Then she added, “The wet nurse must be of noble stock.”
“Ramis has chosen her already,” Helgrune replied. “She is the daughter of Hrethwith the Gold-Bedecked, who is daughter of Galiena of the Wide Fields, who is daughter of…”
Auriane heard no more of this lineage, satisfied; she was not even startled to learn Ramis seemed to know the wet nurse would be needed, having become accustomed to the Veleda’s unerring sense of things to come.
“Will you despise me when you are grown?” she said to Avenahar, feeling forlorn as the night-herons that cried out their loneliness from the marshes. “What will you be? Seeress or wanderer, village priestess or noble wife?”
Auriane squeezed the child once, too hard, and finally gave Avenahar to Helgrune. “Tell her who her mother was,” she said hoarsely. “Tell her of her deeds. Let her know it was not her mother’s will to leave her and that she thought of her every day until she died.”
Then abruptly Auriane turned, fearful her courage would desert her before these men who looked on her with hope. They waited while she retrieved the sword of Baldemar from beneath its bed of moss.
Then she vaulted onto Berinhard’s back amidst the stirring of many horses, the approving murmurs of the men. Berinhard capered nervously against the tautening of the reins, petals from the garlands drifting from his tightly bowed neck. Then they were off at a brisk canter, Auriane in their midst. She was grateful for the wind that blew off her tears.
How do the gods permit it, she thought, that so many from so far dare attack a people who wish only to live unmolested in their own country?
In one moment, she yearned for war as for the embrace of a long-absent lover. In the next, she ached so fiercely for Avenahar that she nearly turned round and galloped back.
No. Leave her where it is safe. I will be back for her soon.
As if to torment her, Ramis’ prophecy nudged its way into her thoughts: “You will be a queen in death.”
CHAPTER XXI
THE EMPEROR DOMITIAN AS SUPREME COMMANDER of the Army faced the legions gathered at the fortress of Mogontiacum, preparing to take the auspices. His purple-bordered toga stirred faintly in a northern wind that carried a warning chill even though this was midsummer. A crown of ivy rested on his head. Two priests of Mars flanked him on a platform raised high enough so that all could view him. Behind Domitian was a newly erected statue of himself in solid gold; it looked with lordly disdain toward the rambling hills of the barbarian lands beyond the river. The colossal image generated subtly in the soldiers’ minds a vision of their Emperor as some solar hero of old, manifesting on earth to pierce the barbarian darkness with light.
Arrayed about him on the parade ground was a sea of helmeted men. The four legions of Upper Germania were here, strengthened by the legion Domitian had raised for this war— called the First Minervia after the goddess Minerva, his patroness—and detachments from the legions of Britannia. On Domitian’s left were the cavalry troops attached to the northern legions—both men and mounts were gaudy and brilliant in full parade dress. On the place of honor at Domitian’s right were the two cohorts of the Praetorian Guard who had marched with him from Rome; they numbered a thousand, their beautifully worked gold breastplates afire in the sun. This was not the whole of the Roman forces. Detachments had set out in advance with the army’s engineers to begin the penetration of the disputed valley of the Wetterau and the Taunus Mount. Were all assembled, they would have numbered forty thousand.
Domitian’s journey to Gaul had taken three months, for he had traveled in comfort. In addition to his military staff and his advisors, he brought an army of masseurs, the Palace’s most skilled chefs, an Etruscan soothsayer, his favorite readers—one for poetry and one for prose—and an astrologer and a cithara player whom he claimed could cure melancholy with his music. To entertain him at dinner, he had brought selected men of wit and literary pretensions, as well as Bathyllus the pantomime and a troop of comic actors, followed by three carriages packed with their costumes and masks. For his amorous needs he’d brought but two concubines. He would have commanded more to come but their furnishings, chests of rich garments, and supplies of special foods required too much space on the march. That he left his eunuchs at home he counted a concession to the asceticism required by military life.
