“Only at Aurelia’s. How can you be so upset about a servant? Really.” Unconsciously she protectively pulled a drying cloth about her to conceal her breasts. His great contempt roused in her a normally dormant loathing of her body.
“You will leave now. Or I will have you forcibly removed.” His voice, though still soft, had the finality of the executioner’s stroke.
To Junilla it seemed a hero of ancient tales took possession of him. Now that Marcus seemed so thoroughly to detest her, love for him washed over her in a flood. It was a poisoned love that festered and burned, but love enough to cause her to stand mute and still, transfixed by him as she saw him anew. He was Hector, he was Achilles, and she, a trembling prize of war awaiting his will.
“I love you. Monster…”
She flung herself at him. He caught her and held her fast as she kicked and bit; all the while he called out loudly for her litter. When it arrived, she abruptly ceased struggling, though still simmering with her need to have and hurt; she was amazed herself at how completely her feelings for him had been turned about. She despised him still, but now for his cruelty in denying himself to her. There he stood, so beautiful in his fine fury, so maddeningly independent of her that she could not bear it. She must leave her mark of proprietorship upon him for others to see.
“Marcus, my husband,” she said as she settled herself in the litter, her voice now coquettish and sweet. “My first act after this outrage will be to see Veiento recalled from exile. And when he returns, he will kill you.”
“As you wish,” he said with cool indifference. “Your effects will be sent after you tomorrow.” But within he felt a small twist of fear. Had Junilla that much influence? She had. With Domitian she had what he counted an incestuous father-daughter relationship, and though Domitian criticized her, when in her presence he could deny her nothing.
Smoothly the bearers lifted her aloft. Her whole mind was in ferment. Her soul was divine; had not Nero assured her of it? And this house was her palace, as the Golden House had been Nero’s. Marcus would be punished horribly for this. Her divinity demanded it. She would have him and chastise him. He wins this bout, but there will be others.
She drew back the litter’s silken curtains and leaned out, eyes innocently wide. “Go and look at your library, Marcus. It was a cold spring and I was short of money. I hope you don’t mind too much—I burned the last of those useless books for fuel.”
Junilla left him in peace for a time, and there was no sign of ill on the wind until the spring of the third year of Vespasian’s reign, when an urgent summons came from the Emperor, commanding Marcus Julianus to come to a private audience.
Vespasian’s purpose was mysterious; as Julianus readied himself, he swiftly considered what this might be about.
Had Veiento worked some mischief against him? For Veiento had indeed been recalled from exile, in the previous autumn. On the day he returned, Julianus encountered Junilla in the street as she was bound for her seaside villa with an entourage that halted foot traffic for an hour; she leaned from her litter and gave him a knowing nod and a smug smile, then drew a hand across her throat, to let him know Veiento’s recall was her doing.
Or was this to be some sort of imperial reprimand? For he had stood for no offices in the Senate and turned down every post offered to him; the organization of his Academy had become the whole occupation of his spirit. Or perhaps Vespasian merely meant to offer condolences for the death of his wife. After putting Junilla aside, Marcus Julianus had married again, knowing his father’s ghost wanted children and immortality. He lived with Claudia Valeria for one year—a union marked with kindness and haunting sadness but not much passion. She died in childbed, their infant girl soon after, and it was rumored Junilla had murdered Claudia Valeria by sending a midwife who tended her with cloths taken from the corpse wrappings of fever victims. But by that time all manner of evil things were said of Junilla, and he did not credit half of them.
The mystery of the summons intensified when the Chief Palace Chamberlain conducted him not to the regular audience chamber but to a humble workroom adjacent to the rooms of the imperial architect-engineers, where the Emperor spent much time overseeing the numerous building projects he had initiated. The room was windowless, unpainted and small, furnished with rough benches and a great cluttered worktable covered over with inkpots, rules, architectural plans and maps.
