Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Speratus awaited her in his tent, seated on a camp bench. An errant vein of kindness showed in those flinty eyes; he seemed a man in a battle against his inclinations to gentleness. The greater-than-usual stubble on his chin was turning to gray; she noted this at the same time she remembered his people left off shaving when in mourning. Mourning for Marcus Julianus, no doubt. But the sorrow in his face was sober and correct in the way of the professional mourner who walks in a funeral procession, rather than one who truly, helplessly grieves.

  His manner filled her with dread.

  As she settled herself opposite him, he wordlessly offered her a battered tin cup of unwatered wine. Oddly, she found his respectful treatment warming, though she knew it was inspired by no more than the man’s sense of duty toward Julianus.

  “It is not good news,” Speratus began. A light rain began to fall, its drumming amplified against the tightly stretched goathide of the tent. “Marcus Julianus was a great and good man, such as our country doesn’t produce anymore, and now, I think him only the more so—”

  “Was a great man?” She spilled some of the wine.

  “In absolute truth, no one knows his exact fate. But from what I tell you, I fear you’ll see . . . he cannot be living. Are you ready to hear it all?”

  Her stomach gave a hard twist, but she forced out the words, “Yes. Spare me nothing.”

  He was momentarily silent, gathering strength to tell the tale.

  “Julianus bravely volunteered to lead a final party of negotiation, right into the Dacian king’s stronghold. It was believed by Trajan’s counselors there was a fair chance the Dacian king might yield up his stronghold, and himself, without a single ballista ball thrown. So the Dacian king had little trouble getting Trajan to agree to this. It proved, however, but a treacherous ploy on old King Decabalus’s part, to keep his wretched life and his gold.”

  Thunder sounded, faraway—a war in the sky, at a comfortable distance—as that war is, to me, she thought.

  “Julianus’s party of twenty set out through the gorges, believing they had an envoy’s immunity. How bold he was, to go at all—that stronghold’s in dismal mountain country where on nights of the full moon a plague of the dead rise up to prey on wayfarers. It sits high atop an outcropping of rock. There’s a cloud of buzzards above it that never moves off. The gateway’s decorated with captives’ heads, and solid gold images of ravening monsters. You must be as proud of him as you can be—I’d sooner turn up at dinnertime at the stinking lair of Polyphemus.”

  Cannot he come more quickly to the end? But she didn’t hurry him, for she was gratefully devouring every scrap.

  “As Julianus’s party arrived, the double-dealing rogues seized him and put him under guard. King Decabalus, you see, had heard that Julianus saved the Emperor’s life last winter, for the tale’s become famous—”

  “Saved the Emperor’s life? I did not know it,” Auriane whispered. Marcus, you’ve lived another lifetime in that country, of which I know nothing.

  “He did, indeed. A Dacian envoy somehow got aconite into our Lord’s wine. The whole world is indebted to Julianus’s quick thinking. And so, Decebalus thinks, What would a just and good ruler like Trajan not do, for the man who preserved his life? So the Dacian king believes he’s got the golden fleece. He sends one of our men back to Trajan with demands: He, Decabalus, is to be allowed to keep his own life, in exile. And he’s to keep his wealth—that fabled hoard of gold he buried somewhere beneath a river. The king has twenty guards watching Marcus Julianus night and day, because the sly dog remembers how the last high-ranking Roman hostage managed to outfox him by taking poison.”

  Auriane put down the cup; her hand shivered too much to hold it. She felt she had no more substance than wind. She was frantic to hurry him on but bit back her words, suspecting that if she didn’t hear the full tale now, from him, she might never hear it.

  “This comes from the mouth of our only envoy who escaped alive,” Speratus continued. “Julianus was kept in a filthy yard with pigs and the half-eaten bodies of prisoners who’d been left there to starve and rot. It had a low wall, to keep the beasts from tumbling down a sheer drop into a glen below. The guards were set at intervals along the wall.

  “Julianus determined on the noblest course—ending his life, and sparing Trajan the cruel dilemma of having to decide whether to give in to the king’s demands. He had no access to poison. So he waited for the first moonless night. He surprised a guard, and started bravely grappling with him—”

  Auriane could not suppress a small cry.

