brought him to the empty plain where the standing stones waited, one circle inside another of enormous blue-white columns, and both surrounded by the familiar type of ditch and earthworks he knew all over the Downs. The sky was vast and streaked grey with high clouds; too cold for snow today. A sharp wind whipped his hair against his face. A robin sprang up from a bush as the horse approached, and a small flock of sparrows chided him from the turf.

  He passed through the protective earthworks, the ditch and mound, dismounted outside the first stone circle and hobbled the horse. The blue-grey stones were enormous, the outer ring set in twos with a joining stone on top. Near the center was an altar stone. Wondering at the size of this structure, he paced out the ring at its widest part. Who built this? Not the Celts. And why? It had been here since before Time itself. He had no better ideas than the Druids; the place guarded its secrets well.

  He ran his fingers over uneven surfaces, icy to the touch, listening to the voice of the wind through the archways. The stones gave off a faint perfume, the smoke of long ago burnt offerings, and a hint of the far away sea. Completing the circle, he walked it again. And again, his mind empty of thought, only sensation. The horse stopped grazing to gaze through the archways at him as he passed. The hazy sun was at its highest point for the day now, still low as the year turned toward solstice, and the sky had blown itself sharp and clear as glass. His legs grew tired, but he ignored them and walked the circle again. It felt right to do this.

  Overcome with sorrow he’d been keeping at bay for too long, he sat down abruptly on the turf. Tears flowed. He opened his mouth and the sounds of his pain poured out. The pain assumed a name: Amminus! Then another: Breca. Lost to him by his own actions. All his fault. His throat ached. His tunic was wet with tears. He couldn’t stop. All the years he’d held in so much grief. He was drowning.

  A shadow fell across him. An old woman dressed in a tattered homespun cloak stood looking down at him, hair the color of the stones themselves hanging loose and tangled over her shoulders. Her eyes were grey, set in a deeply lined face. She rested her weight against a wooden staff as tall as she was.

  “You are sick.” Her voice was surprisingly deep for one so aged. She spoke the Old Tongue, but with an accent to it that he couldn’t place. “Heal yourself or you will die.”

  “Not sick, Mother. Weary is all.”

  “The soul is sick. Regret. Guilt. A king should not burden his soul with such poisons.”

  How could she know? “I don’t claim that title, Mother.”

  She brandished the stick at him. “You may hide from yourself, King. You cannot hide from me. Get up!”

  He did as he was told, seeing how long the shadows were now that stretched from the standing stones across the grass. The air was rapidly growing colder. The sparrows had fallen silent. There were no roads or settlements within a day’s ride from the stones that she could have come from.

  “Your soul is in danger, King.”

  He shook his head; either she was mad or he was. Yet at the same moment he experienced the confusion of her words, he was filled with longing to be whole again.“You’re right, Mother. I’m weary in body and soul. I can’t find healing.”

  She shook the stick at him again. He had no doubt she’d strike him with it if the idea took her, and she was probably stronger than she appeared.

  “Let it come out,” she said.

  “I’ve killed my own people. And a boy – a boy like --” He couldn’t go on.

  “A boy like your own son.”

  She nodded at him, but there was little compassion in her face. He didn’t deserve compassion from others when he couldn’t find any for himself. How would he find healing?

  “If you would be healed, King of t
he Regni, you must spend the night here, in the Stones’ embrace. But not clothed like that.”

  She was right that he’d be better off camping here overnight and returning to the legion in the morning. But the legion had moved on, leaving him alone with his decisions. He looked down at his clothes, rumpled, grass-stained and mud-stained, damp with sweat and his tears. Blood along the hem of his cloak. Not his blood.

  “I have no other garments, Mother.”

  “Fool!” she scolded. “You think the Stones want your Roman abominations?”

  What harm could there be in doing as she ordered? Druid ceremonies sometimes called for the body to be naked, and Celtic warriors often went into battle even in the depths of winter unclothed except for the paint. He’d done so himself in his youth, before he went with the legions. Yet he would’ve wagered she wasn’t a Druid, not even a Celt. He thought again of the stories of the Ancient Ones in the dawn of time who’d raised these blue stones.

