Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Auriane rose to her feet, thinking only to somehow give comfort. Gunora was steadying Avenahar with a firm hand on each shoulder, whispering words Auriane could not hear.

  At this time you will need more than one mother, Auriane had told her daughter once.

  A hundred mothers might not have been enough.

  From behind her, Auriane heard a slurred snort, as of sharply suppressed laughter. Hildigun.

  Then came whispered words, audible in a sudden silence. “Who’d believe the daughter of a Roman murderer would’ve dared come here.” Ivalde.

  Their smiles vanished when they realized they’d been overheard.

  Auriane turned to them, feeling herself not a woman, but fire.

  The avenging passion in Auriane’s eyes held everyone transfixed. Sharp silence collected. The ceremony had twisted off course. The elderwomen stared in blank surprise, not sure what Auriane meant to do.

  “Hildigun. Ivalde,” Auriane said softly. “Gunora proclaimed you women, but I never will. I say you don’t deserve to walk among human creatures. Leave this place.”

  Leave this place? Hildigun looked to Gunora for help, then to each of the elderwomen in turn, but got no response from those impassive faces. What was this? Were they to go home?

  “Perhaps you’ll live long enough to know, one day,” Auriane went on, “what it is that makes a woman noble. It is not a father. It is not a tribe. It’s the nobility that lives in your deeds. Go from here!”

  Hildigun and Ivalde rose uncertainly to their feet, not knowing what to do. No one spoke. The two edged off to collect up their possessions, still waiting for some mollifying words, some counter-command, from Gunora, from anyone.

  But Gunora had decided not to interfere with a mother’s vengeance. Hildigun and Ivalde were fully born into the tribe now; they must settle their own accounts with Auriane, as one tribeswoman would with another. And the others, following Gunora’s lead, kept silence.

  Gunora waited until the two chastened maids were well away from the fire, then returned her attention to Avenahar.

  “We take Avenahar to our hearth a woman,” Gunora said gently, arranging the blue mantle around Avenahar’s shoulders.

  Avenahar was an isolated figure, stiff and still as a boundary post, her head wilted forward. The blue mantle fluttered sadly, looking too large for her.

  Auriane cautiously came up beside her.

  “Avenahar . . . dear child . . . do you see, now, why I couldn’t tell you before this day? You needed to be stronger. You needed to be a woman to hear it.”

  Gunora put a firm hand beneath Avenahar’s chin and lifted it so that their gazes met. “The blood of your mothers is strong, Avenahar—easily strong enough to cleanse away the blood of that father. Listen to me. You would not have been given that great vision, were you not greatly loved of the gods.”

  Avenahar turned then to look at Auriane. “Why, Mother?” She looked like some urchin who begs on temple steps, eyes tremulous, imprecating. “You should have torn me from your womb. You should have drowned me in the bogs at my birth.”

  The words were scalding broth flung in Auriane’s face.

  “No, Avenahar,” she whispered. “How could I have, when I loved you before you were even born.”

  “Is this truly so, or have I fallen into a nightmare?” Avenahar said. “My father’s a man of the people who destroyed us . . . and not the best of them, as . . . as Marcus Julianus is, but the vilest of them. I’m not even Chattian, then, not fully, as you let me believe. I am like some mule, with a horse mother and a jackass father. At home at the villa, I’m an outcast . . . and now I don’t belong in this country, either. I belong nowhere. Why did you never tell me?”

  “I hadn’t the heart to savage your pride when you were at too tender an age to bear it,” Auriane whispered.

  Avenahar collapsed slowly to her knees before her mother, her hands covering her face. “I can’t live with his poison blood in me. It burns like fire.” Several deep sobs came from her. She scooped up a handful of earth and smeared it on her face, as women in mourning did. Then she looked up at her mother with her frightful, dirt-smeared face. “Did you give me life as some cruel jest?”

  “Avenahar !”

  Auriane dropped to her knees and seized Avenahar by her shoulders. “This is madness. You must calm your hatreds before they kill you. You were midwifed by Ramis. Would she have done so if your blood were poison? Decius was no monster! I knew him as nobly kind.”

