Night of the Wolf (20 page)

Her breath caught in her throat and she pushed the memory away.
No, I am here to tame this killer, and if he will not be tamed, to end his life.

She realized her memory had been about to present her with an image of her child, the way she’d last seen him before Caesar had invaded the White Isle. If she accepted the burden of that memory, for a long time she would only yield to the utter prostration of grief and be useless for all else.

Be still and I will banish him.
The voice spoke in her mind. Dryas’ eyes flew open and she looked up at the trees marching up and up toward the ridge above.

Close your eyes,
the voice whispered from what seemed an immense distance.
Then I can talk to you. I will help you to catch the wolf.

They were so beautiful, the autumn woods. The unchanging evergreen and pines were a patchwork of green among the oaks’ brown and the scarlet gold of aspen and poplar. The leaves of the slender birch were fallen and the pale trunks stood out among the rest.

Dryas closed her eyes. “I must capture the wolf,” she said.

He watches you now, but he will not come to you.

“Why not?” Dryas asked. Her fists clenched and she was filled with frustration.

I don’t know.
Then the presence trailed away and was gone.

Dryas slept.

The wolf watched her. Yes, this one was beautiful and she came to the pool alone, almost as if she wished to meet him.

I have a taste for them,
he thought.
Otherwise, I would not be looking at this one because, beautiful or not, she shows no touch of desire. She is as one apart, the way Leon was. But different in that she carries no aura of death about her but is rather an ice form carved by wind and rain or a cloud shaped like a mountain or a wolf’s head, a thing that deceives the eye into believing it is what it is not.

He rested his head on his front paws and he also slept.

The cold woke them both. The sun was almost gone beyond the trees.

Dryas rose, stretched, and walked toward her clothing. She was wiggling into her shift when she saw the shadow among the trees.

A shadow alone as the thing she’d seen in the stone circle. A shadow not made by anything else. She froze, not out of fear, but caution. She had encountered them before, but this was the first time she’d been this close to one; and they could be dangerous.

The voice spoke in her mind again.
The wolf is here.

Dryas looked around and saw him watching her from a rocky outcrop on the other side of the lake.

Do you want him? You must make the choice. Do you?

Dryas really never wanted to yield her body to anyone again. She sensed she could leave, change her fate, and abandon her useless quest, return to her people on the White Isle, return to the Isle of Women. Her heart hungered for it. The silence broken only by her sisters’ voices or the cry of seabirds on the shore. From there, she could leave on her last voyage and not return, not for a long, long time. She could cleanse her abiding grief and drink of the river of eternal forgetfulness.

Her heart hungered for this. But she had her duty.

“I will dare the eagle’s talon, the wolf’s maw. No matter what the suffering, I will not commit my soul to sleep until my heart’s blood runs red from battle wounds and my head is sundered from my body. Nor will I abandon my chieftain or my duty, living or dead, till I have completed my course and victory is within my grasp. This is what is asked and this I yield.”

Eyes glowed in the shadow’s face.
If you would have the wolf make an offering.

She fumbled among her clothes and found the poppy broach. She lifted the ornament and hurled it into the pool. It splashed once and vanished.

Physical desire entered her body the way water soaks a cloth and left her just as limp as wet linen. She fell backward. Her legs were weak with the compulsion and she sprawled on the pine needles. Her eyes searched the twilight for the wolf, but she didn’t see him.

In his place was a man and he moved with the assurance of the great killer. In a few moments, he was bending over her.

XII

He was backlit by the flare of sunset above the trees. Long rays of pink and gold light streamed upward as the sun vanished behind the mountain.

Dryas tried to push herself away from the dark figure standing over her, but her hands slipped on the carpet of pine needles.

Almost casually, he reached down and scooped her up with one arm. She was sure he must be immensely strong because he held her easily.

He pulled her closer. “It’s cold,” he said. “Let me warm you.”

She found herself pressed gently against the length of his body. He was warm. Being held against his flesh was rather like experiencing a conflagration.

To her terror, she realized his right knee was between her knees, rising, easing her legs apart.

“No!” she gasped, her hands pushing against his chest. “No . . . no.”

“What’s wrong? You don’t want me? You knew I was here. I know. I can tell. You reek of desire. It’s not so different for one of us. Even the odor is much the same. I don’t understand. If you didn’t want me, why did you come here? Why didn’t you go hide in the old man’s den with the . . . the mad girl?”

Then he had both hands holding her. “Come. Imona was afraid at first, but then she quickly realized I would do nothing to harm her.”

Imona! Dryas twisted anew from him, trying to get herself under control. A second later she was on her feet, running uphill into the dark wood. She could move silently in the shadows. They were black, thick as velvet, but she found she couldn’t escape him. No, not even for a moment. Though the air was cold, she saw the faint brush of starlight on his damp skin.

He embraced her, kissing her neck. Then he lifted the luxuriant spill of her hair and nibbled expertly at her throat and ears.

Gooseflesh erupted all over her skin as a thrill of pure lust poured over her body.

He laughed, then kissed her again, running his tongue between her lips and pressing his to her open mouth.

