B007IIXYQY EBOK (104 page)

She shivered faintly in a night that was colder than it should have been in this season. He unfastened his cloak and began walking toward her slowly.

The diminishing distance between them seemed alive. That was not wariness he saw in her eyes, he realized, but wonder. Those eyes!
They were tremulous pools of distilled intelligence, watching him with the bright silence of a woodland creature.

But still he could not guess her thoughts, and the torment this brought was new to him. He came up beside her, slowly drew the cloak around her shoulders and fastened it, careful as he did so not to touch her or look upon her bared breast, lest she despise him and count it one more act of violation in a night of many. Subtle scents of pine and grass drifted from her hair. Her skin sparkled faintly with gold dust. She lifted her head slightly to hold his gaze—he was taller than she, but barely—and the look in those great, round eyes was like a soft, exploring touch. The silence was like wine, fortifying and warm.

He broke it when he saw the cut from the whip. He put a hand to her chin and turned her head gently to better see.

“The swine,” he muttered softly.

“That is an insult to pigs,” she replied with such sober earnestness that he smiled. Her voice put him in mind of the lower notes of a wooden flute.

“I mean to aid you,” he said hesitantly, feeling he extended an awkward, tentative hand across a gulf between worlds. “I mean no harm…do you understand? I beg you, do not judge me by the others.” More to give comfort than because it was necessary, he reached out and straightened the cloak, which was too large for her and began to slip from one shoulder. “I would have you count me a friend…but that may not be possible.”

With a look she asked the question,
Why?

He told her his name. She repeated it slowly, taking possession of it. Her eyes darkened with recognition. “The name is known to me. It is that of my father’s old enemy, the Governor.”

“I am his son. By your custom, I am your enemy. Though for myself, I prefer to select my enemies personally—I do not inherit them.”

Those somber, searching eyes studied him intently. “I count you a friend, even as a friend of old, though I cannot account for this.”

“I too can account for none of this,” he replied, marveling at how she could seem so artless, yet so knowing. Urgently he spoke on. “There is much I must tell you, and I must say it quickly. First, your child is alive—at least there’s no reason to believe she is not—”

“Not truly….? They did not slay her when we refused to open the gates?”

“They deceived you. In truth, they never found the babe. When our soldiers came to Alder Lake, there was no island—and no Ramis.” To Julianus, this meant some clever native had led the Roman forces to the wrong place.

But Auriane took it to mean Ramis rendered the island invisible through sorcery. Joy came like a sudden flush of drunkenness. Warm strength flooded into her, as if a dead limb on her body were rejuvenated with blood. “Blessed night. She lives,” Auriane whispered. In her mind she saw Avenahar growing into knowledge, Avenahar, protected as she was before, the sun at her back, moving through forest glades with Ramis as her guide, awaiting her mother’s return. She shut her eyes for a moment, clinging to rapturous relief as it steadily rose in her.

Then she looked off, eyes silvery with tears. Warmth and peace collected between them; to him it was a marvel. When she looked back at him, he saw recognition in her eyes.

“You are the man who tried to save me in my own country.”

“Yes.”

“And yet, if I had acted as you wished,” she continued haltingly, painfully conscious of how rude her speech must sound, “you would never have seen me again. You would have gained nothing…except the possibility of causing your own ruin.”

“It was a choice of your death or your living free. There were no other choices, then.”

She watched him, considering this, and it seemed her soul edged very close, but still there was a hesitation, a distance. But what truly did I expect? he thought, quietly despairing. It is foolish to think that love, just because it is felt, will be returned in equal measure. She has known abominable things; why should she trust? To do so would be near to madness. “Come then,” he said. “I’ll take you back.”

It was then that she banished his doubts.

She caught up his hand in her own. The simple act was carried out with such passion and urgency that it was as intimate as a coming together of bodies; at the same time it was somehow an embrace of spirits, rich with the rapture of unbounded understanding. His joy in that wild and precarious instant was almost too great; it seemed to close all wounds, and he imagined he knew what some philosophers promised for the moment of death—union in brilliant light with all that was ever desired, ever known, a moment not merely of knowing love but of becoming love—and then he wondered if this night lived too close to the knife-edge of death had left him more than half mad.

