Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  “Good riddance to the eccentric, bookish fool.”

  Small in the distance now, the fleeing man shed his cloak with one savage twist of his body and sprinted on. He was a Herculean runner; long, powerful strides pulled him steadily ahead of Victorinus’s men. Finally he vaulted a creek and lost himself in the eternal twilight of the mountain ash trees beyond.

  Below them, the guards’ captain found he could do little to combat the flames. The carriage was like an open forge, too hot for anyone to approach. The town’s bucketmen doused the elms with well water so the fire would not spread. In the confusion, no one had yet brought vinegar.

  Lamentations arose. Some cried out Julianus’s name and tossed Flora’s flowers into the flaming carriage. This roaring evidence of murder held many transfixed with an odd reverence. They’d come to gape at a celebrated statesman, never expecting to find themselves witness to his mortal journey’s final moments. Their insignificant tributary of Empire felt a little more significant today. Some in the crowd whispered that the fire had such fearsome power because of Auriane—had Julianus not entered into that strange conjoining with an outlandish northern woman snagged in the net of war, had he not formed an amorous alliance that did not even have a proper name, allowing alien gods with gnarled names to pass through his gate, then he might not have perished in such an extraordinary way.

  Chapter 7

  While the carriage bloomed in flame Auriane sat quietly unaware, tutoring her children in the villa’s library. When Auriane taught her daughters, she took them down shadowed paths their Greek and Latin tutors would never tread. She related tales of battle-chiefs who won victories by putting war-fetters on their foes, of land-spirits who saved the harvest when approached with respect and given cakes. She had told them of the birth of the Chattian tribe from the body of a dead giant. In the world Auriane brought to them, leaves rustled with intention, streams coursed with Fria’s blood, each mossy stone had its ghost.

  As she put questions to them, she saw by turns, Witgern’s savage disappointment, Lurio’s alert interest as he examined the coins. So she was more irritated than usual with Arria, who always put up a bitter resistance to these lessons.

  Arria sat slumped in a matron’s basket chair that all but engulfed her. Its wicker back framed that small, wise face like a nimbus around a stubborn little deity. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, and she swung her legs in boredom, while sneaking peeks at a cheaply made bookroll flattened out beneath her ivory study box, which wasn’t as well concealed as she thought it was. She’d spent an hour by the water-clock readying herself for these lessons, and Auriane thought her aim was, in part, to shield herself from them by clothing herself in aristocratic Romanness. Her heat-pressed aquamarine tunica embroidered with vermilion trim draped to hennaed toenails, revealing remarkably unscuffed sandals. She’d had the ornatrix style her hair with a tight row of curls in front, and long ringlets behind, captured into a net of gold thread. To Auriane the effect was sad and odd; a girl of nine, even by Roman custom, wasn’t expected to bend and curb her nature; her hair was normally left loose and free. Sadder still for Auriane was that Arria had cast aside her Chattian name and answered only to her Roman name. Auriane never objected to these small self-assertions; she’d brought her children to a borderland between worlds, and long ago decided to let each daughter’s allegiance be her own affair.

  Avenahar had spent no more time to ready herself than it takes to beat the fleas out of a saddle-blanket and throw it on a mule. Spurning furniture, she sprawled on the mosaic floor next to her sister, elbows resting on a portrait of the Greek philosopher Anaximander, amidst soiled bookrolls that might have been blasted about by storm winds. Her sandals looked as though a goat had chewed on them. Her short brown tunica was a record on cloth of all she’d done of late, stained with oils used for conditioning leather, blood from helping with the birth of a calf, and slime from the well she’d shimmied down, to clear it of branches. She had stood still long enough to allow Brico to run a few strokes through her hair; it was a black silk curtain drawn across her face as she bent over her wax tablet. Only about her hair did Avenahar have a measure of vanity; Auriane supposed it because her older daughter counted herself Chattian through and through, and to a woman of the tribes, hair was sacred treasure, and a cloak of power.

  “A stranger presents himself at your hall, begging food and help,” Auriane asked them. “He is bloodied, and tales have come to you of an ambush and murder nearby. What must you do?”

