B007IIXYQY EBOK

by Gillespie, Donna

  He knocked the sword from her hand.

  She scrambled quickly from beneath the boy’s body, narrowly evading a stroke that would have lopped off her left arm at the shoulder. Her right hand scurried about in the sand, seeking her sword. But it lay nearer to Aristos; triumphantly, he scooped it up.

  Proudly he held her sword aloft for his devotees to admire.

  “Behold the fate of a false-speaking, murdering kin-killer!” he cried.

  “Good show!” his followers shouted back. “Now nail her to the ground!”

  He turned and tossed Auriane’s sword far behind him. It struck the sand beneath the imperial box. Half the width of the arena separated her from it.

  Cries of dismay broke out sporadically up and down the steeply ascending seats.

  Auriane quietly accepted that Fria deserted her. Of her own will she had entered the sacred enclosure for a judgment, and the Fates had ruled against her. It was the way of the heavens and earth. She stood on waste ground. And yet she could not stop fighting, though all struggle now seemed as futile as the final writhings of a freshly killed creature.

  With slow, deliberate steps Aristos advanced upon her. She was too exhausted to feel much fear. Nimbly she backed away, traveling even farther from her sword. She knew she had no chance of reclaiming it; he could too easily block her. He had now only to herd her to the barrier and finish her. To the throng it seemed she faced one final choice: She could submit at once, or she could force him to pursue her, and gain a few extra moments of life.

  Death hung about her like stagnant marsh mist. The air about her whistled as it was torn by his blade; a dozen times he missed her by less than a hand’s width.

  She made a last attempt to draw the forces of earth into her body, reaching hard for the invincible peace of Ramis’ holy fire. This time she thought she felt a small, subterranean pulse, then a deep drag from far below, as though she were a dry tree and one long root touched water deep in the earth. Then she felt sustenance readily flowing in; gradually she was a well of warmth and light, generating soft, fiery strength. Praise to the land, praise to sun and moon, she thought as the luminous bewitchment buoyed her, held her, then let her go, flickering in and out like a distant torch carried through trees. No, she realized, I have not been abandoned.

  Ramis, I sense you are here, definite as the draft from a wing-beat. Something excites you. You come to take. I suppose you come to collect my soul at death, and bear me north.

  Then came the ghost of Ramis’ voice from long ago—Never forget the power in hair. It is a shield and a birth-string connecting you to earth.

  What I must do is clear and evident.

  I have a weapon still—one holier and far older than the sword.

  She was positioned directly beneath the foreign ambassadors’ seats. Later these dignitaries would relate that in the last moments she seemed thrown into some divine rapture, a thing that to them betokened madness. Cleopatra’s black eye-paint had run with heat and perspiration. It streaked down her cheeks like a comet’s tail, causing her eyes to appear narrowed and glowing, as though she wore a frightful cat mask.

  They watched, mystified, as Auriane pulled out the bone comb that secured her hair. She shook her head once to loosen it, and it shuddered down into a womanly mane.

  Aristos’ body jerked as though he tripped on a root. What foul trick did she play now? Bronze hair flowed extravagantly over her shoulders, dropping to her waist like heavy silk, shivering and alive with menacing magic. He had lived all his life knowing that much power for good and evil dwelled in women’s hair. In their own country, if a woman other than a priestess padded about at night with hair unbound, the crime was punishable by death.

  First she marked him with an evil sigil. Then she somehow divined his most abominable secret. Now she planned some witchery with her hair. He sputtered a curse.

  His dizziness was increasing, and the weakness in his limbs. Was loss of blood the cause, or was this, too, the result of her sorcery?

  From his followers came amused laughter. “Clip it for her!” they shouted gaily. “Make us a wig of it!” Simpletons, Aristos thought. They have no notion of what they speak.

  “Lying whelp with poison in your veins,” he muttered as he started forward once more, slashing in greedy arcs. As she danced away, she felt for the particular rhythm of his thrusts and cuts, and began to shift in time with them.

  The rebellious cry, “Spare her!” was thrown up all around, in spite of the people’s terror of Domitian; it was as if they had decided suddenly that the bowmen could not slay them all.

