Fire and Sacrifice

by Victoria Collins

  I couldn’t take in the details of the kitchen but I knew I loved it. This kitchen was outdoors and open to the sacred square, where I could cook with the sun and the stars over my shoulders and see and be seen. This was no dark little room in the back of the house. I realised later, too, that this one was even built so my hearth fire could be seen from the street – the hearth fire of the house of Sacred Hearth, a holy of holies, for me to run.

  The curvy one tore a chunk of bread and wiped the bottom of a pan with it. ‘We feel that the goddess brought you to us. That there’s something you’re to help us with.’ She smiled encouragingly at me through a mouthful of bread, then at Aemilia. ‘My name’s Pompeia.’

  Aemilia looked at me and for a moment we were of the same mind; she and I had both been swept into something everyone else had already decided on. ‘If you wish to stay a while, perhaps you can help me work out what the goddess wants of us?’

  I nodded. Of course. For ever, for whatever and whenever you need.

  ‘Please’, I said. I bowed again, for want of something bigger than my silly scratchy ‘please’, which could never be enough. It was also a reason to look at the floor and disguise this wild, untidy, silly joy.

  ‘One last thing, darlin’.’ Urgulania closed my palm over a pile of nuts. ‘Change!’

  Flavia presented me with a brand new woollen tunic with long sleeves. I held it up and it fell all the way to my ankles. I’d never had full-length clothes for winter before. And there was a chick-yellow wrap for my shoulders. No more slave brown. I wanted to cry my thanks so they could see how big it was, but that would be ugly so I held it in.

  You had these for me?

  They read my look. ‘Urgulania is an Etruscan haruspex,’ said Pompeia, with a cocked brow. ‘She tends to know what’s coming.’

  WATER

  Pompeia

  October 114 BC

  I wanted to see what the river would pull from her. Aemilia had never done a thing so scandalous as invoke her powers to save that girl. Now it was before her and I sensed she still didn’t know exactly why she’d done it.

  ‘This is new’, I said, knowing she’d know I meant saving Secunda.

  ‘No one should have their life decided by another.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And we’re talking about Secunda?’

  ‘Of course.’ She dipped her toe in the water.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Urgulania wanted the river for the girl because she was so full of fire. She’d had a big few days. A woman of fire needs water to balance her – the goddess included – lest her own fiery spirit get the better of her in its want to flare and rage.

  But for Aemilia I wanted only the river’s gentle tug.

  There was an untouched stretch of river bank between the old cattle market and the new river port we called the Emporium. There the water was allowed to mingle into the grasses and sit on overhanging leaves so its spirit was unbound, a big old rumbling mass like the soul of a mountain.

  I’d wrap that scrumptious old river into a big hug if I could. People think I am fat but it is mostly my waters, settled about my hips where I carry the feelings of those around me like I would carry a child. I am an empath. I can’t help it. Like water, I mould to what’s around me – a riverbank, a cup, a man’s aching heart, a child’s unbridled joy – and I absorb.

  In the temple I have stood for hours with my hand on the door to the sacred store, just feeling the throb of ancient tragedies of Troy and Aenaes and the seeds of Rome. (We don’t get to see inside the store; it’s never opened, except rumour has it the head priestess will be allowed a look before her death. Its contents were secret then and will remain secret forever, but the story is there are statues and weapons that Aeneas brought when he escaped Troy and came to Italy and from whence the story of Romulus and Remus was seeded. I don’t need to see it to know that’s true – I feel it every time I go to it. It’s the most delicious thing!)

  I know I’m meant to be a priestess of fire but this was chosen for me by the gods, before the priesthood was chosen for me by men. Or perhaps the gods merely tapped men’s hands, so I could balance out my sisters. It was most definitely my role for Aemilia, to feel on her behalf the things she could not name.

  Yes, she balances me, too. She was a cool salve to me when I came into the temple. Mother was devastated to let me go (Father was happy to be rid of the challenge of marrying me off) and cried for a week before they sent me, which didn’t help me at all, and cried the whole visit whenever she came to see me so that soon my biggest challenge was not my new life in the temple but dealing with my mother’s grief. I am quite sure Terentia asked Mother to stop coming.