The Emperor nodded to the priests of Mars. One led forth a garlanded goat given drugged feed so it would be docile—Domitian would not risk having the men see anything so ill-omened as a victim attempting to flee. A flute blower sounded a long, wan note so no evil sound would be heard; for an extended moment that anxious tone with its slight quiver was the only sound between heaven and earth. Domitian, feeling he played the part of a pantomime actor, first briskly washed his hands in a silver basin, then sprinkled meal, wine and salt on the victim’s head.
Domitian had no fears of what the entrails might reveal. Victory was assured. His strategists and engineers had proved that to him beyond a doubt with their detailed diagrams and maps; they had calculated precisely the minimum number of men needed for success and assured him the Chattians would be crushed in five months. Domitian felt he had left nothing to the caprice of a testy and volatile Mars. But soldiers were a superstitious lot; they needed the calming effect of a good augury.
The sacrificing priest felled the goat with a mallet. The second priest produced a knife and swiftly opened its belly. Gravely, Domitian inspected liver, intestines and gall. “Exta bona!” he cried at last. “The entrails are good!”
With a grand flourish he gave the entrails to the altar fire. As the smoke billowed, the soldiers responded with a volley of unified, disciplined, deep-throated shouts of joy, a driving chant like the tramp of thousands of marching feet—“Ave, Caesar, Imperator…”
The love of soldiers, Domitian observed with sullen detachment, is so easily won. They are like hounds—their instincts are sharp, and when the disciplinary slap is necessary, their memories are short. They forgive all and slobber with devotion as long as you pet them, feed them, praise them. The Senate and nobility, by contrast, are not hounds but foxes, with silly pretensions of becoming lions. Would that my empire were composed only of soldiers!
And what a magical effect my coming in person has wrought. Who among these men remembers I had a brother on this day? Titus is but a name in the annals—while I am their living god, and gods are entitled to the occasional murder. I should feel the ecstasy of the Olympians. But I do not.
Domitian gave a short battle speech in which he praised each legion by name and briefly cited its glorious history. His words did not carry over all the vast assembly; most would learn the text from recorders’ copies. But it hardly mattered. To the soldiers, merely having their supreme commander speak to them was to have the light of the sun shed on them alone.
Marcus Arrius Julianus observed all this from a viewing stand behind the priests’ platform, among a half dozen senatorial dignitaries. To him, the soldiers’ cheers seemed so much controlled yet frenzied noise. There is something monstrous, he reflected, in the sight of these rows of men regular as furrows in a field, their thousands of blades poised for the bloody harvest. Here is the bestial underside of civilization, the tearing tooth and claw of empire, normally kept neatly concealed. Can this be the natural order, as it is so easy to believe when so many proclaim it is, or is it vast presumption? Here are thousands wrenched from their home ground, prodded out to this mist-ridden place with its spirits older than ours, its primeval laws, then forged into one creature with a single will—that of a quite ordinary man hoisted by the Fates to supreme power, a man driven chiefly by the lust to outdo the deeds of his father and brother.
We do not need the fertile valley of the Wetterau—we are a rich man with ten carriages who out of pride must murder for the eleventh.
That morning Julianus had received an ominous letter from Rome, written by his chief steward, Diocles, on behalf of a friend in the Senate, a certain Junius Tertullus. It was a desperate plea fo
r help. This Tertullus was certain he was being tracked by Domitian’s informers; of late, he was openly followed in the streets. Coincidentally with the disappearance of a recently acquired slave secretary, he’d found his study chambers rifled through; a packet of private letters was missing.
This letter might not have been so disturbing in itself. But already in the past eighteen months two Senators of the old aristocracy that Domitian despised, Fabianus and Serenus, had met what Marcus Julianus counted suspicious ends. The world thought both men dead of natural causes, but Julianus knew their deaths occurred shortly after Veiento secretly denounced them before Domitian, accusing them of privately ridiculing this war. Could Domitian truly have set upon a course of picking off members of the Senate one by one like an archer shooting beasts in a hunting theater?
