His focus shifted from the wall behind her to his ink pot, managing a deft swerve round her gaze. “I perceived a growing danger to your younger daughter in the last months.” He spoke in his usual stately cadences, but the studied look of anguish deepened. “The vicious pranks of your neighbors had only gotten worse—as you know, petty folk can become emboldened, when they think a powerful man might fall. So I judged it best to remove Arria Juliana to Rome, to the household of her great-aunt—as Julianus insisted I do in his last instructions to me, if matters worsened. But it seems your daughter’s met with some . . . misadventure.”
“Misadventure?” Auriane rose weightlessly from the bench.
“Sit! Calm yourself. It seems your Arria Juliana’s carriages were attacked by a band of highwaymen. She was kidnapped from her carriage.”
“What sort of protection did you give her,” Auriane said softly.
“I warn you, impertinence will not serve you. Members of your household have described the bandit party to us, and we’re hunting them now. But I fear the steward of your estate, Demaratos, is dead.”
“Gods below,” she said, her throat tightening painfully. “No.” She dropped her head into her hands and for an extended moment was mute in misery. May ravens pluck out my eyes. Demaratos. Arria. It’s all my doing. To the end of my days I’ll flog myself for not being with her.
“Others of your servants were injured, but most were unharmed, it seems, and—”
Abruptly she met his gaze. “When did this happen?”
Maximus calculated silently for a moment. “It must have been . . . eight . . . no, nine days ago.”
“Nine days? Why have you taken so long to tell me?”
“Word was brought to me only today. Your servants were terrified and scattered over the countryside. An old woman called Philomela made her way to me, here, on foot—”
“Her nurse! You must take care of her, and provide her with a carriage. What did she report?”
“She’s well enough, you can have speech with her, if you like. I’ll send her back with the post carriage. She insists they didn’t harm your Arria. They just bound your child and took her off on horseback. They took no plunder—it seems they wanted only your daughter.”
“They want ransom, then.”
“No demand for ransom has been brought to your villa, or to me.”
“This is madness, it makes no sense whatsoever, why take only my poor babe and no jewelry or coin . . .” An upwelling of sick fear closed her throat. She wanted to claw at the ground, cry out, rip cloth, tear houses down.
“We will find her abductors,” he said with an unctuous, complacent calm that angered her. “You have my assurance on that. That much, I owe Julianus. Rest your mind on one matter, at least—given the cautious way they handled her—whoever snatched her evidently wants her alive. You mustn’t despair.”
“Nine days,” Auriane whispered, slowly shaking her head. “Time enough for every vile obscenity invented by man or goat to be committed on her.”
She sat very still, her mind a huntress in the dark.
“I know where she is,” Auriane said suddenly. “And I would wager a year’s harvest upon it.”
He frowned sharply and sat forward. “Tell me. I’ll dispatch guardsmen there at once.”
“Volusius Victorinus has her.”
“That unsavory rascal?” The Governor put a meditative hand to his chin. “. . . Who sits at home, poisoned by his hatreds . . . Hmm . . . perhaps that’s a road worth walking down. But could this man who’s but a cockroach Julianus stepped upon have summoned the mettle to commit such a heinous act of vengeance? How would he dare?”
“I don’t think it’s vengeance,” Auriane said. “It’s a case of regular good sense overtaken by a satyr’s itch, a carnal madness fixed upon my daughter.”
ARRIA JULIANA HAD lost count of the days in this place. There were no days, actually, just one long night all run together, because the room they put her in had no windows.
Sometimes the room’s lamp was lit, and she saw the belly of the beast.
