Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Iarbas looked meaningfully toward the wooden palisade, the open gate, then to the rampant, beckoning forest beyond. “When do they come back? Decius, your guard’s gone. Sprout wings and fly, old friend.”

  “Open your eyes, Iarbas. Look in that tree. Not that one, that one.”

  Iarbas’s bleary gaze settled on a scraggly fir with wooden steps nailed to the trunk at crazy angles, then moved up until he saw a shadowed form heavy enough to bend a branch.

  “One man, Decius?” Iarbas said. “That’s all it takes to keep you leashed?”

  “One man with a horn, Iarbas—and mighty lungs. He’s got one blast for fire, another that means ‘suspicious-looking strangers approaching,’ and another, just for me.”

  “But how quick can they get back here to grab you?”

  “It rouses the whole countryside, not just Chariomer’s men. No one hereabouts would be mad enough to shelter me. They all know who I belong to and they fear him like the plague.”

  At the door of Decius’s quarters, Iarbas peered within at a pair of bronze lamps in the shape of many-branched trees. “Gods, Decius,” Iarbas exclaimed, “you took your house with you!” The trader’s eyes adjusted further. “You even brought the table!” The “table” was a low dining table that had cost the wealthy provincial from whose riverside villa it had been stolen at least a half million. Its citrus-wood top, which Decius reverently kept buffed to a high shine, had the pattern serious collectors called “the peacock’s tail.” It had been a gift from the king, after Chariomer successfully retook a salt spring from the Chattians, acting on Decius’s inestimable military advice.

  Iarbas entered, stepping over an entranceway mosaic of badly mismatched tiles that showed a stiff-backed dog with bulging eyes, and the barely readable warning, CAVE CANEM—BEWARE OF THE DOG.

  “You don’t have a dog, Decius,” Iarbas commented needlessly.

  “Don’t be contrary. I’m fond of it. My father’s house had one like it.”

  “A fiendishly clever fellow you are, old friend!” Iarbas said as he stepped within. “You capture all the creature comforts of the Governor’s Palace, wherever you go!”

  “You haven’t heard the wind howling about here at night.”

  They settled themselves about his fine table, already set with a silver wine service, eating knives, and silver spoons. His guests had to recline on hen-feather cushions set on the planked floor, but that worked well enough.

  “I hope you’ve brought a good appetite,” Decius said. “I’ve got pickled artichokes I’ve been saving for months, and my cooks have roasted a pheasant stuffed with bayberries. And I sent for the bread you like—what they bake here would send a ship to the bottom.”

  Two aged and cheerful Ubian women carried in the first course from the cooking shed. These serving women had several times drawn from the trader the surprised comment that they seemed truly fond of Decius, jesting with him, seeming delighted when he liked what they prepared. Decius supposed one didn’t see that often, hereabouts. Not that the tribes were cruel to their thralls; actually, it was against their native law to strike them—and Rome couldn’t claim that. But they didn’t quite acknowledge them as fellow beings, either.

  “Decius,” Iarbas said at last, when he’d assuaged most of his hunger, “on the way here I fell in with one of those fellows who runs supplies to the Wolf Coats—you know, a tree branch doesn’t fall in the forest without them knowing it. He told me something that’ll make you prick up your ears. Your Chattian warrior-maid-turned-villa-matron is coming to the Holy Wood, at the edge of the West Forest. She brings her—your—daughter, for the maid’s womanhood rite.”

  Decius found himself in a rare state—amazed to complete silence. If a ballista stone weighing half a talent had just crushed his roof he probably wouldn’t have noticed. In the next moment he felt like an old fire-mountain starting to rumble to life again. But the excitement he grappled with was all muddied up with a sadness debilitating as bog fever.

  Both mother and daughter could still do that to him. An irritating thing to admit.

  Lastly, Decius felt something else he hadn’t for a long time, with Auriane tucked safely away in her aristocrat’s villa—fear for her life.

  When his tongue unfroze, Decius sent off the kitchen staff, telling them to take along a jug of his best wine and what was left of the dinner, and finish them off in the yard.

  He turned to Iarbas. “Are you certain?” An idiot’s response, he chided himself.