  For an imperceptible space of time Auriane was poised, still. Then she sprang.

  It appeared to those nearest as though she leaped right into Aristos’ whipping blade, a quite unnecessary act of suicide since in moments he would have had her against the barrier.

  But Aristos’ sword never struck flesh. Her lunge was precisely timed; she flung herself into an opening that lasted no longer than a bone-crack. She clung like a monkey to the front of him; together they toppled to the sand. He thrashed beneath her, struggling to get away from that hair—it was hideous, alive, and everywhere; in his madness it hissed, it burned, it stung like bees.

  For long moments they struggled for his sword, fighting for holds like wrestlers in the palaestra, their hands slipping on blood. The wound she had inflicted beneath his heart weakened him more than her various lesser wounds had undermined her, and so their strength was nearly evenly matched. The throng rose up as one, screaming for both of them at once, their shouts rising into a massive mountain of incoherent noise.

  Finally he flipped her onto her back. Her hair fanned out onto the sand, dark, lustrous, dangerous, a midnight lily pad on a moon-white pond. I’ll scalp this demoness after I finish her, he thought, looming over her, teeth bared like some beast, sword poised, ready to fall on her jugular. But she kicked hard with both legs, striking his stomach. He grunted and crumpled onto his side. Swiftly she scrambled onto his wide back, slipping on oiled skin. He bucked like a horse, frantic to throw her off. Then she got a grip on his shoulder-guard and clung like a bramble.

  Her hair streamed down, plastering itself to his damp shoulders, lashing his face, snaking over the sand. Quickly she separated out a thick tress and, using it like rope, looped it round his bullish neck, then pulled, pouring the last of her waning strength into this final, desperate act.

  Her arms soon became numb. And still she pulled, straining so hard she heaved for breath. The moments stretched, seeming deep and boundless as night. Once she nodded into childhood and heard Hertha’s soft, cracked voice relating a winter-fire tale— And when the end had come, and the enemy was ringed about their high-place, the shield-maids chose to give themselves to Fria rather than be sacrificed to the enemy’s gods…and so they loosed their long hair. With it, they strangled one another, and thus they stayed free.

  The throng’s cries betrayed confusion now; her masses of hair obscured them both, shrouding in mystery the final moments of the struggle.

  Auriane imagined the sand was a sea of foam-capped waves that would soon lap over them both. She felt lulled, washed clean, as slowly, his ponderous body began to sink beneath her.

  Odberht, I give you to Fria. Let the great Giver be your judge.

  Tension ebbed out of him in one long, receding tide. Once a violent spasm passed through him and she thought it must be his maddened spirit, cursing her, fighting her still, outraged at being expelled from its earthly housing.

  The sword dropped from his hand.

  Odberht, you were right to fear my hair.

  In the next moment she knew with warm certainty that one spirit animated all life, and was seized by the frightful sense she squeezed the life from her own body—that she slew herself. But still she pulled—the momentum of the years was too great. He must die.

  Through labored breaths she managed the words of the rite—

  “In the name of Wodan, god of the spear…I claim vengea
nce on Odberht, son of Wido. Let honor be returned to those he betrayed. Cleanse of bloodstain these hands fated to slay….”

  She did not feel she lived in the words, as she expected to; it was as though they were spoken by a priestess of a foreign religion. Does this death bring you comfort, you who threw yourselves on the guards’ blades but an hour ago? I am not sure it gives me comfort. I do not see entry into heaven here. I see but one more corpse.

  He gave one final, blind kick; then Aristos, born Odberht, bane of her people, enemy of her whole life, breathed his last.

  Auriane collapsed on top of him, exhausted, and slid into the soft blackness of a dreamless sleep. Her hair was a glossy coverlet thrown over them. An unholy quiet settled over the stands until it was so profound that the awnings high above could be heard snapping in the wind.

  Many in the throng shuddered as if an icy draft had found its way in. The people of Rome sensed that dark gods hovered over this scene, shrieking bog-dwelling deities of the North, whose presence could pull down temples, undermine all laws—spirits unknown to their fair Olympians who ruled in sunlight. The Vestals would need to perform a purification rite on the spot to remove the stain of evil, lest it infect the whole city.