  “—and got the guard’s falx into his hands, and made to turn it upon himself. There was a great and grim struggle that went on for long, and—”

  Auriane shot restively to her feet, every muscle taut, feeling herself a being of air and fire, ready to hurl herself into battle to defend him. She edged toward the entryway to the tent, right hand clenched about the grip of an imagined sword as she looked out at the sea of forest rolling on forever to the east—to that place of dragons.

  “You said you wanted to hear the whole tale,” he said from behind her.

  She returned to her place. “Forgive me. Go on.”

  “Good, then. I want someone who was dear to him to know what became of him.

  “A clamor was raised throughout the barbarian compound,” he continued. “King Decabalus himself flew there in a fury and promised to see them all flayed alive if Julianus was allowed to harm himself. Julianus took wound after wound; he fought like Hercules to get his hand upon that weapon again. But his jailers overwhelmed him, and stayed his hand. In the end, it was impossible to say whether Julianus leapt from the wall, or was pushed. But he fell. That is how he died. He perished in the forest below.”

  “What was the name of this witness?” Auriane closely examined Speratus’s face, her voice tightly controlled. “How high was this place?” She knew she begged for more than he had to give. “Might he have lived?”

  “I was not told these things, I am sorry. But it was a long drop. It’s enemy country. And he’d lost much life-blood already. The only Roman witness said he died. And mark that King Decabalus himself evidently believed it—for directly afterward, Decabalus withdrew his ransom demands and fled for his life.

  “Be grateful it was a hero’s death,” Speratus added, as a faint rumble of oratorical fullness started to creep into his tone, “well worthy of such a man. Can you call up a more fitting exit, after that lifetime of bold deeds? He outwitted one last tyrant. Marcus Julianus will be honored through all time.”

  Auriane said finally, while slowly shaking her head, “It’s not a credible tale.” In fact, it seemed not so much false as oversmooth—a public story whittled into overrefinement through repetition, its relation to truth like that of the portrait bust that renders its subject as a tranquil Apollo, to its living subject who sweats and fears. Would Marcus have been so quick to leave this life? Confronted with two evil alternatives, wouldn’t he have sought out a third? “He lives,” Auriane said with soft force. “I’ll not hear you say otherwise.”

  Speratus said nothing. She glimpsed herself reflected in his eyes, and knew he thought her protest no more than the madness of grieving.

  The rain drummed more urgently.

  “I am sorry,” Speratus offered again, turning up his palms as if to say, I have no more to give.

  As she rose to leave, the thought that she would not see Marcus again in this world struck her a blow so jarring, so disorienting, that everyday life dropped off, shed like the flesh at death—and the veil that obscures future days dropped away.

  And she saw the morrow, clear and sudden as the images of a wall painting in a darkened room, at the moment a torch is brought in. But that torch was whisked away before she had time to make full sense of what she saw.

  Some unknown catastrophe comes.

  “What is wrong?” Speratus said, watching her with great unease. Auriane was bent over like someone peering down a well. Her gray ey
es seemed able to pierce stone. “Are you ill?”

  “Something grievous comes to us. And very soon.” She squinted, as if to better see. “As soon as . . . tomorrow.”

  “What are you saying?” A covert look crept over Speratus’s face. He watched her with acute interest, for he believed that the single genius of her primitive countrymen lived in their women when they spoke in oracular voice. He dropped his voice, not wanting the man at guard to hear. “You’ve got spirits in you, don’t you? You’ve an augur’s powers—only yours are true. Tell me, is what comes of nature, or of man?”

  “Of nature,” Auriane whispered, “and of man. It is both.”

  He continued to stare at her, trapped in the hallowed silence while the rain sealed them in, their positions reversed now, as he was the one begging more than she had to give. She wrestled off the oddness of it first, and resumed her manner of polite distance. “I’m sorry. I can’t see more.”

  The centurion rose to his feet, bringing their audience to a close; not quite knowing what else to say, he repeated, “Marcus Arrius Julianus was a great man. Be content with that.”

