Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  “I said longer, not long,” Auriane corrected. “I’ll be back . . . soon.” The lie had an acrid taste, but the dictates of a mother’s kindness demanded it. She felt the words might not have been spoken, for all the effect they had on Arria. The lie dissolved immediately in those great, round seer’s eyes.

  “Arria, I have some things I must tell you. I do face dangers, though I expect to overcome them. And you know, Arria, the Fates never tell us everything, and so, we must think of what would happen . . . if I didn’t. Just to think of it, mind you. So I must tell you some marriage-things, even though you’ll not need to know them for six years or more to come.”

  “You have chosen a man for me.”

  “Yes. But only with your blessing. And it doesn’t mean you can’t choose someone else, when you’re old enough to know about that. But Father will help you there, so don’t worry over it now. Here is his portrait.” She gave to Arria a portrait of a boy, small enough to cup in the hand, painted with delicate detail in tempera on wood. “He’s studious, and in good health, and he has his honorable career all plotted out for him. He’s sixteen now, so he’s not terribly much older than you. He is the youngest son of the brother of Cornelius Palma, who a few years ago served as coruler with the Emperor—”

  “Consul, mother,” she said, as the raw delight of a child handed a fine present came into her eyes. “And his father’s a man who’s great, among the Emperor’s friends. He’s the one I chose.”

  Auriane felt a rush of relief. “Keep his picture near your breast and it will cause love to develop. But if love doesn’t grow, or if it turns out, in time, that we . . . made a mistake, know this: It’s the way of Marcus’s people that another choice can be made for you, even after the horn’s been shared, the oaths given, and the bridal rite complete, so don’t worry—”

  “Divorce. And we don’t share horns. You’ve forgotten, Mother, you’ve told me about all this.”

  “Of course,” Auriane said, privately amused for one quick instant by Arria’s confidence in these matters. “But as I said, it’s a long way off, and Father will be here. But I thought it right that, as your mother, I be the one to give you his picture. Now, come with me. There’s something else that’s very important.”

  Auriane got a sulphur match from her belt and lit a terra-cotta hand lamp. A cook’s boy pulled back a door for them. Auriane led Arria across a stone walkway to the herb storeroom, just outside the kitchens. Arria walked beside her, grim and upright, taking large, firm steps, feeling important because her mother was telling her important things, which in turn helped her accept all this with courage. Within the pungent dark of the storeroom, Auriane took from a high shelf a tightly sealed, green glass jar filled with seeds, and a corked glass phial that contained a dark sap.

  “These are seeds of the rue plant, which can be found almost anywhere. And this is Cyrenaic juice from the silphium plant, which is found almost nowhere. It grows in a faraway hot place, and it’s very costly, with good reason—there’s little of it left in the world. But a good herbmistress can usually get it for you, if you pay her handsomely enough.”

  The girl seemed lulled into a trance by the sound of her mother’s words. She’s listening with her whole spirit, Auriane thought. She hears the dread in my voice.

  “These plants have the power to keep you from bearing. This is very important, Arria. After the blood-of-life comes, if ever you don’t wish a babe to grow in you, you take a chick pea-sized dose of this,” she said, indicating the Cyrenaic juice, “and a pinch of rue seeds, early in your moon. You choose the time to bear. You are no one’s servant. Do you understand?”

  Arria nodded solemnly.

  “The next thing I must tell you is this. Even though I know you think little of my people, I want you to remember this: You spring from warriors. Your grandfather is Baldemar, greatest of them all, who kept his people free for a generation. Your mother was one, too—she couldn’t keep her people free anymore, but she did win vengeance in single battle against Odberht, the enemy who betrayed us and led an army against our back. And so, you, too, are a warrior, even if you never lift a weapon, which I don’t suppose you will! . . . But know, Arria, you have that fire in you.”

  Arria gave her mother another solemn, slow nod.

  “Be kind to the weak. Let none steal your honor. And remember, nothing is ever as it first seems. And that life is never done. And that your mother is with you always.”

  “You must be going far,” Arria mumbled, looking at the floor. Auriane lifted her easily—she was so fine-made and small, yet strong—and settled the child into her lap.

  “Not far. And not for long,” she whispered through a throat thick with sadness. Fria, let it be the truth. “I love you more than my life, Arria.”

