Fire and Sacrifice

by Victoria Collins

  . . . When Macedonicus died he was likely succeeded in the college of augurs by his nephew, the future Numidicus* and the Metelli were again in the spotlight. Others have posited various dates for the apex of Metellan power, but an attractive option is offered in the year of Macedonicus’ death. If the tenure of magisterial offices and other positions was any indication of power, then the Metelli practically had a strangle-hold on the political scene in this year. Diadematus was censor, M. Metellus was consul, Delmaticus was pontifex maximus by the close of the year, Numidicus had replaced his uncle as an augur, and Caprarius was running for the consulship. However, the family may have contented themselves with the symbols and trappings of power, which rested on unsure foundations that quickly began to crumble.

  * Dalmaticus’s brother Quintus.

  FIRE

  Secunda

  October 114 BC

  Had my first public appearance with the Vestals not come at the same event that was to be the beginning of the chaos, I may have had less to account for in the end.

  Typically I did not just be there in a way that I might never have existed, as was Terentia’s preference, but I established myself firmly and proudly as the monster at the Vestals’ gate.

  It was Aemilia’s family that built the Emporium – one or the other of her father or grandfather. It only made it more magical and perfect to me that this amazing place was of her. It was a wondrous, huge place of a mass stone platform above the river as high as a ship’s deck and covered in people. Tristan was fairly alight with it all and we explored together the little stairwells that led down to the water’s edge or the bank at low tide, where great lions’ heads with rings in their noses were carved into the wall for tying the boats. There were pulleys and hoists and ramps, and a long row of arched doorways into storerooms. There was heaving and creaking and shouting all the way along. Crewmen scurried around the disembarking solders trying to offload as much as they could before dark. There were crates and amphorae and sacks and chests. Then the soldiers filing onto the dock, some carrying wounded and sick on stretchers, some limping, some fairly running off the plank into family arms. There was an overwhelming smell of men; of wetness and earth and sweat, but also that manly smell of doing, of bodies thrown into contest and work. Their bare thighs red from exposure and exercise, their faces sunburned and hands streaked with dirt and blood gone unnoticed.

  My first thought was that Aemilia was too immaculate and clean for all this. But she is Aemilia. She was all ease and confidence, smiling at every one of them as though he were the brother she’d grown up sparring with. They loved her in a different way to the other priestesses. They loved Aemilia because she was more; everything. An untouchable beauty at the same time as an easy, natural, freckled thing who made them feel safe and worthy even in all their stink and bruising. Aemilia knew how to be what they needed of her.

  The woman in yellow screeched past us again, calling names: ‘Papa! Paullus! Marcus!’ She watched the commander disembark the last ship. She waited there, wobbling on her feet, and then slowly cross the plank to search the ship. ‘Marcus?’

  That day at the river dock was the day I truly first met Rome.

  Until then my world was the master’s house, or rather his kitchen and the back of the doors to rooms where I was not allowed. For me Rome, then, was the posturing self-importance of low-level politicians and their guests.

  At the dock I realised Rome was a woman waiting for her lover to return from war. She was a delicate balance of the loss and the hope, ever threatening to tilt either way. She was the anxiety of waiting and the labour required to quell it, and survive. She was a perpetual state of betweenness – between events that could be devastating or triumphant. I realised it was she and her perpetual wait whom the Vestal’s perpetual fire was for. It was we who kept the home fires burning to comfort her, and to give her something for her lover if he returned. It was our gift to her and her gift to him. Without the home fire and its promises he fought for nothing and his absence could have no forgiveness.

  The women knew already of the defeat. They knew not all the men were coming home and they had been waiting to know who, of course. By the time the boats arrived it was late afternoon and they had had another whole day to fret.

  It was a day of ghosts, and not just the dead but the tired, worn men who got off the boat and the hungry, desperate women who waited for them.

  ‘Get me back to the farmhouse,’ I heard one man say as though he never wished to leave it again.

