Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  A signifer by the bridge’s approach signed to a unit of Ubian auxiliaries to begin the crossing—two hundred and forty young recruits from Germania.

  But their decurion dropped from his horse and soon after, every man of this unit dismounted with him. To a man, the tall Ubians set their shields before them, bent one knee to the ground, and remained solemnly still. We will not move. The brisk wind gracefully unfurled their heavy cloaks as they ignored, in turn, the threats of the two highest-ranking centurions, the calm pleading of Firmius Speratus.

  Auriane knew their minds. The ways of the Ubians were not unlike those of her people—and they did know the ways of northern rivers. A recently made oath to a distant Emperor was easily forgotten before this show of enmity by spirits so much older than man.

  The centurions and the praefect of the march met in an emergency council, to debate what must be done to induce the Ubians to cross. As threats of brutal punishments were proposed, Speratus happened to think of Auriane. Without consulting his colleagues, he left the council and sought her out.

  “If you’ve some remedy we don’t know of, you must tell me,” he told her when his guard had unbolted the door of the reda.

  Her first thought was, Why aid them? But nothing was to be gained by impeding the crossing. And matters wouldn’t go well for these men of a brother-tribe if she stayed apart.

  “They count you some sort of holy woman,” Speratus pressed on. “Get them across somehow—inspire them, exhort them, tell them your gods say they’ve got to get to the other side—and I’ll see both of you granted extra privileges for the rest of the journey.”

  “No one has performed the proper rites by the bank.”

  “What sort of rites?”

  “The river must be given a small gift. The Nixes who live in this river—”

  “The who?”

  “The divine women who live naturally in the river—some call them sprites. They come on land sometimes, and if you’ve maddened them, they’ll pull you down with them. The Nixes in this one are offended by thieves. If any among you has stolen anything, he must offer a part of it to the waters.”

  Speratus rubbed a hand across his chin. He had heard vague reports of watery beings that dwelled in northern rivers, rapacious and lustful creatures that looked human enough until you saw the duck feet or the fin down their backs. Their existence was not as definite to him as his own comfortably familiar Mars or Bellona—but who dared deny what might live, unseen, in a strange country?

  “I suppose it would do no harm.”

  “It’s a stilling-rite that’s needed,” Auriane said. “Your priests must first sing a river song to summon them, and then they must—”

  “You know them?”

  “I believe I remember one well enough. I watched my mother once, when the creek by our fields threatened to overflow her pea garden, but—”

  “You’ll do it, then. Our priests aren’t schooled in these things. You succeed, and I’m a man of my word, you’ll see better treatment.”

  “I’ll need a mirror of bronze. And keep everything fashioned of iron covered from the river’s sight.”

  He removed her fetters, then dispatched a slave to seek among the camp followers for a bronze mirror. As Auriane was conducted to the bank, walking with tedious slowness from the pain of her cracked rib, the tall Ubian horsemen looked on in profound silence. Some slowly nodded at her, then met one another’s gaze with approval. Auriane remembered little of the stilling-rite, but for them, she wrestled off discouragement. At the riverbank, she removed her shoes so she could feel the heat of the earth fissuring up from the spirit realms underground.

  The river in this place was half as wide as an ox field, surging onward with the wild energy of chariot teams closing on the finish. She closed her eyes, sank her mind into the river, and lifted the bronze mirror to entice the Nixes, who loved to see their own images. An alert quiet, partly baffled, partly amused, settled over the troops on both banks, as they watched the tall foreign woman in a torn cloak, her bronze hair collected into a braid that hung down in a heavy rope, as she performed some unknown rite by a river. The mighty rush of water was the only sound.

  Her hands burned as she held them over the waters, as if that angry froth were hot steam. Tears of longing streamed down her face as she started to sing a song about rivers, half remembered from that remote time of red-gold contentment, when she was a loved child at her father’s hall. She wasn’t sure she’d spoken the verses in the correct order. Her imprecations felt fragile against the watery roar; this was like shouting into a riot.

