Night of the Wolf (52 page)

He’s besotted with her,
Dryas thought.
I have no choice.
She felt an increasing sense of foreboding.
I want to destroy him, but why am I afraid?

“She is the dragon’s own,” Cut Ear growled from behind her. “From the sea.” He pointed to Dryas’ leg. “He marks her. Look at leg.”

Dryas lifted the long tunic as high as her calf, showing the marks of the puncture wounds.

“Women trouble,” Cut Ear said. “All trouble.” He pointed at Dryas. “This woman, worst kind of trouble. You smart man. So smart, nobody get ’round you. To you, chiefs, warriors, like children. Play fool, you spank. Play worse fool, you kill. They learn. The ones still alive learn. Lucius, Roman fool. She snare him. She take him. Let have him. Nothing to you. Have many more young fool. Ya. But cheap. Lots. Follow you for free. Pick of lot. Ya.”

He pointed to Dryas again. “Old, old, old people. She is one. Live in mist, rain, darkness. Gods fight in sky. Look into other world. Mouthpiece of hag. Dragon queen. Star singer. Men steal first magic from woman, this kind woman. All trouble, worst kind. No good reason she come here. No good. I ever tell you wrong?”

“No, my friend,” Caesar said. “You never lie. Is what he says true?” he asked Dryas.

“Yes,” she answered. “I would urge you to take his advice.”

Cut Ear grunted.

“This begins to intrigue me,” Caesar said. “You can really tell a man his fate?”

“No,” Dryas said. “Only about himself. I have never known anyone who wanted to know as much as I can tell him. Never.”

“Just possibly I do,” he said.

“Yes, well, you will face the woman. When?”

“I have never been afraid of women. Now. What do you need?”

“Nothing. A quiet place where we will be undisturbed.”

“Day or night?”

“Now, as you demanded,” she said.

“The Temple of Vesta. The ladies, the virgins, will be happy to favor me. She, Vesta, is, after all, a woman.”

The temple was an ancient one, perhaps the oldest in Rome. It was, in the course of centuries, rebuilt many times. It housed a fire and, really, that was all. Its stark simplicity perhaps replicated the huts built by the first settlers. Probably they were from Greece, those who came and settled the stony, hot soil of the seven hills beside the Tiber.

Its center was the hearth where they first gathered for protection against the cold and dangers that lurked in darkness. In those days, the last sight people had before they slept was the banked coals of the night fire, and the first, the rising flames of a morning before sunrise as the woman, keeper of the flames, built it higher to cook the day’s first meal.

She was Vesta, guardian of the family, the chastity of wives and daughters, protector against misfortune, hunger, and disease, keeper of the flame and, perhaps, the spirit of fire, itself forever dividing men from beasts. Yielding to men the gift of heaven, placed in the trembling hands of our kind’s first immortal dreamer; the first to lift her eyes and hands from the mire, and stretch them out toward the star-filled sky.

Yes,
Dryas thought,
this is one of those places like Delphi, Tara in the Irish valley, or the one on Salisbury plain. A seal is set here. Yes, she will come. I am sure and Cut Ear is right. It is a foolish man who meddles with women’s magic. Who would have thought it? This Caesar a fool. She will destroy him and possibly me, too, in the process.

The temple was a small, though imposing, structure. Round; the fire burned alone on a circular marble altar in the center, tended day and night by its guardian vestals. The walls were white limestone surrounded by marble Corinthian columns. Once inside, Dryas could see that there were no paintings or statues, only plain white walls and a rotunda over the altar with the fire.

Dryas felt a deep dread slowly creeping over her.

The day outside was warm, almost unseasonably warm. The sky above the Forum was filled with high-topped cumulus clouds, white at the tops, but darker at the base where they rode the thermal layer above the city.

Dryas took a last look at the light and air beyond the heavy, cedar double doors. Caesar spoke with the vestal on duty. She nodded and departed.

Two of the soldiers closed the heavy doors and the room grew dark. The fire on the altar didn’t shed much light, but the roof had a double dome, a smaller one atop the larger, and windows surrounding the division between them let in clear, bluish-white light, as did the smoke hole in the roof that served as a chimney.

