Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Chariomer rose unsteadily to his feet.

  “Daughter, I command you, grow it back!”

  Elza’s low, husky laugh was so like her mother’s, Chariomer thought his slain wife’s ghost had taken possession of his daughter. “Who listens to a war-chief who’s failed to avenge his kin? I’ll grow it back when you swear vengeance against Auriane, before all your men.”

  “In your madness you’ve taken no heed of the fact that Auriane’s living in Roman lands now, under the protection of one of their high chiefs.”

  “Ah, but she’ll be here soon,” Elza responded. “She has a daughter approaching her moon-time. They’ll need to come here to proclaim the daughter’s womanhood.”

  Chariomer saw that his objections, his hesitation, were a mistake. Many watched him doubtfully, thinking it somewhat thickheaded of him not to have anticipated Elza’s challenge. Others looked like men discovering midway across a river that they’d climbed aboard a leaking boat. They could not pledge to follow such a man. “Why doesn’t he just declare?” came a growl from along the hearthfire.

  This was the hornet’s nest that, for so long, Chariomer had no desire to thrust a sword into—for once he slew Auriane, every man of the sons of her father’s companions would then come for him. This was the curse of vengeance. It was never complete.

  Elza had destroyed him.

  When Chariomer spoke, his words came out in the bare, whispery voice of a man cut down half throttled from a sacrificial tree.

  “I do now swear before Wodan to avenge my son, Odberht—”

  “Louder, Father. Those on the low benches can’t hear you.”

  “—by the slaying of Auriane of the Chattians, daughter of Baldemar, who was born at the Village of the Boar, and to carry this out under the sun, with honorable weapons of war.” He refused to look at Elza as he spoke. “And, I pledge every man of you before me to aid me in this quest.”

  Along the hearthfire, men’s faces began to relax.

  “Hail, brothers!” Chariomer spoke on, with a weak show of cheerful-ness. “He who drinks with me now shares my blood, through this world and through the next.”

  “For one bloodstream runs through us all.” Elza spoke the ritual response. “Gold-friend of men, dispenser of treasure, you are our Lord, and all here are kin.”

  She handed her father the god-infused mead. Chariomer wrest the horn from her so roughly that half spilled on the planking—a thing Elza counted ill-omened for herself. The mead was holy, and that was her own luck and fortune sloshed like waste-water onto the floor.

  “Miserable she-spawn,” Chariomer whispered to her before he took a generous draught. “I oath one more thing: Cries of regret for this betrayal will be the last words on your lips!”

  Her father was a killer of women, capable of making good his threat. But Elza felt no terror as she took the horn from him, refilled it, then turned gracefully as a dancer to offer it to the man who was first among the companions. For she had the protection of a powerful tribal seeress now, and could flee from her father’s vengeance. She would steal off on this very eve and stay at the seeress’s sanctuary until the marriage with Sigibert could be arranged.

  As the First Companion rose to his feet and repeated the formula of the oath, proclaiming himself everyone’s brother and finishing with a promise to murder Auriane, Elza strove not to worry over the foul omen—the mead that was her blood, still glistening on the floor. For she’d set her course well. And the seeress, a woman called Sawitha, would praise her and love her, when she learned her harsh will had been done. It was this Sawitha who so keenly desired Auriane’s death. Sawitha meant to take the staff of the Veleda. And she was tormented by the suspicion that the ever-unpredictable Ramis meant to pass her oracular staff to Auriane.

  Resting in the stillness pooled in the wake of her fine victory, Elza felt a fleeting throb of disgust, realizing that the purest, simplest part of her detested Sawitha, thought Auriane more nobly fit to become the Veleda, and believed this outcome sad and wrong.

  But the moment soon vanished. After all, she judged, such sad and wrong things were the way of the world, brought about because the Fates preferred to tangle their skeins so that their purposes were impossible to track with the mind.

