Authors: Donna Gillespie
The boy has been seized by a demon. It cannot be. He truly means to return to the streets.
“Wait there!” Julianus cried out. “You are quite mad. Do you really think I’m going to sit here while my newfound son bludgeons me with Stoic philosophy, then vanishes once more? Halt!”
The boy did not slow.
“Perhaps—perhaps something can be arranged.”
Marcus paused before the richly carved door.
“I…I will do it secretly. I’ll get someone neutral in this matter to buy this fellow in his own name, and then he can turn round and sell him to me. Come now, back to your place. I will not have to pay a master of rhetoric for long; I see you’re already formidably adept at persuasion! Look how you’ve made a beggar out of me! Where do you come by such thoughts? You are utterly confounding. You really meant to leave, did you not?”
Marcus visibly relaxed and smiled awkwardly, a boy once more. A fleeting look of shame and fledgling affection for his father came into his face. “Not willingly, Father. But yes, I would have left.” He hesitated. “Father, I
am
grateful. What you said of ingratitude—it is not true.”
When Marcus had settled on the couch once more, his father reached across the table and put a clumsy but protective hand over his. After a space of comfortable silence, the elder Julianus said with a new darkness in his voice, “Fine son that you are, I fear you’ll not live long. You’ve little or no notion of what you’ve fallen into. You’ve come aboard a golden ship, you see, but know this: It’s one that’s slowly sinking.”
Julianus was silent while a mute servant came in to light the many-branched bronze lamp suspended low over the dining table. Almost as an afterthought the Senator started to pick delicately at the meal. Marcus could not eat; the boy looked away from the growing cluster of little flames, out into the swift-gathering gloom, and shuddered at how close he had come to spending this night shivering in the Great Drain, struggling against the damp to snatch a little sleep.
When they were alone once more, Julianus continued, his tone resonant with warning, “I mean not to frighten you, but there is something you must know at once. You see, you are a slave still, in spite of all—only now, to that lyric-scribbling brute in the Palace. Nero is outgrowing his old tutor, Seneca—and when he outgrows people he kills them. Already he has poisoned his foster brother and suffocated his first wife in her steam bath, and I fear that someday soon, when he gathers up the courage and finds a way to make it look like someone else did it, he’ll murder his own mother. And Seneca, who has long been my friend, is not separate in Nero’s mind from me. Soon he will turn on us,
if not this year, then the next, and if I am away or no longer living,
you will bear it alone.
You must learn to curb that stubbornness, or drag yourself and all our family to our doom. You must learn to flatter and to bend. And it is not, I fear, your nature to do so.”
Marcus briefly met his father’s eyes, then looked off again, thinking it better not to say: Surely there were ways other than flattery to ensure the survival of those you must protect. Why cannot they be preserved with truth, as the philosophers suggest?
Julianus saw the resistance still very much alive in the boy’s eyes, though settled now into a low-banked fire. And he found himself thinking once more of Archimedes’ prediction that one day the fate of the country would rest in his son’s hands.
“You
must.
It is a greater lesson than any tutor’s. One day you will be the prow of the ship. One day you will stand in the Senate instead of me. All the lessons in literature and music and philosophy will not serve you so well as this one. Learn to bend. Or perish.”
GERMANIA
CHAPTER III
I
T WAS MIDSUMMER, THE HEIGHT OF
the raiding season.
The valley was sacred to Wodan, god of the spear. It lay in the wilder part of Chattian lands, where tawny mountain cats slunk over sandstone escarpments and scrub pines made a stubborn stand in sandy soil. The god’s sad, wise presence seemed everywhere—in the quiet, bold eyes of a fawn, the incantation of a brook that had dug its way into this valley for millennia, in the moody sky, which, to the south, was a fierce, joyous blue and, to the north, frowning with thunderclouds.
Among the stalks of yarrow a hare hesitated, upright on its haunches. Its free forepaws seemed to ask a question. Its black eyes were fixed on everything and nothing.