  JULIANUS’S FLEET OF four redas moved at a fast trot over the post road, through a brooding morning tense with withheld rain. Auriane pressed close against him, feeling a thorn was embedded in her heart as she struggled to raise up an indwelling strength, as on any battle’s dawn.

  At the Fortress of Mogontiacum, Julianus would remain, to be a party to the treaties being made, and to the interrogation of Ramis; from there, Auriane and Avenahar would journey on alone. In a reda bearing the Governor’s emblem, accompanied by an escort of four cavalrymen, mother and daughter would pass through the Empire’s northern gate, and then, as far as the roads were passable, on to the Holy Wood. Maximus had provided Auriane and Avenahar with false documents identifying them as Gallic natives, mother and daughter, given leave to travel to a marriage.

  It could not be that Julianus had made one plan, and she, another. The more she thought on her sad stratagem, the more firmly she pressed against him. The opposing thoughts—What have I wrought? and But how could I have done otherwise?—swung to and fro in her like a slow bell clapper ringing tidings of doom. What I plan is not only against your wish, Marcus; it’s against my own. I want only for our life to be what it was—an idyll by a river.

  She felt herself a voyager into nowhere.

  Avenahar managed somehow to sleep among the cushions and coverlets spread about on the carriage’s floor, despite the fact that the reda shook them like grain in a winnowing pan. The deep peace of the young, Auriane marveled. And what’s to become of that peace when, on the last day of the ceremony, my over-proud daughter hears Decius named as her father?

  Through these thoughts she saw again, with needling clarity, Victorinus’s moist mouth, his eyes fogged with carnal passion, on that day in the basilica. “We’ll send Arria off soon,” she said tensely, once, to Marcus, “to have speech with her groom?”

  “As soon as next year’s thaw allows travel to Rome,” came Marcus’s distracted reply; he was studying copies of every agreement ever struck between Rome and the Chattians.

  “I feel dangers closing about you, coming with the black creep of a tide at night. Why do you not ask the Emperor’s protection in the matter of this young fanatic who loves Domitian?”

  “Someone powerful is helping that young fanatic get about. It intrigues me. First, I would learn who. You trouble yourself needlessly. Trajan does not carry out secret crimes, nor does he ruin men clandestinely. If he’s displeased, you know it in clear terms, and at once. You must not worry over me.” He turned to her then, sensing something dark in her silence, and with passionate sadness, enclosed her hands in his. “You must not suffer so. Your leaving won’t be forever.”

  She averted her gaze to look into the shadowed green redoubts of the passing forest, veiling her plan, certain it was brazenly visible in her eyes.

  Chapter 15

  Auriane and Avenahar trailed the procession of women and girls as they climbed a rock-strewn path up a nameless summit. Gray-robed elderwomen led the way. The late afternoon sun bathed them in amber light. Warm earth cupped their bare feet. They meant to gain the Holy Wood by dusk; then, the nine-night-long ceremony would begin. All the tribes of Germania favored night over day for the convening of sacred assemb
lies; in childhood, Auriane was told this was because, “Night came first; day was created.”

  Gunora, most senior of the elderwomen, strode forcefully at the head of the file, her knotted staff striking out at the slope like some stiff third leg, her weighty gray braid swinging grandly from side to side. She was bulky as a bear in her dress of calfskin hides. Her broad, seamed face was bound in fierce quiet; those slitted eyes emitted a peace deep and trackless as the forest. Gunora’s kinswomen vigorously kept pace, despite the fact that each had more winters behind than ahead of her. Their strong faces spoke of rites most of the folk had forgotten. They numbered eight; Auriane, climbing alongside them, would complete the circle of nine. The elderwomen carried out a role that was dying among the people: that of Grandmother, who educated girls. At other times, they raised root vegetables and emmer wheat in the holy fields within Ramis’s summer sanctuary. These women are trees, Auriane thought; they live from season to season, gripping to the old ways with roots so deep, they surely break into Hel’s caverns. The maids they teach are the supple fast-growing branches, who must learn that they pull their life-spirit from what is ancient, below.

  Behind the elderwomen came the three maids: Avenahar, Ivalde, Hildigun.