Marcus Julianus knew his own influence over the Emperor had not diminished in spite of Veiento’s best efforts; it seemed even to have increased, as though travel in strange lands roused in Domitian some eccentric long-buried insecurity. Domitian lately seemed eager as a schoolboy for his approval, seeking his opinion in every odd emergency that arose, even on matters in which he was not particularly qualified. Once when an officer of the Guard became ill and died, Domitian asked him to review a list of candidates and name a replacement.
It is as though he cannot shun my opinion as some men cannot shun wine. But he cannot shun Veiento’s opinions as some men cannot shun poison. We are delicately, evenly counterbalanced. Can I halt this coming murder?
Philosophy had never seemed a more useless tool.
In the next days the fortress of Mogontiacum was alive with swift, orderly preparations for war. Through the fortress’s massive stone gate poured a steady stream of military wagons laden with supplies to last the winter: For the common soldier came wheat from Egypt, first parched to ensure its preservation, as well as salted beef, venison, vegetables preserved in olive oil, live chickens in crates, several varieties of Italian wine, Gallic beer, and dried pears, figs, apricots, and apples. In separate wagons were expensive delicacies for the Emperor’s staff—amphorae of the purest olive oils, bottles of old Chian wine, the finest garum, or fish sauce, from Hispania, live thrushes, quail, mullet and eels to be prepared to order by Domitian’s chefs, and one precious crate of that most sought-after fruit, the cantaloupe.
Two new granaries had been built to accommodate the incoming supplies. The camp hospital was readied to receive casualties, and military doctors were drawn from neighboring fortresses to aid those stationed here, bringing with them their antiseptic resins, their arsenal of tools for cauterizing wounds, extracting spearheads and removing gangrenous limbs. The common soldiers made wills and deposited them with the clerks at the fortress’s headquarters. The staff of clerks was increased to keep records of the payments and deposits in the soldiers’ compulsory savings bank and to dispose of the property of men slain in active service.
The war began unremarkably enough; for a month the legions encountered little resistance as they began claiming territory with a webwork of roads on the Taunus Mount. Army surveyors set out in the vanguard, protected by outriding cavalry; they determined the lay of the roads and selected sites for timber forts and fenced watchtowers. Along these roads at intervals of a third of a mile signal towers were constructed; the sentries stationed there used a torch signaling system whose code Domitian took pride in having devised himself. The regular legions, broken into cohorts of four hundred and eighty men each, then began cutting roughly parallel assault roads to gain access to the Chattian hill forts. In the event of an attack upon any work site, bonfires would be lit to summon reinforcements. To increase their mobility, these reinforcements were positioned on the Rhine fleet so they could be ferried quickly to districts where fighting erupted. The Chattian lands were vast, and Domitian knew the tribesmen would never march out to meet them in a body—a tactic that would favor the Romans—and so he saw no harm in spreading his forces out thinly over a hundred miles.
The Chattians had no great wealth or concentrated resources, as had other conquered lands, where wealth was generally hoarded in cities. Their principal resource was the people themselves. And so the order was given to slaughter without pity when the legions came upon the occasional small village where the inhabitants had not fled. It was an order normally repugnant to the average Roman soldier; nowhere in the civilized East could they have exterminated children without remorse. But the Germanic savage roused no such sympathies; many believed them not capable of true human speech. They did seem to show some affection for their children, but does not a bitch lick her pups?
The first earth-and-timber hill forts they overtook were abandoned. The steep pine-clad Taunus slopes lay in eerie, sun-dappled silence. The Romans systematically disabled these forts by forcing the gates by burning, draining the wells and pulling down sections of the timber walls. The whole of this vast engineering effort drew praise from Domitian’s military staff, if not from his critics at home; it was said of the Emperor he proved himself worthy of his patroness, Minerva, goddess of rational warfare, as opposed to Mars, that blind stirrer to battle. This was the one interlude in Domitian’s reign when he inspired respect without reserve, and he found the taste tauntingly bittersweet, for with cynical, certainty he knew it was not to last.