  But Aemilia was a cool and gentle breeze, a light caress and onto other things. Sometimes I think she simply would not let herself feel. Wouldn’t break from duty. Wouldn’t risk being untidy; hadn’t been in so long she didn’t know how anymore.

  But she had always been more alive outside of the stone walls of the temple square. She came to us a freckled, suntanned girl who rode horses and chased her brothers, and now at the river after almost thirty years she reached up to touch branches overhead, picked up stones and pegged an acorn at Tristan’s head.

  It was my hope that her depths would recognise kin in the depths of the river, find themselves coaxed out by the current, and she would remember what was down there.

  ‘You need to listen to your own heart, Aemilia, not everyone else’s,’ I said, with our toes in the water and Secunda away talking with Tristan.

  ‘Not even yours?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re my sister. My heart needs only for yours to be happy.’ A bit sickly sweet, but there you go. Mostly the truth.

  ‘I don’t know, there are so many things.’ She dragged her toe through the ripples.

  Growl. Only two months to go.

  EARTH

  Fragments

  Robin Lorsch Wildfang, Rome’s Vestal Virgins: A study of Rome’s Vestal priestesses in the late Republic and early Empire, Routledge, London, 2006, p. 11–13.

  As numerous ancient sculptures and reliefs demonstrate, the Vestals wore their hair in a special hairstyle. While there are many artistic renderings of this hairstyle, only one ancient literary source refers directly to it, Festus, who notes that both Vestals and brides on their wedding day wore their hair in a style he calls the sex crines* . . .

  The bride put aside her hairstyle as soon as the rites that ensured her transfer to her new family were complete. The Vestal, however, retained hers as long as she was a member of the priesthood, visibly demonstrating her peculiar liminal state and perhaps gaining protection from its existence.

  It seems probable then that Vestals and brides employed the same hairstyle because they were both pure and occupied a liminal position in relation to the traditional Roman family structure . . .

  Along with the distinct hairstyle, the Vestals seem to have had some special form of dress . . . The various sculptures of senior Vestal Virgins found within the atrium Vestae seem to bear this out, as all are portrayed dressed in a stola with the vittae and suffibulum on their heads. At least some of these garments were also demonstrably visual signs of the Vestals’ purity and meant to serve as visual reminders to ordinary Romans of this purity.

  * A hairstyle of six tight braids wrapped round the head.

  FIRE

  Secunda

  October 114 BC

  There were men at the river. Men on barges hauling crates and sacks and urns. Men leading bullock teams which we had to get out the way for, dragging the barges from along the bank. Men looking busy doing very little, the men I call Togas, noblemen, and the businessmen who own the things in the crates and sacks and urns, and the bargemen to boot. I have served many of these men at the master’s house, seen them get ruddy and floppy with wine and pretend to still talk sense, like they pretended their bullocks didn’t drop dung as they passed us.

  They watched us, and we ignored them.

  I discovered quickly that
people fell silent or scrambled backward when Aemilia passed. Goats were yanked back to hips, children stilled with a strong grip on the shoulder. Men bowed. Women bowed just enough to keep their eyes on her, taking in every detail for later report. I like to think even the birds sacrificed their song to her until she passed.

  She was not the most beautiful of priestesses, if beauty is a measure of the face. That would go to Marcia, or Licinia, depending on the taste. Or Terentia, some years ago. But Aemilia is the most beautiful if beauty is power, the sweet yet regal stuff on the inside that moulds the face, the stance, the walk into things of light.

  The vanilla in the milk that you cannot see but that changes the whole thing.

  At the river, we left the carriages and walked along the green bank to where we could dip our toes, and throw stones into the water. I’d have sworn that I could see an aura of white light around the priestesses as they came to life in that place, but I know that sounds like I’m a silly little girl in love.

  Aemilia and Pompeia walked with me between them, and we drank the cool water in our cupped hands, side by side. Me, the ugly brown stalk attached to the pretty fruit. This time not discarded.

