When they had no more spoil to burn, the bonfire was fed with whole trees, and Roman wagons. It was such a potent fire, people said, that anyone who came near its gusts of heat would be cured of all manner of ailments, from festering boils to the wasting cough, and that barren women who danced round it would conceive within the year.
This, then, Auriane thought, is the rapture of vengeance. The great cat-spirit that guards our souls smiles and licks its paws. The sun loves us. The moon fills our wombs.
But the taste was so much more pallid than she had expected. She sensed a crouching evil behind the celebrating that the others seemed not to feel. Perhaps it was because Odberht still lived. All was not well; she knew it in the blood.
When four days had gone, they watched from the ridge as a party of Romans returned to the field of battle. The legionary soldiers were petty and small in the distance as they methodically collected their dead for the pyres. Auriane heard her people laugh and mock and call them cowards and slaves.
She saw Decius but once before they broke camp. She had arranged for him to secretly go ahead of them with a native thrall for a guide. When she came to take leave of him, he told her of the unknown witness who had seen their last embrace. Decius asked what would become of her, were she accused of shameful acts with a foreigner.
“Nothing, while Baldemar lives—no one would dare harm me, not even Geisar. My father has always honored his own law above sacred law. But if…if….
“Baldemar dies.”
“Yes. Then I am certain Geisar would see me tried and condemned by the Assembly.”
“Condemned. That means…drowning in a lake beneath hurdles?”
“It would be necessary, to keep my evil from infecting the whole tribe.”
“The compassion of barbarians, it tugs at the heart. Well, my dove, you must tell your father to stay alive.”
“Please, Decius, do not mock.”
On the next day the army dispersed to the tribal farms, hoping to return in time for the harvest. Baldemar could ride if the pace were slow, though not for long, and so began a torturously slow journey home.
They were hardly under way when one of Baldemar’s young messengers galloped toward them on the trail, coming from the north. He was shaken and pale from loss of sleep, and he had already ridden one horse to death.
A number of northern farms were being pillaged and burned by raiders of the Cheruscans, he said. There had been killings and burning at the remotest farms. A stream of refugees traveled toward them now.
Baldemar had feared these ancestral tribal enemies of the far north might take advantage of his long absence in the south. He quickly arranged for Witgern to ride ahead at great speed with a company of five hundred to surprise and punish the brigands.
When the five hundred were ready to depart, they began to clamor for Auriane to ride with them. Baldemar firmly refused.
But the cries of “Daughter of the Ash! Bringer of victory!” only became more determined. She was their living shield; the men were outraged that Baldemar would deny them her protection.
“This will bring no happiness to Athelinda,” Baldemar protested to Auriane. But when the men dismounted, set down their weapons and refused to ride out, Baldemar at last relented.
Auriane privately rejoiced that she was not to return home. Her unsettled soul needed movement in these times, and the newly built hall was not home anyway. The spirits of childhood no longer dwelled there; they had been driven off by the fire. What did dwell there were pitiable ghosts—of Arnwulf, of Hertha. The shifting grasses of the plain were her fields now; all the trees of the Hercynian Forest were the pillars of her house. Most of the time this was as she wanted it. But somewhere within, it caused a dim point of sadness; sometimes it seemed like too much house. If everywhere were home, then nowhere was home.
As they journeyed north, the air became sharply cold, and she sensed a ruinous winter settling in before its time.
ROME
CHAPTER IX
SUMMER WITHERED INTO FALL. AS THE wind stripped bare the trees of the northern forest, preparing them for the anguish of winter, in the gentler climate of the capital city of the Empire a different sort of winter closed in upon Marcus Arrius Julianus the Younger, once Endymion the slave. In these, the last blood-washed days of Nero, he who, ten years ago, had gained all, prepared now to lose all—before him loomed a treason trial, his family’s ruin, and a humiliating death.