  “They’ve already chosen the elderwomen and arranged their passage. Three Chattian maids are to be initiated at once. Avenahar’s one of the three, I swear it on my mother.”

  As his mind turned like the wheel of a crane, he supposed he stared a little too long at his half-eaten fried squash, because next he heard Iarbas saying somewhat plaintively, “Speak, Decius—you’re worrying me. I hope you’re not planning something foolish. Don’t forget, every fort on the Frontier still has standing orders to put you in chains. I like you the way you are, with limbs still attached.”

  It was true. The military could be stubborn about some things. It couldn’t be said the Roman Army knew how to forgive. And it didn’t seem to matter to them either that, technically now, he was aiding their ally.

  “There’s a thing you don’t know, Iarbas. Auriane’s not safe here. Just four days ago, Chariomer declared vengeance on her, before all his men.”

  “You’re jesting. He’s too lazy to do such a thing.”

  “He was goaded to it by his daughter, Elza. Now there’s an Agrippina in furs. She’s far more dangerous than he is. It was all slightly ridiculous—at least, until you told me Auriane was coming here. I must admit, this causes me a spot of queasiness.”

  “Gods, what was her purpose?”

  “Elza’s? To lift herself out of this cesspool by means of an intelligent marriage. And destroy her father in the bargain. You need to have studied the barbarian mind before it makes any sense. She’s got ambitions to marry Sigibert, you see, the son of old Sigwulf, of the companions of Auriane’s father, Baldemar. Impossible, of course. For that, she needs Sawitha, you know, that bloody-minded seeress no one likes. Who’d only help Elza if Elza helped her—”

  “—by setting Auriane up for murder,” Iarbas finished, catching on, “so Sawitha, not Auriane, can be named successor to Ramis.”

  “You do have a grasp of barbarian politics. Iarbas, you must warn Auriane.”

  “I suppose, I’m going that way anyway, I could—”

  “She must be told to quit this country as soon as possible. She must look to her back while she’s here. Chariomer just took two hundred new men into his band, and that, added to what he’s got . . . let’s see . . . that’s over four hundred, and every one of them has sworn an oath to separate her spirit from her mortal form. You can’t fail me in this, Iarbas. Ten aurei are yours for doing it, good fellow.”

  Decius knew the trader would balk at asking a friend for money, but knew, too, how precarious Iarbas’s financial health was. Last year, Iarbas had lost his accounts books in a river flood that drowned one of his mules—and with them, his only record of what everyone owed him. “I’ll do it, Decius,” he said at last. “Keep your gold.”

  “Take the gold, I insist on it.” Decius got to his feet. “Iarbas, wait just a moment.”

  “Long as you’re feeding me I’m not going anywhere.”

  Decius looked about until he remembered where his strongbox was, then returned carrying a square of yellow silk, on which lay a fibula—an ornate brooch for securing a cloak—fashioned of purest white gold. It was shaped as a circle that was completed where the heads of two serpents met; their eyes were sapphires. Where the pin was attached, it was set with an irregularly formed pearl, the largest Iarbas had ever seen. The sight caused the trader’s eyes to become fogged over with what Decius could describe only as avaricious awe. Mercury Himself might have materialized before him.

  “That thing’s worth more than your dinin
g table,” Iarbas said. “Chariomer give that to you, too? Now I understand why you don’t run away.”

  “Not the king, his dead wife. She loved me.”

  “I hope you don’t want me to take that anywhere.”

  “I do, Iarbas.”

  “I’m a junk dealer. You’ve said so yourself. I get robbed all the time.”

  “We’ll sew it into the lining of your cloak.”

  That silenced Iarbas; who could wrestle that cloak from the fleas?

  “What if I’m murdered and dumped in a river, cloak and all?”

  “I’ll take my chances. You’re my one true friend, Iarbas. Now that’s an advantage that comes with some responsibility.” He was smiling as he said it, but Iarbas’s frown only deepened. “Take this to Avenahar,” Decius pressed. “Twenty aurei. Don’t argue.”

  “But . . . how do I get near a maid during the ceremony? They’ll beat me off with switches.”

  “Sometime during it, she’ll be commanded to go off alone. That’s the way it’s done. Approach her then. Mind, mother and daughter don’t look much alike. Avenahar looks more like me—black hair, black eyes—at least, I’ve heard it said. You’ll know her when you see her. Tell her the brooch is a gift from her true father . . . just a small assurance of my goodwill toward her.”

