by Tanith Lee
When she saw him, there in her house, she had blushed then, too. She had thought him fine. It was like the first look she ever gave him.
The orchards did not seem irremediable, overgrown and in need of pruning, but that could be done. She said she liked to be in the villa, now the summer was coming. It was really rather dreadfully run down. The window in the long atrium was broken and had been patched up with honey and wax. The heating did not work properly. There were swallows in the bath-house.
Somehow all that made it funnier, more likeable. The villa needed them. They could do things for it.
And to come out to her here, tonight, feeling as he did, free and young, that was well-omened.
When they had walked about a little, in the lavender afterglow, on which the fierce hills lay docile, like sleeping swans, they went in to the supper Lucia had set. It was a very familiar feast, the fried sausage and garlic, the basted chicken, black olives and sauce of mushrooms, the round white cheese with raisins, new bread, old purple wine from the home vineyard, and the dish of candied plums. He might have been here only a week ago, not years.
They talked about the villa and the farm. Later he went with her to the small shrine in the garden court. (The shape of the Christians’ fish was gone from it.) After the offering, they sat under the colonnade, in the dark, and watched fireflies. It was what they had been used to do, in the days before their marriage. Now and then, a slave would go across the lawn on some errand. That had happened then. They had had to be furtive, then.
He began to want her, his wife, as he had wanted her long ago.
“Vinia,” he said, “couldn’t we …” like the young fool he had been.
But this time there was no need to dissemble or to say no.
The cries of her joy were strangers to him. Whores never raised this paean, even in pretence. He gloried in what he could do to her, and in the vigour of his own body. His seed burst from him with an overwhelming pang. He had forgotten that, too, the edge a woman’s love could give to it.
They coupled twice more in the night, like hungry wolves.
In the early morning, just before sunrise, her eyes seemed vivid, flowerlike, more savage … husband and wife parted like lovers.
Weeks after, he said to her, “Were your eyes always this colour?”
And she laughed at him.
It was high summer when she told him her news.
“The physician says I’ll bear to term. The auspices are good. Nothing can go wrong.”
He stood with her on the hill among the plum trees. Below the road went down to Par Dis, the cemetery, the walls.
“Isis will help me,” she said.
The curve of her belly was barely visible. In there, the life was, the son perhaps he had made. His immortality.
The other thing … was just a dream. (Now and then he had a slight pain, under his ribs, it was nothing, no worse than momentary indigestion. As the weeks went by, it lessened, never quite going away.)
As he rode back to the town, he kept thinking of her eyes. They had changed, as she had changed. But when he mentioned it, she told him that his eyes too had come to be another colour. And this amused them both. In the dull metal mirror he saw no alteration. Only sometimes, in the faces of men he knew well, a sudden uncertainty, a second glance –
She had a long labour, it was rough on her. But the child was flawless, and a boy.
His eyes, in the first hour he opened them, were the colour of the amethyst, might have been made from the amethyst.
Retullus Vusca, cold as death, held the life of his son in his arms. What should he do? And the impulse came to run to a high place, and there throw back this tiny breathing thing to the gods. But he only held the child, and Lavinia whispered, “You see now, he has his father’s eyes.”
It was the scar of a past battle. Let it be that. The cicatrice of a healed wound, that could no longer kill.
PART TWO
The Suicide
The prime retribution on the guilty
Is that no one can acquit himself of his own judgement.
Juvenal
Ten columns, dyed with Tyrian, marched down the cella of the temple, to the obsidian plinth, figured with shields. There stood the god: Mars Pater, in his armour, bearded and helmed, night-underlit by the votive lamp. The sprays of fig, oak and laurel from the spring festival were still aromatic and sappy. In his small house by the shrine, the elderly, tame wolf, sacred to the god, lay quietly, muzzle on long paws. He was a pet of the priests, more often than not his chain was off. He would eat from your hand, had forgotten he was ever a wolf at all.