  “Take him in and shelter him from his foes, for the law of guest-friendship demands you keep a wayfarer well, even if he’s a fleeing murderer,” Avenahar replied effortlessly, from behind her hair.

  With each question, Arria pretended her older sister had spoken up too quickly for her.

  “What passed in this season, and on this day, in the time of your grandfathers?”

  “Our grandfather Baldemar destroyed the Roman fort at Aquae Mattiaci and claimed as a war-prize the javelin of a first centurion.”

  “Arria. Will you let your sister answer every time?” Auriane said it neutrally, but hurt edged in, in spite of herself.

  Arria’s head sagged in a child’s parody of misery, and she mumbled, “Why must I learn of people who live in dirt?”

  “I tire of this, day after day, Arria.”

  Arria went limp as silk cloth, feigning weariness unto death.

  “Arria, sit up. You have a Mother-line. You will learn of all the spirits that made you or you’ll grow into an ignorant woman.”

  Arria contorted her face in the usual manner of a thoroughly disgusted girl of nine. “Your people are nothing but dirty, beaten beggars.”

  “They are your people as well.” Auriane felt a momentary jolt of shame at the quiver of vulnerability in her voice.

  “They’re not my people. Don’t say they are! Everyone makes cruel jokes about us because you say that. Avenahar loves them so well—let her study them!”

  “When Witgern’s army is at your door,” came Avenahar’s supple retort, “then, maybe, you’ll have respect for the history of our people.”

  “Be silent, both of you!” Auriane felt a dark, ugly twist of misery within, as though Arria were trying to saw herself away from her with a serrated blade.

  “Let me see what you learn of,” Avenahar said then, leaping up, eyes sparking with playful malice. With a whip-fast motion, she snatched off the bookroll Arria had been secretly reading.

  “Give me that!” came the younger child’s piercing shriek as she twisted off the basket chair, ripping the fine tunica on the wickerwork in a frantic effort to retrieve the bookroll.

  “Mother, look at this!” Avenahar said gleefully. “She’ll pick through Roman garbage to get one tasty scrap of gossip! It’s the Acta Inepta for the month of Aprilis—” The Acta Inepta, or “Doings of Fools,” was a popular satirist’s play on the name of the Palace bulletin posted daily at Rome, the Acta Diurna—“Events of the Day.”

  “—and here we have”—Avenahar nimbly bounded to her feet to keep it out of Arria’s reach—“momentous events, well worthy of study! Scantia is divorcing Gaius Apronius, solely so she can ruin his career. But it is just as well, since all her children were sired by his footmen. The Emperor’s favorite boys held a midnight contest to see who looked best dressed as Helen of Troy . . .” Arria sprang on top of Avenahar then, a wildcat onto prey, and both children fell hard to the floor.

  “Enough of this!” Auriane’s voice grabbed them and held them fast. Her children froze in mid-struggle, with Avenahar’s leg hooked about Arria’s waist as her elder daughter strove to push herself off from her sister.

  I’ll have no more of this, ever, Auriane thought then. Arria is as the gods have made her. I can do nothing. There must be a deeper purpose here, subtler than my blighted yearnings and knowings.

  On realizing this, strangely, Auriane found the misery swiftly drained out of her like poison from a tipped phial. And then an odd, striking peace flo
oded about her, a rapture she’d felt strongly before only in the presence of Ramis. It was as though the old seeress somehow blessed this understanding.

  “Arria Juliana, stand up,” Auriane said, feeling softer, more certain, within. The girl disentangled herself from Avenahar and stood like a small soldier at attention, ropes of hair from the ruined coiffure springing free in riotous coils. I love the pride and belligerence in her eye, Auriane thought. It does not matter anymore that it does not serve what I serve.

  “You’re free, Arria,” Auriane said. “You no longer have to study my people. I give you over to your Greek and Latin tutors. From this day forward, I free you from serving your Mother-line.” Arria knew enough of Chattian customs to understand this meant she was absolved of all duty to worship her mother’s deities, and somewhere within those soft gray eyes was a primitive start of alarm.