  He wasn’t sure in the dim light, but he thought Iarbas’s eyes were looking a bit watery. Perhaps it was his own eyes, and he was remembering it wrong.

  “Tell her that her father wants to see her, Iarbas. He has to escape first, of course, but that’s not her problem. Perhaps she’ll find she has some affection for me stored somewhere in her maidenly heart. Her mother certainly did. We’ll meet at a place . . . at a place I haven’t worked out yet.”

  “But Decius . . .”

  Decius cringed. He saw signs that Iarbas was trying to be gentle.

  “. . . You endanger her just by being near her. You know, Chariomer’s blood debt could be extended to cover the daughter. I’ve known of cases. His men might follow you and harm her. And the Chattians hate you as much as your own people do—it might make trouble for the maid.”

  Iarbas was right, of course, but Decius supposed that too much time in this dripping wilderness had left him more than a little mad. “I have it,” he said. “We’ll arrange to meet at the house of Auriane’s mother, Athelinda. It’s natural our daughter would journey there to see her own grandmother. Athelinda’s homestead is sacred ground. No one would carry out an act of war there.”

  “And how many times have you told me, escape’s impossible?”

  “When inspired I can do amazing things. Until now, I didn’t have a great reason to risk life and limb to get away.”

  “Decius, I’ve never known you to be so light-headed. You’re worrying me. And I must ask you something else. Has it occurred to you that . . . that Avenahar might not want to see you? After all, your being her parent hasn’t exactly made life easier for her, or done her much good that I can see.”

  “I’m her kith and kin, Iarbas. I know I can win her. There’s never been a single specimen of the female race I couldn’t bring into my camp, if I really tried. It’s a bounty of Venus I was gifted with at birth.” He grinned.

  “When you say it, I believe it.”

  For a moment, Decius forgot Iarbas was there.

  Avenahar. The suckling Auriane gave birth to on Ramis’s island was probably now as tall as he was—maybe taller, from the influence of her barbarian blood. She must be the very image of her sturdy mother on that day so long ago when Auriane came to him, to wring what she could out of him. What do I want to do? Live those days over? And what will she see, when she sees me? An old man battered by winters and years. A face once that of a daring Cynic jester, twisted into that of a tired, acid-filled curmudgeon. Time’s river’s flowed over my face for too many years, carving deeper and deeper cleavages . . .

  But when a man’s got no future, I suppose the past swallows him up.

  He was only half aware Iarbas was speaking to him. “I’ll do it, Decius. But keep your payment. Don’t insult an old friend.”

  Chapter 12

  Rome Seven days before the Kalends of Junius, 105 CE

  The month of Maius was near to a close, and Rome had formally declared war upon Dacia. In a chamber of the Domus Augustana, the private wing of the new imperial palace built into the eastern ridge of the Palatine Hill in Rome, the Emperor Trajan prepared to meet in secret with his Consilium. Historians claimed that eight centuries ago on this very summit, beneath the same azure sky, the humble grass hut of Romulus had stood, and the people of Rome believed it had always been a place of rulers—today’s were just better housed. Rising from the hill now was a labyrinthian, multitiered glory of pillared porches and ascending porticoes that might have made Romulus feel he’d been snatched off to some shining otherworld. This present house for Roman kings featured octagonal reception rooms with ethereally painted walls that haunted the eye, peristyle courts with waterfalls rippling down stairs into pools of gold-glass mosaic, banqueting rooms sheathed in polychrome marbles rising to ceilings fretted with ivory, and crowning it all, a complexity of gables and domes, the gilded roof tiles creating an impression that some divine hand lavished liquid gold over the whole.

  In a most interior room of the Domus Augustana, two youths of the Imperial Pantomime Troupe searched about in the gloom for a terra-cotta lamp. The windowless chamber was a storage room for the troupe’s costumes.