  “Kind? He’s helped Chariomer slaughter his way through half our lands!”

  “Avenahar, I cannot speak for what he’s done since. It’s beyond my kenning, too. I only know that in desperate times, long ago, he sheltered me when no one else would. But for him I would have died. But for him, I would never have become adept with a sword. But for him—ah, you’re too young to know these things, how can I bring you to understand—”

  “Get off from me!”

  She flung Auriane’s hands from her shoulders.

  “Put your head up, Avenahar,” Auriane said, rising to her feet, her voice stern. “I will not have this. Wipe the dirt from your face. Gunora has just told you his blood cannot harm you. You dishonor a great elderwoman if you don’t give weight to her counsel.”

  “You lay with a Roman thrall and bore his babe, and you speak to me of dishonor?”

  Auriane knew dimly that her arm flashed out and she slapped Avenahar across the face. Never before had she struck her daughter. She looked, horrified, at the fast-blooming crimson blotch on Avenahar’s cheek.

  Avenahar rose and backed a few steps away, one hand raised, protecting her face. As surprise ebbed off and rage rushed back in, she met her mother’s gaze with a look that was bold and unafraid, feeling vindicated by the slap—it strengthened all her swift-forming assumptions.

  Avenahar then turned and strode off, the blue mantle slipping from one shoulder, stumbling once as she made her way through a gauntlet of concerned elderwomen. Then she disappeared into her brushwood shelter.

  Auriane started to follow. Gunora put out a hand to stop her.

  “It might not be wise, now, to crowd her with so many mothers.”

  Walberga came close, and said, “There’s much child in her yet, Auriane. Let the storm subside. It will be well.”

  Auriane stood mute, feeling covered with stinging nettles, filled suddenly with a dreary, stagnant shame she thought she’d purged from her spirit long ago. Avenahar reacts rightly to that crime I committed as a maid. I defied sacred law when I lay with Decius so long ago.

  Gunora sensed the shape of Auriane’s thoughts, and offered, “She loves you, Auriane. A day or so ago when you were off somewhere, she told me an amusing tale of how you humiliated some arrogant Horse Guard who came to your villa. It was easy to see, her pride in you is wide as the earth.”

  Auriane was not much comforted. In dark silence, she sat before the bonfire. Gunora sat wordlessly beside her through most of the day. Beneath layers of misery, Auriane was grateful for this.

  As dusk came, the elderwomen began breaking camp, preparing to travel over the hill to the small settlement of ten longhouses and join in the less-than-gay feast of celebration that had already begun—Avenahar’s despair, and Hildigun’s and Ivalde’s banishment in disgrace had left an inauspicious gloom over the ceremony’s end. When the elderwomen departed, Gunora stayed behind with Auriane.

  Gunora left a millet loaf and a pan of soup outside Avenahar’s hut. Avenahar did not touch them.

  Wrapped in a rough wool coverlet, Auriane did not stir from her place as nightfall came; eventually Gunora fell off to sleep. Poised high above was a full moon in majesty, pitiless, victorious, swollen with covert designs as it flooded its waxen light into the grove. But Auriane saw only the now-untended initiation fire as it burned itself out, feeling lulled somehow by its slow death. When the night was more than half gone, Auriane, too, dropped into sleep, curled before the fire.

  After unknown hours had passe
d, Auriane found herself suddenly awake. The stars were still bright, but a halo of charcoal gray hovered above the eastern forest. She did not know what had awakened her. Perhaps it was that there was too much silence about.

  Barefoot, and still groggy with sleep, Auriane made her way to her daughter’s brushwood hut. She had prepared no words to say. Her stomach seemed made of aspic. Her whole soul felt sick. Her head hammered painfully as if something large in there fought its way out. Her mouth felt full of dust.

  “Avenahar?” She bent to peer inside, staring into darkness for long moments, while time seemed to stretch and contract.

  The hut was empty.

  It meant nothing. It meant everything. Auriane got a glowing brand from the fire, to better see within.

  Avenahar was gone.

  There are two kinds of emptiness, she realized then. There is incidental emptiness, in which the space still strongly holds the spirit of the absent person. Then there is an emptiness full of intent, that jolts the heart to desperate attention.

