Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Gunora seemed to gaze upon something sorrowful in the distance. “Remember my dream of nine fires. No fire for this year. Auriane, you must not go back there.”

  But Gunora’s admonition was a whisper in a windstorm. Later, as Auriane drifted into a fitful sleep on a scattering of hay and bedstraw by the hearthfire, she strove mightily to envision Avenahar living and free, in spite of a small, troubling thought that kept nibbling at her like rats—if that’s so, then why haven’t cold and hunger driven her back to the only world she knows?

  Only when Auriane was half lodged in dreams did she acknowledge another reason for returning to the Fortress: The Governor had summoned Ramis before his military tribunal for questioning. And that interrogation was set for four nights from this day. The thought of beseeching Ramis’s help intoxicated Auriane with hope; she felt like someone sealed into a tomb who’d broken open an aperture and gotten the first whiff of unbearably sweet air.

  If I throw myself on her mercy maybe she’ll help me. Her powers, like wind, are far-travelling and invisible. She knows what lies beneath the lake. She gave Avenahar her water-blessing and her name. And she travelled on a long journey to pull me from my own mother’s womb. Surely she has some love left for me . . .

  But it’s equally likely her displeasure’s soured into loathing, for all these years I’ve turned my back on her, luxuriating in a rich villa on foreign ground.

  The great prophetess was, in these times, so drawn into her mysteries, none dared approach her unless summoned. But Auriane had heard it said that if Ramis was petitioned while travelling, she never sent anyone off without an oracle or a blessing.

  Surely, Auriane thought, the fearsome old seeress is my best hope.

  THE AUROCHS HUNT would commence the next day at dawn.

  The Governor’s great hunt engaged over two hundred men, slave and free, from professional beast-handlers and native game-beaters, to net-men, wagon masters, weapons masters, and grooms, and the battalions of slaves who shouldered the provisions. A half-day’s journey from the Fortress of Mogontiacum on the Rhenus had brought the vast hunt company to a melancholy forest the Chattians called Wodanswood, a hilly wild place free of villages, presided over by the god Wodan, lord of magic; here, the game-beaters had sighted the pale beast. The Chattians had abandoned this country to the dark elves, and told tales of ghostlights that came at night, to lead men off high promontories to their deaths. This was a land that scarce knew it belonged to imperial Rome, and the city-born hunters supposed it had changed little since the days of Saturn.

  The professional animal-baiters set out for this country four days in advance of the hunt party, to track the famous aurochs the Governor sought. Mostly men of nomadic Libyan tribes, they were seasoned hunters who had provided Indian tigers and Mesopotamian lions for the beastfighting school in Rome. They were aided by men of the local tribes, who knew this aurochs’s favorite watering holes, the muddy places in which it liked to wallow, its favorite paths through the forest. Broken tree limbs less skilled hunters might have ignored, the tribesmen recognized as sites where the great bull had groomed itself by rubbing its hide against a trunk. On the morn of the third day of tracking, the hunters had sighted the infamous beast, drinking at a pool. The native hunters had never known the aurochs’s shaggy coat to stray from shades of black-brown, but this beast’s coat was dead-white, like the bone in the field, the flesh of the corpse, killing snow, or ghosts. The native hunters believed it a spirit conjured by the seeresses who dwelled in caves in this wood, and claimed it had dragon’s blood in its heart. Every hunt party sent against it had ended in wails for the dead. The Governor thought his hunt would end differently only because earlier expeditions had never committed so many men, nor had they planned each detail with his thoroughness.

  The animal-baiters employed a Roman method of rendering the beast tractable—drugging its watering hole with quantities of wine. Then they frightened it with trumpet blasts while game-beaters wielding thonged whips weighted with clay balls drove it toward the long meadow, where the high officials from the Fortress of Mogontiacum, lords of the world out for a day’s diversion, awaited the dawn of the hunt.

  On the hunt’s eve the forty tents of the Governor’s party were laid out with military precision at one end of the nameless meadow. The tent of the Governor was grandest in scale. Within, Marcus Arrius Julianus was his honored guest, along with the Mogontiacum Fortress’s two senior tribunes, young noblemen required to complete two years of military service before beginning their long climb to the Senate. In adjacent tents, fellow huntsmen, officials from the Governor’s staff, were taking their evening meal. Set in neat rows behind them were the humbler tents of the personal slaves and grooms. Their many cookfires formed even ranks and files of warm, shimmering lights strung out across a field of night; these little fires seemed the only light in the world as Cimmerian darkness closed over the vast forest.

