They started in a chorus of soft low voices singing sorrow and sorriness and prayer and hopelessness, then rising to sing hope and challenge, and just when we were filled to overflowing, then came the gentle caress of flutes like a young mother’s hand, somehow hitting exactly the pitch of the heart.
We opened all the gates and stood on the steps of our own temple, and watched. Helvi, Flavia and Pompeia (in tears) broke into song with the crowd. Me and Aemilia held hands. They sang for our Pet, and they sang for our judges and they sang for themselves. It was also a song for the dead.
***
Elian came, of course, on the last night. We never saw him. We let Aemilia escape round the back of the house, but I stopped my work at the stove and sat quietly at our workbench pretending at beans.
I heard her say, ‘Whisper to me, when I’m in the dark, whisper to me from your fire and I will hear you.’
***
Terentia and Urgulania sitting together at the fig tree with the sun on their shoulders and their feet in the grass, one in priestess whites and the other in a brown slave tunic, was an image I would nurse forever from that moment.
If there was any doubt in my mind walking up to them, that sight quelled it.
They watched me come, without a word, and I waited until I was close to them so others would not hear.
‘There is still one thing can be done,’ I ventured.
Terentia looked at the braids still in my hair. ‘Perhaps. Aemilia would never agree to it.’
‘Belladonna,’ I said, nodding to the plant nearby. ‘I can control the dose.’
Terentia and I looked bemused.
‘I used to put it in the master’s wine to send him to sleep and keep his hands off my mother.’
Terentia let out a loud clap of a laugh. ‘Good for you.’
‘Peducaeus will hunt me.’
We stared long and hard at each other.
It was agreed.
***
I looked in on Aemilia and she lifted the corner of her bedsheet and said, ‘Come.’ I crawled in from the bottom and laid behind her. To lay in front and have her look into my face was too much to bear.
The priestesses smell of the olive oil I made for their skin, and the ever-present smoke in their hair mixed with the almond oil they used to smooth it. Comfy smells pressing lightly on me, thickening the dark so it was familiar and safe and full of sweetness.
They have the softest blankets I’ve ever felt. Aemilia’s blanket is heavy on my body, and I bury my face under the covers against her shoulder, where my breath warms my nose and I can smell her. Pompeia joined us, taking up most of the bed and squashing me hard up against the cool wall. Like bread dough, you could just press against her and she’d mould to you. And Helvi, all bones and joints in a little pile of rubble at our feet.
I rose to peek as Marcia and Licinia and Flavia join us, but no way was I giving up my spot.
The tapestry insulating the wall at my head is a mass of fruit and vines, peaches like bums and pears like Pompeia, earthy reds and ochre and purple so rare. Delicious and delicate.
Someone had their arm round me. Mine is around Aemilia’s; as I lay behind her I let my arm fall gently across her waist. All of us clinging, hoping, praying, hiding away deep in each other.
Licinia and Flavia carried in a mattress of their own and laid it on the floor to share. Terentia and Urgulania followed, already wrapped in their blankets, and together they made a jumble of bodies and blankets below us. A little room so very full yet empty at the same time, each of us praying and reaching through the dark for reassurance, breathing it in, breathing it out onto Aemilia, breathe her in, breathe her out.
Helvi fell asleep first, with Pompeia’s hand on her blond head, and we all lay in the dark listening to the little girl’s oblivious sleep sounds.
‘Promise me one thing,’ Aemilia’s voice came through the darkness. Small and gentle. ‘Don’t say goodbye.’
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Fragments
Theresa Moorey, The Goddess: A beginner’s guide, Hodder & Stoughton Educational, London, 1997, pp. 2–3.
Perhaps the most significant implication of the demise of the Goddess has been a loss of a sense of immanence. ‘Immanence’ implies that deity exists within matter, that all is divine, all sacred. The ancient Great Mother Goddess not only presided over life – she existed in it. This meant that hill and stream were sacred. It meant that human activities such as weaving, pottery, sowing seed also were an expression of the sacred, and all existed within a totality – a ‘holiness’ which means ‘wholeness’ . . .
It is not hard to see how separation of the divinity from His creation has been bad news for plants, animals, the human body, women and sexuality, not to mention the ecosystem, for what is not divine is flawed and suspect, indeed evil, to be used at will and yet also shunned. The Goddess, who blessed sexual love, whose mystery was revered in each sprouting shoot, was gone. In Her place stood a grass-widower God presiding over a sterile creation.
Plutarch’s Lives (110 AD) with an English translation by Bernadotte Perrin, William Heinemann, London, 1914, Vol. 1, p. 343.