She quickly learned to prefer darkness. For when the lamp burned, he was there. The room had one door through which a maidservant would come, bringing food that was never what she liked, and a larger door through which he would come, the man with scraggly hair and funny ears who was her father’s enemy. Victorinus. That stubborn boy’s face looked more like a sad flabby demon’s, in the light of the one lamp on the floor. He watched her from his cave-corner, wanting to move toward her, but not yet able. As the run-together night went on and on, divided only by his coming, Victorinus started babbling stories while he sat there, telling her of himself as a child, talking of cruel doings that made no sense while he cried sick tears that terrified her. One time he moaned of the treachery of his wife, Decimina, who’d left him to return to her own family after Marcus Julianus wrecked their fortunes. Victorinus wanted her to say words of pity. He didn’t seem to see that she was too frightened to say them.
He moved closer each time—slow, sneaky, and certain as a tide creeping up in the dark. Lapping up more and more ground. Eyes blurred with an unknown wanting. She was being pushed into a narrowing tunnel of darkness and it was harder to get a breath, locked in a room slowly filling up with mud, smelly slime that would force its way into her nose, her throat, and fill her up until she changed into something else, a creature made of swamp water and dung.
Room of darkness. Never allowed to leave it. Four walls with an alcove and a pallet on the floor. No nook to squeeze into where you couldn’t be seen. She should have been a bird, then she could have flown up to the ceiling where no one could reach her.
Maybe she would become a swan.
The time came when she snapped awake to find Victorinus bent above her.
Mother, help. But there was no one to help. She felt a fright so great she thought she would turn inside out. She wished herself small. He laid his flesh-of-a-worm palm on her belly—fearful of doing it, but doing it nevertheless. Skin of a rotted mushroom. Sliding flesh of a dead toad. He breathed strangely, like a winded dog. She thought herself into a thing of marble. It did little good.
Thinking only of the safety of darkness, she kicked the low stool on which he’d put the terra-cotta lamp. Light and dark leaped across the walls. The coverlet caught fire. He shrieked for the maidservants and shouted at her that she was a harpy’s spawn. She saw that he had a greater-than-normal fear of fire. A mad fear, almost like a beast’s.
The servants’ door opened a cautious crack, then was thrown open amidst trilling voices as three womenservants rushed in. They flung their own cloaks on the flames to snuff them out.
She’d put Victorinus in an angry muddle and stopped him, this time.
But what of the next?
A swan. I’ll be one of the snowy, kind ones that live on our river.
But the next time surprised her, for it was not at all the same. For the first time, a maidservant led her out of the dark room. She didn’t want to go anywhere clad in nothing but a tunica of silk spun so fine she might as well have been naked—but the maidservant was strong as a bullock. Arria was thrust into a dingy dining hall, blinking from the lights of more lamps than she’d seen for many days. The dining chamber had no doors to outside gardens. If a room could be ill, this one was. Soot-blackened wall paintings glistened with grease. Fish bones from old meals crunched beneath her bare feet. Myrtle and bay were strewn there, too, but it didn’t help the smell—a sweet foulness to cause you to look round and see who had a festering wound. The serving women wore rags, and were sad. In one corner a dwarf with muddy shoes played a reed pipe.
She turned about with a wail when she saw men reclining there, eating. But the maidservant forced her forward until she nearly stumbled over the low table before the couches where Victorinus and his dinner-friends lay, watching her the way a hound watches its meal being brought—two stout, brutish men with wrestlers’ arms. Their brows glistened with spikenard oil.
Two girls from some far-off place, Numidia or Cyrene, were captive in that room with her—limber maids with burnt-almond skin and kohl smeared thickly round their eyes. They were naked. They danced slowly, moving as if they were frightened. They were slaves, and she was ordered to say she was one, too—the daughter of one of Victorinus’s carriagemen.
It was a dinner party from a fever dream. Boys hidden behind a curtain were singing shepherd songs, in thin, pretty voices.
Somehow, she knew it was to cover sounds she might make.
There was a monkey in that room, a prisoner like her, shrieking like a frightened boy in its wooden cage. A boy monkey, chattering. And a red-and-green parrot on a perch, which kept greeting Victorinus and speaking flatteries. Victorinus himself reclined on the first couch, in the place of honor. He was stupid from drink, blank-eyed—so much so, no one was home inside him now. So besotted, there was no one at the tiller.
