I cannot say that he laughed. It was more that I felt his laughter. Sarah, I heard him say, Sarah, our pirate daughter. You can’t protect her any more than you could protect me. She is what she will be.
And all at once, I felt so light that a breath of wind could have carried me over the cliff. I stretched out my arms to steady myself and opened my eyes. Then I saw him some distance away, standing perilously close to the edge. Or not perilously, since he was a vision. I began to walk toward him, delirious with joy; he so rarely appeared to me. Then he turned toward me—
A Roman soldier with worn chain mail glinting in the moonlight beneath his cloak, his hand on the hilt of his short sword.
Behold, whispered my beloved, one of these, the least of my brethren.
Then he was gone (typical), leaving me alone to face an armed man, one, moreover, who looked as though he were seeing a ghost. All my instincts went on the alert, and I began to fear for the man more than fear him. He was awfully close to the edge, and if he lost his balance, even for a moment, he could easily pitch over. I wondered what dreadful apparition he saw in me. Roman soldiers, I knew from long experience as a whore-priestess, could be very superstitious, easily spooked, especially if separated from their rank and file. When on the march, they set up camp each night in perfect formation, each man to his task, each man in his place. What was this one doing off by himself on a cliff edge? I decided to stay very still and do nothing to alarm him.
“How do you come to be here?” he spoke at last in a low voice, his Latin distinctly of the senatorial class, though he was dressed as a common foot soldier.
Something was definitely amiss here.
“It is a beautiful night for a walk,” I answered carefully in my own best Latin.
“How do you come to be here?” he asked again. “This night of all nights.”
As he took a step towards me, I got a better look at his face and almost cried out. He looked so like the boy Esus, and yet how could he? His face was lined and his short-cropped hair almost as grey as mine. It was the eyes, something about the eyes, the pleading, the intensity.
“Tell me, how do you come to be here?” He stopped too far away for me to touch him or I might have reached out to steady him, to steady myself.
I don’t know why I didn’t just say: I walked. I came here for the view. Or why I didn’t just back away from this man who was, quite possibly, mad. But there was something about his bearing that drew my attention and held it.
“Long ago,” I heard myself answer, “I left behind a child. I wanted to look out across the water—”
My voice caught in my throat. And he looked at me, his face opening in wonder. How had I thought him old a moment ago? He was just a boy.
“That is why I am here, too, beloved.”
Beloved, he called me beloved, and in that voice, that deep voice, so like Jesus’s, that carried without effort. What was happening here?
“I should never have left you,” he went on. “I should never have left you alone with them.”
I did not even have to close my eyes to see Esus racing on horseback across the Menai Straits with the druids in pursuit and me, about to give birth, remaining behind on the shore. It was as if no time had passed. No time at all.
“I made you go,” I spoke to the boy who had blamed himself for years. “They would have killed you. I made you go. I commanded you in the name of the god of your forefathers.”
The soldier hung on my every word, as if he was starving and only my words could nourish him.
“I should have defied you,” he accused himself again. “I could have fought them all, killed them one by one. Instead, I killed you. It was my child you died of. Tell me the truth. It was my child.”
As I stared at his anguished face, I felt my own story recede. It came to me: I had a choice to make, a terrible, beautiful choice to make. And I must make it now.
“I never blamed you, beloved,” I said slowly.
“But you died believing I had abandoned you. How could you not?”
I gazed at his eyes, eyes darker than the moon-flooded night; eyes shimmering like scrying pools. I let my ordinary vision blur. I looked. I saw.
“You were meant to be a warrior, beloved, it was all you had, all that was left of the old ways, the only way you had to restore honor and fortune to your family. I knew that, beloved. No one knew it better than I did. I knew you would never abandon me. I knew you would come back.”
His tears caught the moonlight, tiny oceans with their own tides. I wanted to touch them, but he knuckled them away with his fist like a small boy, and then his anguish gave way to something else.
“Then how could you—”
He choked on the words; I could taste their bitterness in my own mouth.
“Go on,” I urged him. “Say it.”
“How could you marry my enemy? How could you let him raise our child to his knee, claim our child for that family, that lineage.”
This time, I did not look into his eyes. I closed mine and prayed to Isis, the compassionate, and Mithras, the soldiers’ god. And yes, to Jesus, too, in whose name I had received countless men. Show me what he needs to know. Give me the words to speak.
“They blackmailed my father,” I said, opening my eyes and looking directly into his. “Claimed they had evidence that my father was part of the conspiracy to kill Germanicus. Tiberius was looking for people to punish to deflect guilt from himself. I was the price they demanded for silence. Even so, I might have risked everything, run away, left my family to ruin. Then word came that you were dead. Dead in Germania.”
He let out a wordless sound, not a cry or a sob, something more elemental like the groan of a tree before it breaks. I did not know the rules of this strange engagement. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe it didn’t matter. A wind sprang up, and blew back my hood. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my hair streaming out in the moonlight. Red hair. And the man before me was a beautiful, heartbroken boy.