She closed her eyes as though overcome. He bent his head, raised that hand to his lips, and softly kissed it.

Then without knowing what prompted him to act, he took the amulet of earth from about his neck, pausing only for the briefest moment to think—have I lost my last scrap of reason? I have worn this all my life. My own father gave it reverence; it is infused with a portion of his soul. It brought me out of Hades and led me into the light.

But it was a night for such impetuous acts and he placed the amulet about Auriane’s neck, certain that this was where it belonged.

Auriane held it to the torchlight, regarding it in dread silence as if it were the most sacred of temple relics. He saw a flicker of fear in her face, then a melting into hopeful amazement. She looked at him.

In a low voice she said, “This is a thing dearly sacred to my people. Who are
you, that you have this?”

“I am no more than who you see. As for how I got it, that’s a tale for another time.”

“How can this be? I had its twin…before I bloodied my hands…and crossed my fate.” She started to remove it. “I…I cannot keep it. I lost the right.”

“Who has said so?” he said, smiling, catching her hand. “I’ll not be content unless you take it.”

A long shudder passed through her. She smelled a pine fire and saw a hooded figure in black chanting low, life-bringing words. That I have even
seen
this holy thing, she thought, signifies that Ramis has opened her eyes to look at me. I bolted off her path. Have I somehow blundered back onto it? Have the gods sent this man as a pathfinder?

From far too near came loud talk and the clink of metal. The carriage was readied. “Plautius!” Julianus called out loudly, to allay any suspicions that might arise among the rest of the Guard. “Help me with her. She’s dead weight here, she lost consciousness!”

To Auriane he whispered, “I mean to get you out
of this wretched predicament, or die trying. Do not worry, I won’t let them use you as part of any bloody spectacle. Be of good courage, and do their bidding for now. As I live, I mean to see you free.”

“You have freed me already,” she whispered, thinking of Avenahar. She lifted his hands and held them to her lips, then quickly moved away when she saw blots of light through the oleander, and a torch’s reflection on a gold breastplate.

“Quickly, fall in a faint,” he whispered as Plautius and two of his fellows came up noisily.

Auriane imagined she dropped into warm, nurturing water. Her mind was an overfull cup of honeyed mead, joyously flooding down; the life-giving heat of a hearthfire penetrated through to her marrow; great gratitude to the gods knitted together all within her that had ever been torn asunder.

Avenahar flourishes in her forest nest. And near to me now is a noble presence to whom I am bound by threads of magic. What horror can I not bear up under now?
All the while she was aware of the close, tender presence of the moon, seeming to affirm
, Yes, still I am here. Yes, still I wait.

And there came then secret, sure, swift-gliding serpent thoughts she knew came from the mind of Fria
— Your fate has turned. All dies to rise again. What you learned in darkness, you will learn again in light.

CHAPTER XXXIV

O
N THE FOLLOWING DAY
D
OMITIAN’S SPIES
who went about as fishmongers brought him alarming news from the city’s streets. A troupe of actors had presented a play on a makeshift stage before the Temple of Mercury. The protagonist was a young Parthian prince who despised his older brother, who was their father the king’s designated successor. The prince gained the army’s support through bribes, then provoked a war on the barbarian frontier—but the war brought him only ridicule, and he never regained his father’s favor. The unloved prince was tall, tending to baldness, had an inordinate love of eunuchs, and practiced archery.

“How did it end?” Domitian demanded to know. The young prince, they related, murdered his older brother, but never took the throne himself because he was torn apart by an avenging mob.

This caused the first grave crack in the dam that contained Domitian’s festering rage at the populace. Already Auriane’s words,
“
You are no fit king” prodded him continuously, seeming in one moment an uncouth woman’s simple nonsense, easily dismissed, and in the next, a prophetic and profound thrust to the heart.

When the hapless players set up their stage in the same location on the next day, a detachment of the Praetorian Guard arrested the cast and scattered the audience, many of whom were crushed to death when they choked the narrow streets attempting to escape. The actor who played the prince was crucified on the stage. The author of the play attempted to hide, but was hunted down and murdered the next day while bathing in one of the cheaper bathhouses.