  The four noblemen in the Governor’s tent reclined before a sumptuous country feast—soft cheese in reed baskets, preserved citrons, honey frittatas, wild mushrooms grilled with fish sauce. Behind them was a small shrine to Hercules, the most beloved god of this reign, scarce separate in the minds of Rome’s more credulous citizens from their Emperor Trajan; an offering of bloody boar flesh lay before the stone image. Incense curled from the altar, leaving a pungent odor of piety, thick and unmoving in the air. Just outside the entrance of the Governor’s tent, Maximus’s chief cook roasted a boar on a spit, basting it with silphium and rue.

  Slaves had lit the bronze lamps scattered about the low table. Twilight was an indrawn breath.

  “Good friend, I’ve a thing to ask of you,” Marcus Julianus was saying to the Governor. A nervous Gallic serving maid dressed in leather hunting attire entered the tent wielding a platter too large for her; on it was an island of boar meat in a steaming lake of juices. Julianus paused briefly in his talk to steady the platter, and help her make a place for it on the table.

  “Near Confluentes dwells a petty man of ungovernable appetites,” Julianus spoke on, “a former magistrate called Volusius Victorinus, whom I’ve ruined. I won’t trouble you with that story. But I worry that this fellow might be spiteful enough to try some mischief against my daughter Arria, in my absence. She’s well cared for now—she has a good household about her, and nurses who love her. And my estate is well guarded. However—” Julianus needed to lean closer to Maximus in order to be heard; the voices of the two tribunes were becoming more florid and aggressive with each round of the wine jug.

  “—should it happen that I lose my life, and should some misfortune befall Auriane as well—it would ease my mind greatly to know you were watching over the estate.”

  “Of course,” Maximus replied, frowning in mild surprise. “But we face an aurochs tomorrow, not Hannibal. And that adventuring wife of yours is probably more a danger to the countryside than it is to her!”

  Marcus Julianus cast a restless glance toward the living darkness outside the opening of the tent, beyond the cookfires, where dusk gathered thickly among the old oaks and beeches, turning forest pathways into sunless caverns. “Her party’s two days late in returning,” he said in a voice grown grim. He fiercely regretted having capitulated to the womanhood ceremony.

  “Ah, they probably had some trouble with their passage,” Maximus said. “It’s rough country. But it’s peaceful country. And we gave them my four best Batavians.”

  They were forced to silence as the blustering words of the senior tribune took over the tent. To Julianus, both were forgettable young men, matched in self-love and blindness to all the world but the small scrap of it on which they stood. The man’s name was Camillus, and he was holding forth on the grandeur of the hunt.

  “And why do we hunt dangerous beasts, when we do not need the meat?”

  Because we’re an empire in middle age, in terror of losing our mettle, an irritated Julianus answered in the silence of his mind.

  “Consider that it’s only
the noble who pursue the hunt,” the tribune rumbled on, “for overcoming a great beast requires a man be living a noble life, an existence not defiled by laboring over daily bread, and endless, tedious scurrying about to meet animal needs. A life with the hands free leaves the spirit free to ascend, to grapple with higher things. A humble country farmer might snare a hare or two. A slave, a woman, does not hunt at all. The slave’s hands are too busy. A woman is . . . too undisciplined, too full of unmanly timidity. Most likely, she’d be in complicity with the beast. Nor do idle, luxury-loving foreigners have a great passion for it. Consider the Egyptians, for they further prove my case—aeons ago, princes of Egypt did passionately pursue the hunt. And these ancient days coincided naturally with Egypt’s days of greatest battle-glory. Witness, too, the present-day slothfulness of the Greeks—”

  Thank all the gods I’m not being asked to respond to that windy effusion of self-congratulatory nonsense, Julianus thought.

