The Wedding Shroud - A Tale of Ancient Rome (49 page)

A man wearing a bull’s headdress staggered towards her. He wore a goatskin cloak and leaned on his thyrsus staff. Streaks of purple wine mottled his breasts. It was the Maru.

Grasping her arm and pushing her to her knees, he hitched up his kirtle with his other hand. Caecilia could see his soot-ringed eyes through the eyeholes
,
the coarse-haired mask
grotesque in the shadow and light. He stank of wine fumes. Terrified, the world spinning around her, Caecilia was not sure if he was a man or Fufluns himself.

Hot stinking bile erupted from her, pouring over his chest, spattering her gown. Apercu released her, stepping back as she convulsed and heaved. He studied her for a while, then, grunting, wiped her vomit from his skin and walked away. Caecilia lay there puking up the last remnants of the potion, her tongue and mouth and throat burning with the taste of acrid sick.

Time stretched.

Quivering, she curled into a ball, pulling her hem over her feet in case the maenad’s serpent slithered beneath her skirts and bit her.

Then from the darkness someone lifted her onto their lap. Solace and comfort enfolded her. Sure that it was Mastarna, she leaned her head back upon his chest. But it was not a man who held her. She was cradled against the soft breasts of a woman. A woman who held her as a mother would. A curtain of wings cocooned her. Caecilia looked up into the face of a guardian angel.

The arms around her tightened, the pinions no longer white but black, shimmering with iridescence, scales not feathers, membrane of skin not down. The fetid breath of her comforter assailed her, a breath that stank of bile. Caecilia twisted around to see who held her. Pale and soulless eyes glared at her, a slit of black bisecting them. And Tuchulcha, sharp vulture’s beak poised above her, tilted her chin to him as would a lover.

Glossary

Cast of Characters

Cytheris was cradling her and stroking her hair. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Hush.’

It was dawn. Bleak. The sun begrudging an appearance. The ground’s chillness seized her limbs. Cytheris had draped a cloak over Caecilia but the girl still shivered in her torn golden gown. The ache in her head was agonising. Just moving her eyes hurt. She searched for Mastarna and then remembered.

Bodies lay jumbled around her, masks askew, mottled and streaked with wine stains. For a moment she thought them dead until she saw that some were twitching. Nudity had lost its allure in the half-light. Fire and candlelight were forgiving, but in daylight there was nothing appealing about blotchy skin and veined legs or bodies resembling congealed fat.

Flies buzzed around scraps of roasted goat and half-eaten figs. The air, hopeful of a breeze, smelled of pee and wine, hazy with smoke, lethargic with the cold. Extinguished torches smouldered where they had been carelessly dropped. Scattered around her were shreds of flesh and hide. Dappled and pale. A fawn’s.

All but one of the maenads had disappeared. She lay flat on her back snoring loudly, her mouth ajar, her robes fanned out about her. Her snake curled up in a tight ball in one fold of her leopard skin cloak. Dried blood smeared around her mouth. Upon her teeth and gums. A strip of lightly spotted fur dangling from one hand.

Caecilia retched, her stomach empty.

‘Hush,’ murmured Cytheris. ‘Hush.’

On the altar, amid pateras and stumps of tallow, one young bride lay sleeping. Her veil had gone, dress torn. Her face stained with tears, the lap of her gown with blood.

Pesna’s wife sat propped against the side of the sacred table, head drooping, a thin thread of saliva trailing from her lips. Her shift was also ripped, stripes of red upon her back. The soles of her feet and her knees were filthy as were the palms of her hands. Her husband stooped beside her, face pinched and anxious. His stag headdress lay toppled on its side upon the ground. Swaying, Pesna strained to raise his wife but she was too drugged to stand. He was weeping.

Caecilia nervously scanned the scene for Apercu, her heartbeat painfully tapping at her throat. To her relief the Maru was sprawled asleep, still wearing the bull’s head, his muffled snorts and whistles far from godlike.