  Avenahar was attacking the hillside with strong, young strides, and Auriane thought her daughter looked fine, noble, and determined in the brick-red cloak she had woven for the ceremony. Ivalde, born in the small settlement below, was a girl with pleading eyes, pale hair, and paler skin, an indrawn creature of twelve summers who always knew when a calf would be born. Hildigun was the daughter of a celebrated seeress, who, like Avenahar, had been fostered for a time at Ramis’s sanctuary; she was a girl large for her age, heavy of bone, with handsome, masculine features, and, Auriane saw, an intrusive way of pretending to know what she did not. These maids would be initiated by the Old Ceremony, passed down from the Time of Peace and Wandering, an age only Ramis’s women remembered, when it was said “the spear was sharpened only for the boar.” The Old Ceremony bore more resemblance to the rites of initiation into the order of village priestesses than to the common womanhood rites of the Chattian tribe, in which a maid displayed skills at brewing and working the loom, her readiness for marriage and bearing children. It was claimed that this was because, in the Time of Peace and Wandering, becoming a woman was not so unlike becoming a priestess. Its purposes were to test oracular powers and strength of mind, and to open a way to the knowings that would come with greater age.

  Auriane realized they were being followed. One lithe, long-maned man, then another, limbs naked but for heavy, gray battle cloaks, tracked the party at a measured distance—Chattian warriors moving smoothly as foxes, threading in and out of sight. She caught up with Gunora to ask why. “Yes. I asked them,” was Gunora’s cryptic response. “They stand watch.” Stand watch? Auriane wondered. At a womanhood ceremony in peaceful country, within shouting distance of my cavalry escort camped outside the village below?

  They came to a high place; the Holy Wood lay at the bottom of a great bowl formed by a ring of hills. Auriane halted, absorbing her first sentinel’s view of her lands. The lean profile of the long, quiet hill enclosing the valley had the smooth elegance of bone; beyond, the heaving gray-green ocean of forest swelled and dipped like music, falling back until it dissolved into gold-fired haze. Fertile tranquillity lay over all like a mist. She felt she’d outdistanced the separateness, the sadness, of cities. For all its vastness her forest home was a house, and the family it housed, small.

  Her body stiffened as she saw something on a far hill, flaring brighter than the haze; from it issued a furiously roiling coil of smoke, dark as a scream. “Gunora,” she said in a low voice. “Something’s afire. That’s a burning settlement.”

  Gunora squinted, and shrugged. “I see nothing but clouds and sun.”

  As Auriane continued to stare, whatever it was flashed off like light-spectres playing on a lake. I must have been mistaken.

  Gunora frowned, lost in calculation. She seized Auriane by the arm. “Auriane. There is something there—but you couldn’t have seen it, it’s too far off. Where you pointed, if you journeyed straight for perhaps three days—that’s where Chariomer the Cheruscan is camped.”

  Auriane fell into an iron-bound silence, feeling swollen with sorrow for them all. Chariomer. I destroyed the life I loved to stop you, and still you taunt me with your coming. How I loathe what I’ve done.

  Gunora was still watching Auriane with guarded amazement as the party dropped into the steep descent. Their downward progress hastened the fall of the sun. It was as though they dropped into a cauldron that swiftly filled with night, a fertile bowl where all would be stirred into something new and unknown. For succor Auriane found herself watching Avenahar, who was galloping down the hill with huge, exuberant bounds. Her bright hopefulness is the only balm, Auriane thought, for the stifled hopes I carry inside. Was that ever the way, with a daughter?

  The Holy Wood closed over them. It was a grove of old beeches that hid in its most secret places a cave, a pool, a hallowed stone. A chill wind flowed through the sky-reaching branches—a river on high, composed of familiar souls. A soundless flutter of yellow leaves drifted down on dwindling shafts of light, and she felt it was a greeting. Gray-violet shadows were sprinkled with the blood-red leaves of wild cherry. The air was humid, welcoming, and rich with the sweet, fungal aroma of many layers of moldering leaves over yielding loam. Mud oozed beneath their bare feet, as if the tender ground were bruised and bleeding. The place was beautiful but haunted. Inviting, but strange. Scattered here and there were looming clusters of outsized mushrooms that had sprung high after last night’s rain, tiny ghosts frozen in silent shouts of surprise, their pale caps like miniature skulls. Fragrances of death and fertility were richly mingled in the ground’s perfume. Elven presences skulked shyly in the somber places. Sad Ancestresses’ woody faces peered down from the high branches. Affixed on a beech trunk was the moss-mottled skull of a mountain cat, peering down on them from eternity—the spirit animal of the Chattian tribe, standing watch forever.