She found herself remembering that mouth in the twilight—firm, warm, seeking, searching. She moved toward the heat in him like a moth to a flame.

I want to die in that fire,
she thought. But no, no, die wasn’t the word she wanted. And then she remembered
die
was sometimes what that final pleasure was called . . . a kind of death. When the final flash of desire’s lightning bums away all else, it is like death.

No, if anyone was going to die here, she must not be the one. She allowed herself to fall limply against him as if in total surrender. She could feel his arms close around her. The wish for that splendid pleasure, that burning delight, surged like some dark fire in her veins.

And then, abruptly, she saw her son’s face—the pupils cloudy, but the irises still green and clear like shallow seawater in the sunlight. But he was dead, given into the hand of darkness. With a strange look of comprehension in his eyes and pale lips parted as if to speak, showing the small teeth of a child only seven or eight years old— Stop! And then came the filth and the horror, just as it had been when she saw her son and knew he was dead. He and the rest of the children he lay among. There was nothing left but darkness.

Lucius didn’t need Philo’s help. The house was acrawl with servants—slaves and freedmen and women belonging to his family. Mostly to Fulvia.

Both young men attending him were slaves, newly purchased from one of Caesar’s gladiatorial ludi and thus slated for death in the arena at some festival or other.

They were very glad to have escaped that fate and fallen into a very soft life, and he was pretty sure they had been told to keep him happy at any and all costs. Beyond that, he had no illusions as to their loyalty. They would report to Fulvia.

It was a source of some puzzlement to him that Fulvia controlled all of the household slaves. How had it happened? When he’d left to take up his first command in the legions, she had not dominated the household so completely. But gradually, as the years passed, he found his mother’s remaining women and his father’s freedmen slowly being supplanted by those knowing no one’s authority but hers. She was expert at picking individuals such as the two young Campanian Samnites, who knew their very lives depended on her favor.

She need not bother even with so simple a thing as a household execution. All that would be required would be to return them from whence they came, with a notification that their services had proven unsatisfactory, and the lanista would make sure they died in the next combat.

The same was true of the two Greek girls who saw to his chamber under Philo’s direction. They were both beautiful still, and had been favorites of Fulvia in their time, but though no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, they were now growing a bit long in the tooth for their original profession. They would not survive long in the unhealthy brothels clustered near the Tiber. Thirty to forty men a night would destroy most women’s health in a matter of a few years. Neither of them was very bright, both entirely unskilled and physically not very strong, so they went in terror of Fulvia.

He was, as it were, surrounded. He studied himself in a long mirror. Yes, it was a mirror, silver backing with a glass surface. True, the reflection was a bit fuzzy and one arm appeared longer than the other, but it was definitely him. He was decked out like a bridegroom or, as an even more sinister metaphor suggested itself to him, like the main attraction at a bull sacrifice: hair curled, horns gilded, freshly bathed, shorn, and drenched in perfume. He sighed. His two servants were still fussing around him. He reached up to see if he perhaps had horns to gild.

“Don’t do that, my lord,” one of the young men said. “You’ll mess up your hair and the divine Julius will—”

“Divine Julius!” Lucius broke in on him. “Has the Senate voted him divine honors? You mean he’s not satisfied to be first man in Rome, father of his country, consul for life, and whatever else those whimpering senatorial toadies can dream up, and he wants to be a god, too?”

The two young men busily arranging the folds of his toga kept perfectly straight faces.
At least Philo would have laughed,
he thought rather self-pityingly.

His bedroom cubiculum was another source of conflict between himself and his sister. She wanted him to move into the more spacious, luxurious, and newer part of the villa, but he was attached to his boyhood room. She considered his desire for privacy one of a number of unpleasant eccentricities that made him an unfit heir to the Basilian fortune.

She herself lived in what he considered gilt-edged squalor with two secretaries—Firminius was one of them—five dressers, two tiring women, three maids of all work, and several pretty little things, none of them out of her teens, ready and willing to snuggle with her whenever she felt amorous. She slept in solitary splendor on silk sheets in a bed of aromatic lemon wood covered by brocade.

Firminius enjoyed quarters of his own nearby, but the rest bedded down in concentric circles around her luxurious couch and, when he visited her, he could always tell who was in and out of favor by how close their present sleeping arrangements were to her bed.

In his cubiculum there was no real accommodation for servants. The Gallic woman who’d cared for him along with Philo and his two personal attendants had rooms nearby. Fulvia considered it scandalous that his room, at the corner of the house, was only a little bigger than his servants’.

He liked it, though. For one thing it was cool in summer. Two high, narrow windows near the ceiling were covered with heavy iron grillwork. They overlooked a strip of grass shaded by cypresses. A glass skylight in the ceiling admitted plenty of light by day and the windows near the ceiling drew cool air from the tree-shaded garden outside. In winter, the windows could be shuttered and the room easily warmed with a brazier.