Weariness overcame her. Too tired to weep she laid her head on Cytheris’ shoulder as she watched the revellers wake. Priests were moving among them with bull’s horns of milk. Wineskins were passed from hand to hand. A panpipe was trilling from lower down the hillside along with the hiccup of drums and bells. The sound of laughing drifted to her. The carousing of the night was continuing into the new day.

She closed her eyes, only to sense someone was observing her.

Artile—steady and sober.

Fufluns was not his god. This feast was not his celebration. And yet he’d given her the milk. He’d let her see and do shameful things.

‘I have given you the chance to see Mastarna’s god, Mastarna’s resurrection. Return to the Calu Cult, sister. Return to me.’

*

In the end it was Tarchon who carried her home. After Cytheris found him lying between his green-eyed lover and one of the many sloe-eyed boys he’d had that night.

Dark circles of exhaustion ringed his eyes. ‘The Divine Milk was too strong. You should have flown, circled the earth and lain with a god, Caecilia. You
were not meant to suffer so.’ Wearily, he bore her in his arms. He would not let another touch her. He lay beside her on the bed in her dirtied wedding gown and soothed her to sleep.

He did so because Mastarna was not there.

*

She slept fitfully for three days. In the fuzziness of first waking she heard shrill keening, eerie and heartbreaking, desolate and panicked. The people had been told of Ulthes’ fate.

The Zilath’s corpse, dismembered and quartered, was being burned and buried beyond consecrated ground, destroyed to protect Veii from any trace of divine intrusion. There
should have been a procession that swayed and wound along the wide symmetrical avenues of the citadel to the City of the Dead. Blood should have been spilt in the great man’s honour and for his salvation. Instead the insulting way in which Ulthes was buried would be remembered long after by more than his family and his tribe.

With Ulthes gone, Tulumnes’ ordination was held with indecent haste. The day after the desecration of the Zilath’s body, the College of Principes confirmed his appointment as Lucumo. But although the Chief Haruspex placed his right hand upon Tulumnes’ head to transfer power to him, Tulumnes was not crowned, wishing his coronation to be glorious and splendid. A date was set upon his return from Volsinii, when games and festivals and tournaments would be held. In the meantime, but for a golden coronet upon his head, Laris Tulumnes was Priest King, and the task of surviving his reign had begun.

Caecilia called for Cytheris to draw aside the heavy bedroom curtain so she could look into the garden. The sky was streaked with smoke, plumes of black against palest blue from the Veientanes lighting small fires in the street in memory of the Zilath. The air brimmed with their grieving, the lament aching within her, too. And lying alone in the big tall bed with its coverlet woven of plaited red, blue and green, Caecilia wept. Wept for Arnth Ulthes. Wept for Mastarna. Wept for herself.

Cytheris bathed Caecilia’s grazes and bruises. There was a sharp cut upon the girl’s cheek where she’d danced too close to a maenad’s whip.

‘Who were those women? They were not at the Winter Feast.’

‘They arrived here with the Greek actors. Their god is Dionysus in his guise of the Wanderer. Unlike Fufluns, who is gentle, he calls upon them to spread his message through wildness and violence. It is the first time I have seen an animal torn apart in sacrifice or the brides scourged to gain divine acceptance.’

Caecilia remembered how the Veientanes had abandoned themselves readily to the ecstasies of the Wanderer last night, sensing that in the future they would be all too willing to re-create their rustic Fufluns in a darker form.

Watching her maid bustle around the room, Caecilia realised how much she owed the maid for protecting her from the drunk and drugged followers for hours. She knew she should’ve listened to her at the beginning of the night. Now a flood of salty tears would not be enough to cleanse her, nor a river of lustral water.

Sitting on the edge of the high bed, feet dangling above the tiled floor, Caecilia wondered if she was expected to be dutiful to Mastarna or to Rome.

His panoply hung on the wall with its crested helmet and engraved shield. Its presence proof of his vulnerability to Tulumnes.

When Caecilia tried to pull the iron sword from its hook, she staggered under its weight. It clanked to the floor, lethal and lifeless. How had Lucretia lifted such a weapon to plunge it into her breast? Caecilia could barely raise Mastarna’s three inches from the floor.