  Marcia was already busying herself with clearing away, avoiding any more interaction, and I was helping with the brazier – carefully transferring hot coals into an earthen pot for transport rather than create the spectacle of putting out the sacred fire – when a scream rang out beside us.

  The young widow stood in front of Aemilia and screamed at her with every part of her being – ‘Marcus!’ – as though the name meant everything.

  There was nothing Aemilia could do. Around us I could feel people stopping to stare. Sound stopped.

  ‘Marcus!’

  The defeated woman slumped to Aemilia’s feet, groping for her hands as she went down.

  There was a collective gasp around us.

  You don’t touch a Vestal.

  Aemilia stood transfixed by the woman hanging off her.

  I jumped in but Aemilia stopped me with a gesture of her free hand. She was right, I would be too rough, and the look of me would be more than the poor woman could bear.

  The requirement to either touch a Vestal or meet with the woman’s pain prevented anyone else around us from moving to help. Pompeia and Marcia were stupefied.

  The woman sensed her utter solitude and sobbed. ‘The corn’s rotting,’ she said.

  Dalmaticus surveyed the scene intently but let Aemilia handle herself.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said, apparently to everyone and the woman at once. She knelt down, letting the woman continue to grip her hand, and kissed her forehead as she sobbed.

  Just as the crowd fell in love with the scene before them, the young woman pulled back, her fingers biting into Aemilia’s hand making white rings in the skin.

  ‘They believed in you! Papa and then Paullus and Marcus.’ The words swiped at Aemilia and across to Dalmaticus and the other priestesses. ‘I came,’ she said, turning again on Aemilia. ‘In the spring. I came and you broke the sacred bread over me.’ She shook Aemilia’s hand with every syllable. ‘Where were you when they needed you?’

  The woman grew stronger with every question, becoming the protectress of her men and rising in the only task she had left that she cared about. I knew that anger. I charged between her and my Aemilia, grabbed the offending hand and wrenched it free of the priestess. I wished so much to be as gentle as Aemilia but it had gone too far.

  Another woman around the same age had escaped the arms of her husband and come to her friend. She gathered her off the ground and bundled her away.

  A little wail escaped the widow, into her friend’s chest. ‘I forgot to turn the cheeses.’

  ‘I am so sorry for her loss,’ Aemilia offered.

  ‘What would you know?’ the friend said, leading her resigned friend away.

  A cry broke the shocked silence not a moment later.

  ‘The priestess is bleeding!’

  Aemilia’s hand went straight to a swell of blood on her wrist but there was no hiding the awful red finger smears down her crisp white tunic.

  Somewhere in the melee the widow had drawn blood, had held on too tight, dug in nails or caught a bracelet. Whatever the case she had done it and there were witnesses and too much blood to ignore, and it was punishable by death to draw the blood of a Vestal Virgin. Their bodies cannot be desecrated in any way. Ever.

  ‘That woman cut the priestess!’

  ‘The priestess Aemilia is bleeding!’ The repeated call was an icy gust through the crowd, meeting no resistance from the frayed and stupefied people. It got away from us fast.

&
nbsp; It stopped the friend with the widow in yellow too long before the situation dawned on her. The yellow widow saw the blood and lost control again, screaming not because she had yet realised her own new predicament but because blood was the image of all her horrors.

  Aemilia gave me a desperate, searching look.

  She could not let this woman be harmed in her name. Not after today. Not ever, but not after today.

  Dalmaticus appeared beside me and I seized on the idea of the pin that secured his purple scarf at his shoulder that declared his position as head priest and which he wrapped around himself for warmth when not in public. I yanked my wrist across the point, not caring how deep, shut him up with a single look and jumped in front of Aemilia with my bleeding wrist in the air.

  ‘No she’s not, it’s me!’ I cried, my burnt-out voice not quite getting volume but succeeding with attention. ‘It’s not the Vestal’s blood, it is mine. It’s mine. It’s okay.’

