Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Ahead, the crowd thickened, as those who depended on the river for their livelihoods—stevedores, caulkers, the boys who dove to recover lost cargo, sandmen who handled the ships’ ballast—left their labors. Auriane and Brico found a place among the men and women massed on the steps of a small temple of Hercules; Ramis’s route would take her close, and the temple’s upper steps gave a fine view of the river and the quay.

  Brico, with the keen eyes of youth, saw it first: A torchlit boat of elegant shape separating from the mass of other craft, approaching the dock with magisterial slowness, submitting in small spurts to the pulls of a single row of oarsmen struggling against the powerful current of the river. As it drew closer Auriane saw it was bedecked with thousands of flowers; the aft cabin was curtained in mystery. High above, a floating island of clouds moved off to reveal a white-gold moon in decline, balefully gibbous now, softly misshapen in its dying, just robust enough to command a place in the sky. It shines with the tranquillity of a spirit that knows it will live again, she thought. But that expiring moon disturbed her, seeming a portent of ill.

  As Ramis’s boat drew nearer, Auriane and Brico saw a thing that was marvelous. Among the press of people close by the riverbank, a fragile fire bloomed, doubled itself, then began to flow along the riverside. This slow-rippling, living fireglow kept pace in an ever-lengthening line with the flower-bedecked boat of the prophetess. The on-flowing flame was a glory in the dusk, an exquisite, warm beauty in the somber half-light. Auriane drew in a breath, baffled and awed. Only gradually did she realize what they were seeing: The folk formed up along the bank carried unlit torches. As Ramis’s ship came abreast of them, a burning torch was touched to one that was cold, and in this fashion the light kept pace with her, so that the prophetess moved with a growing line of fire spreading majestically into the deepening dusk. It was as though Ramis held dominion over fire; her movement over water pulled light into the gloom. It roused the spirit-terrors of Maximus’s soldiers; it reminded all who witnessed that there were other kinds of power, older than the sword, other empires in the country of thought and dreams. The disarmed tribespeople had chosen this way to say to their Roman masters: Beware, she has our devotion. Do not treat her roughly, do not humiliate her.

  That rippling light pulled Auriane straight into times she did not want to remember: sitting before Ramis in her island sanctuary, performing the Ritual of Fire, while Avenahar lay within her, unborn. Ramis touched her living torch to me. I let it go out. I wanted safety and Marcus and peace. “Your desires are idols, worshipped blindly,” she remembered Ramis saying to her on that day.

  She has ways of bringing her apprentices home.

  The mad thought came then that every trouble ringed about her was Ramis’s curse, from Victorinus to the loss of Avenahar, to the horror and mystery of that high-placed attempt to murder Marcus. Ramis had always said that only a woman stripped of her robes and pitched out of the nest of all she knows will continue a quest for clear sight.

  Brico, sensing Auriane’s distress, gathered up her mistress’s hand and held it, as a child will comfort a parent.

  When the boat’s artfully-curved silhouette came abreast of the quay, Auriane saw the craft was an old wine merchant’s galley converted for the prophetess’s use. The stem was carved into playful volutes that culminated in the head of a goose, a creature counted a messenger between the living and the dead. In graceful majesty the sternpost arched high over the aft cabin. The draped cabin that housed Ramis was blanketed in garlands. The vessel’s name, Libertas, hadn’t been removed from the bow; Auriane supposed both the goose figurehead and the galley’s name had been considered by Ramis’s women when they made the ship their own. For Ramis, too, was counted an emissary between life and death, and the old seeress was said to bring the one true freedom.

  As the galley approached the Fortress’s dock, the oarsmen raised their oars high, and the exquisite craft with its lacy silhouette glided in like a swan with upraised wings. Smoke from burning sage and marjoram scudded out over the still water. The goosehead prow slid soundlessly between the quay’s twin snowy images of Neptune looming spectrally from the stone dock. People stretched out their hands to the great priestess they could not yet see, proffering pipe clay images of their native goddesses and softly calling Ramis’s name.

