Late in the afternoon the next day, a baffled and amazed Erato moved into the Prefect’s offices. His first act was to overturn the order for Auriane’s execution; his second, to order a close inspection of the rations given the men of the lower grades.
Auriane felt she had been lifted out of darkness by the hand of a god. She had escaped a miserable and ignoble end. Marcus Julianus was well and living and for her sake had banished the beast, Torquatus. She would not have known who her benefactor was except that Erato named him, uttering the First Advisor’s name with a reverence that surprised her, for Erato was naturally inclined to be contemptuous and distrusting of the great. The increasing devotion she felt now alternately exhilarated and terrified her; it was a flood tide too powerful to oppose that might bear her away from all she knew. But it was also a welcome comfort after the harshness of the last years, lulling as a suspension in birth-waters. For so long she had been solitary as the ash, sheltering others when she could; she had forgotten how it was to be sheltered herself. It brought haunting memories of the days before the Hall burned, when last the world seemed a stable place. But in these days she could not forget its illusory side; in the beat of her blood was the warning—the hall will ever burn again. His protection was a well from which she might drink, not a sea in which to immerse herself. Only Fria protects perfectly, she reminded herself when she found herself taking dangerous comfort from his love.
When Auriane was returned to her cell, she abruptly ended Sunia’s joy at their reunion when she told her of her grim discovery at the banquet of Aristos. At first Sunia would not believe. Surely Auriane had seen a wraith, a fetch or some other kind of spirit-double—or a conjuring of a sorcerer.
“Sunia, it was Odberht, and he was alive as the worms that animate corpses. It requires no sorcery, no wandering spirit-doubles—only that he was sent off to Rome with the earliest captives, which would mean he’s been here for a year and a half…which is the length of time Aristos has been here. Doubtless he hoped I would be killed before we discovered him.” Her eyes sharpened with a realization. “Sunia, he was the one who tried to poison me in the prison cell—I’m certain of it.”
Sunia lapsed into miserable acceptance, terror accumulating in her eyes. “Every breath he draws poisons our blood. What will we do? We are prisoners. We can do nothing but watch him thrive.”
“Perhaps you are wrong. All of us who are here will stand against him. I’m not sure what to do, but the matter’s not mine to solve alone. Tonight over our gruel I’ll call a council.”
Auriane rose restlessly and walked to the small, barred window of the cell door. Across the passage was a vertical window cut into the thick wall; beyond, the ghostly disk of a near-full moon haunted a clear afternoon sky. She seized it with her mind and fervently prayed, but got no strength from it; that moon seemed too weak, too wan, too distant. She felt certainty draining out of her as it always seemed to when an ill-omened thing occurred and the old shame rose up like some evil sap, fouling her heart, flooding her lungs, suffocating her.
I thought my shame more than half conquered, she thought. But still it slinks back when I am weak, like the slender gray wolf who creeps out of the snows when he scents death is close.
Barely audibly, Auriane said, “My own curse is everlasting. It follows me in dreams, it follows me across the world….” Her voice was a cruel hand working open an old wound. “Because of me, we are battered down, and Odberht thrives…. Because of me, vengeance is impossible, the tribe is scattered, and we are mocked in this place where men are trained to fight like dogs.”
Sunia caught her breath at the pain in Auriane’s voice. Slowly she rose to her feet. “Auriane, none are left alive who still believe in your shame—except you.” She hesitated as if she ventured where she should not, then went on anyway. “I have no good understanding of such things, but…the Fates must have preserved Odberht’s life for some purpose we cannot see. As they’ve not cut our threads, they must mean to weave us into one weaving. That man in the Emperor’s garden, who, by your own words, loves you, he who sees with the eyes of Wodan—would not he have seen your shame and despised you, had it been there to see?”
Auriane turned to look at her, managing a weary smile. “An intriguing twist of thought, Sunia.” She turned away. “What does he know of shame? Kingly innocence lies on him like a cloak.”