But she that has broken her vow of chastity is buried alive near the Colline gate. Here a little ridge of earth extends for some distance along the inside of the city-wall; the Latin word for it is ‘agger’. Under it a small chamber is constructed, with steps leading down from above. In this are placed a couch with its coverings, a lighted lamp, and very small portions of the necessaries of life, such as bread, a bowl of water, milk, and oil, as though they would thereby absolve themselves from the charge of destroying by hunger a life which had been consecrated to the highest services of religion. Then the culprit herself is placed on a litter, over which coverings are thrown and fastened down with cords so that not even a cry can be heard from within, and carried through the forum. All the people there silently make way for the litter, and follow it without uttering a sound, in a terrible depression of soul. No other spectacle is more appalling, nor does any other day bring more gloom to the city than this. When the litter reaches its destination, the attendants unfasten the cords of the coverings. Then the high-priest, after stretching his hands toward heaven and uttering certain mysterious prayers before the fatal act, brings forth the culprit, who is closely veiled, and places her on the steps leading down into the chamber. After this he turns away his face, as do the rest of the priests, and when she has gone down, the steps are taken up, and great quantities of earth are thrown into the entrance to the chamber, hiding it away, and making the place level with the rest of the mound. Such is the punishment of those who break their vow of virginity.
WATER
Pompeia
19 December 114 BC
I never saw Elian or Aemilia again after our night curled up together in Aemilia’s room.
I don’t remember walking away from the tomb after the burial. My body will not allow the memory that might devour me.
I do remember the walk there, though, in preposterous detail.
They brought Aemilia from the temple already covered in a full veil, ready to be laid on the litter like a dead body.
Terentia had pushed away the guards, who were to bind her hands and feet, and gag her lest she disgrace them all along the way up the hill. ‘I will bind her myself, in the temple. Let us do her the dignity of being touched only by priestesses. The goddess will be her witness, surely.’
They gave Aemilia red wine to help her nerves, and Terentia allowed Ember into the temple – a dying wish, for Aemilia to show Ember her special place. Terentia didn’t want me around. I was to mind Flavia and Helvi. Truly, I was too messy to deal with.
Aemilia had to be strapped down on the litter. Tristan and Cor insisted on taking the place of two of the six soldiers tasked with carrying it.
Lucius led the litter past us, for us to fall in behind. He’d turned his insides to steel. His big triangular back, in front of me the whole way, was a shield before us protecting us someh
ow from the thing that he himself was about to do.
The walk up the hill from the forum to the Colline Gate took most of the morning.
Ten thousand people came to watch. They crammed along both sides of the street, in front of shops, hanging off eaves and perched on rooftops, pushing onto the road, leaving barely room for our procession to squeeze past.
A whole city had come out to mourn its princess, not just dead but fallen.
They were silent. The only sound was the earthly scrape of the litter bearers’ fatigued steps on the road.
There was darkness in that crowd. Hatred and blame. Shame and sorrow and fear. They had allowed monsters to hunt this beautiful creature, they had abandoned her, then they had become the monsters themselves. Now they felt it. Some clutched their hearts, some stifled sobs they had no business indulging.
The only movement was a ripple along the crowd as they readied themselves for the litter to draw alongside them and face them with the horror they’d come to see.
Puny posies of wildflowers – all that was left this time of year – were thrown discreetly, anonymously, before the litter, wilted with the morning cold and trampled. Ember’s roses were a long way yet from flowering.
As soon as the cart passed them by, the people turned to watch us. We were the debris, the gore, the human face of the white thing on the cart that none of us could quite believe was Aemilia.
Terentia and Urgulania, more grey than I would ever see them, walked at the far ends of our line as though to hold us in lest we lunge at the crowds. I could feel Licinia willing flames to burst from her and incinerate them, but sadness sogged her power.
I had gone to water at the first step from the temple, but I would not sob nor shake, or squeak nor sniffle. I would not growl or groan. I let the tears run until my front was soaked, but we would bear it, upright and proud. Regardless of what they had done to us, we would do our duty that day. We were still theirs.
I remember little Helvi’s hand limp in mine, and her other hand clutching Tristan’s tunic as though he too would be cast into the tomb if he stood too close.
Tristan was my ally in tears that day. Poor lamb was crimson with the effort of holding his silence while the tears dripped off his nose and chin, his hands occupied with carrying Aemilia’s litter.
Absurdly, I remember the smell of fresh bread from the shops.
I scanned the crowd for Elian. The world was not so bereft if Elian was there. He was the one who loved her. He was the promise that she was not alone, he was the thing her soul would take with her, that meant this was not the end of everything. But I couldn’t see him. Much as I convinced myself that he must be in disguise (he was still in danger; if Marcia and Licinia were free then the brothers may not have been involved either, and they needed another amour for Aemilia), I felt in my waters that he wasn’t there, and that was the worst of all, the totality of our emptiness.
My mind could not fathom the eternity of what we were doing, yet the feeling of eternity was a black smoke wrapped round every other thing.
I remember wondering if the bed in the tomb would have a blanket. I should have made sure. I was so sorry that I had not made sure.
In later days, in moments when my mind slipped from my grip, I wondered how long she waited to take the poison sewn into her tunic. I wondered if she would have bothered to eat the bread. I hoped she did. I wondered when she would have blown out the lamp.
No matter how much my mind goes back, I also still cannot remember seeing Ember either. I could imagine easily that she was back burning the temple and Regia to the ground in our absence, but we came back to the temple intact.
I could have felt her raging fire among ten thousand souls, and I did feel her somewhere close, but her fire had softened. Brittle shards of heart throbbed on a bed of embers; she burned away as though she would burn forever, never stopping, never forgetting, but somehow gone was the raging stomping rebel and somewhere instead was a fire contained.