  Aemilia named the birds and trees for me as if each one was a gift. I didn’t take the names in. I wasn’t really listening to the words, only to her voice.

  Tristan pointed out the new port upriver where the barges were headed. And behind it the massive warehouses of the Porticus Aemelia. Her family built that, he said, and Basilica Aemilia, in the forum, too. They were very rich. She was virtually a princess.

  Tristan’s little sister, Helvi, skipped round us as we walked, singing nonsense songs. I noted the Gaulish name that even the priestesses honoured despite her being a slave. I guess she was around seven, too tall for herself, like Tristan, with white-blond hair and big cornflower-blue eyes. She reminds me, still, of the moon in the morning sky.

  Tristan and his father, Cor, brought us in carriages, and Helvi stared at me the whole way, clutching Pompeia’s skirts.

  I like that kids stare.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ she asked me, simple as that.

  ‘She is touched by Vesta,’ reproached Pompeia.

  ‘I fell in the fire,’ I said.

  Cor had helped me down from the carriage in exactly the same way as he did the priestesses: standing ready to catch, with a hand out for me if I wanted, but respectfully not touching.

  I liked him already. He was a big, raspberry-faced Gaul. Widowed, I presumed, for Helvi had nowhere to be but with us. Tall as Tristan but thick-set and not so pretty. The kind of man a household of women needs to have about. He stayed at the carriages, ever ready to serve.

  It was too long ago to remember if there really was a breeze but it was the kind of alive day that ought to have had one. The kind of day that has droplets of sun across the tops of everything and you notice, as if you never have before, the very tips of the grasses and the finest strings of spiderweb between them, and the smallest wildflowers snuggled in the grass.

  It’s silly, but the only word I can think of is big. I felt big that day. Not in the way of monsters but the way a fire is bigger than just the flames you can see but there’s a bigger body of warmth and light that reaches to the world around it.

  ‘You realise you are the talk of Rome,’ Tristan grinned sideways at me. We sat watching while Pompeia took Aemilia to the water for something too private for us. I’d never been allowed to just sit like that, in a pretty place. It was odd to not be doing something with myself.

  ‘Aemilia, I’m sure, not me.’

  ‘Both! We live in the forum of Rome!’ He threw out his arms. ‘Everything about everything to do with half the world – and much that isn’t – is discussed there at great length. Most especially the sort of sensation of a Vestal Virgin saving a prisoner on their way to execution. Legends are born of such things! Peducaeus has been most vocal about his gift to the Temple of Vesta.’ His smile told me what he really thought of that. ‘Oh yes, he is most proud to be able to say the Vestals consider his slave to be chosen by the goddess . . . He credits himself with your upbringing, of course: a slave who tends the hearth fire, what could be more fitting, and he even kept you a v –’. He blushed and cleared his throat. ‘Well, clearly the whole thing was fated!’

  I realised that Tristan was quite exquisite. Handsome but a bit wrong at the same time, in a way that makes it hard to look away. He was all dangly limbs (too scrawny to look like they were capable of lifting me the way he had) and long stringy hair, but his face was finely featured and square and he had a pretty smile, with lips in perfect rosy peaks and rounds.

  ‘What do others say?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing to me, obviously, but they take so little notice of a slave boy they tend to speak freely around me.’ He smiled sideways. ‘You are the first, it seems. I mean, everyone knows it’s within the Vestals’ powers but I haven’t heard anyone who’s ever known it to have been invoked. They’d eat their togas to know why.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He flicked his eyes toward Aemilia, who was coming to towards us. ‘Perhaps now is your time to ask,’ he whispered encouragingly, and stood to remove himself.

  Aemilia sat beside me on the grass!

  ‘Tristan showed me the Portus,’ I said, trying to sound like I had at least some knowledge.

  ‘Ah! My extravagant family,’ she said, tucking her feet under her and plucking a wildflower.

  I was trying so hard to not wither beside her.

  ‘How did you become a priestess?’ I had to push my voice to make it work and it came out too strong, too sharp. I flinched from myself. ‘I mean, with all that to inherit, why are you a Vestal?’