  She saw that Avenahar’s womanhood cloak and her goathide sack of possessions were gone, as well. Only then did she feel herself poised for a plummet into limitless dark.

  She awakened Gunora.

  “Ah, this is ill,” Gunora said. Both women began examining the ground about the brushwood shelter, looking for some telltale sign. While Auriane walked a slow circuit of the forest all about, calling out Avenahar’s name, Gunora settled herself on a cowhide before Avenahar’s hut, and lifted her gaze to the crowns of the beeches. She dropped at once into that bright, still state in which she heard the language of the leaves.

  When Auriane’s search yielded nothing, she returned to Gunora.

  “It is ill, indeed,” Gunora said, using her staff to rise cumbersomely to her feet. “I cannot feel Avenahar’s ghost. She has already gone far, though whether in distance or in mind, the forest would not say.”

  “Curses on all the gods—what if she’s taken her horse? Gunora, I must go ahead of you, and see.”

  Without pausing to collect her belongings, Auriane set out swiftly over the hill. Their horses were tethered just outside the small village at the hill’s base, in the glade by the brook, where their cavalry escort camped.

  Three of the cavalrymen were attending to morning tasks: One strapped on his armor; one mended a bit of harness; another noisily rattled tin mess cups before their cookfire as he prepared their breakfast gruel. She passed them with scarce a word, and came to the roped enclosure where their mounts were kept.

  Avenahar’s lean roan mare was there, happily tearing at hay. Auriane felt a small surge of relief. Avenahar was on foot. She couldn’t have gotten very far. Auriane realized it would have been impossible to saddle and bridle a horse and bring it out of the enclosure without rousing the cavalrymen.

  Just then, the fourth cavalryman tramped out of the forest behind the roped enclosure, clad in the long woolen tunic they wore beneath their armor. He looked angry enough to join a tavern brawl. He shouted to his comrades that the villagers were thieves—he would see the men crucified, and the women sold into slavery.

  After Auriane managed to stem his choleric outburst, she learned he’d tethered his horse outside the enclosure last night, leaving the stallion on a long rope, for this was a noble beast that needed more grazing room than the ordinary horse. And now, his beautiful Apulian stallion, which had cost him half his yearly pay, was gone, along with the handsome boy-groom charged with keeping watch over the proud animal.

  “You will leave the village in peace,” Auriane said curtly. “I know its folk well, they don’t steal horses. Your groom’s fled in fear of you. My daughter has your horse.”

  Chapter 16

  Auriane’s mare splashed noisily through the shallow stream, throwing up showers of shattered crystal. The hoof prints of the cavalryman’s stolen stallion had led to this stream, then vanished.

  Auriane’s hopes first began to founder when she realized Avenahar had been clever enough to ride in the stream.

  By now, she’s had time to travel far.

  But where would she go? She has no knowledge of our rivers and trackways, little understanding of all one must know to thrive alone in the deep forest. Boldness and determination are not enough. She’ll be overtaken by some war band and slain for that fine horse she stole. Or dragged off to be the slave-concubine of a petty chief.

  Or she’ll be found by Chariomer’s men and slain in vengeance.

  Even now she might be lying alone in the forest, her leg broken, waiting for night, and wolves.

  Auriane remembered suddenly that she’d stashed Decius’s golden fibula in Avenahar’s goatskin sack. At least, she has a thing of value—if she’s still alive to barter it. Auriane thought it odd that the despised Decius’s extravagant gift had become the whole of her daughter’s patrimony.

  The sun rose to midheaven while Auriane scanned the stream’s stony banks, keenly alert for prints in the mud, broken branches, trampled grass, a bit of torn cloth—anything that might reveal where her daughter had turned off into the forest. But studying those banks was like reading some endlessly unrolling volume that proved relentlessly blank. She’d assumed Avenahar would have the good sense to ride in this direction—the opposite way would take her closer to the villages overrun by the Cheruscans. But as the sun eased into the western part of the sky and still she saw no telltale signs, Auriane was forced to consider the possibility she’d spent most of the day riding in the wrong direction.

