B007IIXYQY EBOK (81 page)

“I want a great effort mounted to see us better armed. To rely on the gods alone is madness,” she continued, her voice gradually finding its strength. “Wherever there are stores of iron, whether it be tools of the field or weapons fallen into disuse, I want them taken and forged into iron heads for spears. And I would have the captured Roman swords dedicated in the groves to Wodan be taken out and distributed to those who have no sword.”

“Monstrous sacrilege,” came an indignant whisper behind Coniaric.

“A blight will take us,” said a Companion of Sigwulf’s.

“Is it a greater sacrilege than allowing me to return?” she replied, soft gray eyes on them steadily. “Or than accepting Avenahar? These times seem to demand sacrilege. How do we know the gods have not originally given us these things that we might make good use of them in the direst of times?”

“I scent truth in those words,” came a voice at the rear of the company, followed by cautious nods and scattered mutterings of assent.

Witgern marveled as he saw gradual acceptance come into their faces.
She calms, she binds—who else would dare propose such things?
She is like, yet unlike Baldemar, he realized. Both test limits, but she intrudes on a realm he never challenged—the precincts of the gods.

“And I ask as well,” Auriane continued, “that we give the war-leaders we select strict obedience, whether in the march, the retreat, or the charge—or in the matter of disposing of spoil. All quests for individual glory must be set aside. The hosts of the Romans act as one, and that is their strength. We must do the same.” She paused, looking slowly from one countenance to another.

The wind rose suddenly, lifting the horses’ manes, billowing her long tunic.

Coniaric grinned. “Well, it is settled then! Come, and mount your horse.”

“How can that be?” she asked. “Do you not have to go to the Assembly with these things?”

“It was said at the last Assembly: ‘Do what she wills. But do not return without Auriane.’ They cannot go back on those words.”

This battle so suddenly won, a chilled emptiness came into her chest.

If I am wrong, let only me be punished, she silently prayed. Baldemar, if you heard these things I proposed, things you would never allow, forgive me and know I do this so we can live.

She turned about and walked past Helgrune, pressing Avenahar’s silky cheek to her own. For long moments they stood like this, while the wind mingled their hair. They made one sorrowful silhouette against the water. Witgern turned away, unable to watch. Coniaric’s horse clanked its bit impatiently. Avenahar, unconcerned with all this, tried to snatch Auriane’s warrior’s ring, on which the sunlight played with liquid movements. Auriane pulled it off her arm and gave it to the child.

“That is your warrior’s ring,” Helgrune protested sullenly.

“She must have it—I’ll have another made,” Auriane replied, not taking her gaze from the girl’s bright, inquisitive eyes.

Then she added, “The wet nurse must be of noble stock.”

“Ramis has chosen her already,” Helgrune replied. “She is the daughter of Hrethwith the Gold-Bedecked, who is daughter of Galiena of the Wide Fields, who is daughter of…”

Auriane heard no more of this lineage, satisfied; she was not even startled to learn Ramis seemed to know the wet nurse would be needed, having become accustomed to the Veleda’s unerring sense of things to come.

“Will you despise me when you are grown?” she said to Avenahar, feeling forlorn as the night-herons that cried out their loneliness from the marshes. “What will you be? Seeress or wanderer, village priestess or noble wife?”

Auriane squeezed the child once, too hard, and finally gave Avenahar to Helgrune. “Tell her who her mother was,” she said hoarsely. “Tell her of her deeds. Let her know it was not her mother’s will to leave her and that she thought of her every day until she died.”

Then abruptly Auriane turned, fearful her courage would desert her before these men who looked on her with hope. They waited while she retrieved the sword of Baldemar from beneath its bed of moss.

Then she vaulted onto Berinhard’s back amidst the stirring of many horses, the approving murmurs of the men. Berinhard capered nervously against the tautening of the reins, petals from the garlands drifting from his tightly bowed neck. Then they were off at a brisk canter, Auriane in their midst. She was grateful for the wind that blew off her tears.