  I certainly quieted things.

  I was quite prepared for the staring. The horrified looks were perhaps a bit much but I was the last thing those people were ready for, and I was bloody on top of everything else, so I wore it. I didn’t care about my scars. I didn’t care about my voice. I was quite content to be the monster right then. No one would come near Aemilia now if it meant going through me.

  While I took the attention, an old woman slipped a coloured wrap over Aemilia, hiding the blood and allowing her to discreetly wrap a corner round her bleeding wrist.

  I felt Aemilia take a deep breath and she stepped forward to be at my side. In the wrap she looked less like a priestess and the people relaxed a tiny bit. ‘Secunda! Let’s get you taken care of, shall we?’ She addressed the crowd. ‘Secunda is a friend of the Vestals. She is touched by Vesta.’

  Dalmaticus groaned to himself and stepped in front of us. We could both feel Terentia cringe from afar.

  He nodded at the friend and the widow. ‘Take her home.’

  He nodded over his shoulder for us to follow him and led us through the crowd. Aemilia put her fingers lightly in the small of my back and guided me toward the carriage. Sometimes I think about walking side by side like that and I think perhaps she was happy for me to be her dark side. Through me, the ugly, angry, nonconformist part of her could breathe.

  Tristan and Cor raced in behind us to gather up the brazier. The passing faces looked me up and down, incredulous, to Aemilia’s bloodied tunic and back to me. By my mere presence I pushed them back from my Aemilia, like the fire itself, there in my scars on my face for all to see – she is touched by Vesta – and Aemilia let me lead her through the crowd like a talisman at her breast.

  ***

  That night I cooked the very best supper I could for my priestesses. I wrapped fish fillets into little vine-leaf parcels, which I poked with lavender sprigs and clove pods. I smoked the fish parcels over my hearth, all at once, laid out on a sack (which I had carefully washed in salted water) so that not one went cold or dried out. I held them in the smoke until my arm muscles burned and shook, and I could feel the wound in my wrist start to pull apart under the bandage, and I could smell the herbs, and my fish would be cooked in the purest possible way for a Vestal – and my priestesses would see that I understood.

  That night was the first time I had cooked for people I loved. I was never allowed to make food like this for my mother. I didn’t love the master.

  I walked my plates into the common room like my whole life was laid out on them. Those plates were simply the truth of me and what I did in this world, and in that moment I was proud of it.

  ‘Absolutely scrummy-licious!’ Pompeia said.

  ‘Yes. That,’ Aemilia laughed.

  EARTH

  Fragments

  Erich S. Gruen, Roman Politics and the Criminal Courts 149–78BC, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 127.

  The destruction of Cato’s army in Thrace had so terrified the Roman populace that they regarded it as a dreadful portent from the gods. A sophisticated and educated aristocracy too often obscures the fact that superstition remained widespread and potent in late Republican Rome. A frightened and insecure mob was prepared to see dire warning in unusual events.

  FIRE

  Secunda

  October 114 BC

  Instead of using the Grove of Vesta the priestesses walked for an hour all the way to the sacred grove of wood sprites to collect the morning’s water and back, so as much of the city as possible had the happy reassurance of seeing the pure white Vestals at their work.

  Helvi was allowed to go with the priestesses, skipping about as an open invitation to other children to follow like a little troupe of sprites themselves. The priestesses were the people’s friends.

  ‘Smile!’ Terentia ordered. ‘You must be a picture of ease. But remember you are at important work on their behalf. Always.’

  Every morning for more than 500 years the Vestals collected sacred water to sprinkle through the temple with a bow of fresh laurel, to cleanse it. Their water had to be alive water, always moving like the fire, full of spirit. They had a special urn with a pointed base so it could never be set down and the water never allowed to settle.