  And looking on, above, emitting its swift-gathering power, was the crisp, white-gold sliver of a new moon, nine days off full.

  Moving quickly to take advantage of the last of the light, the elderwomen began dragging the timber and brush that had been chopped and stacked earlier. First they built a bonfire. Each wood had been chosen for its particular power: The smoke of birch aided birth, and all that grew swiftly. Oak gave strength. Pine, long life. Gunora kindled it in the ancient way, by vigorously rubbing woods from a fire-tree that grew in Ramis’s sanctuary. She called it the Middle Fire and proclaimed that it would not go out for nine nights.

  In a ring about the fire, they constructed nine rough shelters of interlaced beechwood branches. The maids built their own brushwood huts, outside this circle. The three initiates were instructed not to speak. Another of the elderwomen, Walberga, a gaunt-faced woman who moved about in stately silence, kindled a smaller fire beyond the circle of brushwood shelters. Over it she set a tripod, from which she suspended a bronze cauldron. Auriane helped her haul water from the spring that fed the pool, then watched as Walberga prepared a soup that would last through the nine nights. Walberga put in leeks, onions, turnips, dried venison, and thirteen grains, as well as herbs with the power to lure guardian spirits. Auriane saw she also put in secret things—the vertebrae of a wolf, stones inscribed with helpful signs. The soup would get richer and stronger, through the days. Outside the circle of huts, Walberga set up a stout post carved with avertive runes, to keep at bay harmful spirits loose in the forest.

  The sun was snuffed out behind the fringe of firs that rimmed the wood. Night came with enthusiasm. A fragrant, twisting rope of steam connected the cauldron to the sable-black, star-dusted sky.

  Late in the eve, after Gunora had performed the opening sacrifice and sent the three maids to sit out before the pool, the nine women sat about the fire, passing a mead horn
and telling stories. As the talk began to drift down, Auriane leaned close to Gunora and confessed her fear of the ceremony’s last day, when Avenahar would hear Decius named as her father.

  Gunora’s response gave her no comfort.

  “It will bring her sorrow,” the elderwoman responded bluntly. “She must know her sorrows. That is why she is here.”

  Auriane asked again about the warriors who had been posted as guardians.

  “They are for you.” Firelight cast harsh shadows on Gunora’s dour face; she looked like an angry old man. She frowned more deeply. “You do not know?”

  “Whatever scraps of news I get of our people come rarely, and late.”

  “Just over one moon past, Chariomer declared vengeance on you. His four hundred companions did likewise. He knows you’re here. It’s not impossible they might send a lone adventurer to this place, to do the deed and take the glory.”

  There was little room in Auriane just then for the full measure of horror this might have brought; she felt only a great, debilitating resignation. This was, after all, to be expected. Her long-ago act of vengeance stalked her like a wolf.

  “I wonder only that Chariomer waited so long,” Auriane said at last.

  “He’s no true warrior, just a small and ruthless man. He needed to be goaded.”

  “I must get Avenahar away from here—it’s not safe for her, either.”

  “She’s being well looked after. Those men keeping watch are warriors of the companions of young Sigibert, son of Sigwulf who followed your father, Baldemar. They are devoted to you. They carry no weapons, because Rome is so close. But they’re adept at killing with whatever they find on the ground.”

  “Who goaded Chariomer, after so long?”

  Gunora leaned closer, and said in a covered voice, “None know this part but you and I—and I just learned it myself. The seeress Sawitha’s behind it all. She seduced Chariomer’s daughter, Elza, into her camp, and got Elza to play the part of goader. Sawitha wants you dead, Auriane—I suppose it’s to be expected. She lusts to carry Ramis’s staff. Sawitha’s fear of you is a measure of your power.” Gunora dropped her voice still more, and Auriane had to grope for her words. “A power I saw today, I must tell you. Up there on the hill, Auriane—you had a vision in day. That is rare. And to my mind, your gift’s a particular one—you see what threatens the land.”