  Unexpectedly, those mild and meaningless words brought her to fury.

  “Content? Never. Julianus believed that war was a stupid folly of overreaching, no more than organized rapine and murder, to seize a country so distant it can’t possibly be held. If he has died, it was for a cause not his own, and it was a foul and miserable and meaningless death—”

  “What impiety, how can you—”

  “—as is mine—condemned to death for doing what any honorable woman of my people would have done. You praise him for love of country and kill me for the same. There is no meaning in all this. He died wretchedly. Do not tell me to go content.”

  “Grief has taken your mind. I’ll not listen to such viciousness.”

  After a short, tortured silence, she turned away. “I sound ungrateful,” she said in a voice gone flat. “And I shouldn’t. You’ve been honorable and kind.”

  Auriane had little memory of being taken back through the camp.

  Afterward she told and retold the tale of Marcus’s death, sometimes to Brico, while stopping frequently to ask the girl what she thought, and sometimes in the silence of her mind. She was like some Alexandrian physician cutting into the body of a suspected poison victim to learn the truth of the crime, closely examining the color and shape of every part of the story Speratus had told her.

  At midnight, she shook Brico awake and whispered, “He is alive. Why would he seize a falx to take his life, if the drop from this place was great enough to ensure death? Wouldn’t leaping from the battlement have been easier than attacking a strong force of guards?”

  As understanding slowly came into Brico’s sleep-fogged face, so did helpless sadness.

  “I suppose, but—”

  “He must have judged that the fall might not have guaranteed death.”

  “I . . . I suppose that could be so.” Brico, fully awake now, said no more, deciding it would be a cruelty to remind Auriane that the Dacian king himself had believed in Julianus’s death.

  “Brico, I saw something, on the eve Marcus and I parted for the last time. A sea of grass. Multitudes of men on horseback, men who roam the plains and do not farm. A tribe of riders. He is with them.”

  Brico’s eyes glistened with tears and she turned away.

  Auriane lay sleepless through the rest of the night, stunned beyond weeping. We are two wings of a heron. If you were gone, Marcus, I would know. She would have felt his death as a faint break of tension on invisible threads, as the Fates severed them. It would have been announced to her in the marked silences of the forest. She would have seen his absence from the world, as a sad interruption in the strings of stars across the night sky—one would have vanished, leaving a chill void.

  When sleep finally overcame her near dawn, she dreamed of Ramis.

  The seeress was serenely young, with gilded chestnut hair, a brow smooth as an alabaster vase. She wore a crown of marine blue flowers. Before her was a shallow bronze bowl in which hovered a still dagger of flame. Auriane smelled a rich incense that brought to mind honey and plums. A crawling in her stomach suggested that this vision might be the work of more than one dreaming mind. Ramis’s spirit had never known distance, and Auriane felt it flooding with proprietary strength round her own.

  Lady. Does Marcus live?

  Ramis’s frown was that of a schoolmaster enduring a pupil who isn’t trying hard enough. The living are water; the dead, snow. One is the companion of earth. The other eddies through air, leaving no tracks—and will become water again. There was a serene silence, and then: I cannot see him, Auriane. You’re being asked to live as if he’s gone.

  Black wings closed about Auriane. Cannot you toss me a scrap of hope?

  You do not need hope, came voiceless words. You do not even need me. You must learn, now, the power that lives in consenting to dissolution. Of letting yourself be pulled apart and reformed, over and over, like wind-borne clouds. Stop struggling against what’s befallen Marcus. Or your children. Or yourself. Honor it all as if it were Fria herself.

  And it will bring a brilliance beyond the Sun.

  Another silence. Then: Auriane. You have no more time.

  The austere face, the aquamarine mantle, were smoothly swallowed back into dream-blackness. Auriane felt her body contract in a soundless shout—Don’t leave me.

  She awakened to a pulsing headache—and to Brico, bent over her worriedly.

  “Mistress,” Brico said plaintively. “We’re moving. The river crossing, it’s close.”