I held out my arms to him, and he ran into my embrace.
Now here is where it gets a little dicey. Now we aren’t just talking about a trick of moonlight, his apparition of me or mine of him, as a long-lost (long dead) love. Two warm-blooded bodies are pressed together here.
“How can this be?” he whispered, holding me tight. “No one returns from the dead, alive again.”
That’s what you think, I did not say. Perhaps I ought to have said: Listen, I’m not who you think I am. I should go now. But I didn’t. Even with his armor cutting into my flesh, I wanted to stay right where I was, pressed against this man who was at once so strange and familiar.
“Love is as strong as death,” I said at last.
There, at least, I spoke the truth, and after that there were no more words. We needed our mouths, our tongues for other things. And it was sweet, I tell you, sweet. We let go of each other only to strip off armor and clothes. We made a bed with my cloak, and a shelter with his cloak and spear, and we drew each other down and made love for hours as the moon sped west and the night chill turned to mist. It was not like learning a new lover at all. It was as if I had known him all my life. We fell asleep entwined.
In the night, I had a dream, so vivid, I still wonder if it was a dream. I am standing with my beloved on the tower at Temple Magdalen on a full moon night, just as I stood with him long ago before he left, feeling his warmth become insubstantial, as if he was a patch of sunlight.
“Stay this time,” I whisper.
When I turn to him, he is the soldier, not warm but cool as moonlight. And we are not at Temple Magdalen but on the edge of the cliff. I reach to pull him away from the edge, but he backs away from me.
“Don’t,” I cry, “you’ll fall!”
Then he disappears, and all at once a hawk lifts from the cliffs, moonlight bright on its underwings.
My heart trembles in my small dove’s breast.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MORNING AFTER
HE WOKE FIRST, sitt
ing up abruptly and almost dislocating my arm as he flung it off him. I opened my eyes and saw him staring about wildly—looking everywhere but at me.
“I’m in a fog,” he said.
“Well, yes,” I agreed. “We both are. It must have rolled in while we were sleeping.”
Dawn had broken, but the fog was so dense, it would not be safe to go anywhere until it thinned—not with the cliffs close by and the ground slippery with damp.
“Who are you?” he said, his voice so low in his throat it was almost a growl.
(It is not so unusual, really, what happened to us. Don’t most people fall in love with their own longings? Then wake up months or years later to wonder who is that person lying next to me? The true lovers stay to find out.)
I propped myself up on my elbow and glanced at the hair tumbling over my shoulder. Grey again. I looked at my arms and my hands, quite muscular from weeks of riding, but with a few age spots that might have been more noticeable if not for my freckles. Continuing my survey of myself, I lifted up one of the breasts that the druid Nissyen had once told me men would die for. My breasts were still beautiful, I decided, round with perfectly shaped nipples. No need to hide away in shame, though I might want to cover myself against the chill. I began to feel around for my tunic.
“Why did you deceive me?”
(Another common question of disillusioned lovers.)
He was on his feet now, his back turned to me, though I couldn’t see much in the fog, pulling his tunic over his head, and fretting that his chain mail, beaded with dew, would have to be dried and oiled. In my earlier career as a whore, I had seen many men dress in a hurry. Sometimes it was a relief, but after a night like the one we’d just spent, his haste was depressing—and insulting.
“If you want me to answer you, look at me,” I insisted.
I knew he must be avoiding the sight of me. He had no doubt woken in horror to discover that his lost love returned from the dead was in fact an old woman he’d never laid eyes on before. If I hadn’t been the one he was reviling, I might have felt some sympathy for him. Some. As it was, I felt increasingly irritated as he fussed with his chain mail shirt and tried to get it over his head. He probably had slaves who dressed and armed him. I got up, still fully naked, and helped him pull down the shirt. Even with me standing in front of him, he still looked away, staring out blindly into the fog. I studied his profile. His nose was prominent but not overly beak-like. The lines around his eyes and his mouth had taken some time to get so pronounced. I did not think they came from smiling. His hair still had some black underlying the grey, but I doubted he was any younger than me, or not much.
“What’s the matter?” I said, as I bent down and picked up my tunic, a bit damp but not as nasty as his chain mail. “Don’t the Romans have stories of maidens disguised as hags and hags disguised as maidens? Heroes are supposed to be able to look on both with equanimity and not be taken in by appearances. But then maybe you’re not.”
I slipped the tunic over my head.
“Not what?”
“A hero.”
“Etruscan,” he muttered, still not looking at me.
“What?”
“My family is of old Etruscan stock, not Roman. But among all peoples, there are plenty of stories of sorcery. Of women, old and young, true or treacherous, who use magic for their own purposes.”
I supposed that might be an accusation, but it was too veiled to bother with.
“Why did you take her form?” he pressed when I remained silent. “What did you hope to gain?”
“Man,” I said, taking a step closer to him. “I don’t know who your gods are, but beware lest they take note of your ingratitude.”
“Ingratitude!”