  A dock crew lowered a plank onto the galley. Two white-robed girls carrying pots of smoldering herbs descended from the craft; chaplets adorned their heads and their dark hair flowed free. They were from the sacred order of maids who sang the spirit-songs as Ramis gave her oracles. A third maiden attendant emerged from the cabin with a length of white linen, to spread over the mud where Ramis would walk. So deep was the hush, Auriane heard the tinkling of temple bells drifting from the ship, a sound like children’s ghosts, laughing.

  The crowd’s murmurs were punctuated with the occasional wails of babes. Some tossed wildflowers onto the muddy path Ramis would tread. Many of the native faces in the throng were malnourished and thin, or scarred from disease. Some were borne on litters. Their eyes were vague with hopelessness, or keenly alight with hope.

  Auriane turned to Brico and saw a trance-state had settled over the maidservant. Her lips were parted faintly; she was intensely awake and alive, in some other world. She seemed prepared to see Ramis turn into a swan.

  “She’ll give me another child. And this one will thrive,” Brico said when she saw Auriane looking at her.

  Auriane was not certain Ramis could do such a thing, but wasn’t about to churn the waters of such a pure devotion. Perhaps my own certainties got blurred from having lived a life in more than one world. In these times Auriane found herself less stirred by Ramis’s wondrous acts, and more drawn to the old prophetess’s masterful detachment in the face of life and death.

  A fourth figure emerged from the deerskin-draped cabin. This was a peaceable-looking woman of middle years; a wreath of wildflowers lay on her gray head. Soft cries of Ave! started up among the throng; some thought this the prophetess herself. But she carried a plain yew-wood staff, not the brass-bound staff of the Veleda. This proved to be a woman called Algifu, of the Holy Nine, the most revered sisterhood of seeresses in all the northlands, who answered only to Ramis. It was usual for one of their number to accompany the great prophetess when she travelled. This woman, too, started up the path.

  The throng’s attention was fixed so raptly on the cabin, they might have watched some acrobat quivering on a tightrope. Many flinched at a crash out on the water, as if a river Nix had slapped his scaly tail on the surface. A nervous Horse Guardsman drew his sword. But it was only an oarsman throwing out the galley’s anchor.

  A stern, sweet tone floated out over the water, rippling like a silken bridal veil; a white-cloaked attendant flanking the cabin played a bird-bone flute. A second fluteblower joined her, and the tone enriched into a sharp, chilling harmony that opened a door to archaic remembrances, softening the texture of the night. Wordlessly all were seduced into a world infinitely older than this one. The fluteblowers beckoned and calmed the land spirits. They stepped from the boat and followed Algifu.

  At the cabin door, all saw a flash of silver.

  A woman emerged with slow grace from the deerskin-draped cabin. Even when this mystery was still in shadow, people sensed she seemed quieter than the others, and it was a curious stillness that spread out wide as the river. Soft murmurs arose; then came a silence that prickled the skin. Brico’s hand tightened on Auriane’s.

  The people saw that she carried a staff nearly as tall as she was, amber-studded, and deeply incised with runic signs—the staff of the Veleda.

  The silence was mighty. Two torchbearing attendants came up beside her, and illumined the face of Ramis.

  Hers was a visage so stark and strong, it would impress a memory that would remain in the minds of those who saw her this night even if fifty more years of life were left to them. The old prophetess’s face had the forbidding beauty of snowy escarpments, the cold auth
ority of an alabaster temple image—until one saw there was so much living sorrow hovering about her eyes. In her great age, her skull asserted itself strongly through the skin as though death pressed hard into life, but still her beauty was the sort that made one think of the perfect architecture of the human face. Deftly-carved cheekbones accentuated haunted hollows below; an arched mouth was sculpted with stern grace. Her silver-and-bronze hair was collected into a massive braid that recalled nothing feminine, but rather, ship’s cable, thick serpents, rope to hang a man. On her high, smooth brow was a silver ornament in the shape of a sickle moon, suspended from a circlet on her head. Those hooded eyes were wells of memory that saw equally the visible and invisible.

