The Forest House

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The anterior horns of the saddle jabbed his buttocks as the slope steepened; he gripped with his knees and settled lance and shield, scanning the fleeing figures for armed men. Their orders had been dear enough - to avoid slaughtering a peaceful population, but to keep the fugitive rebels among them from getting away. The Legate had not explained how, in the confusion and darkness, that was to be done.

  Still cursing the fate that had sent him after Cynric and the Ravens at this of all places, Gaius saw a glint of metal, a white face contorting in fear or fury. Responses trained into him by ten years as a soldier moved his arm without the need for decision. He felt the jerk and tug as the lance pierced flesh and pulled free again, and the face disappeared.

  The charge was slowing; they reached the flattened hilltop and saw it almost deserted, though people were streaming away on every side. A terse order to his optio sent riders swinging outward in pursuit. His mount half-reared as a white figure waved its arms wildly, mouthing something about sacred ground. Gaius kneed the animal in a rocking canter around the perimeter, looking for Cynric, heard the clash of metal on the other side of the mound in the center, and headed toward it.

  And suddenly his mount was plunging, whinnying in terror as a wing of shadow swirled around it and someone screamed. It was not fear he heard but anger, anguish; a cry that contained all the horror and fear and fury of all the battlefields in the world; a shriek that turned the bowels to water and shivered the bones. Every animal that heard it for a moment was maddened, and every human felt the spirit within him gibber with fear. Gaius lost his reins and his lance and clung to his pony's mane as the world whirled around him. The face of a Fury hung before him, haloed by seething tendrils of shining hair.

  His mount plunged onward and he came into the leaping firelight; all around him men stood frozen as if by some spell. Then his horse came to a shivering halt and people began to move again, but he could still see the terror in their eyes. He took a deep breath, realizing that surprise was lost, and looked around.

  Some of the Druids were supporting a man in white whom he realized in shock must be Ardanos; he looked very old now. The blue-robed priestesses were easing what looked like a bundle of cloth out of the chair on the top of the mound. As his battle fury drained away, Gaius felt suddenly very tired.

  Another rider, his optio, appeared at his side. "They've scattered, sir."

  Gaius nodded. "But they can't have gone far. Set the men to scouring the area. They can report back to me here."

  Stiffly he swung his leg over the pony's neck, slid to the ground, and walked forward, the horse plodding behind him. As he neared, Ardanos stirred, looking at him pleadingly.

  "It was not my doing," he mumbled. "Called the Goddess — suddenly Cynric was there!"

  Gaius nodded. He knew the Arch-Druid's policies well enough to believe him. It was the woman whose shriek had paralyzed them who had given the rebels the extra moment they needed to melt into the crowd. He continued walking towards the group of women. Somehow he was not surprised when Caillean turned, staring at him defiantly, but it was the woman who lay on the ground he wanted to see.

  He took another step and found himself staring down at a woman's face; white, unconscious, identifiable only in its broadest outlines with the Fury who had appeared to him. And yet with a sick certainty he knew that it was She, and at the same time that it was Eilan.

  Twenty-Three

  As the Romans hunted Ravens in the days that followed the fight at the Hill of Maidens, Gaius felt as if he had become two people, the one dispassionately reporting the results of the operation to the Commander in Deva and then returning to Londinium to repeat the story to the Governor, while the other tried to reconcile the mask of fury he had seen there with the image of the woman he loved. Julia hovered about him with wifely solicitude, but after the first nightmare, they both agreed that for a time it might be better if he slept alone.

  Julia did not seem to mind. She was as affectionate as ever, but during the two years he had been away her focus had shifted to her children. The girls were growing fast, miniatures of their mother, although there were times when Gaius thought he saw a gleam of Macellus's determination in his elder daughter's eyes. But though they were dutiful, he had become a stranger. It hurt a little to hear their laughter cease when he entered the room, and it occurred to him that perhaps if he could find the time to get to know them better the distance between them would disappear.

  But he could not bring himself to try to bridge it, not now, when his heart was telling him that whatever love had remained between him and Eilan had been swept away by the Power that possessed her. At times the strain of concealing his anguish made him want to howl. Gaius was relieved when the Commander at Deva requested him to return for consultation, a postscript indicating that his father was hoping that instead of staying in the fortress, Gaius could pay him a visit in the new house he had built in the town. Perhaps it would be easier there to reconcile the conflict that was tearing at him.

  "Have they captured any more fugitives from the Raven conspiracy?" Macellius poured wine for Gaius and handed him the cup, good but not gaudy, like the dining chamber itself and the mansion that surrounded it. His father's place was one of the better houses that had been built around the fortress, evidence of a growing civilian presence as the country settled down. Gaius shook his head.

  "That fellow Cynric — he was their leader, wasn't he?" Macellius said then. "Didn't you capture him at Mons Graupius?"

