The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  Appointments with tribal leaders were hardly based on punctuality, yet the Romans' counterparts were late, and then hours overdue. In what had become a blizzard, with mounting impatience, the four officers waited in the counter-fortress. "They don't like entering Roman fortifications," Decimus sneered. "I bet they're out there freezing their rears, expecting us to go meet them in the open. They've done it before. What do you think?"

  Aelius spoke only because his colleague asked him directly. "Either that, or they decided against the parley." Facing Decimus after their last meeting he felt a sort of sad repulsion, for the way the Roman covered his insane scheme with self-assured arrogance. "There could be an attack," he added deliberately, looking him in the eye.

  Decimus's sneer tightened into a grimace. "I think they're waiting for us to make the first move."

  Close to noon, a trooper was sent out to reconnoiter. The woods around the burgus had been cleared, but weeklong forests lay just beyond. So called because of the days needed to cross it, the woodland ran nearly uninterrupted from here to regions unexplored, cracked by ledges and ravines, threaded by animal trails that formed the only clues to the maze.

  Aelius went to the upper floor to watch the trooper and his mount lose their contours in the spinning wall of snow. Alone in the small room, where the dazzling whiteness of the outside filtered through slit windows, the wait was less oppressive. Eventually, he thought it was as good a time as any to take Anubina's letter out of its cylindrical envelope and unroll it. His eyes met her firm, capable hand, the small, punctilious marks of a woman who takes pride in having learned to write.

  To Commander Aelius Spartianus from Anubina, written with the help ofThermuthis to put it into better language.

  Dear Aelius, I hope this finds you in good health and happy. I am well and so is Thaesis, whose greatest friend is presently the dog you left her in October. Sirius is not a very clever animal, hut well-behaved and affectionate. Thermuthis says husbands should be that way. ..

  The letter went on for another paragraph with the usual update on people and things, but it was the lines below that most acutely caught Aelius's attention.

  .. . for the time we lived together, once a month while you were away, at the brothel — not Thermuthis s, the establishment oflsidora the Alexandrian (Aelius could see Thermuthis suggesting that they add the explanation, to protect herself)—J lay with a man other than yourself Not a Roman, not a soldier, not anyone you know: every time a different man, as long as he was a farmer or a potter's helper or a fisherman. Not to betray you, but because I wanted to be sure that if I became pregnant, it could not be said the child was yours. You need no such complications, and neither do 1.1 was a soldier's daughter: I will not have my daughter fathered by a soldier, albeit an important one like yourself.

  Thaesis is too dark, too plain to be yours. Tall, yes, but children grow taller these days. There are half a dozen men in Anti-noopolis she resembles. She will go into business with me in three years, and become able to make a living on her own so that she may choose her man freely. Between now and then, she will go to school and learn not only her letters but how to count, and so on. Ladies who are such because of their husbands or fathers are no freer than their impoverished counterparts.

  Thus far I have written with Thermuthis s help. Now I add these words in my own voice: May the gods Serapis and Zeus Ammon, Aphrodite-Hathor, and especially our Blessed Lady, Isis, watch over you and keep you. When I will choose a husband I will make sure to ask for your approval. When my sons are born, I will send you news. Please do the same when you marry, and when your children are born.

  Written by her hand in Thermuthis's chambers at Anti-noopolis, the second day of January, eighteenth day ofMechir.

  The hiss of the wind through the window struck him with a handful of snow, as if someone had blown air and ice through a reed. Aelius stood motionless in the cold blast when one of his colleagues stuck his head in the door. "Curius Decimus wants you to go out with him. The trooper reported that the barbarians halted in a small clearing a mile into the woods; they seem skittish, and to be be waiting ... Are you all right?"

  "I'm all right."

  Below, Decimus had worn his cape again. Lifting the hood over his head, he said, "They don't trust us. We have to meet them where they are, or not at all. Since you speak the language, Spartianus, let's go and see if we can convince them to follow us back here."