How do the gods permit it, she thought, that so many from so far dare attack a people who wish only to live unmolested in their own country?

In one moment, she yearned for war as for the embrace of a long-absent lover. In the next, she ached so fiercely for Avenahar that she nearly turned round and galloped back.

No. Leave her where it is safe. I will be back for her soon.

As if to torment her, Ramis’ prophecy nudged its way into her thoughts:
“You will be a queen in death.”

CHAPTER XXI

T
HE
E
MPEROR
D
OMITIAN AS
S
UPREME
C
OMMANDER
of the Army faced the legions gathered at the fortress of Mogontiacum, preparing to take the auspices. His purple-bordered toga stirred faintly in a northern wind that carried a warning chill even though this was midsummer. A crown of ivy rested on his head. Two priests of Mars flanked him on a platform raised high enough so that all could view him. Behind Domitian was a newly erected statue of himself in solid gold; it looked with lordly disdain toward the rambling hills of the barbarian lands beyond the river. The colossal image generated subtly in the soldiers’ minds a vision of their Emperor as some solar hero of old, manifesting on earth to pierce the barbarian darkness with light.

Arrayed about him on the parade ground was a sea of helmeted men. The four legions of Upper Germania were here, strengthened by the legion Domitian had raised for this war— called the First Minervia after the goddess Minerva, his patroness—and detachments from the legions of Britannia. On Domitian’s left were the cavalry troops attached to the northern legions—both men and mounts were gaudy and brilliant in full parade dress. On the place of honor at Domitian’s right were the two cohorts of the Praetorian Guard who had marched with him from Rome; they numbered a thousand, their beautifully worked gold breastplates afire in the sun. This was not the whole of the Roman forces. Detachments had set out in advance with the army’s engineers to begin the penetration of the disputed valley of the Wetterau and the Taunus Mount. Were all assembled, they would have numbered forty thousand.

Domitian’s journey to Gaul had taken three months, for he had traveled in comfort. In addition to his military staff and his advisors, he brought an army of masseurs, the Palace’s most skilled chefs, an Etruscan soothsayer, his favorite readers—one for poetry and one for prose—and an astrologer and a cithara player whom he claimed could cure melancholy with his music. To entertain him at dinner, he had brought selected men of wit and literary pretensions, as well as Bathyllus the pantomime and a troop of comic actors, followed by three carriages packed with their costumes and masks. For his amorous needs he’d brought but two concubines. He would have commanded more to come but their furnishings, chests of rich garments, and supplies of special foods required too much space on the march. That he left his eunuchs at home he counted a concession to the asceticism required by military life.

The Emperor nodded to the priests of Mars. One led forth a garlanded goat given drugged feed so it would be docile—Domitian would not risk having the men see anything so ill-omened as a victim attempting to flee. A flute blower sounded a long, wan note so no evil sound would be heard; for an extended moment that anxious tone with its slight quiver was the only sound between heaven and earth. Domitian, feeling he played the part of a pantomime actor, first briskly washed his hands in a silver basin, then sprinkled meal, wine and salt on the victim’s head.

Domitian had no fears of what the entrails might reveal. Victory was assured. His strategists and engineers had proved that to him beyond a doubt with their detailed diagrams and maps; they had calculated precisely the minimum number of men needed for success and assured him the Chattians would be crushed in five months. Domitian felt he had left nothing to the caprice of a testy and volatile Mars. But soldiers were a superstitious lot; they needed the calming effect of a good augury.

The sacrificing priest felled the goat with a mallet. The second priest produced a knife and swiftly opened its belly. Gravely, Domitian inspected liver, intestines and gall.
“Exta bona!”
he cried at last. “The entrails are good!”

With a grand flourish he gave the entrails to the altar fire. As the smoke billowed, the soldiers responded with a volley of unified, disciplined, deep-throated shouts of joy, a driving chant like the tramp of thousands of marching feet—
“Ave, Caesar, Imperator
…
”

The love of soldiers, Domitian observed with sullen detachment, is so easily won. They are like hounds—their instincts are sharp, and when the disciplinary slap is necessary, their memories are short. They forgive all and slobber with devotion as long as you pet them, feed them, praise them. The Senate and nobility, by contrast, are not hounds but foxes, with silly pretensions of becoming lions. Would that my empire were composed only of soldiers!

