B007IIXYQY EBOK (165 page)

Authors: Donna Gillespie

BOOK: B007IIXYQY EBOK

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“Well, that’s
a departure from the dull and commonplace! This city swarms with women desperate to be a wife, who relentlessly stalk husbands, preferably rich ones—women who’ve no intention of becoming the mother of children. Our mountain cat has it all refreshingly reversed.”

“You are not angered by this?”

“Angered? Amused and amazed is closer, and, yes, saddened a bit. What has happened? It is what we spoke of before?”

“That…and a bit more. Since last we saw one another I…I have learned that the staff of our highest Holy One will one day pass to me. Not for many years, though—our Veleda still has all her powers. But those who are one day to administer the highest rites of Fria must never throttle and bind her highest gift—earthly love. Our Old One despises the permanent shackling together of woman and man just as does your own Diana. It is a curse of newer times, you see, a thing that belongs to the age of iron—”

“Diana’s whitethorn torch bursts into conflagration! The part of me that serves philosophy understands at once—what purpose can ever be set over the seeking of divine knowledge? But I do not like it, truthfully. It presents problems. With inheritance, with—”

“But it does
not
prevent me from going freely with you as one beloved, and staying with you for long times…leaving only to attend to sacred duties.”

“Why is it that opposing you feels like a violation of natural law? As if wrenching you from your path were like trying to coax a tree to grow on bare rock, or breed a donkey to a doe? I knew a man once, a philosopher called Isodorus, who was under the spell of the time of Saturn. I believe he would have held you up as a model for man. Long ago, on the night before he went to his death, he asked me to look after his pupils. I never understood it, for he had no school—his pupils wandered from gutter to bridge. But I think now that he meant
you.”

She watched him with bright, still eyes.

“I still hold out marriage as the only way of properly behaving toward a great and noble woman who is carrying my child. Curses on Nemesis—why is nothing in this life just plain and simple,
as it should be?”

Within two months Auriane and Marcus Julianus set out for the villa on the rivers Mosella and Rhine. Their train was impressive; the Emperor Nerva sent a sizable staff with them to aid Julianus in carrying out the duties of his new office, that of provincial Minister of Public Works for the province of Upper Germania, and they brought with them as well the whole of his household—or as much of it as Julianus had been able to rescue. Auriane felt she traveled with a city, so great was the number of carriages.

Though she moved homeward, still she felt she rode into shifting mystery, and uncertainties thronged about. Could she thrive in a house at all, or would she feel anxious as a wild horse trapped in a paddock? Would her people, not yet recovered from Domitian’s war, accept her gifts and aid, or would they despise her for living with one of the hated foreigners? When she found it needful to go off to study the ways of the seeresses, would he want her still when she returned? Strangely these questions did not trouble her; they almost seemed a delight, as though life would have been a dull porridge without them.

When they came so near her ancestors’ country that she knew the names of the grasses and felt the familiar souls of the trees, often when they halted at dusk, she would climb to some high place, sometimes with Marcus, sometimes with Sunia, and look at the land’s shape on the horizon, waiting patiently for it to know her. At first she sensed only bleak, chilly indifference. Gradually, with the passing of days, she began to feel an affectionate caress in the wind, to hear greetings in the autumn rattling of the leaves of elm, oak, and ash.

You remember the one who loved you.

What has changed? Little enough on the face of it; beneath the surface, countries rose and fell.

Most would say it all quite remarkable. I was brought to that city naked and chained in a cart. I leave it borne in a gilded carriage.

Nature explains nothing, expects everything, and swallows us all at death. Nature dresses us, then denudes us again, like the land endlessly passing from winter to summer. At least now I begin to know you, winter and summer, as one.

Author’s Note

Auriane and Marcus Julianus are invented characters whose stories I’ve woven into those of historical figures. Auriane has no exact historical antecedents—at least, not that have entered the written record. Women warriors among the Germanic tribes are better attested to in the third century than the first; the triumphal procession of the emperor Aurelian included ten Germanic women who fought with the Gothic army. Tribal seeresses were powerful and plentiful in this period, however; their counsel was revered on both sides of the Rhine, and they served as ambassadors from the tribes to the Romans.

Marcus Julianus was created with the Stoic philosopher Seneca in mind, along with a lesser-known senator of the day who was a gadfly in the era of Nero, Helvidius Priscus—but the details of his life are entirely fictional. No one knows who planned the assassination of the Emperor Domitian; I’ve inserted my character into an empty space provided by history.

As clarity was of primary importance to me, in most cases I avoided the use of ancient place names, keeping to more modern forms for towns, Roman provinces, rivers, and other geographical features—for example, here the River Moenus is the River Main. And I kept to the simpler modern forms for Roman names—Domitian is Domitian, and not Titus Flavius Caesar Domitianus Augustus.

In two cases I intentionally departed from fact. In my story, the Colosseum is the Colosseum, a name derived from a colossal statue of Nero erected nearby, remodeled after Nero’s fall to represent the sun god Helios. In fact, the name “Colosseum” not adopted until several centuries later. But because not everyone would have recognized
Amphitheatrum Flavium,
as it was known in the first century—and there were times when this would have compromised suspense—I kept with the better-known name.

But the greatest liberty I took was with time: Ever-tightening constraints of plot as I came to the end of the book forced me to depart from literal chronology and deprive the Emperor Domitian of roughly ten years of his reign. Maybe Domitian deserved better. But I discovered that the chronology of a period you’re writing about doesn’t always fit well with the fictional time you’re creating. History doesn’t unfold at the pace of a plot, and can even hinder storytelling when your first purpose is maintaining suspense.

Throughout the book, historical events are emphasized when they serve the interests of the story and made less prominent when they didn’t. In my story the Roman civil war of AD 69, also known as the Year of Four Emperors, a cataclysmic event in Roman history, is only lightly sketched in, while the Chattian War, a footnote in history, is painted on a broad canvas.

History provides a rich store of colorful lore about Domitian—I found I couldn’t use it all because much of it didn’t forward my lead characters’ stories. Readers interested in knowing more are referred to his ancient biographers, Dio Cassius and Suetonius.

In the last few years, both Domitian’s and Nero’s reputations have been rehabilitated somewhat by modern historians. My versions are modeled on the grim tyrants portrayed in Dio Cassius’
Roman History
and Suetonius’
Twelve Caesars
. This is in part because these historians’ accounts make for a more entertaining story. But it’s also because I think these accounts have a color and authenticity no modern historian can match—after all, they did have access to the imperial archives, and, in Suetonius’ case, a chance to speak with still-living eyewitnesses. With Domitian’s story I went a step farther and dramatized a contemporary rumor—again because it made for a better story. I doubt Domitian murdered his brother. But it’s interesting—and telling—that so many believed it at the time. The moderate modern views of historians can make for pallid villains.

And finally, my apologies to two northern goddesses, Freyja and Frigg—whom I hope won’t mind that in this book I’ve conflated them into a single deity I’ve called Fria.

About the Author

Donna Gillespie is a longtime resident of San Francisco. She spent twelve years writing and researching
The Light Bearer,
her first novel, and is currently at work on the third novel in this series.

Table of Contents

Critical Acclaim for The Light Bearer

The Light Bearer

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Revised Edition

THE SACRED EARTH