The man who had entered, grizzled and muscular, perhaps in his fiftieth year, offered the wolf a titbit, watched him eat, nodded, and walked back into the central aisle before the statue.
The man carried a bundle, which he now unwrapped and put down on the altar. He bowed his head, and seemed to pray.
A priest came into the cella.
The man who prayed broke off, looked up; he appeared glad that the priest was an old man, someone he had known for years.
“Commander,” said the old priest, then smiled. “I always forget.”
“You forget, to please me,” said the man. “A young puppy rules the Fort of Par Dis. I’m a retired pensioner of the Empire. I tend my farm. My business is goats and vines and fruit trees.” He stopped, and said, “And the lies I tell myself.”
The priest looked at the things which had been placed on the altar. There were three legionary javelins, three swords, some knives, the breast-plate of a cavalry skirmisher, service bracelets, bracelets for valour, the badge of command, a Medusa shield.
“The things that matter,” the man said, “that the god values.”
“The arms of the warrior,” said the priest. “They should hang proudly in your house. Why?”
“Because my house is ruined. There’s a disease – something due to me – do you remember, I told you once –?”
The priest’s face closed like a fist. Not against the man, against the fate.
“But that was finished.”
“No. When the boy was born – I knew then. I knew.”
“You did nothing.”
“Nothing. I should have killed him.”
“You must speak to no one else in this fashion,” said the priest. “There were only twenty at the Spring Rite. The priesthood outnumbers the worshippers now. These Christians have the town, as they have the Empire. The Christians are powerful, and understand nothing of this sort. Be careful, Vusca. I warn you as a friend.”
“The time for carefulness is done. Don’t you see why I came here, with the offering?”
The old priest reached out and took the hand of Retullus Vusca.
“Yes, Commander. Is that all you want? Isn’t there some way in which –?”
“No, Flamen. No way but this.”
“Then, it can be arranged for you.” The priest touched the pattern of laurel on his breast, and let go the hand of the man, which was cold as winter marble. “Your family?”
“I have – left provision, all the correct documents. But my family’s cursed, Flamen. I should have seen to it. I can’t. It isn’t in me. A weakness. I make this sacrifice to Mars in the hope that he –”
“Hush,” said the priest, gently. “Only the god can decide that.”
“The caterwauling of the Christos dulls all their ears,” said Vusca.
“Hush,” the priest said again. “Come now. There’s the purification. They’ll make ready for you.”
“The room under the altar.”
“Yes. Come now.”
Lies and weakness. The deception of self. More than eighteen years of that, aided by them all.
The boy was handsome, his son. Everyone cherished him. He was his mother’s. The women’s. Vusca did not go too near. That much, at least, that distance … a sop to the truth. So his son grew up pampered by women, by Lavinia, and Lucia, and all the slaves. He liked the villa farm, had no hankerin
g after a military career. At seven, Vusca had been dreaming night and day of the legions. But not Vusca’s son. And Lavinia, so afraid: if he becomes a soldier he’ll be sent far away. Sent away … something in that. Eighteen and a commission – it might be anywhere, now. It might be Rome. Vusca might send – that – to Rome. (Unnamed, unthought of, somewhere in his brain or heart, it stayed him.) Let the boy be a farmer, then. He was good with the land. That too was under the favour of Mars, and of Lavinia’s Isis, if it came to that.
Vusca watched the boy grow up, as if from a nearby hill.
Petrus, they had called him. She had wanted the name. It had been the uncle’s, popular among Christians. Vusca might have argued, but it did not seem to matter. He had no pride in this handsome son. He would say to himself that that was because Petrus did not take after him, would not be a soldier. That made it easy.
The boy of course knew his father did not really care for him. He seemed to accept it was for the logical reason, the reason of the army. Once he had apologised to Vusca, quietly, on his fourteenth birthday. Vusca had taken the boy to the Fort, shown it to him, since that would somehow be expected. There was no doubt Petrus showed an interest. And the men took to him, the way everyone did. A father might have been able to persuade such an interested and likeable son to a taste for the soldier’s life. Vusca did not attempt it. And Petrus, feeling the lack, assuming it was his fault, his omission, said that he was sorry.