His bed was narrow and covered with a feather mattress and linen sheets. The mirror was the only luxury in the room. It was a present from his mother, but he always felt she was encouraged by his father to give it to him, since they dealt in the things. To say Hortensus was close with a sesterce was a very charitable understatement. Even her secret drinking, uncorrected by his father’s poorly veiled death threats, probably bothered his father more because she preferred to seek oblivion with the aid of expensive Falernian rather than the cheaper tipples stocked by the cook in tuns near the kitchen.

Well, his father had been rewarded by his single-minded pursuit of the almighty denarius, his two financially rewarding but unhappy marriages, and his obsession with saving something on every purchase. He was known, in certain quarters, as “Never Pay the First Price” Hortensus. His miserly ways meant he left a large estate when he died.

Now, Fulvia was expanding his empire. And these particular dinner guests were in a position to make her very rich.

The light coming in through the glass plate in the ceiling was growing dimmer. The two young men wanted to continue with the folds of his toga, but he felt that as much as could be done to improve his appearance had been done and any further efforts were simply foolishness.

He showed only too well the effects of a long illness. He was overthin, rather pale, and he still limped a bit on his left side. The massive bundle of scar tissue left by the wound pulled at the big muscles of his buttocks and thigh.

He went out without locking his door. Why bother? If a thief could find anything of value in his room, said thief was more than welcome to it.

He met his sister near the big triclinium close to the front door. He hadn’t seen the formal dining chamber fully lit since he was a boy, and its appearance staggered him.

The floor was decorated with a mosaic of a garden, a green garden organized as if the beds bordered the room. The tessera that formed the green plants and flowers were malachite and the petals of the flowers were cabochon semiprecious stones: crystal amethyst for the purple, bloodstone for red, citrine for yellow. The picture seemed to leap from the floor to the eye.

The walls gave the appearance of severity, being pure white marble, but each panel was set with onyx bordering violet porphyry, all inlaid into the marble.

The pale violet of the porphyry was picked up by the couches upholstered in the brightest shade of Tynan purple velvet he’d ever seen. The room was brilliantly lit with hanging bronze lamps, all hissing away, doing their best to cast out the night.

He stood, gazing at it, awestruck. “Now I know what killed Father,” he said, bursting into laughter.

Fulvia, resplendent in white gauze draped over white silk, all embroidered in gold, spoke without moving her lips. “No miser jokes, no entertaining stories about your exploits with Gallic whores. Don’t tell him how you got your wound or where your scar is or discuss your low Roman or military friends. Don’t, don’t, don’t embarrass me in front of this pair. If you do, I’ll kill you.”

Lucius didn’t doubt it for even one moment. He opened his mouth, but nothing emerged because there was a sound of military movement in the streets—the tramp of booted feet, to be exact.

“They’re here!” he finally whispered.

“Yes,” Fulvia said.

Lucius found his mouth was dry. The closest he’d ever been to the most famous man of his time was a bust in the atrium of one of his mother’s sisters. It had depicted a young, handsome man. Painted, as most statues were then, it showed him with slightly curling hair and light, rather piercing hazel eyes, a full, if firm, mouth, and a strong chin. The famous profile was that of an intelligent eagle, fierce but fair, domineering but just. The very epitome of all Rome brought to the world and the reason she had been chosen by the gods to rule it.

All of this was about to enter the front door.

In a swirl of draperies, Fulvia hurried toward the atrium to greet her guests. Chained to his usual place and as terrified of Fulvia as all the other slaves, the porter reached the door first. And so the rattle and clank of fetters announced the entrance of the most important man in the world.

Lucius felt an odd weight enter his stomach.
How is it that though I haven’t eaten since morning I have dyspepsia? I must ask Philo about . . .
That was as far as he got because, by then, he’d realized he was afraid.

A soldier entered first and bowed to Fulvia. He carried a torch that brilliantly lit the old entryway and was followed by others.

The shock of brightness blinded Lucius for a second, then he saw they were not in parade dress, but wearing the working armor of legionnaires on duty. Leather helmets stiffened with bronze, boiled leather cuirass and thigh protectors studded with metal, and greaves on their shins. All three looked around very carefully.

The Basilian villa, like almost all houses of the period, was a patchwork of old and new areas. The entrance was one of the oldest parts. No one knew quite when it had been built, probably as a farmhouse before the city surrounded it. Its tenants had been plebeian farmers nursing vines, olives, and the low, hard wheat that didn’t rise any higher than a tall man’s knee, and living by the sweat of their brows on an open, ancient hillside beyond the walls.

The door was very heavy, old oak reinforced with iron. The first room was an atrium where pour-offs from the roof filled a pool, once a water source for the whole family. The same stars still shone through the opening in the roof, but beyond, a magnificent peristyle garden, brightly lit by torches, beckoned.

Cleopatra preceded Caesar into the atrium through the doors. At first, she seemed but a shadow. Fulvia greeted her with as close to a curtsey as Lucius had ever seen her make, but then she rose and she and the queen embraced, kissing like old girlfriends.

The slave porter at the door bowed down so low, his forehead almost touched the ground.

And
he
entered the doorway. He also seemed a shadow until he passed the atrium pond where Fulvia and the Egyptian queen took his hand, one on either side, and led him into the light.

Lucius backed up quickly to get out of their way and saw the living man for the first time.