Sunia tentatively approached Auriane, smiling hopefully. “Perhaps it’s not your curse but your great heart that throws us in with Odberht at this time. Perhaps, for you, he is a gateway to another world.”
“Another world?” Auriane smiled more warmly. “You’ve a gift for saying encouraging words, Sunia.”
Sunia seemed faintly embarrassed by this. Auriane took her hand in silence.
I struggle mightily and it is never enough, Auriane thought, remembering the spear she cast at the legion when she was told Avenahar would die if they did not open the gates. Perhaps this time the wind will carry the spear and it will fly at the stars…and it will be enough.
CHAPTER XLII
DOMITIA LONGINA WAS IN TORMENT THROUGH the winter, desperate for some way to respond to Marcus Julianus’ request without risking her life. She felt like a moth fluttering about a small, still flame, caught in troubled suspension, attraction balanced by fear.
Then one night she found herself unavoidably confronted with him. She dined in her suite of rooms in the West Palace among friends with literary pretensions who still enjoyed imperial favor—a dozen modestly talented lyric poets, among them three noblewomen, and several authors of plodding epics—men whose work she could no longer bear to read, for it was so distorted with turgid praises of Domitian. Her dining chamber overlooked a circular garden, the site of the small library she was having built to house her rare volumes of early Greek and Latin poetry. Construction had stalled indefinitely when Atrides, an architect-engineer employed by the Ministry of Public Works, halted suddenly, claiming the design she had approved could not be built. His reasons were vague. Sometimes he complained of the too-sandy soil; at others, he protested that the precious marbles she wanted could not be found. She suspected the truth was that he chose to please her husband rather than her. Domitian saw her library as evidence of anarchic tendencies on her part, as though it were a temple into which she could flee from him and couple with the geniuses of the poets. Or perhaps, she surmised, he resents that my love of the poets is genuine, and his own, feigned.
She entered her dining chamber only after all her guests were in place. Two bored Praetorians flanked the door; a half dozen more were placed strategically about the walls—a reminder that Domitian’s unblinking eye followed her everywhere.
And there was Marcus Arrius Julianus, boldly present at her own table, reclining on the couch opposite from the place of honor reserved for her, next to young Castor and the aging Lucullus. She found him maddeningly at ease, jesting with her friends with the easy alertness of a hunting animal at rest.
She felt a quiet start of terror. Who let him in? But then, who could keep him out? Quickly she realized the Guards, doubtless, assumed he was there with her husband’s blessings, sent to observe her among her friends—though she knew better; more likely he was there for some inscrutable purpose of his own. She chose to play his game, greeting him as though he were expected, thinking—curses on him; he knows there is no privacy here. Panic and obscure excitement knotted together in her stomach. What did he intend?
The others shied away from him at first, but as they drank deeply of her Setinian wine they lost some of their fear of him. He asked her question after question about her unfinished library, polite but insistent, and she fought vainly for indifference. She understood why even those friends she counted petty tale-bearers called him a man of uncommon grace. She watched him with great pleasure, holding his eyes long as she dared, then dropping her gaze to his hand as, with swift, assured motions, he moved a dish and traced forms and figures on the table to illustrate a point, showing her that Atride
s was wrong. What you will can be done. Was this all he had meant by that message—that her library could be built? She wondered with a flash of panic if those about her guessed how warmed she felt by his tantalizingly brief smiles of understanding.
Once she saw a quick look of concern come into his eyes; it happened when he heard an exchange between Castor and Lucullus, whose talk had long since slid down from matters of the mind to the mores of Junilla.
“How could she?” Castor said with relish. “She might as well mate with a bull!”
“That was last year, you’ve not kept up.”
“Are they certain it was Aristos?”