  Panic compressed her heart. With a sharp pull on the bit Auriane swung the mare about; a rope of blood-flecked foam streaked the tall chestnut horse’s lathered neck. She began retracing her route, urging the mare to a weary canter. Tears blurred her vision.

  Even now you might be lying, trussed and gagged, in the bed of some slave trader’s wagon.

  The agony of being roasted alive could scarce be greater than this.

  Her nurturing, mist-wreathed forest home had become a brooding dragon, lusting to devour her daughter. How swiftly, how utterly all else was forgotten, she realized as she peered with diminishing hope into tree trunks receding far into gloom, felt the cold, empty enmity of that massive, unending forest. It was a warped, taunting dream-place from a nightmare. Its leafy sighs were death-rattles. She had no thought now for the troubles that pressed about her, or the darkness collecting about Marcus. Adrift, too, was her plan to flee off to her mother’s hall. In all the world, there was only Avenahar lost. She was but a ghost in search of her daughter.

  At dusk she returned to the small settlement, too tired to weep. From Gunora’s grim face, she knew the elderwoman had had no better success. Gunora had passed the day at the longhouse of the village alewife, sending out messages to neighboring villages, organizing a band of folk to help with the search.

  At dawn the following day, the collection of youths, maids, farm wives, and field thralls that Gunora had assembled split into four parties. Auriane, at the head of one of these, rode deep into the danger-fraught northerly direction, inquiring at villages, halting travellers on the trackways, closely examining river fords. As the sun descended on the second day she began to see Avenahar’s shining hair in the glistening black-green water of rushing streams, to hear her voice in the bright talk of water over stones. She never stopped crying out Avenahar’s name, lest her daughter be lying somewhere, unable to move about. Auriane returned to the village at darkfall, too hoarse to speak.

  The four cavalrymen who had escorted them across the frontier refused to take part in the search, claiming they could not exceed the orders given them by their centurion. As the nine days of their assignment stretched to eleven, they became sharply restless, pressing Auriane to return with them to the Fortress of Mogontiacum.

  On the third day of searching, one of the parties discovered an overturned hide trader’s cart alongside the great West Forest track. The spear they worked free from the corpse of the murdered driver incited much talk; Gunora identified the runes
cut into its shaft as Chariomer’s victory formula.

  If any man of Chariomer’s travelled this far in advance of the Cheruscan invaders, Auriane thought, he could only have been hunting for me. Or my daughter.

  That eve, in the village alewife’s longhouse, Auriane and Gunora conferred by the hearthfire.

  “I’ve alerted all Sigibert’s men,” Gunora was saying. “Every hunting party they send out will search. The seeresses of the summer sanctuary know now—they’ll carry news of this wherever they travel. By next moon the Great Assembly will be told, and those who come can take word to—”

  “That’s too many days off,” Auriane said suddenly, rising restlessly to her feet and moving to the longhouse’s door to look out into the thick darkness.

  “We can’t gather the people before then. They won’t come if the moon isn’t full.”

  The sunny shrieks of the alewife’s children interrupted them then; at the far end of the hearthfire, they were playing with a tame red squirrel. One child’s laughter was so like Arria’s, it was like a brand laid on Auriane’s heart. Arria. Avenahar. Will we ever sit round one fire again?

  “Gunora, I must go back to the Fortress.”

  Gunora grew sharply quiet, lower lip protruding decisively as she bridled her disapproval. “Ah.” The word was a soft grunt. “This, then, is how you end.” Auriane had told Gunora of the coming criminal charge against her, and of her plan to stay at her mother’s hall. “You are handed one fine chance to escape your Roman accusers—and you spurn it.”

  “Gunora! Do you not see, I have no choice!” Auriane dropped down beside Gunora again, meeting the old woman’s gently damning eyes. “I’ve got to enlist Marcus Julianus’s help. Our efforts are pitiful compared to what he could command into being. He can have the Governor send cavalry detachments into every village of our people. He can cause messengers to be sent to every Roman fort. He can send an alert to a thousand watchtowers. He can have the Governor put out an edict that my daughter’s not to be harmed. Gunora, I have decided it. I return on the morrow.”