“Hadrian favored a public trial and exile. I journeyed to Ravenna in secret and told Archbishop Comus that I would be less than prostrate with grief if Paul met with some mischance. That fool was as chicken-livered as Hadrian. Men! With all their talk of law and due process!” Lucilla spat. “What nonsense. As though such as Paul Afartha ever worried about law. As though he would worry about law if our Frankish alliance should fail and I or Hadrian ever fell into his hands.”
Regeane was warmer now, the wine flowing hot in her veins, emboldening her. She took another sip. “And?”
Lucilla chuckled as if amused at her own cleverness. “I rented a large house and gave a feast for the archbishop and Paul and his men. I hired nearly every whore in Ravenna to entertain them. Certainly they expected no less of me. I am, after all, the very dissolute Lucilla.
“When they were all far gone in drink and the ecstasies of carnal pleasure—there was not one, but three beautiful girls to every man there—my men and I took Paul down to the cellars of the bishop’s palace and garrotted him.”
Lucilla looked down at her hands. “I turned the stick that snapped his neck. He didn’t make it easy for me.” Her voice shook. “He pleaded, he begged, he made promises that weren’t worth the breath it took to make them. He died, all in all, a most unmanly death. Archbishop Comus got the credit for Paul’s untimely demise and he took it rather than admit he’d been hoodwinked by a woman.”
“Killing sickens you even as it sickens me,” Regeane said.
“Yes,” Lucilla said, looking at her helplessly. “It does. I don’t think I’d be going to confession to you if it didn’t.”
“I can’t offer you absolution.”
“Nor I you.”
Regeane drank again. “How will I kill my husband? That’s what Gundabald wanted, you know.”
“Do it in such a way that you won’t be caught, and,” Lucilla cautioned, “only if it’s absolutely necessary. That’s the best and only advice I can give you. And never learn to glory in death as some men do. Women have the power of life and death. We, after all, give birth and the fate of humanity is in our hands. That’s why men try so hard to rule us, my dear.
“They know if we once looked well on what they have made of the human existence, we might close our legs and within our barren wombs bring the comedy to an end.”
“Would you really, Lucilla? Could you?”
Lucilla threw her head back and an expression of almost unbearable pain crossed her face. “No. I can remember when Antonius first kicked in my womb. I believed then that anything was possible. Ah, God above, he was my life. My life was in him. I continue to hope though all hope is lost. We women are accursed with life. It binds us fast and we continue to believe with every child we bear that the world will be better than it has been in the past, that it will receive them with love.”
“Not always,” Regeane said.
“Never,” Lucilla said. “A child, my dear, is often only another mouth to feed. Perhaps we’re lucky when some man finds a kind of honor in the fact that his little squirt of spunk made our belly swell. And he sees fit to protect it.”
The wind picked up. High clouds flew past the moon.
“The north wind is blowing,” Lucilla said. “Tomorrow there will be frost on the grass and even the flowers in my garden will feel the chill.”
“Who is Adraste and why did I get her mirror?” Regeane asked.
“Adraste is a dead woman, a dead whore. What does she matter to you?”
“I don’t know,” Regeane said, “but somehow I think the dead are as important in this as the living. Tell me, Lucilla, who was she?”
Lucilla shrugged. “Since you ask, I’ll do better than tell you about her. I’ll show her to you.”
There was a lamp on the bench beside the wine pitcher. Lucilla lit it by striking a flint on a steel ring she wore.
“I have another dining room.” She shielded the flame from the wind. “One I don’t use anymore,” she said laughing. There was a cruel edge to her laughter.
She led Regeane around the atrium pool to a dark, curtained doorway on the other side, and stepped inside the room. When the curtains fell, the room was almost pitch black. The tiny flame created only a small circle of light around the two women. Lucilla walked toward one of the walls, lifted the lamp, and said, “Behold Adraste.” Lucilla turned her head away and covered her face with her mantle.