“Oh, there is no doubt. I know a man who lifts a cup with the freedman of the very guard Junilla bribed to be let into his cell,” Lucullus went on, aglow with the attention this succulent bit of gossip was netting him. He decided to make the most of it. “He said last time she stumbled out of there looking like a wrung-out rag. Imagine those pearly arms, white as sea foam, white as…as Aphrodite’s milk, encircling that grunting, hairy behemoth, that leather-skinned, lice-ridden bull—”
“That’s not the picture I hold in mind,” Castor broke in. “He perfumes himself and sings to her, and just to please her, softens the hairs on his legs by singeing them with hot walnut shells.”
The Empress shot the two a sharp, reproving look, misinterpreting Julianus’ unease as some lingering loyalty to that creature who was once his wife. But Julianus caught her gaze and said in a covered voice, “Let them talk on, it does not offend me.”
The true reason for his alarm would have been impossible for Domitia Longina to guess. Junilla, he thought, I know what you are doing. You stalk not one man but two. You suspect something, that’s been obvious since you outbid me for her horse. Aristos is to your taste, I’ve no doubt, but linking me with Auriane is even more to your taste. And now you’ve got Aristos as your pawn, with all his thugs and spies infesting that school at your service. You’ll be lingering about, watching, perhaps bribing the same guard I must bribe on that night, soon coming, when I must get in to see her.
“That tiresome Atrides will still say it’s impossible,” Domitia Longina went on, a cautiously muted teasing look in her eyes as she returned his attention to her library.
“Nonsense, more excavating will have to be done, that’s all, and the foundations redone. It must be set with piles, and they should be of charred alder or olive wood, placed closely together, like bridge piles. And the intervals between them must be filled with charcoal. I myself could work up a plan for the portico you want. Atrides gave up too soon.”
He paused, then said smoothly, as if the idea had just occurred to him, “There is still a little light.” He cast a professional glance in the direction of the colonnade at the rear of the room, which overlooked the library’s site. “Perhaps I could show you what Atrides could not, if you were of a mind to step out onto that colonnade.” That look, reassuring but with a glint of intrigue, startled her into the realization that this was what he had planned from the first.
She suppressed an answering smile.
Clever man, she thought. He found a way to speak to me alone while remaining within sight of everyone, including the Guards. In sight, but not in hearing. And to those about us, it appears spontaneous. Who, watching this, could suspect us of collusion?
They rose together, causing hardly a pause in their dinner companions’ conversations. Those who did take notice thought her eagerness natural; all knew how frustrated she was by the delays in the construction of her library. As she walked ahead of him, she felt like some adventurer starting out on a narrow bridge, high over a shallow, rock-strewn stream. Though her mind assured her the structure would hold, on looking down, her palms moistened, her knees quivered.
While they were still within hearing of the Guards, he said, “Now stand here.” Below them was the great gouge in the earth where Atrides had tried and failed to set the foundation. “What do you see to the west? That would be the vista, if the entrance were placed as I think it should be. The radiant heating could be extended through here, despite what Atrides says. Now step down here and consider the vista from the east….”
He took her hand to help her balance in her sandals, which were fragile as spider webs; she took four mincing steps down to the garden’s edge. The hand he held quivered like a trapped dove.
Julianus regarded her critically, worried suddenly that she was too delicate to withstand what he meant to do next. Though Domitia Longina was a matron, her face was that of a woman not fully grown; it was too softly modeled, with a child’s fullness and light sweetness in its expression; those lips were set permanently in a girl’s petulant pout. Her eyes were blue smears of uncertainty—soft, seeking, gelid; he thought of scallops pulled from the shell. That pale hair, wispy and indefinite as her thoughts, was drawn back at the nape of her neck, but most of it escaped to form a gauzy aura about her face. Her skin had a fine translucence; even the caress of her azure silk stola seemed too rough for its overprotected softness. That unformed body, pliant as cushions, defied utterly the notion that somewhere within was muscle and bone. She appears too vulnerable for this world, Marcus Julianus thought uneasily. Yet there is a spirited lift to her chin, a capacity for dangerous mischief in those eyes. She generates her own sort of elusiveness. This, I would wager, is at least part of what keeps Domitian’s attentions upon her, for he is at his weakest with women who imply by act and gesture they do not want him.