Something told her that this was an exceedingly ill thing.
The man-guest with the blackened nails of a stonemason hooked a blistered paw in hers and dragged her close enough for a lover’s embrace. He dipped his fingers in the spikenard oil and touched it to her lips, then, to his.
Victorinus told this man he could have her if he wanted her, he’d see that a room was prepared. The man-guest answered that she wasn’t to his taste; his fires burnt only for Cappadocian youths—but he did believe that the monkey, over there, yearned to steer the chariot of Venus.
All three laughed loudly and long at this. A chorus of hissing and barking demons. They began nudging and goading Victorinus, who rose from his place, dribbling and wobbling. Blank-eyed and slobbering. No one at the tiller. He did their bidding, motioning to a manservant, who took the monkey from the cage.
A boy monkey. She knew the difference. The monkey screamed with blind rage as he was carried toward her. The man-guest held her so tightly she couldn’t move. The youths behind the curtain sang louder. There came the fright that makes you float. Gods that come in tales sometimes appear as a golden mist—maybe one of them visited her then; she didn’t know, but something warm and good wrapped about her then—and she knew what she must do. She saw, clearly as if it lay on the table before her, the fine weapon she held, good as a sword.
She told them her name.
They had had her whipped on her first day in this place, “just so that she would know what that was.” And had promised her they would do it again, if she ever spoke her true name.
She shouted her name anyway.
And the name of her father. The man-guest on the couch lurched away from her as if she were a fire that blazed up in his face. He started shouting, too.
Everyone, suddenly, went quite mad.
She’d made them frightened. That was glorious.
Something told her to bolt off like a horse, even though she didn’t know her way about. She dashed down the narrow passage through which the servants had entered. It was too dark. Too narrow. She collided, hard, with someone clammy and bony and sad.
Lucius.
Lucius with his mangled face, from playing the mean trick on her mother and sister. He must have been lurking there, watching it all.
All was lost.
Still she fought like a wild dog, biting, whipping about, scraping her arms against brick. No use. She was clamped in a vise. Now he would return her to the chamber.
Suddenly she realized she was wrong. He was struggling to drag her farther into the passage. Then he opened a small trapdoor, near the floor, and pushed her into it. She found herself on stone steps that led underground, beneath the house, where she saw a forest of brick columns stretching off in every direction. And softly roaring furnaces, giving out their strange, fuzzy light. Nice and warm. Down there, she found many good places to hide.
For what might have been a day and a night underground, no one came. When it seemed her stomach had shriveled to the size of a raisin, she heard scared footsteps. And Lucius was there. He’d hidden his monster face behind a cloth, but she could see his eyes, and they were worried and kind. He set an egg porridge behind one of the brick columns. Next to it, he laid neatly folded linen clothes. Kindness. How could this be? She guessed it must be far into night, when no slaves would come down to stoke the furnaces. She was astonished; she’d always thought him a boy ogre who only wanted to hurt people. But something else had been hiding in him, and now it was coming out.
Three or four egg porridges later, men from outside came. Rescuers sent by her father’s friend, the Governor.
They arrested everyone in the house. Even the slaves, which to Arria did not seem fair.
They urged her to tell them all that had passed, but she wouldn’t. She knew, then, she never would, for that was the only way to stop the evil pictures that rushed at her in a flood. She poured quicklime over the pictures and put them deep in the ground where worms and rotting things lived.
Lucius told her that he’d convinced his father she’d dashed out the door of the kitchens, then fled off into the night. He showed her the swollen cuts on his back, from the beatings Victorinus gave him for letting her get away.
And so, a new journey began. Well, the same journey, really—to Rome, to her great-aunt—but new because now she had a face that didn’t fit her, inside. Like Lucius. In some strange way she couldn’t name, she felt she’d won a race. Perhaps it was just because she’d known how to get free.