It was oddly familiar to Dryas, and then she remembered. The ancient building was very like Cynewolf’s hall, almost as if a command once given echoed still in the human mind and soul, and would forever more.
I do not ask for worship, but honor me this way. I would be remembered for your sake and mine.

Caesar saw Dryas’ waxen paleness in the firelight. “What is it, sorceress? Have you made promises you cannot keep and are afraid?”

Dryas removed her belt and then unbraided the copper crown from her hair while answering. “I am afraid, Caesar, but not of you. She is a being of immeasurably greater power. The promises are not mine to keep, but hers. I am now certain she will keep them.”

She handed her crown and belt to Cut Ear, who stood near her. Her long hair hung like a thick dark curtain, framing her face. Then she walked toward the altar and around it until she faced Caesar over the flames.

“Since you ask!” she said.

Cut Ear backed away very quickly because he knew the creature looking back at him over the flames was not Dryas.

“Why do you summon me to this place without light or air? I find it inconvenient,” she said. With that, they found themselves somewhere else.

Dryas would have known the place, but Dryas was securely tucked away, somewhere where there was no time. They stood on the sloping side of the mountain where the spring became a waterfall and the giant conifers held the mountaintop.

These woods were more ordinary and friendly. Stone pines with their cloudlike tops mixed with holum oaks. Rowan with its blazing berries ringed a clearing at whose center a fire burned on a flat stone. The air was clear and an intermittent breeze blew, cooling the air and fanning the fire. Birdsong filled the trees and bushes around them.

“Have you a question?” Dryas and not Dryas asked. “Be quick because this mortal cannot bear my touch for too long and I won’t be party to the destruction of this woman. Although she is utterly unimportant to you, Caesar, her people need her to accomplish a great purpose. Speak!”

“What is my destiny?” Caesar asked.

Dryas­not Dryas appeared impatient. “You yourself would know the answer to that question if you but bent your considerable intellect to an analysis of the facts. But then, humans like you don’t really want to know. The answer is: It is time for you to die.

“All roads you take will bring you to death, not distant mortality, but death, soon, especially if you go to the Senate tomorrow. Stay away from the Senate during your remaining sojourn in Rome and you will leave for Parthia alive. Mourn your wife; give that excuse.”

“My wife is not dead. Her maids tell me she is resting. A bad storm this morning frightened her.”

“She is not resting, Caesar. The important part of her has already departed. True, she breathes yet, but, by morning, the discarded envelope of flesh she once wore will fail and it will begin its journey down the path to dust. That wasn’t a storm, but of that I will say no more.”

“The Ides of March,” Caesar said. “Every soothsayer in Rome has been moping and whining about them for months. Seems however powerful you are, Dryas, you are still a charlatan like all the rest.”

“Caesar, when a man goes with an ax to fell a tree, he can determine from where he makes the cut how to make the tree fall in the spot he wishes. Once the cuts are made, then the tree is destined to fall in that spot. So it is with a man. The forces that will kill him begin their work at birth and continue throughout his life. There are many kinds of forces. Some are purely physical, others are concerned with the soul, and there are yet others, moral in nature.

“Even mere mortals can read these patterns and see the end. Philo is an expert at certain kinds and foretold your wife’s death some months ago.”

Caesar sighed. “It seems that I am condemned to be talked down to by women. These are truisms you utter. I hear nothing new.”

Dryas­not Dryas was unmoved. “Caesar, disabuse yourself of the idea that you are speaking to a woman or, for that matter, anything human at all. Tell me, do you discuss politics with your horse?”

Caesar’s face colored. It was the first time he’d seemed ruffled by anything. “No! I do not.”

“Well, no more than you could explain politics to a horse, could I explain the ordering of the universe to you. Trust me. It is both vaster and far more complex than you comprehend—could possibly comprehend. Believe me when I tell you all paths now carry you toward death, and soon.

“For instance, should you escape death here in Rome and leave for Parthia, there are some among those people who, spurred by a great fear of you, have studied your deeds and writings. They are searching for weakness and have, they think, detected several. I do not believe you will find them so easy to destroy.

“But that is not all. You are threatened from within. You are old, old before your time, worn by the struggles of a lifetime. But not only your body fails. Your chief terror is the decline in your mental facility. You are more forgetful than most men of your age. How often do you lose the thread of your discourse and have to be recalled by your lady, Cleopatra?”