  She shrugged, bemused. ‘I was a child. It was chosen for me, really.’ She turned to look at me – really look at me – like maybe there was an answer written in my scars. ‘Perhaps this is a more powerful position.’ She saved me from my squirming with a conspiratorial smile. Gods, I loved that smile. She glanced up at a couple of the Togas coming towards us. ‘Perhaps to deny a husband all that inheritance! Why are you here?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you asked.’

  ‘But why did you come back?’

  ‘To be somebody.’ The words came out without me even thinking them.

  That look flashed across her face again but we were interrupted by the Togas. Aemilia rushed to her feet and brushed herself down.

  ‘Your Sacredness,’ they bowed to Aemilia. To Pompeia and the others, who had turned to be greeted, they said, ‘Most honourable priestesses.’ Then they saw me. One even cocked his head like a confused dog.

  With the worst possible timing, another three serious-looking men approached from the other way, and the group before us couldn’t leave fast enough, rushing to converge with the newcomers, barely bothering to hide their pointing and nodding, speaking deliberately loud enough to be heard.

  ‘Shocking.’

  ‘Appalling.’

  ‘The slave girl?’

  ‘The one who –?

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘With them in public?’

  ‘Appalling disregard. Has Dalmaticus no control?’

  I flashed a panicked look at Aemilia. She was so good at masking herself but she could not hide a thing that looked like me.

  Aemilia and Pompeia pulled me between them and, coming to some silent agreement, walked me toward the men with their hands on my back and my scars triumphantly in the sun.

  Licinia and Flavia fell in behind.

  ‘Dear gentlemen,’ Aemilia said, all ease. ‘I see our recent events have piqued your concerns.’ She pressed her palm to my shoulder. ‘Let us put you at ease: this is Secunda, come into our employ in the house. As you can see, she is touched by Vesta and as such we consider her a gift from the goddess.’

  I was taller than most of them men and they clearly struggled with having to look up at me. They got bravely to the edge of my scars and ended up studying their robes an
d their feet.

  Aemilia went on, sharper, ‘I hope we have served our great Rome well enough that our ability to hear the goddess continues to be trusted.’

  ‘Dear Aemilia, we are simply concerned that’ – the man waved in my direction, searching for a word for me – ‘such a person . . . in the sacred arena . . .’

  ‘Such a person is as close to the hearth fire as any, and is deemed by the Vestals to be touched. You have your own slaves tending your hearth in your own home, do you not, sir? And your own hearth, like all others, is Vesta manifest, is it not?’

  The man clenched almost imperceptibly on a rebuke. ‘You are very wise, Your Sacredness,’ he bowed, and Aemilia led our group away.

  Pompeia pulled us toward the carriage. ‘We best get back to Terentia before that does!’

  EARTH

  Fragments

  Russell T. Scott (ed.). 2009, Excavations in the Area Sacra of Vesta (1987-1996), pp. 87–89, 103, 111.

  THE POTTERY, catalogues A–K

  A42. Aryballos; single body fragment. NR (not restored). Etrusco-Corinthian. Decorated with a pattern of horizontal brown triangular dots and stripes 5 YR 4/2; fabric yellow 10 YR 8/3–4.

  A43. Fragment of a small Attic black-figure cup preserving the lower edge of wing, lower body, and beginning of a spreading tail of a bird in flight to right. NR (not restored).

  C6. Pan; fragment of flat-bottomed pan with curving wall. Exterior fire-blackened; interior orange-brown 2.5 YR 5/6–8. Bottom diam. 0.26m.

  C11. Cooking pot; fragment with out-turned rim. Exterior smoke-blackened rim to shoulder, interior on top of rim. Clay orange-tan 2.5 YR 6/6. Rim diam. 0.17m.

  G8. Skillet; leg fragment. Coarse ware. Republican. Fabric brown 10 YR 4/3. Traces of black slip.

  G3. Mortar; rim and wall fragment with traces of sandy mortar on interior surface . . . (6th–1st century BC.)