  Gaius nodded and took a long drink of sour wine, wincing as the movement stretched the healing slash on his side. He had not noticed it until the fight at the Hill was over, but it was more annoying than serious; he had had far worse on the German frontier. The shock of realizing that the Fury who had cursed them all was Eilan was his worst wound. After a moment he realized that his father was waiting for an answer. "I did - but later he got away."

  "Seems to be good at that," observed his father, "like that bastard Caractacus. But we got him in the end, and eventually somebody will betray your Cynric too, someone from his own side . . ."

  Gaius stirred uncomfortably at the pronoun, hoping his father would not remember that Cynric was Bendeigid's foster son. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble, he thought grimly, if he had killed Cynric when he had the chance.

  "Ah well," the older man continued, "nobody blames you for not catching him, and wherever the survivors run to, it's not likely we'll see them here . . ." He looked around him with what Gaius could only characterize as a smug sigh.

  "Not likely," his son agreed. "Are you really comfortable here?" After retiring from the army, Macellius had built his mansion, almost immediately been elected a decurion and was rapidly becoming a pillar of the community.

  "Oh yes, it's a nice place. Settled down a lot in the past few years, and the town is growing. The amphitheater is a draw, of course. More shops every day, it seems to me, and I've just coughed up a goodly sum to pay for the new temple."

  "A miniature Rome, in fact," Gaius said, smiling. "All you lack is a coliseum for the Games."

  "Gods preserve me." Macellius held up one hand, laughing. "No doubt I'd have to pay for those as well. This business of being a city father is highly overrated. I hardly dare open my door for fear II be given the honor of contributing to something new!"

  But he was laughing, Gaius observed, and thought that he had never seen his father so contented.

  "There's one thing I'd not grudge the money for, though," said Macellius, "and that's to send you to Rome. It's time, you know. You'll get a good recommendation from the Governor after this last bit of service, and you can't rise much further on the kind of patronage your father-in-law and I can give you. Has Licinius said anything?"

  "He's mentioned it," Gaius said cautiously. "But I can't go until everyone's satisfied that things will stay quiet here."

  "I can't help wishing Vespasian had lived longer." Macellius frowned. "There was a stingy old fox for you, but he knew
how to pick good men. This cub of his, Domitian, seems determined to rule like an Eastern despot. He's banished the philosophers, I hear. Now I ask you, what harm could a lot of prosy old bores do?"

  Gaius, remembering his own desperation when his old tutor had droned on about Plato, felt a sneaking sympathy for the Emperor.

  "In any case, he's the man you'll have to impress if you want a good posting, and though I'll miss you, a procuratorship somewhere in one of the older provinces is the logical next step in your career."

  "I'll miss you, too," said Gaius quietly. And that was true, but he realized that he would not particularly miss Licinius, or even Julia and the girls. In fact, he thought he would be glad to get away from Britain for a while, to some place where nothing would remind him of Cynric or Eilan.

  Gaius finally set out for Rome on the ides of August, attended by a Greek slave called Philo, a gift from Licinius, who swore he could be depended upon to drape a toga decently and send his master out each morning looking like a gentleman. In his saddlebag was the Procurator's annual report on the economy of the Province, which gave Gaius the status of official courier and carried with it the right to use the military post houses.

  The weather held fair, but even so it seemed a weary journey. The further south they traveled the drier the country became - to Gaius's northern eyes a desert, though the officers at the posting houses laughed to hear him say so and traded stories of Egypt and Palestine, where the desert sands scoured monuments older than Rome. He found himself wishing that like Caesar he could while away the time by writing his memoirs, but even if he waited forty years to do so, he doubted anyone would be interested in reading them.

  Even Julia's chatter would have been welcome, though these days all she seemed able to talk about was the children. But children were what he had married her for, he reminded himself; children, and social standing. And so far everything had gone more or less to plan. Only, as he passed through the endless miles of slave-farmed estates in Gaul, Gaius found himself wondering if this pursuit of rank and position was really worth it. And then they would come to the next inn, or the next villa belonging to one of Licinius's friends. In the arms of whatever pretty slave girl they sent to warm his bed he could forget both Julia and Eilan, and in the morning he would tell himself that it was only his fatigue that had been speaking, or perhaps a natural anxiety about how he would do in Rome.

  Once he reached Rome, it began to rain, heavily and continuously, as if making up for lost time. The kinsman of Licinius with whom he was staying was hospitable enough, but Gaius very quickly became tired of jokes about bringing his British weather with him. And it was not even true, really, for in Britannia there was an honest chill to the rain, but Rome was not so much cold as plagued by a pervasive and pestilent damp. Forever after, Gaius's memories of that time were linked to the alkaline smell of damp plaster and the reek of wet wool.

  Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation of humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

  "And this is your first visit to Rome?" The lady to whom Gaius was talking favored him with a laugh that tinkled like the silver bangles she wore. Exquisitely curled women and elegantly draped men crowded the atrium of Licinius's cousin, who was giving the party, and conversation hummed like bees in an orchard. "So what do you think of the Mistress of Nations, diadem of the Empire?" her painted eyelids drooped coquettishly. This was another question Gaius had heard so often he had been forced to memorize an answer.