  He was dreaming.

  “You know better than that!” she said, her voice scornful.

  Her way of knowing his thoughts jolted him. He drew his gladius and laid it carefully on the ground. She kicked it away, out of reach. A moment, then he removed his cloak, his leather wristlets, his sleeveless leather jerkin, the rows of iron ringlets clinking, his tunic and his boots. Without his armor, he felt light enough to blow away.

  “You stand there in a loincloth like a baby?”

  Anger stirred in his breast, but he silently unwound his loincloth and dropped it beside the other garments.

  Her sharpness turned suddenly to mother’s milk. “Now, King of the Regni, you complain that the rites were not performed in your ascent to kingship? I will perform them.”

  From under her cloak she produced a small stone jar containing a greyish paste and went about daubing it on his brow and cheeks, his naked chest and his groin. The paste had a fishy odor, and his skin prickled under the touch of her fingers. He felt the shapes she drew like lines of fire, and somehow he knew they weren’t the symbols Celtic warriors drew on their skin when they went into battle. As she anointed him, she crooned in a low voice, words in a tongue he’d never heard before. One last touch to his tongue, like fire in ice, racing through his limbs, sending his thoughts whirling. Then she was done.

  His blood pounded through his veins, yet he knew it was right action for him to allow this.

  She stepped back and gazed at him. “Now you are ready.”

  “What am I to do?”

  Her mouth gaped and she stared at him as if he were an idiot – which was how he was feeling. “Stay here with the Stones until dawn. Keep watch. You must not sleep!”

  “I put no trust in rituals, Mother. The gods are no friends to me.”

  “Good.” She nodded sagely as if he’d spoken great wisdom. “I shall return at dawn.”

  She hobbled away, leaning heavily on the stick.

  His first thought was to wipe off the fishy paste and put his clothes back on. But hadn’t he come here to find – something? Even if he didn’t know what that something was. He could think of it as a penance, his own small act of suffering for the grief he’d caused in his life. He could accept that explanation for what he was doing here.

  His stomach rumbled and he remembered the wedge of bread in his saddle bag, still on Warrior’s back, outside the circle of stones. As if it knew he was thinking of it, the horse whinnied. He was strangely reluctant to walk outside the meager protection the stone circle offered to get the bread. He would go without. It wouldn’t be the first time, on a campaign, that he’d traveled on an empty stomach.

  He rubbed his upper arms briskly, the wind attacked the plain with knives of ice as the sun sank. His breath smoked. Fool, she’d called him, and maybe he was, to entertain the ramblings of a crazy old woman. He thought again of Amminus, dead in far-way Rome. He would do this in penitence.

  He started briskly walking the circle again.

  Daylight faded into twilight which in turn became dusky purple, then the indigo of a winter night. Stars came out, crowding the sky, the Bears both big and small, the Seven Maidens, and from horizon to horizon the great arcing wash of that white river that Druids called the River of Souls but that looked to him tonight a vast net full of silvery fish. He remembered leaning out over his father’s small boat at night under the stars, a lad, younger than Catuarus was now, marveling at so much light reflected in the darkness of the sea.

  What was a puny human in the face of that, even a king?

  An owl hooted, and far away wolves howled to each other. Finally, truly exhausted, he lay down on his back on the grass in the middle of the stone circles and watched the winter star patterns wheel slowly overhead in the moonless sky. The warmth of his body released the peculiar smell of the paste she’d used on him. He found that he didn’t mind it.

  He was aware of his own breathing, the rise and fall of his chest. He felt as if he were going out of himself, but at the same time, everything around – stars, stones, night birds and wolves – flowed into him.

  He must not let himself sleep.

  The next moment, darker thoughts tumbled through his mind. The battles he’d seen in his life, the blood he’d shed, the Regni boy he’d killed – his own son’s age. He was overwhelmed with sorrow for his lost son – lost because of his stubborn pride – lost because he’d wanted his son to grow up Roman.

  The gods must truly want to see him suffer.