For long moments after Julianus was announced, the Emperor Vespasian was oblivious to him, lost in a plan and elevation drawing set apart from the rest, making notations, frowning deeply, comparing it to a cost report. The Emperor was humbly attired in a tunic of rough, undyed wool; he had the look of the sturdy peasant he proudly proclaimed he was. His face had a pleasantly battered look; it was like some rough model in clay with the refinements not yet smoothed in. Those hands, bare of rings, were farmer’s hands that might have fertile earth still clinging to them. He was hardy and stubborn as the roots of an old oak, but it was a good-natured stubbornness. For a ruler he was remarkably slow to take offense: Once as he was carried through a crowd, a barefoot philosopher shouted obscenities at him that might have made a mule driver blush, and Vespasian’s only punishment was to shout worse obscenities back.
“Julianus. Good!” It was a voice that held the promise of humor even in his soberest moments. Julianus bowed low and greeted him with all his titles, while Vespasian nodded quickly as if he did not care what his titles were, and resumed studying the plan while motioning for Julianus to come close.
“I’m forced to divulge to you a family matter of a rather humiliating nature,” Vespasian announced jovially, “so before I spill my tawdry family secret and you think less of me, first come look at my masterwork! ‘He could not control his sons,’ I hear the talebearers prattling, ‘but he could build for the ages.’”
Julianus smiled amicably as he obeyed, and was immediately caught up in the architects’ rendering before him, deciphering with trained skill the delicate multicolored webbing of lines, swiftly decoding the triangles that represented staircases, the mazes of vaulted passageways, the great clear space upon which this ordered universe of lines converged—an elliptical arena. He knew at once what it was: Vespasian’s most beloved project, one he was obsessed with seeing completed before his death—the city’s first permanent stone amphitheater. Construction had already begun on the site where Nero had created a private lake for his pleasure barges. Now called Amphitheatrum Flavium, it would eventually be known as the Colosseum after the colossal image of Nero left standing nearby after the new rulers leveled Nero’s sprawling Golden House. Julianus was seized with a disturbing vision of how it would look when complete: a brooding, malign mass, determinedly eternal—and he shuddered as though at the not-too-distant cry of a wolf. Vespasian’s most loved child would swallow nations whole, gulp down rivers of human blood. For a moment quick as the burst of a freshly lit flame, he had the sense of being the one sighted man in a city of the blind.
For certain this thing cast some baleful shadow over the future.
“My palace for the people!” the Emperor said with the mellow smile of a parent pleased with his progeny. “But I did not call you here to boast of this.” He signaled for his Egyptian secretary to depart so they would be left in privacy.
“I called you here to aid me in staving off catastrophe—the fruit of Domitian’s latest spree of high-spirited villainy, which, Hades take that young hellion, will be his last.” Vespasian reached among the clutter of military dispatches on an adjacent worktable and smoothed out a parchment map depicting the lands of Upper Germania and northern Gaul. Then he added with a casualness that made the words the more startling, “I have removed Domitian from public life.”
Julianus carefully refrained from registering approval; to do so seemed a breach of manners, and he had no reason to give offense to this man.
“Ah, polite silence is what I get!” Vespasian remarked, smiling. “A signal honor, coming from the Bane of Rulers himsel
f, who had the temerity to hang Nero by his heels in front of the whole Senate. By the way, you alone outside the family know of this, and I expect my confidences to be strictly kept.”
“Of course.”
“There’s no need for the common populace to know of this. One day Domitian must rule, and Minerva knows it becomes daily more difficult not to have him made into a laughingstock. You are the most knowledgeable man living concerning the ways and customs of the savage Germanic tribes. I need counsel on ways to blunt the effects of this latest act of mischief on Domitian’s part.”
“He’s overstepped himself in the north.”
“To put it gently.”
Julianus knew Domitian had been using his newly acquired influence in civil and military matters to provoke the Chattians across the frontier, using threats and bribes to encourage the Governors posted in Germania to launch punitive attacks against native villages, in order to incite the barbarians into retaliation so that a major campaign against them would seem necessary—a campaign Domitian intended to lead himself. For Domitian was intensely—murderously, some said—jealous of the triumphal procession awarded to his elder brother, Titus, on his victorious return from Jerusalem after the Jewish War.