  “Isn’t this what you want?” Auriane said, perplexed, expecting Arria would feel more like a load of manure had been lifted from her back. “I know not what else to do. Go now. Irenaeus comes today; I’ll have him read to you from Herodotus.”

  Like a long-penned horse that can’t readily accept that there’s no longer a fence about the meadow, Arria did not move. She was discovering what the horse discovers—there’s security in that fence. It encloses a known world. She fastened the gaze of those lucid owl-eyes onto her mother, in that deep-knowing way that always jolted Auriane into wondering—just who is mother and who is daughter here? Then, as if reaching out to touch a possibly-hot grill, Arria ventured, “That’s well. Very well! But . . . are you angry, Mother?”

  “Oh, no, she’s jolly as a wineship’s drunken steersman, you wretched brat, you—”

  “Avenahar, be quiet! No, Arria, I’m not angry. I’m . . . relieved. The spirits of Rome are stronger in you than the spirits of my people. Do you not want to go?”

  Avenahar was staring at Arria with raw triumph in her eyes, so the younger girl put on a brash show of certainty. “Yes,” she said bravely, holding her copy of the Acta Inepta close to her body as if it were a shield. Then she backed out of the room, wondering, by turns, if this were a ruse, if her sister had somehow bested her, if her mother still loved her. Then she turned and fled from the library, leaving Auriane equally confused; a solution that had seemed a kindness now seemed harsh and extreme.

  What have I done? My children are wild horses galloping in opposite directions while lashed to me.

  Avenahar crawled up into Arria Juliana’s huge basket chair, a complacent victor taking possession of territory she’d just won.

  Into the sad silence, Auriane said, “Avenahar, I’m going to read to you from the life of Ramis,” because she felt, suddenly, a great urgency to do so. “Listen well. Afterward I’ll ask you to repeat to me as much of it as you remember.”

  “But you said I needed to be at least twenty to begin to make sense of her.”

  Auriane was rattling a bronze key as she unlocked a cedar cupboard and drew out a rolled manuscript. “Time’s an enemy; I don’t know how much of it we have left. She’s great as kings, yet few know the tale of her beginnings. Her story must be passed on.”

  “That’s the book you’ve been dictating!” The words came in an eager hush.

  “It is. But remember, this is only an account of her life. You can’t learn her teachings from words on papyrus. A person might read them at the wrong time. Or might not hear them as they were meant, and twist her into something else. Her teachings can only be passed from living mind to living mind.”

  Auriane settled herself and gave the papyrus volume a few turns, unrolling it just enough so that she could see the first column of script. The marble-sheathed chamber about her dissolved away. She sat on well-trodden earth, face gleaming from the heat of a hearth fire.

  “I tell you now of Ramis,” she began, letting the words roll out in the lulling rhythms of a songmaker, “and of all her marvelous deeds of knowing. For if it is instructive to study the rise of greatness, it is wise to study her.

  “She sprang from the rudest, yet rose to become more celebrated than any woman or man of all the tribes of the north. A word from her mouth can send a nation into war. Her counsel has stayed the hands of Roman legates. In her fiftieth year the lots were cast and she became the Veleda—first seeress over all the tribes. For those who don’t live among us, this title means, the ‘One Who Sees’—not the future, as is commonly thought, but the true nature of earthly life.

  “She was conceived at the Eastre rites and sired by no mortal father. The village of her birth was the Ram’s Eye, where the folk were so poor they fed off middens. Ramis’s mother, Radegund, shared a goat with four neighbors. The man who called himself her father did not own a sword. One twilight when she was a ragged maid of nine she was grinding herbs in her village’s mead shed. In poured a light not shed by fire or sun, for it cast no shadows. She felt someone standing behind her. Fright blinded her and she wanted to dash off to her mother. At dusk other worlds mingle with ours. By force of will she stilled herself and slowly turned about.

  “In the doorway stood a ghastly hag so withered she might have known two hundred winters. She smelled of grave earth. Her flesh was blue, her hair dry as parched grass. Most unsettling were her hands, for they resembled nothing human; they were the claws of a falcon. This woman of other worlds cradled a white cat.”