  Those who loved Auriane stirred first. Uncertain cries came from the women’s gallery. “Aurinia! Arise!”

  Aristos’ followers then found their voices. “Aristos Rex!” came their hesitant shouts; it was almost a question. Many were certain he played some strange game. Surely he had played it long enough—why did he not stir?

  Auriane heard none of this, for her spirit had fled the place. She glided like a hawk along the banks of Ramis’ smoking lake. It was dusk. A resplendent moon, softly triumphant, crowned the pines. Ramis’ voice seemed to issue from the abyssal darkness between the trees.

  And now you know it, Auriane. The lily opens. And so, now you must come to me.

  Auriane felt Ramis’ spirit wrap round her mind. She formed a mute reply— It does not feel like a great knowing…. It feels common as whisking a burning kettle off the hearth…or suckling a hungry child.

  So it is with all great knowings, came Ramis’s reply.

  For all the sorrowing, Auriane asked then, what was the cause?

  The cause was in you, even before your birth. You will know it fully only after your death. Understand it now only as your willingness to believe in your own evil. For it, you had to cause your father’s death. For it, you were brought to this place. The lesson is learned. And so you are mine.

  And then the seeress-state flowed over her with power and brilliance; all the world gently smoothed into benign shape. Ramis’ old assurance, Catastrophe is fertile, it brings forth worlds, sounded as a dark, strong hymn, its meaning eminently obvious. She sensed a vast cycle of life completed itself; war was the old life’s chief rite. Now the clash of armies seemed pitiable, ghastly as the spectacle of children armed with sharp weapons sent out to slaughter one another. The dead man beneath her was her own emanation—as she had been his. From the first they were caught in a cruel maze constructed from terror and delusion, then forced to fight as gamecocks are made to fight. There was no shame in it; it was simply the way of the world. She felt she reached out a hand of peace to the living and the dead. Had she been able to fear, she might have feared only that this state would desert her.

  This, then, is the death that was spoken in the runes, came final words of Ramis’. You died the serpent-death and sloughed off the old life so you could be born into this vaster one that knows the ends of the overarching sky. For this reason you were impelled to finish this last task with your hair. For at our last great Convening we named you as one of the Holy Nine, sovereign over all the tribes, and they must not touch iron.

  As Auriane’s blood began to stir and consciousness grudgingly returned, she thought: This is some mad jest to play on me—to hand me the very fate my poor mother so feared she kept a sword in my cradle.

  And still Ramis’ words filtered into her mind—

  You wondered why I came at your birth and gave you a seeress-name. You questioned why you were brought to my isle at the sacred hour of midnight.

  Listen well; now I am free to tell the cause. When I die, you, Auriane, will be the Veleda after me. You and no other will ascend the high tower of the One Who Sees.

  CHAPTER LIX

  AFTER A TIME THE DOOR OF the gladiator’s entrance was pulled open. Meton and Acco approached the pair with cautious steps, even though neither Aristos nor Auriane had stirred for some time. Five undertrainers followed in a line, walking as if they probed for quicksand. Each carried a javelin or a brand.

  Meton lightly touched Auriane’s shoulder with the butt of a javelin. She did not move. She seemed to be peacefully sleeping, her head resting on Aristos’ shoulder. Her dark bronze hair was fanned about in a great circle, draped over both like a grave cloth.

  Warily Meton moved around the bodies. This time he used the javelin’s point and lifted a mass of her hair. And he saw Aristos’ face.

  He drew in a breath and backed into Acco. There was no doubt Aristos was dead. His face was horrible. His eyes bulged, staring at nothing with dry, fixed surprise. His cheeks were purplish-black; his mouth, loose and sagging like a deflated wineskin; the tongue protruded in a ghoulish imitation of a Gorgon’s face.

  “By the jowls of Cerberus,” Meton whispered, dropping Auriane’s hair back over Aristos’ face. “She strangled him!”