“We know these five Chattian villages were razed, and all their inhabitants slaughtered like sheep…here, right in a line, northwest of the Taunus Mount. We cannot afford a skirmish, mind you, much less to finish what my fool son started, thanks to those extortionists at the marble quarries,” Vespasian went on with a brief nod toward the elevation drawing of the Colosseum, the greatest drain on the imperial treasury at the moment. Julianus thought it ironic that this theater of blood was actually, for a time at least, preventing violence. That will not last, he mused; once it’s built and paid for, a war will be needed in order to provide victims.
“…and I know of no better man to advise me on ways of disarming these savages through clever diplomacy.”
“I guarantee nothing,” Julianus replied quietly. “To these people, blood vengeance is the most sacred of all rites. But there are measures that could be taken that would weaken or remove centers of influence, and perhaps undermine their hostility.”
“Excellent!” The Emperor struck a bell to summon a scribe to take down Julianus’ replies; then he began asking swift, precise questions about tribal alliances, the methods of supply used by the barbarian armies, the shifting relative importance of various chiefs. When once he paused to order water and wine, Julianus smiled at the dented, tarnished silver wine cups that were brought—they came no doubt from Vespasian’s rural family estate. Julianus often entirely forgot he advised an emperor, so familiar and forthright in speech, so devoid of all pompousness, was this man; once a map fell to the floor, and moving more swiftly than the scribe, Vespasian actually retrieved it himself.
They talked on, and as the hours passed, Julianus found he disliked this task more and more—from his long study of them the Chattians had acquired a share of divine essence, even a shadowy, disarming face—that of the gallant maid of his father’s records; he began to feel like an accomplice in some obscure betrayal. “Here then is my final determination,” he was saying as ruddy late-afternoon light ebbed from the room. “I would begin by paying reparation money directly to their elders, to be distributed among the kinspeople of the families Domitian caused to be slaughtered in the villages—”
“Why do you not just take all the funds I fought so hard to raise and dump them in the Tiber!”
“You scoff, but this is not so costly as war. There is a better than even chance they will accept this wergild for the deaths of clan members and forgo blood vengeance. In addition, I would return the Chattian hostages we’re holding.”
“We have hostages?”
“Yes, they’re at the fortress of Argentoratum. My father long ago secured the three elder daughters of Baldemar’s sister, as well as the infant nieces of two lesser chiefs.”
“It seems a curious choice of hostages.”
“That is the way to get the firmest hold on these people—they calculate lineage through the female line. My father’s purpose was to instigate small land wars through removing rightful heirs. And when that is done, I would make a new pact with Baldemar: The Rhine is only to be crossed at points where Roman troops are present, and our signal towers will extend no farther into the territory of the Wetterau. Halt the policy of forcing their young men into the army, and make certain this is enforced. Lastly, I would send a force to the sanctuary on the River Lippe—this is deep within hostile territory; I would dispatch no fewer than two legions—and have them seize that tower-dwelling prophetess called the Veleda and bring her as hostage to Rome. By this, you might avoid war.”
“Well enough then…but never mind the pact with Baldemar. We’ve other plans for him,” Vespasian said meditatively, and Julianus at first did not pay these words much mind. So many had tried and failed to entrap Baldemar that he dismissed this as mere wishful thinking. “You truly think the removal of this Veleda creature will have such marvelous effect?”
“Yes—to the tribes she is a living goddess. She has for years been telling them the lands of Gaul are theirs by divine right, and exhorting them to follow Baldemar. Unfortunately, ‘Veleda’ is not her name but a title of her holy office, a word related to the Gaulish word meaning ‘to see.’ She is the One Who Sees the true nature of material life—but I won’t bother you with that. What I mean to say is that when she is taken, a new candidate will be chosen to fill her place.”