Young Marcus’ earliest days in the mansion on the Esquiline were filled with the ecstasy of the blind man given sight. Endymion had come upon his true country—the lecture halls of the philosophers’ schools, the Palace libraries, and the celebrated library in his father’s house. He devoured with the relish of the half-starved the principles of geometry and harmonics, the theories of the Alexandrian astronomers, the histories of the great nations back to the time of Saturn. He immersed himself in such diverse studies as the laws of architectural symmetry, the art of augury, the science of siting a temple, of laying a forum, of planning the acoustics of a theater. He committed to memory much of the great works of the Greek and Latin poets, while learning the whole of the art of war, from stratagems of the field to the tuning of catapults. As he grew to young manhood, he traveled to the Academy at Athens to hear lectures on the nature of existence given by the great Platonists and Epicureans of the day, and then to the schools of Alexandria to learn human anatomy and the deeper mysteries of the moon and stars. On his return he set himself to the study of civil law, for the profession of advocate was considered necessary for advancement in government, and he attended the city’s most celebrated school of rhetoric, where his student orations were so highly praised that teachers of rival schools came to listen. At twenty-one his treatise criticizing the strict materialism of Democritus was read at the Palace before Nero and became a popular text for students of the natural sciences. All his tutors agreed he was possessed of uncommon memory, tenacity and brilliance, and by twenty-five he was as celebrated for his learning as Seneca had been at the same age.
Through much of this time, Marcus Arrius Julianus the Elder was absent at his post as Governor at the fortress of Mogontiacum in Upper Germania, and Diocles, the chief steward of the house, watched over the boy carefully, writing regularly of him to his father. As Marcus grew to young manhood, Diocles’ letters became catalogues of dangerous improprieties: Young Marcus held readings of the works of philosophers who had been exiled or banned, attended by “parasites of the lowest classes whom he calls friends.” Marcus, Diocles suspected, had assignations with the concubine of one of the most powerful legionary commanders, a freedwoman far older than himself noted for her cleverness and learning rather than her beauty; how could he even look at such a vulgar creature, Diocles complained, when he is betrothed to Junilla, a maid of impeccable family, and the chastest bloom of maidenhood in the city? Marcus, Diocles scribbled on, drove from the house his most illustrious tutor, the Greek historian Archias, by arguing that Alexander the Great, who was this teacher’s god, was in reality no more than a highly successful murderer and thief. And the boy infuriated Antigonos, his tutor in languages, by putting forth a theory that the rude tongues of the Gauls and the savages of Germania were related in form to Latin.
The elder Julianus’ dismay increased when Marcus turned his attention from the respectable philosophies of the day, such as the staid Stoicism popular at court, and began secretly pursuing esoteric disciplines too mystical for the aristocracy’s Greek-tutored tastes and too critical of all social order. Once Diocles saw Marcus arise with a lamp in the deep of night and followed him. If his charge went off to an assignation, the steward meant to be certain it was a highborn girl or proper married matron and not some tavern trull or Circus catamite. The boy’s father would want to know. But Marcus stole back to the library as if to a lover that would not let him rest. At dawn Diocles found the young man asleep at the reading table; about him were copies of such books as Pythagoras’ theory of the transmigration
of souls, Isodorus’ essays on the evils of any man, be he emperor or king, assuming rulership over others, and Apollonius of Tyana’s diatribes against the temple sacrifice of animals—subversive texts with with no place in a Roman education. It shocked Diocles as much as commerce with the meanest of prostitutes would have.
And then the improprieties, to his father’s horror, became ever more public. In one of young Marcus Julianus’ first civil cases as advocate—he spoke the defense of a freedman accused of stealing sacks of grain from the government stores during a severe winter grain shortage—Marcus in his summation speech mentioned the recent arrival of an Alexandrian grain ship, revealing it was loaded not with desperately needed wheat but with sand for Nero’s private wrestlers. “The young fool’s words touched off a food riot,” Diocles wrote to the Governor. “They are starting to say of your son: What others scribble on walls at night, Marcus Julianus shouts in the shadow of the Palace.”