She’d found a weapon and made them afraid.
She wouldn’t cry out for her mother again.
Once again, she was travelling in a carriage train. But now, everyone was different. A stranger-steward sent by the Governor took poor Demaratos’s place. And now, there were many more guards, some, even, from the Fortress, with javelins and swords.
And Lucius was with her. She’d shouted at them until they agreed to let him come. For he had no father to stay with now, and his mother had left already, which made him an orphan. It was only right she should help him; he’d taken a cruel beating for her sake. Lucius had his own carriage, right behind hers.
All that was the same, now, was Philomela.
As the fine reda sped on, from time to time Arria looked out at the clean, white hills and wondered what had happened to her dog. Surely he lay stiff and cold somewhere in a grave of snow. She cried and couldn’t stop herself when she thought of her dog, and Philomela didn’t scold her. Philomela just looked sad.
But all that mattered was that once again she was travelling in the right direction. To the grandest, richest, most powerful city on earth.
Chapter 27
Germania Libera, The West Forest Early Spring
Avenahar stood uneasily before Athelinda, the mother of her mother. Why had the great widow sent for her? The lady sat spiritedly still on the high seat of the hall of Baldemar, head faintly tilted as if she was listening to music. Her madder-red cloak was gathered majestically at her left shoulder; its silver wheel-form brooch glinted like a medallion awarded for valor. Sunlight from the smoke hole slanted in, singling her out for homage, melting her pearl-gray hair into liquid silver. Baldemar’s shield hung on the wall behind her, forming a fearful nimbus about her head. The last time Athelinda had summoned Avenahar to this storied hall, Avenahar was certain she’d been visually appraised for some betrothal the lady had in mind, and found wanting. A new year had come; this was the moon of the ploughing of the loaves. A lifetime ago she would have called it Februarius, one of the days—who knew exactly which?—between the Nones and Ides. This time Avenahar was fortified by the lustrous gray-brown pelt of a wolf lying across her shoulders. Witgern had made her one of his own. She’d been given a nation—the nation of Wolves. It was a fine thing to no longer be lost between two worlds, to know that few dared spit on her now and call her Decius’s daughter—but this pelt she fought so hard to win was both crown of victory and cloak of mourning. For she waited day by day to hear dread, final news of Auriane.
And now, what could this meddlesome, unbending woman want?
“I greet you, noble daughter of my daughter,” Athelinda began liltingly, faintly inclining her head in greeting. “You’ve grown taller, since I saw you at Yule.”
Athelinda motioned for Avenahar to come closer, a gesture delicate as a pale hand flowing over a lyre. An amethyst necklet glimmered at her intricately webbed throat. In Athelinda’s youth, her great, lucid eyes had been said to shine like a Nix’s behind a watery veil. In advanced age they’d only grown more brilliant in their soft nest of crinkled flesh, as if she hoarded her last store of life-force there. Avenahar had heard her grandmother had buckled from grief when she’d been told Auriane’s fate, but it did not show. Athelinda stowed her private hurts as a queen stows them; she was too busied with managing the world.
“I greet you Athelinda, the Wise in Council,” Avenahar responded, “daughter of Gandrida, wife of Baldemar . . . mother of Auriane.” Her voice faltered over Auriane’s name.
Athelinda squinted, delicately registering affront.
Now what have I done? The spear. Of course. How could I have been so unmannerly?
Avenahar deposited it too hastily on the plank floor, making a clatter that was an insult to the temple silence all about; it startled off a curious hen that strayed in from outside.
Wan humor passed across Athelinda’s fine-boned face, there, and quickly gone. “You look fine and strong, child, even coated in—what is that all over you?”
“Honey . . . I was stalked here by men clad in Chariomer’s colors. A farm wife stowed me in her mead shed last night and—”
Lady of the Light Page 47