Adraste sat painted as Venus at her toilet in a cushioned chair, naked, with her maids clustered around her. One stood behind her, coiling her long, blond hair. Another graceful beauty proffered jewels for her inspection. Yet another, head bowed almost in adoration, laced sandals onto her small white feet while their mistress gazed at the handiwork of the hairdresser in a silver mirror.
So fine was the detail of the painting that Regeane could recognize the mirror with its spray of pink blossoms. Her eyes shifted to Adraste’s face and she knew she looked not on some idealized vision of the artist, but on the face of a living woman. The large green eyes had a sparkle of mischief in them and there was a sprinkling of tiny freckles across the beautifully shaped nose. The slightly too full lips smiled invitingly. The naked breasts were lush and jutted slightly, turned upward at the pink blond nipples. The waist was slender and the belly a sweetly curved platform of desire where nested a sex covered with curly reddish-blond hair.
“How Antonius must have loved her,” Regeane said.
“Yes,” Lucilla answered. “I can’t bear to look at the paintings in this room and I can’t bear to destroy them either. They were some of the last he did before he contracted the disease that was his ruin.
“She came from the east, fleeing, as she said, from a cruel and dangerous lover highly placed in the government. I should have known better than to take her in. Should have known that nothing good ever comes to us from Constantinople. All those accursed Greeks ever do is make trouble. Better she had ensnared any man in Rome—yes, even my Hadrian—than to have taken my son. You see, she knew. Even when she first lay with my son, the bitch knew she had the disease that would end both her beauty and her life.
“When my son fell ill I began to inquire as to the cause of his disease. I sent word to a correspondent at the emperor’s court in Constantinople. I asked him about Adraste. It seems her last lover was not only not a high official, but he already walked the roads robed in black with a clapper in his hand.
“I had her dragged out of her house, the fine house my money bought for her. For you see I indulged Antonius in everything. I had her brought here. My maids washed the paint from her face and body. The lesions, those pale numb marks that slowly destroy the leper’s flesh, were everywhere.”
Lucilla stopped speaking. Her rage left her gasping for breath. In the lamplight her face was set like a stone. Her eyes glittered like dagger points.
“I’ll say this for her. She carried herself at the end better than that puking Paul Afartha. She had the grace to be contrite. She didn’t plead for her life. The only excuse she offered was that Antonius was her last hope, the last flare of a dying lamp before the oil is exhausted and the night closes in. I cannot say I was moved. I wanted to watch her die screaming. But I didn’t want Antonius to hate me, either. So I offered her the same choice the Caesars offered their enemies—the dagger or the public executioner. As it happens, she chose white arsenic. I gave her a magnificent funeral. It was what Antonius wished.”
“Does he know?” Regeane asked.
“I can’t say,” Lucilla answered. “We’ve never spoken of her fate.”
Lucilla walked away from the shadows into the center of the room and hurled the lamp to the floor. It shattered and the flames flashed through oil like a bonfire, roaring up almost to the ceiling.
The two women looked at each other. The one in the painting frozen in time, caught in those last moments before beauty is extinguished by disease and death. Lucilla, the living woman, standing on the other side of the flames, her face a naked mask of pain.<
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“My son, my son,” she cried. “The bitch took my son. Is it my sins, Regeane? Is Antonius paying for what I’ve done?
Is he?”
Regeane backed toward the curtains that covered the entrance to the triclinium and she pushed them aside. The wind tugged at her mantle. She could feel the change coming toward her the way a cloud shadow moves over the plain.
“I don’t know about sin, Lucilla. I’ve never understood it. It’s a thing of the church. Am I to believe in a church that will brand me a witch and burn me? I can’t. All the years on my knees and all the penances my mother offered couldn’t make me, and they can’t now. All I hope is that somehow I can give you back your son.”
Lucilla saw something like summer lightning glow around Regeane and the wolf ran like a silver shimmer, elusive as the high thin clouds above that, one by one, danced with the moon.
XXIV
“WHAT IS IT, SILVER ONE?” THE WOMAN ASKED OF the wolf. As one, they flew across the Campagna. “Will you now try to do the impossible?”