Sitting down, she turned the point towards her, her finger nudging the sharp tip tentatively. The merest touch drew blood. She wanted to draw the blade across her wrist, to open a vein, to let life seep from her slowly, a different kind of ebbing.

She did not have that type of courage. She was no Lucretia.

*

Routine saved her. The mechanics of existing.

Life descended into small efforts. Washing her face each morning and night, combing and pinning her hair, dressing herself.  Taking an infinite amount of time with her ministrations. Labouring upon decisions: What to eat? Which prayer to say? Which book to read?

But routine also led to memories of him. How he would pause at the bedroom curtain to adjust his tebenna, ensuring the folds hung neatly, unable to hide this small vanity despite his ugliness. Or how he’d consult her as they listened to the concerns of their tenants in the reception hall lined with boxes of scrolls and linen books.

But other memories tormented her, arousing jealousy again and again. Those of Arruns shaving his master’s half-beard in the afternoons, making her wonder if Mastarna had been ensuring Ulthes’ cheeks were not scratched in lovemaking instead of hers.

It was not simple to discard all that connected her to him. She wore Marcus’ bracelet. No other ornament. The Atlenta pendant had been dropped into a pouch and stored with her clothes. Before that awful day she used to stroke the embossed figure upon it absently, a habit, a comfort.

There was the empty bed, too, and the smile reserved for her upon waking. She wanted to be rid of him but, like a phantom limb, he’d become part of her. And so, when she heard he’d left the city, unwillingly travelling with Tulumnes’ court, she retrieved the locket from its hiding place and laid her head upon his pillow, eventually falling asleep upon his side of the bed when she could cry no more.

*

Caecilia once again stood on the high Arx, gazing at square fields of varied shades of green. Soon it would be harvest time, a year since she was wed.

The breeze tickled her face but no stray tendrils of hair slid across her cheeks. She wore a tight bun, a matron’s knot, and covered her head with a palla, plain and unfringed. Her clothes were no longer of fine thread and pleasing hues. Rings and necklaces lay tangled, earrings and fibulas in disarray, chains broken, links scattered, gems dropped and lost.

The stola and tunic scratched her unshaven skin until she grew familiar again with the homespun bulk. The earthen colour was restful to the eye after busy threads of silver and blue. When the humble sandals pinched her feet and blistered her heels, she welcomed the pain as a penance.

No more cosmetics added blush to cheeks and rose to her mouth. Without lotions, her skin was soon dry and hangnails snagged her clothes. The luxury of daily baths was forfeited. Cracked lips and dirty hair reminded her that salves were close and perfumes nearby but would not be used.

Donning Roman robes and eschewing Veientane ways did not bring her peace, though, nor lessen her guilt.
Like fleece spun to a tenuous thread, virtue had been stretched thin, snapping at the smallest pressure, the tiniest temptation.

She wanted none of Rasennan religion. All she wanted was the boundaries of her people, their codes and customs. For nearly a year she’d prayed to the gods of Mastarna’s household but it was the protection of her family’s spirits she needed. Would they ever forgive her for her neglect?

The brutality of the Phersu’s blood sacrifice haunted her and the whip mark suffered in the revels of Fufluns had only just healed. Both Artile and Mastarna had played a tug-of-war with her mind and soul, tempting her to abandon her people’s beliefs. She would not heed either of them any longer; rejecting Aita’s gruesome salvation as well as Fufluns’ depraved resurrection.

An eagle appeared, gliding on the breeze before her, wings spread in perfect symmetry. Caecilia stood parallel to it, although the raptor was oblivious to its witness, intent on the prey scurrying in the scrub below. Plummeting, cruel as an arrow, it swooped upon its quarry and flew, effortlessly, from her.

A few yards away two lictors lounged or strutted in her wake wherever she went. She knew little about them other than one liked beer and pickles too much, and the other picked his nose. Her world was limited to the house and the Great Temple, even though she chanced seeing Artile there. The guards did not begrudge her the freedom of standing at the Arx walls either, to relish brief moments of escape in sun or wind or rain.