When others looked at Petrus, they saw the Roman virtues. He was a beauty, but not effeminate, not soft. He was modest, friendly, reserved without coolness, dignified but ready for a laugh. The farmer’s life built his shoulders and legs, he could handle a five-horse chariot with skill before he was fifteen.
When others looked at Petrus, they saw all that.
When Vusca looked at him, he saw the peculiar eyes, which others found so attractive, grey-lilac, Lavinia’s. And Vusca also saw an odd birthmark, the quarter ring of tiny dark blotches around his son’s collar-bone. Isis’ necklace of love – that was what Lavinia called it when he was a child, kissing the marks. Women who saw them always seemed fascinated. The villa slaves had said it was something holy. Even Drusus at the Fort, who had taught Petrus chariots, had been heard to say that the broken ring was the memory of a war-scar of some forebear, carried in the blood. When Vusca looked at the marks they turned him queasy.
He had never liked to touch his son. He found it difficult to pick him up as a child. Later, if their hands brushed over some dish at table, Vusca felt a surge of revulsion, to which he never gave its actual name, and which he refused to acknowledge.
Rome still stood, like a shadow. The power of the shadow took effect. Retullus Vusca quit his command at the ordained time and went to the villa to be another farmer.
He did his best with it, the portion left to him. He had got accustomed again, quite quickly, to disappointment, to sourness. There had been that shining space, less than a year, in the centre of his life. It died down like a fire and left him with the used-up charcoal, which crumbled and had no heat.
There were no other children. He did not sleep with Lavinia after the boy was born. Latterly he did not want women.
Then there was the day in the orchard.
It was the start of harvest, the fields full of men, and the pickers busy with the fruit. At noon, activity fell off. He sat polishing one of the swords by the trough, with the dog at his feet – and then the dog growled very low, and got up and went away, and his son came through the sunlight and the trees. It was curious that, the way the dog never took to Petrus. Vusca’s dog, perhaps it had caught Vusca’s allergy. Vusca thought of a recent incident with the horses hired by Petrus for the chariot, some trouble – then Petrus was in front of him. The sun was behind his head, giving him a sun god’s halo, dampening down the shade of his eyes.
“Father –”
“Yes?” The false jovial voice came out pat, the tone which held Petrus firmly off.
“Father, can I speak to you?”
“Why not?”
His son – he was sixteen, a young man now – uninvited did not sit. He said, as if searching in a barrel for the words: “Mother’s going to talk to you. She’s been going on about it. A marriage.”
Bored (and under the boredom the aversion rising in him like sickness). “Well, if you want,” said Vusca.
“I don’t, sir. I don’t want to marry.”
“You’ve heard the girl’s ugly.”
“No. I think she’s supposed to be all right.”
“Too old?”
“Only twelve.”
“That’s nothing then. She’s young enough to train. Oh, I know who your mother has in mind. A decent family, with Roman blood. You might as well. Out here, choices are limited.”
“I don’t want to marry, sir.”
“Wait,” said Vusca. “What are you saying?”
“Never,” said Petrus.
“Some vow?” Vusca scowled. He wanted to feel an ordinary emotion. It was coming, if he tried. Normal annoyance. A son who would not breed. “Or do you have the Greek ailment? You like your own gender best? You’ll grow out of it. Have you never had a woman?”
Under this ballista strike, Petrus went very white. The pallor threw up the colour of the eyes. Suddenly they were brilliantly in evidence.
“Not – not what you said. And I’ve never had a woman, no. Father – I’m afraid to do that.”
Vusca laughed. He looked away from the eyes, down the orchard. “Yes, you’re not the first coward there. Believe me, it’s not any punishment. You’ll like it. Only virgins can be tiresome. You’d better get in some practice first. Go to the She-Wolf. The other places aren’t worth –”
“No, Father. I don’t mean any of that. I can’t.”