But the final outrage, in Diocles’ opinion, came when the young man began openly attending the street lectures of Isodorus, a Cynic philosopher who owned nothing but the filthy rags he wore. Diocles convinced Marcus’ father his son meant to give away all his possessions, go barefoot and follow this Isodorus, sleeping beneath bridges with him and eating fruit fallen from carts. Diocles wrote to the Governor: “You must return home at once! Unless you are content in the knowledge you pulled that young man out of one gutter just so he could crawl back into another.”
The Governor attempted to resign his post in Germania in order to watch his son more closely. But as always Nero’s council of military advisors would not allow it while the tribal coalitions led by Baldemar still harried the border. In addition, Nero detested Julianus the Elder and did not want him about, imagining old Julianus reproached him in silence for his abandoned life, as Seneca had.
When the time came for the military service so necessary for a senatorial career—it was customary for the sons of senatorial families to serve two years as an army tribune to learn the routines of military life—the younger Marcus requested to be stationed in Egypt. Of course, his father thought. He will see no fighting in peaceful Egypt. Julianus the Elder could almost hear the lecture on the evils of war. “There is not a difference,” Diocles once warned him that Marcus had written in a school essay, “between the seizure of a neighboring country and the seizure of your neighbor’s house.”
So the Governor responded by promptly arranging for his rebellious son to be posted in the North African province of Numidia, a desolate border of the Empire where the fighting with fierce nomadic tribes was almost continuous. For all his loathing of war, Marcus did remarkably well, old Julianus thought—he came home with high praise both from his commander and the men, and was credited with helping to save the entire garrison of one of the desert forts through his quick action during a surprise attack by moonlight in which he was engaged in hand-to-hand fighting. But the young man returned to civilian life with his heretical beliefs intact. Julianus did not cease worrying over his son’s “lust for the impractical and the invisible” until the day he learned from his sister Arria that Marcus had been voted into the lowest office of the Senate, an almost unprecedented honor for a man not yet thirty—though admittedly over the noisy opposition of a small clique on the floor who claimed Marcus was not his father’s son at all but Endymion in fact, a spirited urchin of no parentage whom the old man had taken in, cleaned, dressed, and educated.
The Governor wrote back from the fortress at Mogontiacum, “I am overjoyed you at last decided to live a responsible life. A man should live by philosophy, not for it.”
But his relief was not to last.
On one day early in the month of Maius—in the same year that the auxiliary forces of Julianus the Elder, led by Wido, were defeated by Baldemar—Marcus Julianus stood on the steps of the Temple of Minerva with old Lycas, living on still despite a half-dozen afflictions; they listened to one of Isodorus’ harangues on the wretched state of the city.
Isodorus spoke before a knot of several hundred or so curious students, idlers, merchants and worshipers bearing gifts to the temple. In the street below flower-vendors’ carts overflowed with joyous color; ruddy afternoon sunlight softly ignited the bronze statuary of the roofs of the temples and government buildings all about, melting them to liquid gold. Isodorus’ strident shouts rose over the hum of priestesses intoning a dark hymn within the temple and the cries of fishmongers in the street below.
Lycas leaned heavily on a knotted stick, squinting, wheezing and shivering with palsy. He himself had no love of philosophers, but as age shortened his sight and hobbled memory, he closely followed Marcus everywhere, as though all that was familiar and safe resided in him. As for Marcus the Younger, he was now wholly grown into the intricately ordered world of the aristocracy. He had a comeliness that did not seize the eye at once like some master’s image of Apollo; it was apparent slowly and came as much from the soul within as from the fine lines of that haunted face. A linen tunic and gray mantle fell gracefully on a tautly muscled frame; the years in the desert had left him well conditioned. He wore but one ring—the plain gold one given him upon his entry into the Senate. None observing him would guess he had ever lived anywhere but among great libraries and quiet colonnades. But Endymion was visible still in those eyes; as ever, they were ardent and dark, ready to flash to brilliance at the sight of injustice.
Marcus shielded his eyes from the sun—and then he saw it—a glint of steel just visible through the smoke of sacrifice, within the gloom beyond the vast bronze door of the Temple of Minerva, fifty steps or so above Isodorus. He tensed as if for battle.