  “—and how the tyrant Domitian only hunted animals that were tame,” the oratorical assault continued. “He shot his arrows from a safe place, within a hunting garden stocked with captive beasts. And did not this mockery of hunting parallel a mockery of a rule? Then see how our lord Trajan hunts in places that are remote and wild. One shouldn’t be surprised that the one proved unfit to rule, while the other has proved more remarkably fit than any other.” To Julianus’s dismay, Camillus shifted his attention to Maximus and himself.

  “Marcus Julianus. You haven’t told us who you’re wagering on for the kill.”

  Julianus turned to meet a square, fleshy face painfully overripe from drink, a forehead lightly beaded with sweat in spite of the chill, eyes fogged with wine and complacency, and brimming with assumptions—chief among which was that some sort of close camaraderie existed between them. He wore a fine white tunic with gold-embroidered hem; it had slipped to expose his shoulder, revealing a bunched mass of young muscle on the threshold of going to fat.

  “I’ll lay my money on the aurochs,” Julianus replied quietly.

  The tribune gave a clipped, abrasive laugh. “You’re quite the jester. I didn’t know it.”

  “It seems an eminently sensible choice to me, considering the beast’s record. Fifty thousand on the aurochs.”

  Maximus nudged him. “As your good friend it’s comforting to know you’re in such a robust financial health you can toss off a small fortune.”

  “You know, I do find it odd,” the young tribune said then, assuming a reflective expression that bore a closer resemblance to a wince of pain. “You’re no hunter at all, Julianus. I saw how you stood apart when we gave our offering to Hercules. Yet you had the mettle to face down two tyrants. I wonder . . . can you be the single example that defeats my case?”

  The Governor frowned at this line of inquiry and gave his young subordinate a bare shake of the head that meant, Mind that careless tongue.

  Camillus’s senses were too blunted by drink to notice. “But perhaps it isn’t so odd after all. You do lecture on and on about peaceful containment. Perhaps, philosophers who counsel us to coddle our enemies are also in complicity with the beast—”

  “Be silent, Camillus, or you’ll get no favorable report from me.” Maximus’s voice was iron-cold.

  “We’re in the wilderness,” Camillus protested. “Surely, here a man’s free to speak his mind.”

  Marcus Julianus raised a hand, smiling amiably. “He’s broached a fair question,” Julianus said. “I take no insult from being held to favor dignified containment over massacre of our neighbors. I wonder if men will always count the unfettered exercise of strength to be just in the sight of the gods—perhaps we’ve been in the grip of a long blindness. When Rome conquered Syracuse, reflect on the legionary soldier who slew the great Syracusan mathematician Archimedes, father of so many marvelous engines and machines. Rome won that day. But who was truly the stronger? Today we don’t know that soldier’s name. And every schoolboy knows the name of Archimedes. Feats of arms seem to leave nothing permanent inscribed on the tablet of man—perhaps it’s why I’ve always found Nemesis more to my taste than Hercules. She finds justice for those who can’t seek it for themselves. She prods the phlegmatic into thinking on what they’ve done.”

  The young man lifted the wine jug while fixing sour eyes on Julianus. “Mars be thanked, my father didn’t believe a son should be taught philosophy. I empty this jug to his wisdom.” His colleague, a thin, wolfish young man of darker Hispanian complexion, laughed silently into his cup.

  After the two conversations drifted apart again, Julianus overheard fragments of Camillus’s talk as he consulted a list he’d made on a wax tablet: “. . . two wagers on Sabinus in the next tent . . . twenty wise wagers on our illustrious Governor . . . one insane wager on the aurochs . . .”

  Out in the deep forest, far, but not too far, Marcus Julianus heard a wolf howl most eloquently—an intelligent sound, old as the moon.

  THE GREAT, SHAGGY bull paused in a muddy pool. It lowered its bearded head and gave a bellow of protest at finding itself tricked into the midst of cruel, vile-smelling humankind. The effects of its drugging had long since worn off; it was left with only its rage. Dark stripes of blood streaked down from its massive, humped back to its belly, from wounds made by weighted whips. Hunters’ lances slanted from its sides like long, heavy quills.

  For the better part of the day, the party of Jovian hunters had been harrying the great aurochs and wearing it down. The sun had travelled past the peak of noon and the hunt was moving into its final, mortal moments.