  Chapter 11

  In his time as a soldier Decius had gotten every decoration the Army had to give, even the corona civica for saving the life of a brother-in-arms. And that one was trickiest of all, because first one of your brothers-in-arms had to admit you’d saved him. His course in the army had been bright and short as a comet. A brave man didn’t have to fear a stretch of peace on the German frontier; constant opportunities to show valor helped lift him to the rank of centurion when he was only twenty-three. He supposed all this brazen good fortune must have irritated Fortuna, for he’d had the coveted centurion’s vine-stick but a month when a horde of Chattian savages fell on his men as they were digging the foundation for a fort. That marked the day he was plucked forever from all that was sensible and good. He was taken captive along with all his men, and he alone escaped the sacrificial grove, saved by the bookroll they found on his person, which—Minerva be praised for his scholarly bent—caused them to take him for some sort of seer. Fortunately his father had long since been ferried over the Styx. It would have done the old man to death to know how his son’s fortunes had flipped about, how a man of property had become property, that he who was scion of ten generations of proud Tuscan farmers was now the slave of mead-swilling barbarians.

  His Chattian hosts had been a nervous and excitable lot who made a great show of hating Rome while enthusiastically mimicking her tactics. He’d been used rather rudely by them until the day he’d caught the eye of the maiden daughter of their chief, a rather more advanced creature among them called Auriane, oversupplied with a most unbarbarianlike quality, curiosity. Somehow this maid had gotten her father, Baldemar, to see the wisdom of keeping a learned and civilized man like himself about. And so he, Decius, had kept himself alive by enlightening His Chieftainship on fine points of Roman strategy. Unfortunately this earned him no love from his Roman countrymen, who called him “Decius the Traitor” if they spoke of him at all, but he preferred that to what the Chattians now called him—Decius the Swift, earned after he outdistanced a whole Chattian assembly on the night it was learned he’d gotten Auriane with child.

  On that night he’d escaped a foot’s breadth ahead of his life, he hadn’t considered that Fortuna might have lifted him from the stewpot only so she could drop him on the grill.

  He had fled north, of course—fleeing back into Roman territory would have earned him one of a variety of clever punishments the army had invented for deserters. But he’d only succeeded in falling into the clutches of a fresh pack of unlettered brutes, these of the Cheruscan tribe. These were not much different from the first pack, except Cheruscans had no scruples about cooperating with Rome, and had taken to calling the fur-draped beast who led them a king. Chariomer was his name, and that was whose not-so-tender care he was in now. Chariomer’s seat was a palace of thatch that lay in a mountain fastness in the Hart country, many cold, wet days’ ride north of Auriane’s people. “Don’t be deceived,” Decius had told his drinking-friend, a travelling trader called Iarbas, “a king in this place has neither scepter nor kingdom, nor manners, or plumbing. The wretches who hail him such also call horse blood wine, and a boiled calf ’s head a feast.”

  So he was reduced once again to playing the savage mind like a cithara to stay alive. Chariomer at first treated him as a slave, but with patience Decius taught the old king to call him “chief advisor”—no easy task, for he’d observed that once barbarians learned a thing one way, that was it. He’d read various theories of why this was, and favored that of the naturalist Eutychus, who put forth that the barbarian mind was rendered sluggish by the cold. As Decius’s advice won the king a victory or two, Chariomer was lavish with his gifts. And Decius had been clever in making the best of his dismal plight. On t
he grounds of the old king’s palisaded compound, using scraps the trader Iarbas brought him from afar, he, Decius, had rebuilt civilization. He’d constructed a real house, no mud-smeared hut—with a stone foundation, an atrium with a votive bust of Vespasian, Emperor when he was last a free man, and fully enclosed rooms, not just places sectioned off with wickerwork. And no cattle stabled inside to drop dung everywhere. He’d even built himself a pool, a wise thing to have because Chariomer’s cooks managed to burn down at least two longhouses a year. The water didn’t yet run off properly from the rock-lined impluvium, but the chief engineer was still studying the problem. He had a growing collection of bronze lamps. And a limestone Apollo of unknown provenance, missing a hand and a foot, which he counted a fair personification of himself—lack of materials left him feeling he had one hand; imprisonment in this compound was akin to having one foot. And he’d patched together a good imitation of a steam heating system beneath his wood floor, using lead pipes taken from burned villas and a couple of iron cauldrons. It so confounded and amazed Chariomer that the old king had had him copy it for his own hall. But dearest of all to Decius was his library. Iarbas had a standing order from Decius to purchase anything new and interesting on any subject that he might find in the bookstalls in the Roman settlements along the river Rhenus, and there was no celebrated historian or naturalist whose recent works he did not possess.