The wolf couldn’t answer in words, but the woman understood her joy ous reply. “Why not? I am an impossible thing.”
The lights of Rome behind her, the wolf paused at the top of a high hill to survey her kingdom. The cloud-haunted moon cast a bright light to the wolf’s eyes. Below her stretched a sea of grass broken only by lines of small bushes and low trees. These marked gullies and watercourses where the wolf could, if she so desired, find refreshment and prey. Deep in her savage heart the wolf remembered and exulted.
The memories that flooded the woman’s brain were almost unbearable in their poignancy. The wolf not only remembered joy, but pain also and pain’s sometimes inexorable ending, death. Often swift death under the sharp, crushing hooves of the beloved prey. Death equally quick as she faced the weapons of her own kind, the long, white fangs, and bone-crushing jaws. Death, most feared, inflicted by the lingering slow torture of disease.
She also remembered life, not as humans sometimes lived it—an experience of constant anxiety and fear of tomorrow’s misfortunes, dreading displeasure of the great and powerful among their own species—but life fully realized and lived to the fullest amid the love of others of her kind, the exultant triumph and sometimes bitter disappointments of the hunt.
A life sharpened by the pangs of hunger. Alternating with utter satiation. Of desire, potent and passionate, reaching its fulfillment in love untouched by guilt or regret. A life shaped by the freedom the woman longed for, a sense of power over herself and her own world, a savage strength that could never be betrayed or enslaved into the stupid, mindless barbarity of human servitude.
The woman or the wolf could be killed. She might die tonight as one or the other. But she wouldn’t go stumbling down the road to death hating life or the world around her. She would not be a driven slave, born to drag her burden from birth to death. She would go free, free as the wolf was free, incapable of being subjected by terror or cruelty. Embracing existence, even its pain, to the very last extremity. Herself at one with the wind-tossed grass, the high arch of the dark heavens, urged on by the keening cry of the wind that seemed to speed her on her way.
For one last moment wolf and woman looked up at the moon and then almost with a soundless sigh, Regeane yielded to the wolf’s joyous freedom from fear and she lunged forward toward Cumae.
THE CLOUDS WERE THICKENING AND AN ICY MIST was creeping over the Campagna when the wolf reached the foot of the rock. The temple lifted its empty shell against the sky, clouds its only companions.
The wolf took the holy path to the top. Just before she reached the summit she saw two figures, hooded in black, waiting. Neither held a torch or lantern. Moonbeams found their way between the fissures in the thick overcast, and they seemed blackened shadows in its lambent light.
One of them saw her and spoke. “He said a wolf would come, brother.”
“Yes,” the other answered. “A wolf bigger and more powerful than those of the Campagna. A wolf that didn’t act like a wolf.”
“We greet you, Lupa,” one of the figures said, lifting its hand.
The silver wolf raised her head and stared proudly at them.
“Not everyone has forgotten that God once spoke here,” one of them explained. “A few still remember. Come, he waits beside the hearth.”
Antonius was sitting beside the tall cone of the sacred fire. He raised his hand in greeting to Regeane.
“Lupa,” he said. “What do you want with me? What can you want with me?”
Regeane stood before him, a woman. The wind chilled her to the bone and sent her hair blowing like a dark veil around her body. The two hooded hierophants hid their faces in their mantles and bowed down beside him.
“I come,” she said, “to bring you healing, if I can.”
“The only cure for me is death,” Antonius answered, rising to his feet and facing her. He pulled the mantle around his features. “Even so,” he said. “Do I hide my ugliness from a creature of such beauty as you are, Regeane?”
Regeane looked down from the rock. The fog below was a thickening pall in the ever-changing moon glow. It was covering the landscape with its moist caress, blanketing the outlines of the coast, blurring away the vast plain of the Campagna. The clouds above roofed the high rock, and the silver moonlight came and went as they thickened, then thinned in their racing passage across the sky.
Like the rock and the temple, Regeane seemed suspended between heaven and earth. Not wholly either one, but something different and, perhaps, more powerful.
