B007IIXYQY EBOK (34 page)

Be born among us, be born among us, live again!
she prayed, and felt a stirring behind the membrane that divided the worlds.
Drink our mead, eat meat from our board,
she intoned—and sensed a quickening behind his lids.

She looked up to meet the eyes of a young Companion who paused, amazed, in the midst of stripping a corpse to watch her. She met his eyes calmly, refusing to explain.

Then she rose and left Ullrik where he was, consoled by her belief that she would see him again one day, in the body of one not yet born. With the others she wearily worked her way back to Baldemar’s camp. Witgern kept close by her side, remorse in his manner as he silently offered renewed friendship. Those too drunken to walk were loaded into the carts with the treasure. The Roman dead and Wido’s Companions were left for the ravens.

Baldemar gave the order for a great bonfire to be built on the ridge so the spoil could be dedicated to Wodan. It seemed to Auriane, when she embraced him on her return, that his eyes shone fierce and alive as the eagle’s as it falls on prey. She was certain his vital strength had grown greatly in the span of this one night.

Already, she thought, vengeance has begun its work of healing.

It was not until Auriane sought an herb woman to treat her wound—a sword cut that penetrated the collarbone—that she realized the
aurr,
that amulet of earth she had worn all her life, was gone, cut off most likely by the blade that made the wound. A fearful grief seized her. It could not be. But it was.

I have lost the protection of earth. Surely, it is because I have given myself to battle. Ramis is the great enemy of war, and so she took back her birth-gift to me.

“Never forget the power of hair,”
Ramis warned, and I willingly let mine be shorn. But I cannot so easily let it go! Tomorrow I’ll search among the corpses until I find it.

No. That would be to no purpose.
She has taken it from me.
She will not let me find it. I must travel on without it. What need has one given to Wodan for the protection of the earth?

The victory festival was so joyous and abandoned she forgot for a time the amulet’s loss. They shouted praise-songs to the god in loud, lusty voices as Roman legionary shields, swords and javelins, horse trappings and leather armor were thrown into the bonfire as thank-offerings. And because the god had a great love of horses, thirty cavalry mounts were sacrificed as well, after one fine black Thessalian stallion was saved out for Baldemar to replace the horse killed beneath him. As the celebrating went on through the night, Auriane managed to conceal two legionary short swords before they were given to the flames, so that she and Decius could practice with them. This was a brazen theft from the god, but a small one, she reasoned hopefully, and her fascination with them was stronger than her fear.

The victory festival went on until the mead and wine ran out. For four days and nights, sword dancers performed their stalking dance round the fire, their blades sparking as they were struck together to the accompaniment of pipers and drummers who played hard to be heard over the flames. The ground was swampy with spilled mead. Horse races were run, and cock fights staged. The Companions roasted a whole ox, and listened to the tellings of seeresses who gazed into bowls of blackened silver filled with water from divining springs. Traveling songmakers came into camp with their gaily colored cloaks and battered harps, and sang familiar lays to slowly plucked strings or composed new ones in honor of the battle just won. They sang that the victory was Auriane’s, for hers was the hand that opened the gate.

When they had no more spoil to burn, the bonfire was fed with whole trees, and Roman wagons. It was such a potent fire, people said, that anyone who came near its gusts of heat would be cured of all manner of ailments, from festering boils to the wasting cough, and that barren women who danced round it would conceive within the year.

This, then, Auriane thought, is the rapture of vengeance. The great cat-spirit that guards our souls smiles and licks its paws. The sun loves us. The moon fills our wombs.

But the taste was so much more pallid than she had expected. She sensed a crouching evil behind the celebrating that the others seemed not to feel. Perhaps it was because Odberht still lived. All was not well; she knew it in the blood.

When four days had gone, they watched from the ridge as a party of Romans returned to the field of battle. The legionary soldiers were petty and small in the distance as they methodically collected their dead for the pyres. Auriane heard her people laugh and mock and call them cowards and slaves.

She saw Decius but once before they broke camp. She had arranged for him to secretly go ahead of them with a native thrall for a guide. When she came to take leave of him, he told her of the unknown witness who had seen their last embrace. Decius asked what would become of her, were she accused of shameful acts with a foreigner.

“Nothing, while Baldemar lives—no one would dare harm me, not even Geisar. My father has always honored his own law above sacred law. But if…if….

“Baldemar dies.”

“Yes. Then I am certain Geisar would see me tried and condemned by the Assembly.”

“Condemned. That means…drowning in a lake beneath hurdles?”

“It would be necessary, to keep my evil from infecting the whole tribe.”

“The compassion of barbarians, it tugs at the heart. Well, my dove, you must tell your father to stay alive.”

“Please, Decius, do not mock.”

On the next day the army dispersed to the tribal farms, hoping to return in time for the harvest. Baldemar could ride if the pace were slow, though not for long, and so began a torturously slow journey home.

They were hardly under way when one of Baldemar’s young messengers galloped toward them on the trail, coming from the north. He was shaken and pale from loss of sleep, and he had already ridden one horse to death.

A number of northern farms were being pillaged and burned by raiders of the Cheruscans, he said. There had been killings and burning at the remotest farms. A stream of refugees traveled toward them now.

Baldemar had feared these ancestral tribal enemies of the far north might take advantage of his long absence in the south. He quickly arranged for Witgern to ride ahead at great speed with a company of five hundred to surprise and punish the brigands.

When the five hundred were ready to depart, they began to clamor for Auriane to ride with them. Baldemar firmly refused.

But the cries of
“Daughter of the Ash! Bringer of victory!”
only became more determined. She was their living shield; the men were outraged that Baldemar would deny them her protection.