And what a magical effect my coming in person has wrought. Who among these men
remembers
I had a brother on this day? Titus is but a name in the annals—while I am their living god, and gods are entitled to the occasional murder. I should feel the ecstasy of the Olympians. But I do not.

Domitian gave a short battle speech in which he praised each legion by name and briefly cited its glorious history. His words did not carry over all the vast assembly; most would learn the text from recorders’ copies. But it hardly mattered. To the soldiers, merely having their supreme commander speak to them was to have the light of the sun shed on them alone.

Marcus Arrius Julianus observed all this from a viewing stand behind the priests’ platform, among a half dozen senatorial dignitaries. To him, the soldiers’ cheers seemed so much controlled yet frenzied noise. There is something monstrous, he reflected, in the sight of these rows of men regular as furrows in a field, their thousands of blades poised for the bloody harvest. Here is the bestial underside of civilization, the tearing tooth and claw of empire, normally kept neatly concealed. Can this be the natural order, as it is so easy to believe when so many proclaim it is, or is it vast presumption? Here are thousands wrenched from their home ground, prodded out to this mist-ridden place with its spirits older than ours, its primeval laws, then forged into one creature with a single will—that of a quite ordinary man hoisted by the Fates to supreme power, a man driven chiefly by the lust to outdo the deeds of his father and brother.

We do not need the fertile valley of the Wetterau—we are a rich man with ten carriages who out of pride must murder for the eleventh.

That morning Julianus had received an ominous letter from Rome, written by his chief steward, Diocles, on behalf of a friend in the Senate, a certain Junius Tertullus. It was a desperate plea for help. This Tertullus was certain he was being tracked by Domitian’s informers; of late, he was openly followed in the streets. Coincidentally with the disappearance of a recently acquired slave secretary, he’d found his study chambers rifled through; a packet of private letters was missing.

This letter might not have been so disturbing in itself. But already in the past eighteen months two Senators of the old aristocracy that Domitian despised, Fabianus and Serenus, had met what Marcus Julianus counted suspicious ends. The world thought both men dead of natural causes, but Julianus knew their deaths occurred shortly after Veiento secretly denounced them before Domitian, accusing them of privately ridiculing this war. Could Domitian truly have set upon a course of picking off members of the Senate one by one like an archer shooting beasts in a hunting theater?

Marcus Julianus knew his own influence over the Emperor had not diminished in spite of Veiento’s best efforts; it seemed even to have increased, as though travel in strange lands roused in Domitian some eccentric long-buried insecurity. Domitian lately seemed eager as a schoolboy for his approval, seeking his opinion in every odd emergency that arose, even on matters in which he was not particularly qualified. Once when an officer of the Guard became ill and died, Domitian asked him to review a list of candidates and name a replacement.

It is as though he cannot shun my opinion as some men cannot shun wine. But he cannot shun Veiento’s opinions as some men cannot shun poison. We are delicately, evenly counterbalanced. Can I halt this coming murder?

Philosophy had never seemed a more useless tool.

In the next days the fortress of Mogontiacum was alive with swift, orderly preparations for war. Through the fortress’s massive stone gate poured a steady stream of military wagons laden with supplies to last the winter: For the common soldier came wheat from Egypt, first parched to ensure its preservation, as well as salted beef, venison, vegetables preserved in olive oil, live chickens in crates, several varieties of Italian wine, Gallic beer, and dried pears, figs, apricots, and apples. In separate wagons were expensive delicacies for the Emperor’s staff—amphorae of the purest olive oils, bottles of old Chian wine, the finest
garum,
or fish sauce, from Hispania, live thrushes, quail, mullet and eels to be prepared to order by Domitian’s chefs, and one precious crate of that most sought-after fruit, the cantaloupe.