“Ugliness and beauty don’t exist for the wolf, Antonius,” she said. “At least not in the way you see them with your artist’s eye.”
A gust of wind whipped her hair, lashing it around her face like flame. Dust from the cone of dead ash coated Antonius’ robe, and he ducked his head to escape its fury.
“You were,” Regeane continued, “my first friend. The first to help me. Neither the woman nor the wolf can forget that. Yield yourself to me. I will try to make you whole.”
“How?” he asked.
“By going where the dead go.”
She turned away from him toward the entrance to the temple. The two black-robed hierophants took up their positions on either side of the temple portal, a door that opened now into darkness.
“Mine.” Regeane recalled her own words to Cecelia. “A victory over death.” She forgot Antonius for a second and quailed back. But the woman no longer fought the wolf. They were one.
There was a light inside the temple. Its brilliance showed the temple for what it was. The big gaps in the cella walls, the broken stonework under foot, the cracked pedestal. An emptiness now, where the statue of the god once stood. The glow emanated from a bent figure that leaned on a heavy staff. And as the figure drew closer, Regeane recognized Abbess Hildegard.
Regeane lifted her arm and raised her hand in salute to her, remembering and recognizing the light that had succored her in the night when evil seemed to outweigh everything, when the creatures of darkness had reached out toward her.
The bent old woman paused at the temple door before Regeane and spoke. “I would not have you face the forces of night without a word. Do not think we of the worlds beyond death are all alike. Because you loved my sisters while you were among them, take with you my blessing and the blessing of God.” She lifted her hand.
Regeane went to her knees on the temple steps. She felt the bite of chilled marble on her flesh. The wind was blowing harder. The fog seemed to be rising more quickly. Long scarves of vapor trailed between the tall, white columns.
“May God protect you on your journey,” Hildegard said as her fingers traced a cross of light in the air.
Then she was gone.
Regeane faced the woman out of time. Age and youth flickered across her face like the change of seasons across the mind of God.
“Are you a creature of time?” Regeane asked, rising to her feet.
“I am,” the woman said, “ho
w time looks to eternity. Each thing contains the seeds of its destruction. Its failure is ever compensated by the moment of rebirth.”
“I can’t understand you,” Regeane said.
“No,” the answer came. “And, as you are mortal, you never will. Are you ready for your journey?”
Regeane stretched out her arms to the being almost in desperation. “I am. Can you tell me, will I ever return?”
There was a titter of laughter from the shadows gathering behind Regeane, from the ragged ghosts. It sounded like the squeaking of bats. But the face of the thing before Regeane did not change except to age and then grow young again.
“Some do,” it said. “Some don’t. And some don’t care. Such is their sorrow. Journey with us or not; we are indifferent.”
Regeane felt a moment of hesitation. Even the wolf was afraid as Regeane sought the protection of her lupine shape. For a moment she was lost in the wolf’s memories. She saw destruction as a lightning-kindled wildfire poured across a plain, killing everything not swift enough to flee, an avalanche moving like a cloud down a mountain to carry the corpses of men and beasts embedded in its violence, depositing them, kindred in death, in a valley below. The earth shook. Chasms opened at her feet and fire erupted from the top of a mountain. Scalding, killing ash rained around her.
So many were the ways to die. The universe was death, and death ruled it. All life took a thousand roads to destruction. Yet life lived on, sparkling, illuminating, burning like a candle in a tomb. A star flaring on the horizon’s edge at dusk, returning ever resurgent, like Cecelia’s roses, forever.
Regeane had never felt more woman or more wolf.
The wolf trotted up the steps to the endless tittering of the ghosts and passed through the door.
When Regeane was a child, years before, she reached her womanhood and met the wolf within her. She’d lived on her stepfather’s estate in Austrasia. Even then she’d been a lonely child. Her mother, still beautiful, always hung on the arm of her stepfather, Firminius. The socially ambitious, corpulent thug had worn her fragile mother like an adornment.
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