He finally turned to face me, and I felt the full effect of his eyes, dark, angry, with just a hint of gold that made them seem raptor-like, the eyes of someone accustomed to scanning for enemy or prey. For a moment, they took my breath away, but I was not about to let him intimidate me.
“Ingratitude,” I repeated. “All the gods I’ve ever known are touchy about spoiled mortals scorning their gifts, whining about timing or presentation.”
The fog swirled around us as the temperature began to shift. We almost appeared to be floating. But our eyes were locked.
“Woman,” he addressed me, and I felt unreasonably grateful that he did not call me old woman. “Is that what you call yourself? A gift from the gods?”
I think I might have slugged him, if I hadn’t seen the tiniest of smiles fighting with the grim set of his mouth.
“It makes no difference what I call myself. That is what I am—or was to you last night. The moonlight, your guilty conscience, or your own eyes might have deceived you, but what I saw of your past, the words I spoke to you in her voice, were all true. The gods merely used me as a way to get through to you.” I paused for a beat. “Maybe they shouldn’t have bothered.”
My indignation warmed me more than the cloak I retrieved and wrapped around me, the cloak that had been our bed.
“And who did you see in me?” he asked.
His question took me by surprise. He seemed so completely absorbed in himself. I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer.
“Was it the father of the child you left behind?” he persisted. “You were not only speaking of my child.”
I looked at him again. His eyes were intent, his whole body still, patient. Predators were patient, I reminded myself. What did he want from me?
“I saw someone I loved as he looked when he was young and tormented, just as you must have been.” I decided I could say that much. “He was not the father of the child I left behind. Your story and mine are not identical. When I realized what was happening to us both, I chose to let go of my story and step into yours. The gods did the rest.”
He made no response other than an almost imperceptible shrug. Though he had previously accused me of deceiving him, I sensed that he did not like the implication that I had been more aware than he had—and therefore more in control. Yet, for all I had glimpsed of his past last night, I knew nothing of his present or why his standing on the cliffs had unleashed memories that had overtaken both of us.
“Last night when I told you why I wanted to look across the water, you said ‘that’s why I’m here, too.’ ” I took up the role of interrogator. “What did you mean by that? And why were you away from your camp disguised as a foot soldier?”
He gave me a severe look, or tried to. Again, I could see him fighting a smile. That’s why the lines around his mouth were so deep; he had to force himself to frown.
“Those are too many questions from someone who has still not answered the question I asked first.”
“I’ve forgotten what it was,” I told him.
“Who are you?” he said and then again, “who are you?”
Now I shrugged and turned my face away. The fog was still thick and swirling.
“Who I am would mean nothing to you.”
I did not intend to lie, but as soon as the words were out, I knew I had. That I was the daughter (however unacknowledged) of the late famous druid tactician Lovernios and the foster-daughter of Bran, the late king of the Silures, a tribe that still resisted Roman rule, might very well mean something to an officer (for I was sure he was) in the Roman army. But then I had seldom identified myself by my patrilineage. My mothers (all eight of them) did not think it was nice. I saw no reason to begin now.
“I am descended from a goddess,” I answered, truthfully so far as I knew. He need not know which goddess. That might give him too much information.
He snorted. It was almost a laugh, albeit a derisive one.
“So am I. Venus or, as the Etruscans call her, Turan.”
“Right, you and Julius Caesar.” I am afraid I sneered.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said. “And that’s your answer to why I was looking over the water last night. I wanted to see what Caesar saw the night of his first invasion. It was a full moon then,
too.”
I did not believe him. He might be some scion of the illustrious Caesar’s family, but that was not why he had come out last night.
“You mean the cliffs his fleet was dashed against when a storm came out of nowhere on that full moon night?”
My opponent, as I had come to think of him, gave me a sharp look.
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Common knowledge.” I waved it away; I did not want him making any connections between me and the druids, who had likely orchestrated the storm. “Also, when I was a whore at The Vine and Fig Tree in Rome, my tutor made me read The Conquest of Gaul,” I added to throw him off further.
He looked so amazed, I felt irritated.
“You’ve never heard of a literate whore? I’m sure the Etruscans had them.”
“You were a whore at The Vine and Fig Tree?” he said.
“For a short time. Why?”
“My mother’s family owned Priapus Court.” He named a rival house that also catered to the senatorial class run by down-at-heel aristocrats, who had been on the wrong side of some conspiracy or another.
Goddess, Rome, the heart of the Empire, was such a small town. “So you’re a whore. A literate whore,” he amended.
“Was a whore,” I said. “I’m still literate.” Though I won’t tell you in how many languages, I added silently, or that I still consider writing the ruin of civilization.
“Well, that explains some things.”
Such as why I opened my legs without a second thought? I decided not to ask.
“And you’re a whoreson soldier,” I countered, “who abandoned his post to indulge in raptures about Julius Caesar on a moonlight night.”
His face darkened. For a moment, I thought he might hit me.
“My mother wasn’t, she didn’t—”
Red-Robed Priestess Page 2