“A risk worth taking—the replacement might not be so charismatic. And once spring is come and Baldemar is gone—”
“Begging your pardon, but I cannot help but question your easy certainty that a man my father could not catch in ten years will suddenly fall now into one of our traps.”
“Ah, I neglected to tell you—a collaborator has come forward, a man Baldemar ill-used in the past, apparently. He claims he is the son of Wido—a claim made by many—and he has some savage name I cannot pronounce. Odb-Od something—”
“Odberht, and he is truly Wido’s son. And we never had reports of his death.” Julianus felt a touch of cold. The Emperor speaks truthfully, he thought—this time is different; in days past, no one had been willing to betray Baldemar openly.
“Good, then,” Vespasian continued. “Doubtless you know the tale your father first reported that Baldemar goes unarmed and alone each year to a hidden grove to make his own sacrifice during their great drunken spring orgy called—” He held a military report close to the lamp and squinted. “Ast…Est…”
“Astura, some of the tribes call it—others, Eostre or Eastre. It’s the native dawn festival, the holiest day of their year, oddly similar in some respects to our own rites of Hilaria. My father despaired of ever discovering its location.”
“Well, this son of Wido learned of it somehow and made haste to the fortress at Mogontiacum to tell our new Governor there. Baldemar will not be alone when he sacrifices this year—a cohort of cavalry will celebrate with him.”
Why does this so transfix me with sadness? Julianus wondered then. Has this amulet undermined me, infusing me with their blood and breath?
“I do not like this,” Julianus said suddenly, with more forcefulness than he intended. “Baldemar is a good and fair enemy who always kept to his treaties, who returned many prisoners unharmed, and who fought only to keep his people’s lands. He deserves a nobler end than to be dragged off to die slowly in captivity.”
For an unsettling moment the Emperor imagined his own soul was being weighed before the gods. Something in Julianus’ cold, clear eyes stripped away every trapping of society; they were not Emperor and subject but two men equal before the Fates in every way but one: Julianus had the more impassioned will. “This is a foul plan, hateful to Nemesis, and utterly beneath our dignity,” Julianus said with soft finality. “Undo this, and let him live on in freedom.”
He noticed the jolt of affront in the Emperor’s eyes, and it
broke the spell.
I am a reckless fool. But Endymion will be silenced when he is laid out on the pyre.
For a long, uncomfortable moment Vespasian met his eyes in silence; then the Emperor broke suddenly into an affable grin, deciding to treat this as good-natured contentiousness. “If I could afford it, I would grant him death in battle,” he said at last, but the words were spoken with too much deliberation, as if to say, “I will let you take such liberties just this once.”
Slowly Vespasian poured wine, then water into the battered silver cup, then continued on.
“There is another matter, something more than odd, that I omitted to mention before.” The Emperor seemed to have entirely forgotten the brief moment of tension. “This month’s report from the fortress at Vetera describes a band of Chattian savages, an offshoot of Baldemar’s Companions, led by a ganna—some sort of holy woman—but unlike most of these prophetesses, this one carries arms. They have been burning every fort and signal tower along the River Main—the forts do not last a season. Even in winter they strike. What is particularly disturbing is that they seized three small catapults, the ones called scorpions. And we have not recovered them from the holy groves.”
“Then they must search further. What you imply is unthinkable. Our weapons are tainted and unholy to them. Never would they actually employ them in battle.”
“We’ve also evidence from spies that a captured legionary soldier has turned the worst sort of traitor and is versing them in our tactics and weaponry. What is to stop this wretch from instructing them in the use of those catapults?”
“They’ve changed their very nature, then…or this ganna is a singular madwoman.”
“As you’ve noted before, their fanaticism is greater, not less, when led by a woman—and this one’s extraordinarily effective because the men of the Fourteenth take her for a witch. This dispatch claims the men will not enter a part of the forest where they think she’s likely been. They say she has the power to transform herself at will to a raven, a doe….”
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