  Aelius buckled his belt in silence, adjusting the strap across his chest, where it met the scabbard on his left side. The long cavalry sword, ivory- and steel-hilted, fell impeccably in line with his armpit. The precision of his gestures concealed the confused grief he felt for Anubina's words, whose polite finality he would mercifully have to contemplate at some other time.

  The snow fell more heavily in the courtyard, more perpendicularly now that the wind was dying down. Once out of the small gate in the perimeter wall, the officers followed the trooper's fast-filling tracks toward the dark confine of the woods, and into them. The terrain rose slightly, stony under the snow; the firs created a sudden dusk around them. They'd come without speaking more than two-thirds of the way when Decimus told Aelius, as if there weren't more immediate matters at hand, "I fear I may have taken the wrong tack with you the other night." His voice was calm, engaging, without the slightest anxiety in it. Yet his rings and luxurious harness were probably not much different from those worn by his ancestor as he rode to Teutoburg Forest.

  Aelius, on the other hand, felt a sting of tenseness, just below alarm. He blamed the thought of Teutoburg and his colleague's treacherous speech for it, not anything threatening them from the woods.

  "We are practical men, after all," Decimus went on, "even if we were taught by philosophers. I daresay especially if we were taught by philosophers, Spartianus, since for all their brains they seem unable to make a decent living. You will have your benefit from it, if you join us. We are rich. Say the word, and any one of us can give you an estate in Sicily or North Africa, or here in your Pannonian backyard."

  "I will see you in Hades first, Decimus."

  "Entirely possible." Decimus sniffed the icy air. Under the trees, the snowfall broke into a small sprinkle. He seemed amused by Aelius's reaction. "Is that your final word? Well, that's that, then. I am a man of the world, I can take rejection. We are still colleagues, with a parley ahead of us and a war to fight."

  "You don't understand. I am turning you in."

  "Ha! And go down with us, along with your family? Think about it."

  "I am turning you and yours in."

  A mile into the woods, the trooper's tracks had filled completely. The place looked untrodden, primeval. Yet a whiter swatch in the white-and-black of the snowy firs, like daylight awaiting, told them the clearing lay just ahead. Slowly, the officers led their mounts to the edge of the open space, where snow fell thick and even. No one in sight, no sounds. The higher ground at the other side of the clearing was where the barbarians had reportedly stood on horseback. To the left, where the firs grew shaggier and less crowded, a snow-bearing upward draft caught Aelius's attention. A ridge or a drop-off must delimit that side. Silence was absolute but for the low squeak of harness when the mounts moved in place. Excessive, expectant silence. Prudence called them to turn back, regain the burgus, and call it a day.

  Unpredictably Decimus spurred his horse, causing snow to fly high above its fetlocks. The motion was disorderly for an experienced soldier, which was what Aelius was thinking when he caught sight of enemy riders surging from behind the trees, on their right flank; in seconds, all became fretfully immediate, automatic, grasping and unsheathing the sword and seeking the open to maneuver and fight back, no matter how against hope. In seconds, Aelius perceived no fear on Decimus's part: only cold, gleeful opportunism as he jerked his horse's head by a firm pull of the reins, turned it around in a dazzle of spray, and was gone.

  Surrounded in the middle of the clearing, Aelius felt incredibly small, rapid thoughts pop
through him: Everything his mind had elaborated until a moment ago had dissolved, not to speak of the complex mountain of reasoning and anxieties of an hour ago; sand running out of a bag, leaving nothing behind. He'd reverted to a brutally quick throng of tiny flashes that were less than thoughts: Quadians or God knows what — no, not Quadians. They carry Roman cavalry lances. There's no holding them hack with a sword, fm as good as dead. His life had raced across thirty years to end here. In his anger, he still governed his excited mount, slashed at the closest lance, knocked it off the enemy's hand but could not guard the prod of another spear against his left side; the riveted mail rings snapped only in a small area, enough for the iron point to pass through the breach. He did not feel the pain, only the blow; with an expert pull-and-give of the reins, he brought his mount into a half-turn. Barely avoiding the leaf-shaped lance heads converging on him, Aelius sought a space in the deadly circle that could allow a desperate leap to escape, finding none but spurring nonetheless, at random, because gutting himself against the enemy was better than waiting to be gutted.