He released her hand when they were beyond hearing.
“I requested an audience,” he said quietly “and, of course, I understood that you could not respond.”
Domitia Longina felt suddenly the weight of the night on her chest; she could not breathe. “One cannot always control one’s life,” she whispered, her voice pale. “It relieves me you know it was not done from ill will toward you.” She kept her gaze on the site, frowning and nodding, feigning comprehension of an explanation of an architectural point.
“You are gracious and kind,” he continued in a low voice. “Have I your permission to introduce the matter I had in mind to approach you with then, now that our purpose is disguised?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly as a young girl repeating the marriage vows. But she managed to maintain a bland expression.
Moving his left hand as though he described an arch, he said, “I mean to inform you then, I intend to murder your husband.”
Her body spasmed as if a noose had been tightened about her neck. The fright that came into her eyes was senseless, unpredictable, blind. Slowly she brought up a trembling right hand.
He closed his eyes. Oh, curses on all of life, on love, on all striving…on the infernal gods. I misjudged her. She is summoning the guards. I am a dead man.
But the Empress uttered no sound. The hand she raised stopped at her throat. This automatic defensive gesture she smoothly transformed into the motions of fidgeting with an errant strand of hair. When he looked at her again, to his amazement her face was composed, although she would not look at him. He sensed this was protective, as if she feared he might see too much of her soul.
I judged her rightly, he thought. There’s a firm core of sensibility beneath all that flightiness and fretting.
When she spoke, her voice was bare of all lilting, womanly intonations—it was the flat, pragmatic voice of a woman in the marketplace. “You are mad to so casually place your life in my hands. Why are you so certain of yourself…and of me?”
“It is not done casually. It was a carefully made judgment that your love of freedom overbalances your fear. And I’m not so sure of myself as you may suppose—I’ve made a life of sounding more certain than I am.”
“So that is honesty. I’ve heard tales of it.” She looked at him briefly, appreciating what seemed a Homeric determination in his eyes, mingled intriguingly with a quality of gentleness. She thought: I am not so easily read. This is a necromancer who reads in eyes what Chaldeans read in the stars.
“You frighten me.” It was a fugitive’s voice, not an empress’s. She thought suddenly the ground was too distant, and earth and air were all one liquid medium, tugging at her, rolling in gentle swells. This could not be happening, but it was.
“That is the last thing I wish. I’m sorry to tell you this way but…you are too isolated by your jailers.”
“Most people envy me.”
“They are blinded by eminence. They do not see the woman beneath.”
“I could change my mind tomorrow. Dawn will come and I won’t be pleasantly half drunk, and I’ll realize you’re off your head. Perhaps then I’ll go the Prefect of the Guard. I hold a dagger at your throat.”
“I wished it so, for how else could I have gained your trust?”
“Of all the plots conceived, how many succeed—and how many end in a series of executions?” Her voice became a soft growl. “You had better not be playing with me.”
He suppressed a smile at the undisguised eagerness in her voice. The fruit had long been ready to fall; the tree needed but one firm shake. He sensed she questioned him now merely to test how he would respond, as a collector of bronzes might continue to turn and handle a vase after he has decided he will buy it.
“It will succeed because of what I learned from the failures of others. The ground will be prepared slowly; the first consideration will be the safety of the conspirators—there are shortly going to be quite a few of them. We will do nothing until we have found a successor loved and respected by everyone. It might take a year and more. And I must tell you, I have Caenis’ letters. If it is your wish, I will show them to you.”
“How in the name of Venus did you get them?”
“A tale for another time.” He knew he must hurry or her companions would begin to feel this discussion oddly prolonged. “If you wish to be a part, we will go no faster than you determine. But I wanted you to know at once—aid is coming to you.”
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