  He no longer believed in the gods, Roman or Celtic!

  And even if they did exist, they didn’t deserve his worship. If they’d cared at all about mortals, they would have let Amminus live. For Breca’s sake he’d gone through the rituals and the observances, but the Druids too deceived themselves. The world was as it was and full of evil. It didn’t take the existence of gods to explain that.

  A sudden experience of emptiness, the absence of gods, swept over him. A vast nothingness more terrifying than divine rage could ever be. The anger of gods was a finite thing, but this absence was infinite. Tears filled his eyes, a longing to return to the innocent days of his childhood when he had believed in something bigger than himself. Is this why he was doing as the old woman ordered, pretending to believe in some empty ritual? He was a failure as a king and as a man if he found comfort in pretense.

  When he moved his head, dizziness struck him.

  He looked down suddenly from a high point. The Stone Circles were below him, small as river pebbles. He stretched his arms wide to the sky and opened his mouth, but he had no words.

  He woke, stiff from lying on the icy ground, but oddly, not cold. He opened his eyes and gazed at the stones; they glowed in the darkness. Rising over the horizon he saw Cernunnos the Hunter, his own emblem.

  Then he was floating again, high above the world. He saw all things as if it were a book opening before him: The Ancient Ones, here in the islands long before his own people. The coming of his people. Now the Romans marched along their roads. And after them ...? He could see the blood-soaked roads of Time, and coming down them wave after wave of conquerors, settlers, farmers, fishermen, priests, soldiers and slaves. He saw the flames of battle, heard the cries of terror, the songs of victory, he smelled the blood. On and on into the blackness of a future not even a Druid could dream of.

  He was helpless to understand Time’s march, let alone stop the torment. Tears streamed down his cheeks. This time he opened his mouth and roared words in a language older than his own Old Tongue, words he didn’t understand but knew in his heart.

  The sound of a bell aroused him.

  He sat up. His eyelids were stuck to his cheeks; he scrubbed them free. The morning star, the Herald, rose in the east announcing the sun; the sky turned from grey to pink like the inside of a fish’s mouth. His own mouth felt full of sand, but other than that, he felt – not quite young again, but somehow renewed, like a child waking from a deep sleep. And oddly, in spite of the dusting of snow on the grass inside the Stone Circles, he didn’t fee
l cold.

  The chiming sound came again. Puzzled, he looked around for the source. The old crone was back, standing by one of the blue stone pillars. An owl perched on one shoulder. A wolf, as old and grizzled as she, sat at her feet. She drew back her arm and struck the stone with her staff. The stone rang like a bell.

  He laughed. Wolves docile as dogs, tame owls, stones that were bells – Nothing surprised him now. A great surge of well-being coursed through him.

  “It pleases me you find it funny, King,” the old woman said.

  “I mean no offense, Mother.”

  “Of course not. Laughter is right action here.” From somewhere under her cloak she produced a cup of water and gave it to him. A ray of sunlight struck it, turning it to liquid silver.

  He took the cup from her and drank. It was pure and cold like starlight.

  “What happened to me last night?”

  Now it was her turn to laugh. He was astonished that she laughed like a young girl, silvery and sweet, like the sound of running water over river stones. He saw her now in her green-robed aspect as a young Maiden, the flowers of spring in her long, golden hair. His heart knew who she was.

  The owl flew off to perch on top of one of the stones.

  “You will listen to what I have to say, King. Your name will be forgotten in the river of Time. The Celts will vanish from the land along with their Roman masters and those that will come after them. Many conquerors will take this land, only to lose it again in time. All things are one in the eyes of the Eternal.

  “Yet you have many lessons for your tribe, many difficulties to guide them through. And your seed will take root and grow in your place, and you will nourish them. You will lead not by the sword but by the words.”

  “My seed?” He looked down at the poor shriveled thing that was his manhood, blue as woad in the cold morning. He sensed the wolf was eying him and felt the urge to cover it with his hands.

  Again, the girlish laughter. “You have already begot your heir, King.”

  She turned away.

  “Wait, I beg you. Tell me who you are. I ask humbly.”