  But somewhere down in the river’s living depths, she sensed a pricked ear. When she had finished, she dug up a clod from the earth beneath her feet and tossed it into the churning foam—not surprisingly, Speratus had found no one willing to admit to thieving anything, but she supposed the handful of earth would do, since his people had thieved all this land.

  When it was done, the river raged on, and she felt rebuffed. However, the Ubians didn’t seem to mind; one by one, they pulled themselves onto their mounts, and, trotting four abreast, began the crossing.

  And afterward, though Speratus was careful to secure the reda’s door, to her relief he failed to put her back into the iron fetters. She’d no wish to pass over that river’s snapping jaws while bound. He seemed to have simply neglected to do so, but she knew that sometimes a man’s spirit gives a gift unknowingly, because the unseen folk tell him to.

  Just ahead of her the heavier carts laden with ballistae and scaling ladders rumbled onto the bridge. At last, the reda was moving. For no reason she could name, she felt rising terror mingled with dark exultation.

  The iron-bound tires of the carriage sank deeply into the soft turf of the roadway. Beyond the bridge’s low, cross-timbered side rails, land abruptly fell away. The humid breath of the river enveloped them. The prickle of dread Auriane always felt when coming to an unholy place seized her then. Dark minds swarmed below. The waters, far from growing calmer, had risen—so much for her stilling-rite! She heard the screeching of powerful sprites, felt the firm tug of their strength—some were the ghosts of the drowned; others, the immortal Nixes, who had been denizens of the river since the world’s beginning. The river was a boiling cauldron that would strip her bones. Rivers are the borders between worlds. Marcus had told her of the Styx, which the newly dead must cross. It washed the mind clean of all memory of the old life while it readied the soul for a fresh existence.

  Her gaze was drawn, then, to the plain gold ring Marcus had given her when first they came together—that pitiful remembrance of their rich, fathomless storehouse of days. She felt the faint indentations on one side, where he’d had it inscribed with the words in his tongue, Anima Mea—“My Life.” She heard the slight roughness in his voice as he spoke those words. And she thought she would give up the wretched few days she had left to look once more at the dear and noble contours of that face, to rest again in the womb-warmth of their nights, a last, exquisite coming-together that she might carry into eternity with her. The agony of his absence burned her to purest ash—but the ghost hovering above the pyre was, for a brief moment, strangely content. All whom she had loved inhabited her now. She didn’t understand it, but she was not alone.

  They passed over the second stone pier.

  Her fevered senses saw a corona of amber light playing about the cedar trunk, as if the sword within reddened in agitation. Her father’s sword didn’t want to leave these lands. It wants me to take it home.

  She was sharply conscious of the distance to the water; to fall, here, would be like leaping from a house of three stories. The time felt so marked, she thought herself an initiate waiting to be led into the cavern of the Mysteries. Embracing Brico, her unease grew. Both sat stone still, heads lifted—two birds in a flock, poised to wing off with one mind.

  They were halfway across.

  The elaborate, rolling crack was loud enough to split through the clamorous noise of water. Oddly it
seemed to come from above, like some sky-borne whip in the hand of Wodan, striking out in unnaturally slow time as the god lashed on his windy steed. Deep in the structure of the trestles below, something shifted where it should not shift. Multiple crossed timbers shuddered and bowed. A woody groan shivered up.

  There came a fast snapping of giants’ bones. The timbers between the second and third piers began to buckle. Gently, horribly, the world heaved sideways.

  Surprise suppressed the men to quiet—then, all found their voices at once. Yelps of fright, bellowed commands, competed with the frantic squeals of mules. Wagoners and men in armor fled past the reda, sprinting back the way they had come, to gain the safety of the bank. Brico was pitched into Auriane’s lap. Behind them, an ox-drawn cart overturned; it was laden with the great, smooth stones thrown by the war engine called the onager. The roadway quaked as it was struck by a rain of ponderous stones designed to break down enemy walls. Some bounced; others streaked out, rattling and rumbling in every direction, cracking the spokes of wheels, breaking the cannon bones of mules, knocking men to their knees, before plummeting in silence into the river, far below.