  The undertrainers, emboldened by this news, came up and stood around the bodies in a ring. For long moments Meton stared dazedly at the man he had devoted so much time and effort to training, whose career had been his own best fortune, studying Aristos with detached sadness, as if he were some magnificent ruin. Never would there be another like him. The light coating of sand that stuck to Aristos’ oiled body made him appear like a fallen giant’s image in stone. The powerfully muscled arm lay limp; now it had not even the power to lift itself. Meton kept a respectful distance, as if from a freshly killed serpent, for it was difficult to believe Aristos was harmless, even now. What a sad and ludicrous fate, he reflected, for one of the greatest swordsmen our School will ever house.

  Acco said then, “Poor gallant creature, she’s managed the impossible and paid for it with her life. This is a prodigy to match all prodigies. She killed Aristos. And she was one of mine. I trained her, you know. She shall have a funeral to match Rodan’s if I have to raise the money myself!”

  Scattered sections of the throng started up a rousing chant: “Who lives? Who lives?” Aristos’ devotees joined in with: “Aristos! Enough! Get up!” And “He is our king!” But the larger part of the crowd languished in confusion, unable to cheer or moan.

  Meton recovered himself first and came forward to pull Auriane from the body of Aristos. Behind him a troupe of Numidian boys approached at a trot with two biers for the bodies.

  In the instant before Meton touched her, Auriane moved. Meton jerked back.

  Wearily, ponderously, Auriane pulled herself up, a befuddled Aphrodite rising from a sea of hair. That simple movement might have been an earthquake for the titanic reaction it produced.

  “Aurinia lives!” The storm of jubilant noise drove Meton to stop his ears. “Long live our Aurinia!”

  She held out a blood-caked hand to Meton so he could help her rise. There was no victory-fire in her eyes, Meton saw; only an odd, bright calm, as if she had somehow found a mother’s comfort after a nightmare.

  Aristos’ devotees began taking off their shoes and hurling them at him, in a vain effort to make him rise. Of course, he lived on. He laughed at death.

  Even after they saw Aristos’ face, and watched as the Numidian boys dropped him into the bier and hoisted it to their shoulders, they refused to believe their king had perished.

  “Punish her! Strike her down!” they cried out, shaking their fists. Some of the more sober members of the crowd laughed at them.

  The belief that Aristos was not dead would persist
; his was a powerful ghost that would not be put to rest. In coming days people would say they had seen him late at night, demanding a jar of wine at his favorite tavern, or insist they saw him training in secret. This was only his most elaborate trick of all. Aristos would return, if not at these games, then at the next. Even after his grand funeral, which was a mockery of a funeral of state, attended by hundreds of professional mourners, there were still those who said, “They burned another body. Aristos lives.”

  As Auriane struggled to her feet, she felt borne up by the crowd’s surging cries. They know nothing of me, she thought, or why I performed this deed, but does the wave need to know the one it lifts?

  Meton shouted to an undertrainer, “Bring a horse. It’s the only way we’ll get her through.”

  Auriane was unsettled by the draught of freedom that intoxicated her then. For so long the pursuit of Odberht had compressed her spirit and governed her every act that suddenly she felt she had no stable shape—she might be woman or loping wolf, or mist rising from a lake. She sensed the quiet opening of gates whose existence she had never suspected. Even enslavement cannot touch this freedom, she realized. But this new boundlessness was not without unpleasantness—there was, too, the shock of noise and cold and rude light known by the babe freshly pulled from the womb. She wanted to cry out like a wolf. She wondered in one instant if she should choose a new name.

  A dark, celebratory mood full of exultant lawlessness possessed the amphitheater. To Auriane it had the spirit of a tribal victory dance. Word finally got about that Domitian had departed in haste from the imperial box; it was said he fled in terror because the Chief Augur warned him his Nemesis would be victor. Surely, many felt, this was an omen—could the tyrant who called himself their Lord and God long survive the death of his favorite?

  A sturdy gray cart horse was brought for Auriane. The undertrainers hastily bandaged her wounds with strips of wool, then helped her onto the beast’s broad back. She leaned heavily on the horse’s neck while Meton steadied her to keep her from falling.