At the top of the hill, I saw Aemilia’s mother sitting in a carriage, set-faced, across from a weeping servant. Aemilia’s mother would not have approved of Ember.
The crowed pushed forward, reforming themselves into a deep circle around us. Just ahead, the hole of the tomb flickered with the macabre promise of lamplight, and the tips of a ladder.
The soldiers, Tristan and Cor lowered the litter. They untied the straps, and then the worse thing of all happened: she stood up.
She stood up and ten thousand people remembered that she was still alive. We were putting her in her tomb and she was still alive. We were going to make her walk into that hole by herself, and then cover it up and walk away. We were going to walk away and leave her there alone in the cold and dark and mourn her as though she were dead when she was not. We would go about our daily business, our families and our games while she was in that hole alone, and still alive. We would live as though she were dead, and when her death finally came, out of view, no one would so much as pause for it.
As Tristan untangled the straps from her body I caught a tiny sleight of hand as he slipped a finger round Aemilia’s. One pinky finger desperately gripping another for a fraction of a moment before she pulled away, and I wondered.
Where, still, was Ember? Could she have? Would she have?
Yes, she would.
Aemilia would never agree to it – they’d have to have knocked her out . . .
I imagined Elian stealing into the temple, bundling up our sleeping Pet as though he carried her statue, onto a carriage through empty streets and onto a boat to Aqaba.
I let myself imagine, because it felt so much better, Aemilia in a moment when, hand-in-hand with Elian, she steps from a great red-rock cavern into the plaza of a hidden city of carvings and caves where she will never be found and where they have never heard of the Temple of Vesta. She is wearing blue.
The going down is something my body will not allow me to remember.
There's a flash in my mind of the College of Pontiffs, what remained of them without us in our places among them, in a line opposite. And before them a sickening final glimpse of the top of a white veil disappearing as Lucius started at his ritual as head priest. After the first few words he cut off and fell into a silent prayer instead, unable to speak. I expected to see his eyes plead with me for forgiveness but they did not. He would not lay upon me a single drop more. He would bear his own cross.
I remember the call of crows, reminding Ember that there was still a sky.
Terentia belted out her eulogy: ‘The fire of the earth and the sun and the perpetual fire of Vesta’s heart will never be extinguished. Neither will this soul. Here lies the truest priestess of all. A priestess who will die untouched, and ever entwined with the sacred fire that glowed from within her.’
She knew.
‘Here we farewell a woman of courage. A woman of selflessness. A woman of warmth. A true woman of fire. May the ground lay lightly on her, and may Vesta warm her from the Earth’s heart below.’ Other voices joined in – Urgulania, Flavia, Marcia, Licinia, Tristan: ‘Born of the elements and the perpetual hearths of the sun and the core, manifest in the hearth fire that guides us home.’
I don't know how long I stood there except that after a long time I was alone, for a long time. In the dark Lucius’ arms slid round me and his lips and stubble pressed against my forehead, whispering something or maybe not, that was meant to make me move but I could not. Because Ember was still alive when they had dragged the stone slab across the grass and dropped it over the hole, and the gods-awful shattering of dirt thrown from the guards' shovels which was meant to be their ending, was not hers.
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Fragments
Russell T. Scott (ed.), Excavations in the Area Sacra of Vesta (1987–1996), p. 21.
Of the [temple] building’s superstructure of course nothing remains, but what is significant is what was learned from the investigation of the ‘favissa’. The open shaft remained a constant feature in the building o
ver time, providing a direct connection with the virgin earth that, as Ovid tells us (Fast. 6.249–460), represented the goddess herself.
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Fragments
St Catherine of Siena quoted in Jaq D. Hawkins, Spirits of Fire.
I, Fire, the acceptor of sacrifices, ravishing away from them their darkness, give the Light.
The second ending
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Fragments
Bruce A. Marshall, Historical Commentary on Asconius, University of Missouri Press, Missouri, 1986, p. 196.
Aemilia was condemned a.d. XV Kal. Ian., and Licinia pleaded her case a.d. XIII Kal. Ian. Public outrage was increased by the obvious cover-up, and at the beginning of 113 a tribune Sex. Peducaeus brought in a measure to censure the pontifex maximus and the whole college of pontiffs for a wrongful judgement and to set up a special commission under Cassius who had a reputation for severity, to retry the case.
Michael Charles Alexander, Trials in the Late Roman Republic, 149 BC to 50 BC, p. 21.
date: 113
charge: quaestio extraordinaria (on scandal of Vestal Virgins)
defendant: Licinia (181)
advocate: L Licinius Crassus (55) cos. 95, cens. 92 (ORD 66.III)
quaesitor: L Licinius Longinus Ravilla (72) cos. 127, cense. 125
outcome: condemned
date: 113
charge: quaestio extraordinaria (on scandal of Vestal Virgins)
defendant: Marcia (114)
quaesitor: L Licinius Longinus Ravilla (72) cos. 127, cense. 125
Outcome: condemned
Erich S. Gruen, Roman Politics and the Criminal Courts 149–78 BC, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 129, 131.
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