“This will bring no happiness to Athelinda,” Baldemar protested to Auriane. But when the men dismounted, set down their weapons and refused to ride out, Baldemar at last relented.

Auriane privately rejoiced that she was not to return home. Her unsettled soul needed movement in these times, and the newly built hall was not home anyway. The spirits of childhood no longer dwelled there; they had been driven off by the fire. What did dwell there were pitiable ghosts—of Arnwulf, of Hertha. The shifting grasses of the plain were her fields now; all the trees of the Hercynian Forest were the pillars of her house. Most of the time this was as she wanted it. But somewhere within, it caused a dim point of sadness; sometimes it seemed like too much house. If everywhere were home, then nowhere was home.

As they journeyed north, the air became sharply cold, and she sensed a ruinous winter settling in before its time.

ROME

CHAPTER IX

S
UMMER WITHERED INTO FALL.
A
S THE
wind stripped bare the trees of the northern forest, preparing them for the anguish of winter, in the gentler climate of the capital city of the Empire a different sort of winter closed in upon Marcus Arrius Julianus the Younger, once Endymion the slave. In these, the last blood-washed days of Nero, he who, ten years ago, had gained all, prepared now to lose all—before him loomed a treason trial, his family’s ruin, and a humiliating death.

Young Marcus’ earliest days in the mansion on the Esquiline were filled with the ecstasy of the blind man given sight. Endymion had come upon his true country—the lecture halls of the philosophers’ schools, the Palace libraries, and the celebrated library in his father’s house. He devoured with the relish of the half-starved the principles of geometry and harmonics, the theories of the Alexandrian astronomers, the histories of the great nations back to the time of Saturn. He immersed himself in such diverse studies as the laws of architectural symmetry, the art of augury, the science of siting a temple, of laying a forum, of planning the acoustics of a theater. He committed to memory much of the great works of the Greek and Latin poets, while learning the whole of the art of war, from stratagems of the field to the tuning of catapults. As he grew to young manhood, he traveled to the Academy at Athens to hear lectures on the nature of existence given by the great Platonists and Epicureans of the day, and then to the schools of Alexandria to learn human anatomy and the deeper mysteries of the moon and stars. On his return he set himself to the study of civil law, for the profession of advocate was considered necessary for advancement in government, and he attended the city’s most celebrated school of rhetoric, where his student orations were so highly praised that teachers of rival schools came to listen. At twenty-one his treatise criticizing the strict materialism of Democritus was read at the Palace before Nero and became a popular text for students of the natural sciences. All his tutors agreed he was possessed of uncommon memory, tenacity and brilliance, and by twenty-five he was as celebrated for his learning as Seneca had been at the same age.

Through much of this time, Marcus Arrius Julianus the Elder was absent at his post as Governor at the fortress of Mogontiacum in Upper Germania, and Diocles, the chief steward of the house, watched over the boy carefully, writing regularly of him to his father. As Marcus grew to young manhood, Diocles’ letters became catalogues of dangerous improprieties: Young Marcus held readings of the works of philosophers who had been exiled or banned, attended by “parasites of the lowest classes whom he calls friends.” Marcus, Diocles suspected, had assignations with the concubine of one of the most powerful legionary commanders, a freedwoman far older than himself noted for her cleverness and learning rather than her beauty; how could he even
look
at such a vulgar creature, Diocles complained, when he is betrothed to Junilla, a maid of impeccable family, and the chastest bloom of maidenhood in the city? Marcus, Diocles scribbled on, drove from the house his most illustrious tutor, the Greek historian Archias, by arguing that Alexander the Great, who was this teacher’s god, was in reality no more than a highly successful murderer and thief. And the boy infuriated Antigonos, his tutor in languages, by putting forth a theory that the rude tongues of the Gauls and the savages of Germania were related in form to Latin.

The elder Julianus’ dismay increased when Marcus turned his attention from the respectable philosophies of the day, such as the staid Stoicism popular at court, and began secretly pursuing esoteric disciplines too mystical for the aristocracy’s Greek-tutored tastes and too critical of all social order. Once Diocles saw Marcus arise with a lamp in the deep of night and followed him. If his charge went off to an assignation, the steward meant to be certain it was a highborn girl or proper married matron and not some tavern trull or Circus catamite. The boy’s father would want to know. But Marcus stole back to the library as if to a lover that would not let him rest. At dawn Diocles found the young man asleep at the reading table; about him were copies of such books as Pythagoras’ theory of the transmigration of souls, Isodorus’ essays on the evils of any man, be he emperor or king, assuming rulership over others, and Apollonius of Tyana’s diatribes against the temple sacrifice of animals—subversive texts with with no place in a Roman education. It shocked Diocles as much as commerce with the meanest of prostitutes would have.

And then the improprieties, to his father’s horror, became ever more public. In one of young Marcus Julianus’ first civil cases as advocate—he spoke the defense of a freedman accused of stealing sacks of grain from the government stores during a severe winter grain shortage—Marcus in his summation speech mentioned the recent arrival of an Alexandrian grain ship, revealing it was loaded not with desperately needed wheat but with sand for Nero’s private wrestlers. “The young fool’s words touched off a food riot,” Diocles wrote to the Governor. “They are starting to say of your son:
What others scribble on walls at night, Marcus Julianus shouts in the shadow of the Palace.
”

But the final outrage, in Diocles’ opinion, came when the young man began openly attending the street lectures of Isodorus, a Cynic philosopher who owned nothing but the filthy rags he wore. Diocles convinced Marcus’ father his son meant to give away all his possessions, go barefoot and follow this Isodorus, sleeping beneath bridges with him and eating fruit fallen from carts. Diocles wrote to the Governor: “You must return home at once! Unless you are content in the knowledge you pulled that young man out of one gutter just so he could crawl back into another.”