  Soft cries came; they rose to a roar that pressed painfully on the ear. Within the Principia of the Fortress, Maximus heard it on his dais, and frowned deeply. They came perilously close to courting this strange woman like some soon-to-be-crowned queen.

  The legionaries tightened their ranks and looked to their signal flags, braced for an order to push back the throng.

  But Ramis raised her staff, and it was as if she pressed quiet on the crowd. The Roman guard marveled at this. With slow dignity she inclined her head and began descending the plank, moving with the careful fragility of extreme age. She wore a heavy cloak of lambskin, dyed the strong blue of the sky and lined with white cat’s fur; the cat was beloved of Fria, the goddess she served. The cloak’s hem was studded with gemstones that glowed like small, dark moons. Using her staff, she made her way to the dock. Auriane had never known the exact number of her years, but as Ramis was said to have been in her third decade of life when Nero ascended the throne, she judged the old prophetess must have passed her eightieth winter. This simple calculation caused Auriane to revere her the more, for Ramis was such a woman that every year added another chamber to the vast library that was her mind.

  What she must now know, Auriane thought.

  As Ramis gained the bank, a native woman in the throng managed to force her way between the line of legionary soldiers. She fell on her knees before Ramis, and spread out a handful of earth at the prophetess’s feet. The woman shouted into the silence; Auriane could hear her words without difficulty.

  “This earth is from the grave of my son! Great Veleda, tell me what world he lives in!”

  Two legionaries seized the woman and began to drag her back.

  “Let her be!” Ramis’s voice was lilting as a bee’s flight, but it cut the air, fine and strong. Under the spell of that certainty the soldiers dropped the woman. Clutching the ground, she looked up at Ramis.

  Ramis placed her palm on the woman’s forehead. Those nearest reported that the old seeress began to hum—an odd, earthy, atonal music, more elemental than human. Others insisted this sound rose up from the ground. Some would later claim to have seen a pale, man-shaped light crouching near the woman, a spirit-thing that hesitated, then joined with the prostrate petitioner. Wherever Ramis walked, no one afterward ever agreed on what they had witnessed. When Ramis spoke, it was surprising to Auriane how well that crystal voice carried on the chill air.

  “Rise, Ivixa, basketmaker of the Aresaces. I see your son. He goes about with you everywhere.” No one could say how Ramis knew this woman’s name, trade, and tribe. She traced runic letters in the air, hands knitting the space too rapidly for Auriane to read their meaning. “I send all sorrow from you. Go and light nine candles. The last one burning, that is you. Your son is midwife to your rebirth. Return to your home village and heal them. You can now see future days in water and silver.”

  The woman shook violently as if seized by a spirit. But when she rose and turned about, her face showed the peace of another world—Auriane felt it, recognized it, desired it. It seemed to Auriane all in the crowd were ghosts; only this woman lived. The transformation of the woman brought a variety of reactions from those who saw—fierce envy, bafflement, anger, fear.

  Auriane felt a quiet amazement steal over her. Ramis has powers she had not before. Why did I abandon this? What else in all this Middle World is so important as this? I’ve been flung off a great wheel into darkness. No, I have not—there is no off. I’m the wheel and the darkness.

  The crowd became frenzied, as if someone had cast a fortune in golden coins onto the ground. Many surged toward Ramis, shouting questions and requests. This time they didn’t obey when she raised her staff. A decurion of the Horse Guard shouted an order; a scarlet signal flag shot up among the line of mounted men. Thirty Horse Guards, using the shafts of their lances, began driving the throng away from the bank, pushing them back as far as the warehouses. Simultaneously, in a double file, ten Horse Guardsmen approached Ramis, lances held low; as one, they halted, turned about, then stood ready to open a way for her.