Nearby was another pair of eyes—these were steady, gray, and full of patience, and clear as the mountain pools whose striking clarity conceals great depth. They saw the hare and nothing else. These eyes belonged to Auriane, who had lived now through sixteen summers.
She sat a dun-colored pony. One tanned arm drew back the string of a bow that Baldemar had made for her. As she took aim she imagined herself a hunting cat, aware only of the sun’s nurturing warmth, the fine movement of her hands on a weapon that, like a cat’s claw, seemed not separate from her body. Her hair was pulled back into a single careless braid matted with bark and leaf. It was closer in color to the coat of a chestnut horse than the many hues of blond so common among her people. Though her finely molded cheek and high, clean brow were a close copy of Athelinda’s, Auriane’s features were a sturdier rendering of her mother’s. She wore a sleeveless tunic of bearskin that made her appear one more furry predator of the wild. Strung on a thong around her throat was a Roman silver denarius.
In her gamebag were three hares taken already. Auriane was glad of them; Hertha was less cruel to her when she brought home fresh meat.
The flowery air of midsummer brought drowsy contentment, and she gave no thought whatever to raids. She had heard the gruesome tales told around winter hearthfires and knew this system of valleys was often used by their tribal enemies as an entry gate to Chattian lands, but she had the boundless confidence of a child who has never been grievously hurt. The name of Baldemar had always served better than any fortress, and no raiding band ever dared come near her family’s hall.
In the moment before she let the arrow fly, she squinted, imitating Baldemar.
An animal sense warned her to look up. She stifled a cry.
At the rim of the valley where ground mist rolled down like smoke, blotting out the spires of pines, she saw one flash of red, then another—the deep blood-red of warriors’ tunics. And then she saw dozens of them, massed together as they ran, appearing, disappearing, moving swiftly into the heart of her people’s lands, where their rich fields lay, and their herds of sheep and cattle. She knew at once these were warriors of the Hermundures, their ancestral enemies from the southeast.
A raid
.
Arrow was returned to quiver and she wheeled the pony around, giving him a hard kick with her heels. The pony, whom she had named Brunwin, lunged forward and settled into a choppy gallop, dodging thickets, hurdling fallen logs, losing his grip on the stony ground, running on a track roughly parallel to the raiders above. She knew she must outdistance them and sound the alarm before they reached the farmlands and villages. To do this, she must reach the ford in Elk River before them—which would not prove too difficult if the pony kept his pace.
She leaned far over the pony’s bristly mane, holding back a raw cry of joy. She felt like a racehorse released, eager to test speed to the limit. Here was adventure that was not mere child’s imaginings. Always she felt a pull to be at the center of the fray, as if all life existed there. She would never go round a ditch or high wall if she thought she could send her pony over it. There was a strain of madness in the family, she often heard Hertha say, that skipped only Hertha herself. Baldemar had it in great measure and he had passed it on to Auriane.
She felt, too, the brash pride of the young:
I saw them first, and I will be first with the alarm.
She called on Epona, goddess of horses, and prayed the heron feather affixed to Brunwin’s bridle would make him swift. It was, she thought, a cowardly time to strike—the most celebrated warriors of her people had not yet returned from their last foray, an attack on a detachment of Roman soldiers erecting a line of wooden watchtowers on the Taunus Mountain, which lay deep in the territories her people claimed as their own.
The signal towers had been burned and the Romans driven off—though she knew they would return; they were persistent as horse flies. But the warriors had not broken camp because Wido—the second powerful chieftain of the tribe and her father’s enemy—delayed them with an endless dispute over the spoil, haggling over every last silver horse bit or ivory-handled dagger that had been taken. “He waits to see what I want,” Baldemar reported to Athelinda in a runner’s message, “and it becomes what he wants.” Because of Wido’s petty greed, she thought, her people’s fields and villages were left vulnerable, protected by the old, the very young, and the farm women whose knowledge of weapons did not extend beyond hurling pots and stones.