  The elder of the two, a young man called Pylades, found the lamp, lit it, and knelt upon the floor. His torso was encased in a smooth-fitting tunic of rose-colored wool, revealing a tapered form sinuous as a slender urn. He was flushed and damp from a dress rehearsal and his artfully curved lips still bore traces of cosmetic cinnabar’s harsh orange-red—he’d just danced the part of Achilles disguised as a maiden. His silken, honey-gold locks and blond brows contrasted oddly with eyes of soft slate; it appeared as though a band of mysterious shadow played round his eyes, a striking effect that had worked its quiet sorcery on an Emperor. Pylades was known from the Circus stalls to the Palatine Hill as the current boy-favorite of the Emperor Trajan. Rome counted the young pantomime actor one of the two forgivable vices of the “Iron Soldier,” as Trajan was commonly called. The other, a fondness for downing stultifying quantities of wine, he had acquired in the marching camps and partook of openly. The Emperor’s trysts with Pylades were carried out with such secrecy that his discretion brought him universal praise. “Zeus should be careful of his pretty Ganymede when Trajan is about,” was the worst that whisperers would say of him.

  The lamp flame flared and the chamber glittered, alive with fragile iridescence. Butterflies of light winked through the gloom as the fireglow played off crowns for kings, gossamer wings of thinnest silk, silverine chitons, and brazen breastplates for heroes.

  Pylades removed a thin rectangular tile from the chamber’s floor. Through an aperture the length of a man’s foot but no wider than a finger, the boy could see down into the chamber below. He leaned close and saw a section of travertine floor, a scattering of cross-legged ivory chairs, the polished top of an antique Egyptian writing table.

  This was the private council chamber of the Emperor Trajan.

  The youths had a second occupation: They were spies in the pay of Marcus Arrius Julianus.

  The boy kneeling next to Pylades was Apion, a novice in the pantomime troupe but not to the listening boys’ trade; Apion had pressed an ear to the wall for his master since he was nine. He didn’t know the day of his birth, but by his own calculations, he was at least fifteen. Apion eagerly waited for Pylades to make a place for him so he, too, could look, but for an uncomfortably prolonged moment Pylades pretended he wasn’t there. Since yesterday’s eve the younger boy had noticed Pylades behaving oddly toward him.

  “They come!” Pylades whispered excitedly, more to himself than to Apion.

  Pylades smoldered still at the memory of last eve’s dinner performance in
the grand triclinium of the new Palace, when the Emperor’s glance had wavered as he watched Pylades dance, then was drawn firmly as if pulled by a rope to agile Apion, with his flexible waist, boneless limbs, eyes of bitter-sweet black that begged the world to care for him. The Emperor had called Apion to his couch and kept the boy there through the length of a song, tracing his fingers over those stubborn lips, and had gifted Apion with the brilliant feather mask that hung on the wall above them now. The moment was all the more intolerable to Pylades because he had just celebrated his nineteenth birthday, and was hovering at the cusp of the next age of life. Once a youth attained full manhood, a great and powerful man was expected to set him adrift, for then, a tryst with him was a less forgivable vice. Daily, Pylades expected Trajan would summon him no more.

  “You tyrant, let me see!” Apion whispered. The younger boy shouldered his way in.

  They heard the rumble of a door drawn back, multiple footsteps, men’s neutral murmurs. The strip of room below them was filled, suddenly, with the tops of men’s heads. Both boys had become adept at recognizing Rome’s great men from above, and they expertly sorted out the scene below. The servants they ignored. There—with a round skull and hair like iron shavings, the man prone to quick, brutish movements that made Apion think of an angry boxer caught in a net—that was Titus Claudius Livianus, the more influential of the two praefects of the Praetorian Guard.

  And there, easing into his seat with the casualness of one who counted the Palace a second home, his body matronly in its soft decline—the man with a smooth knob of a head, oyster-shell ears that projected from it boldly, and strong, sun-browned hands that moved with the cleverness of a mime as they collected together everyone’s thoughts—that was the Emperor’s old friend from his home city in faraway Hispania, Lucius Licinius Sura.

  And there, settled in place sloppily as a grain sack, with his ebbing fringe of black hair, the small, mean head of a wasp, set as a comical afterthought on that overflowing body—that was the Senator Lappius Blaesus. This was the man Marcus Julianus had set them to watch. Blaesus kept himself at a taut distance from the other two, as if he’d not yet been initiated into this august company, but expected he would be, soon.