No one goes armed into a temple. Not unless ordered there by one who counts himself higher than the gods.
“Lycas,” Marcus said in a covered voice, “there are Praetorian Guards stationed within the doors.”
Quiet terror seized Lycas; he hugged Marcus’ side more closely, seeing nothing, while fretfully brushing back the forelock of silver hair that fell into his eyes.
Isodorus was thundering forth like a dramatic actor in the final scene of a tragedy. “These then are the diseases of cities! Look at the lives of those about you! He who does not languish in a torpid idleness that would shame an oyster in its bed, indulges in excesses of frenzied, unnatural work—dictating during meals, fearing even to sleep at night lest he do less than his neighbor! Look about and you will see ambitions above the gods’. You will see greed that disgraces humanity. A tenement collapses, killing all its inhabitants. It is built again at once, in the same fashion…and it kills again!”
“Lycas,” Marcus said with urgency, “they’ve moved into sight. They’ve come to arrest Isodorus. He must be warned. Stay here…if I can pull him into the mob, perhaps they’ll lose sight of him.”
“What? No! You are mad!”
But Marcus had already begun a smooth, stealthy progress forward, working his way through the crowd.
“Do not leave me!” Lycas said with childish fearfulness, snatching at Marcus’ arm to pull him back.
Marcus dragged him up a few steps, then turned and seized his shoulders. “Lycas, stay here. It is little matter if I am arrested, not so for you.” Lycas, as a freedman, could be subjected to brutal punishments from which the law exempted one of the senatorial class.
When Marcus continued to climb the temple’s steps, Lycas hesitated but a moment. Then with a brisk hobbling walk he once again set out in Marcus’s wake, using his walking stick alternately to gain the next step and push people off.
“…where, in the Circus, dogs are trained to walk like a man,” Isodorus was crying out, “and in the Palace, humans are made to crawl…where a rich man is followed by a retinue of one hundred, all choking the streets so none can pass, and their only purpose is to applaud his words!” Isodorus had a small, simian face, bright close-set eyes, a voice as soothing as a rope burn. As Marcus climbed closer, ten Praetorians began moving stiffly, purposefully down the steps, red cloaks whippin
g in the wind, armor glinting evilly. Most in the crowd were too rapt to notice.
“…where we keep close track of every hour—all time is to be filled!—and at the end of the day the result is tallied up—did I do more today than yesterday?—as if doing more would bring peace,” Isodorus went on, swaying slightly in a sort of grim ecstasy. “Never do we eat grains we harvested ourselves. How many bodies, how many walls, stand between us and pure, vigorous nature? And might this not be the cause of cancers like Nero and of the desperate unhappiness on every hand?”
I wonder, Marcus thought, if a Cynic does not need a Nero as much as he despises him. But Isodorus speaks his own thoughts, and a man should be able to speak them without losing his head.
“Marcus, no!” Lycas called out. The Guards were too close.
When Marcus was one step below Isodorus, he called up to him, “My good man, look behind! They come for you. Save your life!”
Isodorus looked briefly at Marcus, then that mist returned to his eyes—Marcus knew the philosopher saw him no more.
“And must some be above, and others below?” Isodorus went on, his voice hushed as if he crept up to something very holy. “But, you say, it has always been so. Some must rule. But in the time of Saturn it was not so. In those times all ate at one board. Why have we fallen from this? There are yet, in remote places of the earth such as the wastes beyond the North Wind, people who live in Saturn’s state, keeping only what they reap, speaking an honest tongue that has no word for ‘slave’ or ‘king,’ and loving the law of moon and stars—”
These were the last public words Isodorus was ever to speak. Marcus leapt up beside him, seized his arm and pulled him down. In the same instant the crowd saw the Praetorians and began to bolt. At ten paces the Guards drew their swords. Marcus tried to drag both Lycas and the philosopher deeper into the crowd, but the Praetorians swiftly caught up to them.
B007IIXYQY EBOK Page 25