  A hunter’s net had been strung across the meadow for the length of a quarter mile. This long net, the one human intrusion on the landscape, this lone specimen of artifice, managed somehow to have a most natural beauty: It rippled with the seductive grace of a water snake, and occasionally, inspired by the wind, bowed along its whole length as if straining to fly.

  The eight noble hunters were positioned in a two-tiered semicircle about the beast; the undulating net closed the open side of this human pen. The strangely white creature before them seemed some apparition condensed from ground fog. It showed no signs of wearying. The famous white coat, at a closer look, proved mottled with blotches of pale gray. Its horns were a natural wonder of fluid curves, flaring outward, then inclining forward and upward, to finish with a smooth, inward flourish. Its ears, muzzle, and tasseled tail darkened dramatically to black, as did the tips of its horns, and its feet to the fetlock; these dark points lent the massive, top-heavy beast a strangely discordant delicacy, a fierce grace.

  It arched its head downward and roared, stabbing one beautifully curved horn into the earth, throwing up clods.

  Maximus and the three most seasoned huntsmen were positioned in the inner semicircle. Marcus Julianus was positioned in the outer one, closest to the net. The skilled Libyan beast-fighters were placed by the forest’s edge, beyond the hunters’ sight. They were to enter the field only if Maximus and his friends lost control of the aurochs; otherwise, they would be stealing the kill from their noble masters. As the men waited for Maximus’s signal, their mounts capered in place, unnerved by the musky smells of the bull.

  The Governor dropped a colored cloth, and the eight hunters galloped forward as one.

  Marcus Julianus moved with them. He kept a short rein on his horse, finding his reluctance had risen to a new pitch. He carried two hunting lances, with which he’d become adept in practice, but today they were mostly for safety; he had no intention of depriving the Governor of the kill. By mid afternoon, as the aurochs’s agony stretched on, Julianus found himself, more and more, as Camillus had put it the eve before, “in complicity with the beast.” This is ignoble. Before him, the great bull was motionless as a marble monument as the eight hunters rushed at it. This first hunt will be my last. Between a jumble of horses’ hindquarters, Julianus saw the Governor skillfully positioning himself to cast his lance, aiming between the third and fourth ribs, the killing place. The aurochs has rightly
won. We should let it go.

  At the precise instant Maximus’s lance flashed out, the bull made a nimble half-turn—a creature heavy as a standing-stone suddenly agile as a hart. It veered off with startling speed in a direction no one expected, bursting through their lines. The careening beast crashed into the flank of Camillus’s tall chestnut stallion, slamming the horse to the ground. Young man and mount rolled in the long grasses. The aurochs shot off amidst thunder; once again, it was free.

  The Libyan beast-fighters stretched their hands to the sky, praying for the help of native gods. This aurochs’s cunning and endurance were as unnatural as its whiteness; it should have fallen by now. It was some unknown god that chose to take the form of a bull. They agreed among themselves that it would not be slain until it had taken a noble life.

  ON THE FAR side of the long net, a tall native woman in deerskin breeches and cloak of rough undyed wool made her way among the servants’ tents. She presented herself to the decurion of slaves, asking to be taken to Marcus Julianus.

  Auriane and her cavalry escort had ridden as far as the bridge-head fort across the river from Mogontiacum when she’d learned the hunt was in progress. She’d dismissed the escort, passed a night at the mansio, then set out for this meadow alone, after a day and a night of little sleep and no food. The slaves’ decurion would only repeat Maximus’s order that no one was to cross to the other side of that net. Auriane felt a slow madness stealing over her limbs as she prepared to wait for this odd, overplanned Roman hunt to come to an end.

  Does Avenahar live? Dully she watched the distant riders, near lost in the long grasses, heard the occasional shriek of a brass trumpet, the undertones of low, dusky grunting from the earth-born monster, the hard hammering of hooves as horses swept like a swift tide from one side of the meadow to another. The likelihood dwindles, day by day. Once, she recognized Marcus Julianus’s dappled-gray mount by the distinctive arch of its neck; moments later, he galloped close enough so that she could see his face. Few men look so noble on a horse! she thought, strengthened by the sight of him, full of a vaulting hope—but all too soon, it fled.