  Still, the sour-tempered old king did everything but chain him like a hound, and Decius never forgot he was a prisoner. Not that there were many places to flee off to when you’d made rabid enemies of both Rome and the Chattians—all the land belonged to one, and most of the folk hereabouts had sworn allegiance to the other. It didn’t surprise Decius that he’d tumbled into this new snare because of a woman—the aforementioned Auriane. Ever since he’d donned his toga of manhood, women had followed him shamelessly, comforted him, confounded him. While still in the army he’d made a name for himself as the only man of his unit whose maids never demanded coin in recompense—indeed, they stalked him right back to his barracks. But this time, he couldn’t banish the woman from his mind. Not only was she their fairest daughter—perhaps their only fair daughter, barbarians not normally being given to producing them—but a passable swordswoman as well—much thanks to himself, who’d patiently tutored her in the art for years. She certainly had done an excellent job of covering his back on that night the Chattians chased him off. Iarbas once told him he didn’t understand why Decius kept mulling over this lone specimen of the female race. “Providence gives to some a powerful genius,” he’d somewhat lamely explained, “and it’s not for us to know why. All I can say is, I’m with this maid or that, and I see her watching me scornfully. She overwhelms the one you’re with.”

  Of course Decius had heard she’d long since taken up with a better man than he was. He tried very hard to be sensible about that. It did not sadden him. Indeed, when the memories pummeled him he pushed them off and congratulated her for having done extraordinarily well for herself. No, it did not sadden him . . . but he never forgot that this haunting creature had loved him once, had bred herself to him of her own free will, leaving him ever after to ponder just what sort of child had come from this crossing of a formidable she-warrior with an outstanding, decorated soldier like himself.

  A lust to find out had helped keep him alive these many years in this bookless, bathless waste. The fruit of that fugitive love he knew only by the taunting mystery of her name—Avenahar.

  “Some with a nasty turn of thought,” Iarbas goaded him once after they shared almost a full goatskin of his vile wormwood wine, “would say you want the daughter just because you can’t have her.” And he’d replied that his vices were of a more plebeian sort—he was willing to leave incest to emperors and gods. It was the mother’s spirit he wanted about, and he believed there was bound to be a good measure of it served up in the daughter. For years, this one desire left him restless with an unaccountable grief. He was determined to see his only known child before he was tossed on the pyre. Known child. The unknown ones could go off and populate a province without his guidance for all he cared.

  He wanted more than her name.

  In his fourteenth year of captivity, life took yet another wretched turn. Chariomer began his so-called conquest of the Chattians, pressing farther south, dragging an increasingly unwilling Decius with him. He was pried from his comfortable Roman house and compelled to partake in savageries that had little purpose beyond spreading the terror of Chariomer’s name. Now Decius had a second desire, equal to the first—to flee this flea-ridden king’s side before all his hair was gray—he liked it the way it was now, just elegantly silvered at the sides. Lately, he’d begun committing the one sort of sabotage that was safe: While reading Rome’s directives to Chariomer, he began omitting passages. Once, he’d left out an imperial order to level a village believed to be supplying Witgern, the Wolf Coat chief. Decius told Iarbas he did such things because he believed Auriane’s people had suffered enough. Only to himself did he admit the true reason: Now that his daughter, Avenahar, was on the cusp of being old enough to understand, he wanted her to think well of him.

  He was convinced Avenahar could be brought to see his side of things.