  "I think the splendor of the city far eclipsed by the beauty that adorns it," he said gallantly. He would have said "might," and "power," if he had been talking to a man.

  This earned him another burst of tinkling; then his host rescued him and bore him away to the peristyle, where toga-clad men were grouped like figures on a piece of statuary. He joined them with some relief. Even among the men, there were dangers, but at least he understood them. Roman women produced in him something of the same paralysis he had felt when he first met Julia.

  But she was straightforward by comparison to the ladies he was meeting now. One or two of them had invited him to bed, but a lively sense of self-preservation had kept him free of such entrapments. Rome attracted the best of everything, and if he needed a woman, there were courtesans who demanded nothing of him but his money, and whose arts could banish anxiety, for a little while.

  Moving in Roman society was like leading a cavalry charge across icy ground - exhilarating while it lasted, but you never knew when some treacherous bit would bring you down. Gaius wondered if Julia could have held her own in that company. And as for Eilan -it was like trying to imagine a wild antelope, or perhaps a wildcat, among a herd of high-bred racing mares to picture her here: both were beautiful, but different orders of being entirely.

  "I understand that you served under Agricola in Caledonia . . ."

  Gaius blinked, realizing that one of the older men was talking to him. He caught the flicker of a broad purple stripe on the tunic and straightened as if he were facing a superior officer, racking his brains to remember the man's name. Most of his host's friends were from the equestrian class; he had done well to get a senator here.

  "Yes, sir, I had that honor. I had hoped to call upon him here in Rome."

  "I believe that at present he is residing on the family estates in Gaul," the Senator said neutrally. Marcellus Clodius Malleus, that was his name.

  "It is hard to imagine him resting." Gaius grinned. "I had supposed he would be putting the fear of the gods into the enemies of Rome somewhere on the frontiers or bringing the Pax Romana to one of the provinces."

  "Indeed, one might think so." The Senator's manner warmed perceptibly. "But you might be wiser not to say so until you are sure of your company . . ."

  Gaius stilled, thinking once more of icy ground, but Malleus continued to smile.

  "There are many here in Rome who appreciate Agricola's qualities, qualities that appear ever more admirable each time we learn of some mishandled campaign by one of our other generals."

  "Then why doesn't the Emperor employ him?" Gaius asked.

  "Because victory for Roman arms is secondary to keeping the Emperor in power. The more people clamor for Agricola to be sent out as General, the more our "lord and god" suspects him. In another year he will be due for a major consular appointment, but as things are now, his friends must advise him not to accept it."

  "I can see the problem," said Gaius thoughtfully. "Agricola is far too conscientious to fail deliberately, but if he does well, the Emperor will feel threatened by his success. Well, he will be remembered with honor in Britannia, whatever happens in Rome."

  "Tacitus would be happy to hear you say that," said Malleus.

  "Oh, do you know him? I served with him in Caledonia." The conversation moved into a general discussion of the northern campaign, which the Senator proved to have followed closely. It was only as the guests were being herded to the gardens for a display by some Bithynian dancing girls that the conversation became personal once more.

  "I'm giving a small dinner party three weeks from now —" Malleus laid a friendly hand on Gaius's arm. "Nothing elaborate, just a few men whom I think you will find interesting. Would you honor me by attending? Cornelius Tacitus has promised to be there."

  From that day forward it seemed to Gaius that the superficial round of parties and entertainments that had begun to exasperate him took on a new dimension. It felt as if he were at last penetrating the veil with which Roman society protected itself against outsiders, and if it was only one segment of that society, and perhaps a dangerous one, even that was preferable to dying of boredom.

/>   A few days later Licinius's cousin, whose agnomen was Corax, took Gaius with him to the Games in the new Coliseum that Domitian was building on the site where Nero's overwrought palace had once stood.

  "There's a certain appropriateness in the location," Corax observed as they took their seats in the section reserved for the equestrians, "since Nero himself put on Games such as Rome had never seen before, especially when he was trying to convince everyone that that odd Jewish sect - you know, the Christians -had caused the great fire."

  "Did they?" Gaius was looking around him. They had arrived between fights, and slaves were replacing the bloodstained sand.

  "You hardly need deliberate sabotage to start a fire in this city, my lad," his host said wryly. "Why do you think every district has a fire watch to which we all contribute so willingly? But this was a particularly bad one, and the Emperor needed a scapegoat to counter the rumors that he had started the blaze himself!"

  Gaius turned to stare at him.

  "New buildings, lad, new buildings!" Corax explained. "Nero fancied himself an architect, and the people who owned the property where the fire started wouldn't sell. The fire got out of hand, and the Emperor needed someone to blame. The Games were really quite horrid - no skill involved at all - just a lot of poor souls who died more like sheep than like men."