It brought a wretched gloom to the city’s streets. Overnight, no more plays were performed before the temples; laughter lessened, whispering increased, and the tanner squinted suspiciously at the fuller, wondering if he were in the pay of someone at the Palace. Anyone of education who happened to have an epic poem or ode lying about in his study quietly burned it for fear it might be found by a servant, then turned over to an informer. Every pen carried a burden of fear. Domitian was mystified and hurt when he was told of the people’s temper and accepted no responsibility for it.

In the last days before the triumphal procession, Domitian was often heard to mutter to those about him, “On this day I give the rabble a chance to redeem themselves.”
Marcus Julianus prayed the people would pay him proper homage so they would suffer no more.

The dawn of the day of Domitian’s processional entry into Rome found the city washed clean and gaily dressed—streets were swept, temples garlanded, their doors companionably left open. The smoke of thanksgiving sacrifices rose delicately, wistfully, before the temples’ majestic doors. Chaplets of roses were sold in every street. The multitudes of statues of goddesses, gods and men crowding the Forums were wreathed with laurel. All labor, slave and free, was halted for the day.

Before dawn, men of the City Cohorts lined the procession’s sacred route. This was to commence at the Triumphal Gate, a massive free-standing arch within the vast, grassy grounds of the Campus Martius. Then the procession would wend its way about the city, progressing down the broad Via Lata, around the course of the Flaminian Circus, then about the Palatine and on past the Colosseum and the house of the Vestals, until it halted before the steps of the Temple of Jupiter, where Domitian would preside over a great sacrifice of one hundred and twenty white oxen. Everyone, from rag sellers to patricians, rose before first light to battle for space. They massed on the rooftops and the steps of temples; they crowded into the windows of the upper stories of tenements and onto the makeshift tiers of seats erected in the Old Forum. Those whose quarters had rooms with windows or balconies that overlooked the processional way sold their fellow citizens the right to enter their homes and watch.

As the October sun gilded the city’s jumbled red-tiled roofs and began its steady climb, parasols of all colors bloomed throughout the throng. Along the route, vendors set up stands and began their melodious cries, selling melons, figs, sausages, meat pies, hard-boiled eggs, and for drinking, fermented quince juice, vinegar-water and cheap wines sweetened with lead. Others set up shop selling votive statues of the city’s patron gods and small commemorative equestrian statues of the Emperor. All the people that fed on crowds—jugglers, acrobats, snake charmers, Etruscan fortunetellers—appeared spontaneously wherever they could find space. Prostitutes set up flimsy stalls that provided little more than a blanket hung in the doorway for privacy and settled in place before them, awaiting customers. So many citizens were arrayed in white in honor of the victory that it would have appeared to a hawk wheeling above as though northern snow had come to the city for a day.

This was a spectacle that had not been witnessed in Rome since early in the reign of Vespasian, when his son Titus had entered the city in triumph after the fall of Jerusalem. For all the eight centuries since the founding of Rome, the right to enter the city in triumph had been the highest honor the Senate could confer upon a conquering general. The glory of it had hardly lessened in these latter days, even though the game was no longer open to any contender—now the supreme honor was awarded only to the Emperor or members of his immediate family. The procession’s origins stretched back into the mythic haze of the most ancient days. Some maintained that in those shadowy times this grim parade was the ritual last ride of the god Mars in the guise of a mortal man, journeying to bloody sacrifice in a chariot drawn by four white horses. Even to the present day, by long custom, the triumphant general’s face was painted red, a practice learned men could only explain if he did indeed once embody Mars, the Red God, on his way to die for the fertility of the land. The earliest processions were modest affairs, carried out with an air of melancholy necessity, as sacramental rites meant to propitiate the gods for crimes committed in war. But as Rome conquered vaster territories, as not just neighboring city-states but whole kingdoms fell before her, the processions evolved into a meticulously planned theatrical display, in which the captured wealth of nations was flaunted before the world. Rome never completely forgot its beginnings as a small, beleaguered city-state constantly threatened with extinction; the sight of hordes of prisoners of war herded before the triumphal chariot offered a primitive reassurance, a promise that now their city could live in safety forever and Roman rule would never end. The city’s excitement was always touched with solemnity, for this was the one time when war, normally so comfortably distant from the capitol city, revealed to the populace a small measure of its reality and horror. It was a time when the humblest baker could feel he sat upon Olympus, gazing down upon a subdued and obedient world.