Maid and pony shot through the deep shade of a stand of olive-gray beeches, galloping almost soundlessly over a sandy forest floor and into a muddy meadow divided by a melancholy line of willows. The path sloped steeply downward into Wolf’s Head Bog, and for the first time this place did not fill her with spirit-terror; she knew only the excitement of the race. Here nature’s corpse was laid out rotting. The brackish pools to either side of the narrow path were graves, crowded with the remains of generations of men given in the spring sacrifice or convicted of great crimes and drowned by the Assembly of the Moon. At night their spirits took the form of the fire that played over the water, the baleful will-o’-the-wisps, beckoning anyone who ventured close to join them in restless death. She whipped past the maternal bulk of the Initiation Stone, half hidden among tall ferns, where Athelinda had brought her for her ceremonies of womanhood; it was still stained with her first moon blood. Near it was a cluster of smooth, faceless wooden images of the goddess Fria, springing like mischievous mushrooms from the damp.
Lady of the Bog,
she prayed silently,
protect me from the wrath of the living and of the dead.
The pony scrambled up a steep slope and clattered onto drier ground. As they whipped past the tortured shape of the Lightning Oak, she averted her eyes. In that corpse of a tree, her grandmother told her, were imprisoned the souls of all the wretches who let kinsmen lie unavenged. When she was still so young she was not allowed to ride alone, Hertha had brought her there and cuffed her until she memorized the words—
“If one of our own is slain, I must draw blood in return, even if it takes to the end of my days. Vengeance is holy, it gives life to the clan.”
As they struggled up the long, fir-clad rise, she judged herself close enough to the villages to sound the alarm. Taking up the cattle horn that hung at her belt, she blew three urgent blasts—the signal for a raid.
And to her surprise, from ahead she heard an eruption of answering shouts. As she flashed past a break in the trees, she saw, far ahead of her, a second band of warriors, at least a hundred in number, just as they crowned the rise that concealed Elk River and disappeared. She felt a first spasm of fear—they would reach the ford before her, and she would be trapped on the wrong side of the river. She was a maid alone. They would cut her throat and pitch her into a bog for hunting in territory they claimed as their own. Or they would take her as a slave, and she would live out her life as some warrior’s prize, a miserable creature no better than his cattle or sheep.
Then from behind her came still more warriors’ cries. A third band followed her. How came there to be so many? The three bands seemed almost to run in formation. The men behind were perhaps meant to hold the ford, or to serve as a reserve force. Something about this was sinister and wrong. Hermundures never raided in such numbers, nor with such foreplanning. And what war band would ever agree to follow another? It would bring too much shame. Among both her own people and the Hermundures, warriors fought all their lives for the coveted places at the head of the charge.
Again she lifted the horn to her lips and blew three blasts, knowing as she did so she might be giving up her life in warning, for she signaled her own position. But life left little choice in these matters. The safety she would have won by silence was the safety of a niding,
the strongest term of condemnation in use among the tribes, which roughly meant: “wretch who loses his soul through betraying his kin.”
And this time she heard the answering horns of her people, carrying on her warning to the remotest parts of Chattian lands. The droning and trilling increased, moaning through the wood, sounding near then far, until the horns became so numerous they melted into one powerful disharmonious tone. Her spirit rose with the horns and she was seized suddenly with a fierce love of all this country. She felt her mind a great wing stretched out protectively over the land.
Brunwin struggled up a path cut long ago through the scrub pine and at last gained the top of the ridge. She looked down. At first she saw only the gleaming serpent-shape of the river, molten in the sun. Then she saw them, three hundred and more, swarming in a dark knot, bristling with a thicket of upright spears. The sight was fascinating and terrifying at once, like coming upon a nest of wasps. Some forded the river in thin files while others milled behind. She pulled Brunwin to a halt, fearful they would see her.