“I won’t listen—” Caesar shouted.

“Oh, yes, you will,” Dryas­not Dryas said. “You will listen for as long as I choose and certainly until I am finished.”

Everyone in the clearing—Philo, Cut Ear, Fulvia, and Cleopatra—knew he would, would listen for as long as whatever inhabited Dryas’ flesh desired.

“Do not forget—” Her voice crackled with power. “—that you summoned me and I am not dismissed until I care to leave. So be silent.”

Then she continued. “There are those carefully concealed seizures and the fact that you have awakened and, for a few minutes, have found yourself unable to move your right side or speak. Soon, even in your reckoning of time, this condition will become permanent and you will lie, a helpless, drooling wreck, cared for by your own slaves like a child until, at last, you will not be able to eat or drink enough to sustain life and, imprisoned in your rotting body, you will die.”

Caesar’s face was pale now and, even in the morning coolness of the forest, he was perspiring.

“This is cruel,” Cleopatra cried.

“You, you charge me with cruelty to him?” Dryas­not Dryas raged. “What has he ever been but a monster of cruelty? He who was given everything: beauty, strength, intellect, wealth, health, and, yes, even love. His life could have been an arc of light against the empyrean.

“He could have been one who purified his people and brought them to greatness, but what did he do with his gifts? He used them in a shallow taste for minor cruelty, to gratify a deep thirst for power and what became an obsessive drive for primacy. First Man in Rome.”

Philo didn’t think he could ever convey the freight of absolute contempt in that statement.

“Nonsense,” Caesar answered. “The Romans aren’t fit for greatness. I gave them what they asked for: wealth, boundless wealth, and, at last, power. They will rule the world. I have seen to that. What greatness could I have given them? Answer me that.”

Dryas­not Dryas looked weary. “You still don’t understand, do you? No matter what I say, you
will not
understand. The greatness was yours to discover. Yours to bring into existence. I could not give it to you, but you might have invented it for yourself. In that sense, I was wrong to compare you to a horse. A divine fire burns in each one of you. It is yours to accept or deny and, in your narrow, selfish soul, you denied it and so failed yourself and your people.”

“And so, for this crime of . . . omission, I must receive some . . . form of punishment?”

Caesar’s question was ironic, but fearless.

“No!” she answered. “We do not punish, and I see, even at this very moment, you are struggling to find a way to get the better of me. Never, never understanding that true greatness is not a matter of victory or defeat. No, of all things, what I most deplore is pointless suffering. No! In the normal course of time, you die. All of your kind do. It is inherent in your nature. You could not live, if you did not also die. No, I merely warn you how close you are to that final moment. Come here, Cut Ear.”

For once, the giant warrior looked afraid.

“Come, I said,” she repeated.

He came, drawing close to her side.

“Wait!” It was Philo’s voice that piped up. “I . . . I . . . want to ask a question . . . please? Just one?”

“What? I said we have not much time.” The reply was a stern one.

“Who . . . what are we?” Philo stammered.

She, Dryas­not Drayas, almost smiled. “Ah, the Greeks. I cannot remember when I took such joy in a people . . . I will give you an absolutely truthful answer, but you will not understand it.”

“I don’t mind,” Philo said. “Someday, somewhere, sometime, someone will.”

“Yes,” she answered. “You are stardust.”

Then she turned and spoke in a low voice to Cut Ear. “I have an affection for this woman. Do not fail me. Catch her, for when I leave her, she will fall. I’m going. Now!”

Dryas’ face and body went slack. Cut Ear caught her and then, unaccountably, they were in the temple again. The fire burned quietly in its brazier on the altar. The soldiers ranged around the temple walls didn’t seem to have noticed they’d been gone.

Fulvia had a magnificent fit of hysterics. Cleopatra wept. Caesar looked pale. Philo found his legs wouldn’t hold him up and sat down, right there on the temple floor.

Dryas slumbered peacefully in Cut Ear’s big arms.

Dryas woke on a cot in Gordus’ ludus with Lucius bending over her. She smiled at him in a completely beautiful way. He embraced her thankfully.