  The north side of the roadway was easing down by degrees. With a fresh jolt it sagged more sharply, yielding to the pummeling of the stones, the remorseless weight of massed wagons. At this frightful angle wagons started to slide, and men and beasts were sent scuffling and scrambling, until the whole moving mass was dammed against the bridge’s cross-timbered side rails.

  Auriane’s reda moved with them. Men dangled from the rail, feet scrambling in emptiness as they shrieked the names of patron gods. Several lost their grip and dropped into the water below, to be drowned as the weight of their kit dragged them under. By the bridge’s approach, it seemed battle had broken out as a jumble of wagons formed a barrier, and men trapped behind fought their way past, desperate to get off the bridge. It was a scene from the world’s end, with chaos triumphant and the earth breaking apart to the cries of horns.

  Within the gently lurching reda Auriane fought for balance while Brico clung to her as if to a stout post in a gale. The driver of the ox cart behind them was pitched, wailing, into the waters below. The frame of the reda bowed as it was crushed by the wagons collecting above it. The roadway between the second and third piers hung at an angle steep as the diagonal line a geometer draws across a square. The mule harnessed on the rail side rolled out into space, both forelegs broken; gradually, its agonized struggles pulled its companion-in-harness after—until their combined weight slowly upended the carriage. And there the reda hung, caught on the crossed timbers of the thin, splintering side rail.

  Auriane acted from promptings too swift for thought, wholly inhabited by ghosts of family and tribe. She was upon the cedar trunk like a wildcat; with several savage movements she tore it open, freed her father’s sword from its bindings, then sheathed it in the bronze-bound belt that girded her woolen tunic. It was done simply, naturally as putting on shoes, but another part of her felt as though she had pulled herself onto the back of some celestial horse for a ride into another world. At the last, she drew family, tribe, and fate about her like a cloak.

  Then she got a firm grip around Brico’s waist, and kicked hard at the carriage’s door.

  The bolt held.

  “We must jump, Brico.”

  “No! I can’t! Don’t make me!”

  “We must jump free of it or it will kill us!”

  Where the reda’s side wall met its roof, it split open. They saw a strip of sky. Both women screamed. Again Auriane kicked the door, but it alone seemed secure while the frame of the carriage slowly buckled.

  Then it no longer mattered. The wooden side rail cracked apart.

  Carriage and mules shot down.

  Horribly, impossibly, the heavy reda was airborne. It all happened so cruelly, so swiftly, the carriage might have been pounded down beneath a hammer of the gods. Plummeting mules writhed in air.

  Fright pressed the screams from their throats; Auriane and Brico clutched one another, mute and braced. The cumbersome vehicle slammed into the swift-coursing river as though its waters were hard-packed earth. Auriane’s head struck something ungiving; dense blackness claimed her. While she knew nothing of it, the carriage rocked on the surface for a moment, settled, then drifted swiftly toward the river bottom. The mules, still firmly attached by the harness, were pulled down after.

  The men on the bank saw the river swallow the reda without a gulp; the sprites raised foamy hands and pulled it under. Two more souls were added to the sentient flow.

  The roof of the carriage pressed its passengers deeper and deeper, as though it were a great stone thrusting them into the cold, smoky water. Silt exploded about the carriage as it struck the bottom.

  Brought to consciousness once more by the shocking cold, Auriane whipped about like an eel in a net.

  Who am I where am I—? Memories came like a fast series of blows: the world breaking apart . . . men’s screams . . . herself and Brico, dropping through space. The roar of water still battered her ears—impossible, came the thought, for she was in the river. Locked alive in an underwater sarcophagus. Fright clamped round her like a vise. The Nixes have us, they’ll make us one of their own. Calming herself was difficult as reining in a team of terrified horses, and she succeeded only gradually. Then she began systematically probing about in the frigid darkness, seeking a route of escape.