  Then came the day Iarbas brought him the wonderful scrap of news he’d given up all hope of hearing while he lived.

  It happened just a few days after that recent night he’d helped Elza escape. That had been a harrowing caper—Elza had balked at crawling under those smelly cattle hides, and he’d thought her mewling would wake the world. And Chariomer’s sentries came so close to searching the wagon, the memory still made him break into a sweat. Had he been punished lightly for helping her fly, they might have contented themselves with merely drowning him in the bogs. He certainly hoped that later, if ever he needed Elza’s aid, she would remember this.

  It was midmorning, a cold and brilliant day. Iarbas blew his signature trumpet blast before he came within spear-casting distance of the village, and soon the trader was ambling beneath the gate, followed by his entourage of six slaves and ten mules. Their packs hung slack and empty, for this was close to the northerly terminus of his route. Iarbas was a crafty and nimble fellow who tried to buff his glory by claiming to be a spy for the Twenty-second Legion, but he was in truth an itinerant junk dealer. Many years ago he had been a standard-bearer in the Ubian native auxiliaries, before he was run out of the cavalry over some nasty disagreement about the size of a bribe to his centurion, so he was as close to a brother-in-arms as Decius was likely to find in this place.

  Decius had gotten word that Iarbas would come on this day, and he’d ordered his kitchen staff to prepare a fine meal. Yes, he even had a kitchen staff, and he’d brought it with him, along with as many of the comforts of his beloved house as he could pack on muleback. It lessened the sting of abandoning that fine wilderness nest.

  Iarbas clamped his arms around Decius in a bearish embrace. Decius had always thought Iarbas an odd but friendly specimen. The trader had the rude, roughened features of a cut purse, yet that face was appealingly rounded, like a child’s. A twisted half-smile hinted that he waited for you to catch on to some dark jest he’d been playing for some time. A broader smile made him look as though he’d stashed apples in his cheeks. Missing teeth outnumbered the ones he had left. And his hair looked as though it were trying to escape his head. Nero would have been envious of those frisky curls—no hot curling tongs necessary there. Take away the bristling beard, Decius thought, and you were left with a male Medusa, an amiable Gorgon.

  “I’ve some fine, fine news for you, old friend,” Iarbas said, “but let me wet my tongue before I tell it.”

  Decius was absorbed in examining Iarbas’s remaining wares. “You’ve got few books in here, Iarbas. By the new moon I’ll have these read and be wanting more.”

  “Begging your pardon. I had more, but I got robbed. Is there another oddity like you tucked away up here somewhere? They got a whole mule-load. Th
ey pinched my silver-and-jet and my best glass, too, but the books I find most mystifying. Unless they’re thatching houses with them or feeding papyrus to the goats, what in Hades’s name are they doing with them?”

  “I have seen them cut them up for amulets,” Decius said as they began the short journey to his temporary home in this captured village—a wooden out-building not much larger than a horse stall, which had served as a hide storehouse. It lay behind the thatched longhouse Chariomer claimed as his own.

  “Amulets, you say?” Iarbas pulled on his beard. The trader lurched along with head slightly cocked; some long-ago injury caused him to walk as if he bore up under a heavy load, meditating on each step. “You shouldn’t have told me that . . . There might be more to be made selling the books to them than to you. A bit dangerous journeying this far, anyway . . .”

  “You’ve the loyalty of a sewer rat, Iarbas. If I dropped dead beside you, you’d auction off my cloak.” Decius clapped him on the back.

  “Not if I couldn’t get enough for it. Then I’d roll you into that well over there to poison the water and get revenge on this camp—some of them haven’t paid me in over a year.”

  As they passed Chariomer’s hall, starkly empty but for the single weaving-woman working on an upright loom set in the light of the doorway, Iarbas said, “Where’s His Royal Chieftainship? I brought the red leather boots he ordered. They’ll look ridiculous on him—don’t laugh when he puts them on. I want to get paid this time.”

  “I’ll try. He’s on a boar hunt. Took the whole barking pack with him, too, thank all the gods.”