Vusca was exacerbated, embarrassed. (Something in him said, Don’t let him speak. Don’t hear him out.)
“What about your friend Drusus? Hasn’t he –”
“Father, I’ve never even – once, it started – and I couldn’t – I knew if I did – something horrible – it was like falling out of my body, swallowing and choking –” Petrus was no longer rational. His voice was high and hysterical, like a girl’s.
Vusca stood up. He pushed his son away from him.
“You spend too much time with your mother. Go to a harlot and tell her all this. Let her put you right.”
He walked away and left Petrus by the trough.
What should I have done then? Heard it, and known it. I should have held him in my arms and told him, because I could have reasoned it, could have seen through the flimsy veil. I should have loved him like my son, that he was, and had the courage, with the enemy at our gate, to speak the truth and run him through. By the Light, he knew, he knew. Not knowing, and knowing it all. He only came to me for the answer. He would have made the sacrifice. He was my son.
Vusca knelt in the cell under the altar.
The purification was over. They were bringing him the wine, now. He needed the wine. He was so cold.
He could not weep, his whole life had taught him steel, not water.
The marriage came two years later. The same girl, fourteen by then. The family had waited, for Vusca’s name was reckoned on. The girl brought a small house with her dowry. It was in the town, near the Baths of Mercurius, a poor area going generally to hovels. There seemed to be a reverse of the arrangement between Vusca and his wife: Petrus installed his bride in her town house, and kept to the farm. He only brought her there when for propriety he must.
She was a pretty girl, a blonde with dark Roman eyes, and all the Roman ways studiously ingrained in her. Though she was a Christian, she also worshipped the other gods at their festivals.
At first she seemed merely nervous. Eventually it was obvious she was unhappy. At some point, about a year after the wedding, she confided to Lavinia that Petrus had never slept with her. She was still a virgin. She thought it was her fault, that she smelled, or that he despised her barbarian blood.
(Vusca only heard of all this later.) Lavinia reassured the girl, and took her to the Isis temple, where they procured some draught or other, an aphrodisiac.
Whatever the plan, it was carried out while the girl was still staying at the farm. She wanted Lavinia’s approval and support, and perhaps to boast of success.
Vusca was off with a couple of the men, hunting. The woods to the north were full of boar that season, though they did not have any luck. They were away five days.
They returned one late afternoon, coming along the west road with the sun behind them. The villa looked as usual, the fields ripening, smoke going up from the bath-house. Then, getting closer, Vusca saw no one was out in the fields or the orchard, that the smoke was not from the bath-house vent, but from a burning strip on the slope beyond. He sent two men running to deal with that and rode fast for the villa.
The slaves and field-workers were clustered in the outer compound. They parted before him and could not seem to find any voices when he shouted at them. Then a mad screaming started in the house. It sounded like a woman in labour. The slaves made signs against evil.
Vusca ran into the building. His actions were horribly prepared. He was not amazed, or alarmed, there was only depression, a sense of futility and defeat.
Lavinia dashed into his arms. She said that in the night Petrus’ wife had gone mad. She had begun to shriek, and done so intermittently ever since. She had also torn herself with her nails. They had had to tie her to her bed. Petrus, who had been with her, had vanished. A window was shattered and there were marks on the wall. Lavinia believed a murderer had got in and killed her son, carrying off the body. This was what had driven the girl insane. Far-fetched as it was, what other explanation could be possible? (She did not admit to the story of her son’s sexual reticence, the aphrodisiac, until three days after.)
Vusca went to see the wife of Petrus.
Lucia watched over her, in apparent terror. The girl was trussed. Her body, partly bare, showed deep bleeding scratches, but her nails had never been long, these were more like the scoring of a bone pin. She screamed and tossed, then fell slack until another fit of screaming and tossing came over her. She had forgotten speech. The window had been covered now, for it seemed the sounds of pigeons flying by made her worse.