  The unsettling shadow of the dream roved along the edges of Auriane’s consciousness, demanding to be remembered. She put a hand to her temple, feeling for the hotness of fever. Unease began a slow spider-crawl up her spine. For she was remembering, now—while struggling hard not to. Ramis’s words throbbed through her like a potent headache, or some poison that her blood struggled to expel.

  Embrace what’s befallen us? What vicious counsel—it’s villainous to ask such a thing. And what’s the sense of telling a woman on her way to execution, You have no more time?

  “Mistress,” Brico tried again, her wide-open eyes like the water-filled bowls in which a sybil scries the future. “The river’s high and and it’s seething, and I heard someone say that a boatman drowned in it this morning. I’m . . . It’s foolish, I know, but I’m frightened.”

  Brico’s gaze strayed to the trunk. “I won’t throw that thing in, you must not command me to do it.”

  Auriane sat up, finally shaking off the shackles of the dream. “Brico, Brico,” she said with gentleness, pulling the young woman into a bleak embrace that knew no distinction between mistress and handmaid; they were two far-wanderers huddled together for solace. “Calm yourself. It doesn’t matter. That sword will come to rest wherever it’s meant to be. All will be well.”

  With one arm still draped about Brico, Auriane leaned forward to look through the aperture, but made no sense of the world outside as the row of ox carts alongside their carriage creaked pitiably, complaining of being forced into motion. She saw only Marcus, torn and bleeding in a cold, unknown forest. Arria, terrified beyond endurance from a thing the gods shouldn’t allow. And Avenahar, lost to the killing life. And finally, her own horror at being the cause of it all.

  Auriane had no room in her, just then, to remember the unknown catastrophe, “. . . of nature, and of man,” that she had foreseen for this day.

  Chapter 31

  The river roared softly. The wind was its coconspirator, gusting with warning fury. The sky was a cruel blue, and vast above the men in arms formed up before a trestle bridge. A thin thread of men marching six abreast separated from their formation and moved with patient slowness across the river. The reda that bore Auriane and Brico was stalled behind the ranks and files waiting their turn to cross. From this vantage, Auriane could see grassy earth arching down to a shining belt of black flecked with white. No
rmally this river was better behaved, but spring rains had swollen and maddened it, and it bucked and kicked, thwarted by its bed. It was a living stream fed through aeons with new souls straining for release, a spirit-flow teeming with ghosts strongly seeking the north. The froth-filled air above the waters sparked with rage. The bridge’s five stone piers, brutish, permanent, were like evenly spaced teeth through which the black water flowed—or the high columns of some temple to the sprites. A more careful look revealed the piers delicately mottled with moss, which had been climbing the stone since the reign of Domitian, when men of the legions had built this bridge. The piers are bone, the trestles, flesh, she thought. The fine geometry of arches stretched delicately from bank to bank seemed some naive intrusion, no match for the river’s young, muscular flow.

  Four centurions had fallen out of the march, blood-colored cloaks rippling like pennants as they flanked the bridge’s approach so they could observe the crossing. A unit of regular cavalry proceeded across at a slow trot. The bridge’s roadway was floored with planks covered over with turf; the pounding of hooves raised a fine, stone-colored dust, which drifted to the horses’ bellies.

  Auriane felt a sharp unease she knew was shared by many of the men, and wondered why the army’s priests did not offer a propitiatory sacrifice to the waters. Perhaps they knew nothing of the treacherous spirits that lived in northern rivers.

  The sun glided deeper into the western sky. A century of the Eighth was crossing now, heads bare, helmets strapped to their right shoulders as they trudged over the bridge with the same indifference as the slaves and mules; the effulgence of glory soldiers envisioned about themselves when they passed a village was not in their minds now. Here, the world was not watching; they were men at labor, eager to strike camp before weariness overtook them. Sun glow softly ignited the far, fir-clad hills, so that the earth seemed to emit gauzy light from within, and Auriane felt the land spirits spoke her a final farewell. The Moenus’s course switched back in this place, rushing northward into the heart of her lands, and had her soul not already begun its downward drift to Hel’s realms, that road home would have looked fiercely inviting.