  At that time, soldiers cleared the steps of the small Temple of Hercules. Auriane had to drag Brico from her place, while she whimpered and struggled, for now all chance of approaching the prophetess was lost.

  Auriane and Brico were drawn into the chaos of the crowd. They soon became separated, carried apart in opposing eddies of people. Auriane set out in pursuit, fearing that Brico, in her determination to approach Ramis, might get into a battle with the soldiers.

  Auriane could no longer see what was happening about Ramis, but later she would hear it told and retold: The Governor had provided six litters to carry Ramis and her women to the Principia of the Fortress. Ramis regarded the comely litter-bearers in their tightly-fitted tunics embroidered with gold, the enclosed chairs with their silk curtains, their jumbles of cushions, and announced, “We will walk.”

  The decurion of the Horse Guard protested that the way was long; she would tire and the Governor would grow impatient. Ramis answered that they would ride in the litters only if the bearers were given their freedom.

  The decurion objected that he had no authority to do this. Ramis persisted, and the decurion relented only because he feared she might take ship and depart, leaving him to be called to account for the prophetess’s failure to appear before the tribunal. All this was curious to Auriane, for she had never heard Ramis speak of slaves or the proper treatment of them. Perhaps she saw slavery as not natural to man, as did Marcus and a very few others among his people, or perhaps she went further, impossibly further, and thought it should be forbidden altogether. Auriane felt for a moment she heard cries in tongues unknown; here was another closed chamber of the old seeress’s mind.

  The progress of the litters was slow as a boat ploughing through a reed-filled lake. Auriane strove only to rescue Brico now—she counted the night’s original purpose lost. She wouldn’t let herself know the misery this caused her, how it threw her back onto her own dwindling reserves of courage. She realized then how the loss of her daughter had caused her to want a mother tonight.

  Brico appeared and disappeared; Auriane managed to get a hand on the girl once, but it was like trying to grasp a carp in a pool. Brico was drunken on the crowd’s excitement, the haunted night; she burrowed into the throng like a mole, earning curses and blows. The movement of the mass of people was forcing them in circles. Did the fortress lie this way, or the river? Clouds extinguished the sickly gibbous moon; only the flashing of guardsmen’s torches showed the way. As she chased Brico, Auriane began to fancy she followed a deer through an uncertain forest, its white tail flashing mockingly as it lured her into another world.

  Then Auriane found herself staggering into the space the guardsmen had cleared for the procession of litters. Just ahead she saw Brico, darting with deer-grace toward a litter somewhere in the middle of the line of six. The maid couldn’t have known where she was going much better than Auriane had, yet somehow, in her madness, she’d found Ramis.

  Auriane halted, transfixed, as she saw a white hand emerge from Ramis’s litter, a palm pressed to Brico’s forehead.

  A fertilizing hand? Had balefire flickered round that hand, or was it just the light of a guardsman’s torch, behind them? Was a life-spark passing into the girl�
��s body before her eyes? Or did it mean only that the next time she lay with Demaratos his seed would be strengthened and she’d be delivered of a strong child that would thrive?

  Auriane rushed up to claim the enraptured girl, full of fearful images of mortals coming too near to gods and blazing up in fire. The hand that quickened, if held too long, could kill.

  She caught Brico as the young woman’s knees began to buckle. And looked up to see the muzzle of a horse, bright trefoil pendants on the breast strap of a harness, the hard glitter in the eyes of a young Batavian guardsman. His long hair was twisted into a figure-eight knot just above his right ear, the fashion among this elite force of native-bred horsemen. “Move off!” he shouted, prodding Brico with the leaf-shaped blade of his lance, tearing her leather cape. Blood spread down the sleeve of Brico’s woolen undertunic.

  “Leave her be!” Auriane cried to him.

  The cutting blade of his lance flashed out again. Auriane caught it in both hands, just behind the blade, and twisted it, while throwing all her weight on the shaft. The lance was wrenched from his hand. His horse half reared.