CHAPTER XXII
WHILE DOMITIAN SACRIFICED, FAR TO THE north the Chattian host gathered in the cleared land around the Village of the Boar. Massed on the fields between the cremation grounds and Baldemar’s hall were the hide tents of forty thousand warriors. Those camped in high places could see, far in the south, smudged columns of smoke trailing up into the sky, memorials of the native settlements in the path of the advancing legions where women, children and cattle were slain alike.
In this camp was none of the supreme confidence of the Roman forces. While Domitian with cold formality offered one goat, the Chattians dragged forth their most precious beasts—oxen or fine horses if they had wealth, sheep or fat hens if they were poor—and gave them to Wodan with wrung hands and forced back tears. While the Romans made bargains with their gods as if settling an account with a merchant, the Chattians offered pleas akin to that of child to parent—full of passionate desperation, dark with injured love. While eminent Roman strategists armed with book-learned theories predicted victory to the day, the Chattian holy women who told the future from the rustling of leaves heard the sacred elms rattle with death.
As dusk came and cookfires were lit, the warriors camped on the rise erupted in joyous yelps and the camp’s hounds began to bark.
A party of horsemen came from the west. As they thundered down the ragged avenue between the tents at an exuberant gallop, the throng recognized Witgern in the lead, holding a torch aloft. And when they saw a woman in their midst, gray cloak whipping free, loose hair flying, many leapt to their feet and shouted out in exultant relief.
“Daughter of the Ash! Lead us out!”
“Baldemar lives! Lead us to vengeance!”
Most had given up hope, assuming the party that set out to retrieve Auriane must have been ambushed by the enemy. As the thirty riders galloped up to the stone altar round which the priests were gathered, where the ground was reddened from sacrifice, Auriane’s horse slipped in bloody mud and she fell ungracefully onto his neck. She righted herself, feeling a jolt of humiliation, then pulled the dappled stallion to a halt and dropped to the ground. Auriane knew from the people’s eyes they did not see the frail humanness in that moment—they saw only a young Fate incarnate in a maid. It caused her to long sharply for Decius and his cold, rectifying eye.
Decius! The only man whose touch I know, and you are lost to me forever. One more sight of that mocking grin would be more precious than garnets and gold. At least Avenahar lives, as testimony we were once joined. Without her, I might lie down and die.
Auriane wanted only a washbasin and a quiet place to sleep, but Thrusnelda rushed to her, embraced her energetically, then blessed her, dipping a finger i
n ox blood and tracing the runic sign for strength on her forehead. As Thrusnelda aged, her face seemed to shrink away from her eyes, leaving them large and spectral; she had the look of a kindly owl. “Walk among them now,” she insisted.
Auriane forced down her reluctance.
How can they be so firm in their belief in my holiness when I can see my shame clinging tightly as a shadow? I am so defiled with blood the sacred mold was taken from me.
But Auriane knew she must do what gave comfort, and so she removed her shoes and set out barefoot among the throng. In silence the warriors extended their spears across her path so she could place a palm on them and lend them her battle-luck. Once she looked behind her and caught sight of Sigreda among the priests of Wodan just as the young priestess paused in the midst of a prayer to observe her with banked, smoldering hatred. Sigreda expected Auriane to seek her death, and Geisar’s, for had they not vigorously sought hers?
As Auriane trod through mud, she felt she had no more substance than a shaft of light; she was a husk, filled and moved by the energy of the throng. Only the pinched ache in her breasts reminded her she was a creature of flesh and blood. Avenahar had not been put to them in ten days and she imagined them shriveling and drying like some spider’s prey.
Avenahar! Am I mad to mourn as much for my dried milk as for the massacres in the south? Through you, Avenahar, I shall live this life over. You’ll not live with the dread I lived with.
Soon. I will see her soon. She is safe where she is. We’ll drive the Romans into the earth in one great ambush, and when the Wolf-Men are devoured with fire, I will go, fetch Avenahar and bring her home. Soon. Perhaps, even before summer is done.
Decius, why do I sense you shaking your head no? Fiend. How dare you shatter my peace. My aggravating beloved, will you ever see your child? Avenahar, your name is a noose, constricting my throat. I must not think of it or I will fill a lake with my tears.
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