  Right and left, the slender blades flashed by, glanced off the saddle horns; his mount rammed the wide-eyed, snorting barbarian horses, shorter and shaggier; the counterblow on his right arm alone told him he'd struck hard wood with his blade. Lances become an encumbrance in a crowd. He flew past the long-haired men wheeling around to chase him and headed left.

  The ridge was on that side. Snow fell in sheets against the scraggy line of firs; the void behind them created upward drafts and white whirls. Aelius calculated a narrow crevice, a seam in the land that would launch him across it; he incited his mount to stretch for the jump. Snow and rocks flew; the firs went by. His horse saw the ridge yawn and stopped cold at its edge.

  Being thrown from the saddle was not the hard part. The hard part was falling badly. The ridge was a deep ravine of exposed rocks; snow boiled upward from its bottom like smoke in a cauldron. Into that cauldron Aelius's sword went capering, and Aelius followed headlong onto the rocks. In the wink of an eye the plunge broke against stone. Black, dismembering pain tore him from consciousness, sucked him into a deeper hole where he went with all that he was, or had been.

  Snow stanched the bleeding. It deadened pain. Still, Aelius fell on his knees twice before knowing he was unable to stand, so he lay looking up at the wraiths of snow turning in the air above him, without falling. The ravine was much deeper than it appeared from above. Its edge, toothed with craggy rock his own fall had exposed, seemed a part of the sky. His left shoulder was dislocated, or broken; if he moved, the danger was of blacking out again. In his side was a duller pain where the lance had broken through mail. Thinking wearied him; he limited himself to an awareness that the hostiles were not looking down from above, and it was getting to be afternoon.

  When he came to again, evening was near. Aelius had no recollection of having crawled to a protected place at the foot of the ridge, with the confused intent to rest and then seek the low land in hopes of reaching the Danube. He packed snow against the wound in his side, too weak to cover the blood tracks around him, which wolves and bears would smell from the distant dark.

  14 February, Wednesday, second day of the Feast of the Dead

  No sounds anywhere near. Far into the woods, now and then the rumbling call of male deer like men throwing up. Then, sudden, the swish of birds rising up like the unrolling of a paper roll. From the trailing branches, excess snow fell with soft collapsing thuds. The sky beyond— in the intricacy of branches that seemed black from here—was between blue and gold, sparkling, speckled. Aelius did not know how long ago he'd left the ravine, but since dawn he'd lost his way.

  Overnight snow had fallen on him, the kind of snow that becomes crusty and falls away in crinkly scabs when one shakes it off. Among the trees, he could see the shimmering whiteness of the flat land beyond the woods, an incandescent whiteness set off by the dark trunks and dusky trailing branches. No sign of the river, and he was probably heading west.

  Not feeling much pain worried him. It was not a good sign. He felt lucid, yet on some nights after the exhaustion of a battle or a long march, he'd dreamed with the clarity of a hallucination. Not feeling pain could mean that he was lucidly dreaming this, or something else. In winter, men had been found dead who seemed not to have noticed the coming of death, as if they were sleeping. Others had to have their limbs amputated, arms and legs where no feelings, much less pain, were felt.

  When he knelt to stand up, however, pain shot through him like a second wounding. Aelius fell heavily, striking rock under the snow and bruising his face. But pain had the merit of telling him he was awake and alert and blood still flowed through every part of him. If he could only glimpse a view of the river, detect a sign of Roman presence, the edge of a military road, an abandoned watchtower, a retaining wall— the rest would come by deduction. He had a clear idea of the direction he had to avoid: north. But east, west, south: He wasn't sure about those. The border was indented, irregular; clearings in the forest mimicked the open land on the Danube banks and jumbled one's sense of direction. Seeking a high point would help, although it'd likely mean walking away from the river.