  Her right hand shot out into open space. Hope vaulted.

  She reached into the blackness and collected Brico, who had not been roused by the icy water. With her arms securely about her maidservant’s waist, Auriane propelled the girl through the place where the reda had broken open.

  The river grabbed them. While Auriane clung tightly to Brico, they tumbled end over end, in a current that was muscular and alive. A host of blurred terrors condensed into one shape: the Nixes. Auriane could see nothing in the murk but she knew they were there, flashing to organized attention like an excited school of fish, following her progress in eager swarms. Pallid hands prickly with scales reached for her, tentatively at first, growing bolder, stroking her face, pulling at her tunic . . . hideous. She and Brico were rolling and sliding toward their gaped maws. She would be mangled and ingested; she would become one of them, a she-fish wriggling on a river bottom in a gray, timeless forever.

  Do I live still or did I slide down into the wet gullet of Hel herself?

  Darkness pressed on her lungs.

  I must be living—ghosts don’t crave air.

  The men above. Once they see I survived the fall, the chase begins.

  Mind and body shrieked for air. But she was determined to stay beneath the surface as long as she could bear it, to put as much distance as possible between herself and the bridge.

  She pushed off from the bottom and began undulating upward, moving toward the dim, distant glow above, following the direction of the sunlight cascading down. She felt she was being absorbed into light as she drifted, lungs ablaze, her ascent slowed by Brico’s inert weight, Baldemar’s sword sheathed at her side. She allowed only her face to break the water, and feasted greedily on air, praying the river’s choppy wavelets would conceal her.

  She had to look, just once, to see what the Fates had wrought.

  Behind her was a sight as frightful as the wreckage of any battlefield. The bridge was broken into two parts; between bristling trestles, a vacant place stared back at her. Some clumsy giant might have slammed a foot down between the second and third piers. The timbered roadway was twisted about as if it were pliable as ribbon; debris and clothing fluttered from it sadly. A vast net was draped from a portion of the bridge like some webbed shroud, having been employed, no doubt, in attempts to rescue the drowning. Small, frantic figures hurried to and fro, carrying the injured, dragging the dead; some threw out lines to recover those still struggling in the water. Piteous cries reached her ears.

  Was this the work of gods or men?

  The current hadn’t bo
rne her as far as she’d thought; if they looked with care, she would be seen. Even as she hesitated, treading water, a dozen and more red-cloaked regular cavalrymen separated from the stunned groups of men collected about the approaches to the bridge and began trotting briskly up both banks. To free their arms they’d rid themselves of their shields; fishermen’s nets were slung across their horses’ withers. Though reason told her their purpose was to recover equipment and supplies borne off in the swift current, still she knew the blank fright of the rabbit before the hound.

  She shifted Brico about so that the young woman floated on her back; only her face broke the waters. Auriane then cradled an arm beneath Brico’s chin and swam vigorously on her side; in this fashion she was able to gently drag the smaller woman behind her. Auriane was almost glad of her panic; it helped to deaden the pounding pain of her multiple wounds.

  Brico . . . dear Brico . . . why have you not yet been roused? Awaken now please . . . I know you can . . . I don’t want to be alone.

  She was a blind worm wriggling along, struggling to keep a companion afloat. She allowed herself to think only of the menace on the banks; if she thought of the Nixes below, terror would take her mind. The spirit of this river was mischievous, boisterous, and young—it would not do to show fear to it.

  The river was a highway to freedom, or a grave.

  Auriane wrenched herself around, once, to get a better grip on Brico—and the iron taste of blood filled her mouth. It collected about Brico in a doleful cloud. Auriane realized, then, that there was far too much of it. A long shudder passed through her, and she gave a small cry. Brico’s chest had been nearly crushed, probably upon impact.

  Auriane accepted, then, that her beloved maidservant and good companion was dead. Brico’s goddess Sirona had taken her life swiftly and mercifully. Horror and grief came up in sharp fits and starts, but she vigorously pushed them off—there was no time.