  The priestesses took the things I did every day and lifted them to the realm of the gods. Urgulania said some places become sacred because people came there time after time for generations, and so there accumulated the stories and the souls. Then there were places where, in deep folds of the earth or creases in trees or under stones, sat the shadows that watched the pass of thousands upon thousands of years, or where secrets fled and found a place to hide. And hid there, still.

  Then there were places like the springs where the depths of the earth reach the surface making a horizon between worlds, where beginnings and endings are one.

  ‘Don’t lug it!’ Terentia clucked over Licinia. ‘You’re pulling a face. Put it on your hip like a child. Here,’ Terentia hitched the water urn higher on Flavia’s hip and set it back a little so the pointed base did not dig into her. ‘Nurture it. It will be worse when it’s full of water!’

  They went a little after breakfast when most people were out and about to witness them at their sacred task.

  There were times, especially when they were all together doing priestess things, that priestesses seemed to be shrouded in warm white light like the glow around a candle. It made people stare trying to work out if what they saw was real, and it promised to banish every shadow from anyone or anything around them.

  It used to be that the Vestals went all the way to the springs of the wood sprites every day. It was said that King Numa deemed it. But Numa was a very long time ago and his grove is a long way, and by our days the marsh in the forum was paved and we preferred the sanctity of the spring within our own Grove of Vesta. Numa’s springs were reserved for kingly events like public sacrifices.

  And times like this.

  I was not allowed to go.

  ‘Stay here!’ Terentia ordered me. ‘I have something to prepare at the Regia and then I will need you.’

  Neither of us uttered the real reason I couldn’t go but Terentia couldn’t stop herself glancing at my ridiculous bandage, made far wider and thicker than necessary to ensure anyone from the street could see it and be reassured that it was indeed me and not Aemilia who had been injured.

  To stop my brooding, Urgulania had at least conceded that the ‘something’ was indeed Marcus Aemilius Scaurus’s ‘foreigner’. But who or why or what they had to offer my Aemilia – at the same time as being ‘unappealing’ to her – was another thing. I was full of images of exotic black Egyptians, or Asians with painted eyes, but they were far from unappealing.

  ‘Stay,’ Urgulania smacked my arm when I tried to sneak off for a look. ‘It’s Aemilia’s surprise. Not for you until she sees first.’

  When the priestesses returned, Terentia pulled me with her to the gate to head off Aemilia.

  ‘Aemilia! I’ve been waiting for you. I need you in here.�
�� She scooped us sideways, beaming, into Dalmaticus’s doorway opposite. ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  She ushered us into an odd little triangular courtyard and a cramped portico: the private garden of the famous Regia, holy workplace of the head priest, out of public sight and under the watch of Dalmaticus.

  ‘Come, come!’

  There in the corner, sucking all the light from my morning, stood Shadow Man.

  ***

  ‘Aemilia, this is Elian. Elian, your subject, Aemilia.’

  Shadow Man smiled and bowed. We both looked to Dalmaticus for something, I don’t know what. Dalmaticus leaned against a column, arms folded, and shrugged a tiny shrug that said, ‘You argue with Terentia!’

  Oh don’t you dare, Shadow Man. Don’t you dare be in here!

  ‘Your subject?’ Aemilia asked.

  ‘Elian is a sculptor. Your patrons, Aemilia, have given a most generous donation ’ – Shadow Man puffed himself up; his robes were dirty, covered in white dust, dirtying our space – ‘and afforded us a most renowned sculptor to honour you. In marble. It will stand in the sacred square for generations,’ Terentia declared triumphantly.

  Aemilia’s eyes flashed stone at mention of her patrons.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t deserve this, Mother.’ There was a touch of panic in her voice. ‘It’s . . . so much.’

  ‘You do deserve it, Aemilia. All of it.’ Terentia; in her voice a touch of warning.

  Shadow Man watched. His black hair was pressed by sleep into wayward peaks and licks. Stubble shadowed his jaw. No respect even to groom himself for the priestesses.