  Tracks of foxes, young wolves, and wild dogs criss-crossed this and that snowy space between trees. Cold, need to eat, bleeding: no time for those. Aelius walked—stumbled, in fact, crawling at times when pain and weakness made him unable to stand, his left arm useless— toward the direction where the white incandescence signaled the opening at the edge of the forest. The deceptive quality of distances in winter, in the woodland, was familiar to him. He expected to have to go much farther than it seemed. The clearing seemed to withdraw from him, to shift to the left, to become lost behind dark firs. The firs trailed wide like skirts or capes born of the snow, as if tall women in cloaks went ahead of him. He remembered the tales of the Pannonian Mothers, the goddesses who appear in threes, or multiply before the eyes of those who are about to die, a legion of tall women with invisible faces because they are always walking ahead of you. His rational mind told him that visions of men losing their senses were the origin of such tales, but it was little consolation.

  By and by he did reach the edge of the woods. The intact cover of snow, now that the clouds broke up and swatches of clear sky appeared, was more than blinding: like a white, silent conflagration that made him shield his eyes with his right arm. A valley stretched from left to right, west to east more or less. The land climbed a little beyond the clearing. More woods crowded on the crest; to the right, the woods on the low land and the higher land merged, or seemed to do so. Perhaps there was a pass on that side, but no telling whether the thickness of the forest would allow a passage. Anything—ravine, weeklong forest, impassable river, the foot of high mountains—could be to the east. Even the great river, the border with Rome.

  To Aelius's left, an arm of the forest he had just come through crowded on the clearing like an army that, having chased him, stood still waiting for him to die. Everywhere the woods: How many hours' worth, or days' worth, he couldn't judge. Touching his face to feel the growth of his beard and reckon the hours elapsed since the ambush would not help much, either. Aelius was one of those blond men with glabrous faces; hair grew on his lips and chin thickly but slowly.

  As long as the weather held, there was a chance of making it back. He had flint with him; if he could find dry tinder to start a fire, the chances of surviving until he could cross the border grew. If not, determination would avail him nothing. Decimus, Agnus, Casta, Anu-bina, his mother: they would remain names to denounce, or save, or love; his duty was like a red ribbon that might pull him back, if he could only find it.

  In the clearing, the snow was more than knee-deep. Crossing it was difficult in the best of conditions. In his state, it could take long enough for the sky to cloud over again and start snowing, by which time he'd have no escape. Besides, the clearing led north. The woods were safer; dying in the woods would be less awful than in the unbroken whiteness.


  Aelius went back. He knelt and dug with the stiff right hand near the fallen trunk of a tree, seeking dry sticks or bark, until he realized all was frigid or wet, and there would be no fire-making.

  Images came and went. One moment it was the copper jar in Anu-bina's house, reflecting the African sun; another, it was a red cloak trailing, trailing, a red cape like the one he'd given the beggar at Silver Gate, or the pale wrists Casta stretched to him from the shade, to be taken in. A part of him was perfectly aware of lying in the snow, of the extremity of his situation. The other was free to move about and be elsewhere; he could see his mother lifting golden coins from the earth, smell the flowers in Egyptian gardens, hear the splash of crocodiles' tails in the Nile. The wind blew in the firs, and should another night find him outdoors, it'd be his last. He thought he saw the hut at the brickyard where Lupus had died, a long line of men and women coming to see the miracle man, women who stayed behind and cajoled him, gave him gifts, asked him to tell of his resurrection. They had red ribbons in their hands, like the red ribbon Helena had once passed between her thighs to seduce him. He saw Judge Marcellus in his bloody bath, like Agamemnon slain by his wife; Marcellus had Constantine's looks, and his wife had Castas face. His Divinity stood in a red cloak, or else it was the beggar who'd predicted him good fortune on the bridge. But hadn't he passed by the crossroads? His father's soul had attached itself to him, and wanted grandsons in exchange for his life. Casta danced like the girls at Decimus's party, and Lupus the brick-maker danced with her. The red cloak came and went, trailing like blood in the snow. At the brickyard, a woman in the bivouac glimpsed him and covered her head. She, too, had Castas face. The red cloak spread like fire; beneath it, the beggar's bare feet had turned into boots.

  A foot turned him over.

  The barbarians face was upon him. The barbarian's eyes, distant and light gray, were all malice and glee.