  Intent on the tale, Avenahar shifted too far forward in the wicker chair and caught herself just before she tumbled onto the mosaic floor.

  “The old woman demanded milk for her cat, which was stringy and starved. Famine was on the land. The she-goat Ramis’s family shared had been driven off by a rogue war band; the last jug of its milk lay buried to its neck in the cold earth, at the back of the shed. Ramis fetched it and poured into a pan all the milk they had. One of our elders once asked her what evil took her, that she would feed a beast and leave her family to starve, and Ramis replied it was because in that moment she knew there was but one fire in all the world, and that the ogre of scarcity itself was nothing but shadows cast by our stunted knowings. No sooner had the cat lapped up all the milk than the old woman’s face became changeable as the surface of a wind-ruffled lake; she was by turns a pearl-cheeked maid with coppery hair; a bearing mother; a bald crone wrapped in a rotting shroud. And the clay jar had, through some divine art, refilled itself—it brimmed with milk.

  “The nine-year-old child fell to her knees and asked the strange woman who she was. She said a name that was beautiful, that called forth tears, but Ramis said she could not recollect it even just after she heard it, for it was not uttered in a human tongue; it came out in all the sounds of the world: forest rustles, rushing wind, children’s cries.

  “But the woman’s next words Ramis remembered with stark clarity, as if they had been inscribed in runes on a stick:

  “‘Ramis, daughter of Radegund. I charge you to touch the living torch to the one that grows cold. And you will bear it on as long as you live, and give it over to the next of your line.’”

  “What does it mean, Mother?” Avenahar asked.

  “That knowledge of the world’s true nature ever hovers at the edge of forgetfulness, and that Ramis was here to preserve it. This is the true purpose of the high seeresses our people call the Holy Nine—not to lead festivals or give birth oracles or counsel chiefs in war, as most people think, but to save the near-lost knowings given down to us from the Time of Peace and Wandering when all ate at one board. We’re not in an age in which we can bring this back; we’re in a time of shadows, with more to come—so one torch burns alone in each generation. And then,” Auriane said, returning to the document, “before Ramis’s eyes, this changeable spectre vanished like the moon before day.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Ramis would never tell me, but perhaps the white cat tells the tale.”

  “Our Lady keeps a white cat . . . one of her divine daughters? Or maybe it was . . .” She’d meant to say, Fria herself, but dropped into sil
ence because Brico was standing in the library’s entranceway, clutching the door frame for support. The young maidservant was in startling disarray; masses of red-gold hair had tumbled down into a swollen face blotched from sobbing. Auriane and Avenahar stared at her, feeling shaken awake from enchanted sleep.

  “Brico! It’s all right, come in.”

  The girl edged toward them, her manner both unobtrusive and urgent. She started to speak but lost her courage and looked down, pulling fretfully at the linen cloth of her tunica.

  “What is it?” Auriane asked gently.

  “I am sorry . . . forgive me . . . but you must know . . . our lord Marcus Julianus has been attacked by an assassin. His carriage was set afire!”

  Chapter 8

  Auriane slowly rose to her feet.

  “Does he live?”

  In answer Brico wrenched herself about to face the frescoed wall, crushed the cloth of the tunica to her eyes, and shook her head violently, No.

  Auriane commanded Avenahar to stay where she was and strode swiftly out, whipping aside the heavy curtain, her steps resounding urgently on the marble. All the dove-spirit in her had vanished; now she spread the long wings of a hawk. Within, she felt only battle readiness.

  Outside the villa’s grand, colonnaded entranceway, stunned servants were collecting by the dozens, in great silence; the only sound came from an infant boy in the arms of one of the maids, who cried desperately and hard, as if he could not get enough air.

  Demaratos found her. “We will tend to this, Domina”—this once, he spoke the word with no trace of contempt—“and see to bringing him home.”

  “No, Demaratos. I’ll tend to it. Have them bring out my horse.”

  “But the throng! They’ve turned into a herd of wild beasts.”

  “I’ve ridden through worse. Go quickly!”

  While she waited, a heaving sea of grief welled up in her, and she shivered with the mighty effort of erecting a dam against it. Not now. I must show courage or I’ll throw the household into despair.