B007IIXYQY EBOK (133 page)

Auriane knew she was meant to choose.

Her ghost deliberated. Then it shrugged, shouldered the burden once more, and walked toward her people, her growing kin, all arrayed beneath the assembly oak.

I will live on a while, then—not for Ramis’ riddling reasons, but for a more humble one—I want to see the sun reflected in my daughter’s eyes.

Simultaneously, Anaxagoras bent over her wound, sniffed it, lightly prodded it, then drew in a breath and exclaimed, “This cannot be.”

When he had examined it at midnight, the suppurations were of the evil sort—thin and malodorous. Had he dreamed it? The wound was of angry appearance still, and beset with ill humors, but now the suppurations were
bona
—healthy and white—signifying that the wound would heal. Certain he had managed one more miraculous cure, Anaxagoras sent a messenger to awaken Erato with the great news.

At the moment she elected to live on, Auriane slept soundly, blissfully, and in the diffuse blackness, anguish softened to pleasure. Before her was a silvery temple with columns delicate as snow-laced branches; over it was poised a sickle-moon in the time of waxing. Beyond lay fields over which hooded figures walked in procession, bearing fertile cakes, preparing for the ancient rite of the marriage of the Lady and the Lord, that magical mingling of woman and man that flowered into the firmament, joining the earth to the sun so all life could increase. Kinship overflowed like mead from a cask and embraced even the humblest of animals. One of the spectral hooded figures beckoned her into the temple-house; with dream-knowledge she knew it was Marcus Julianus.
We have come together, then, to lead each other to the gods.

But I don’t deserve this portion while a father’s blood stains my hands.

She felt his reply—
Not so.
Here I shall remain until you know your own goodness and grace.

She opened her eyes. Within moments, life settled back on her shoulders like a sack of stones; her urgent liminal dreams retreated into pleasant, distant impossibility. She felt for her resolve. It was there. What was gone—cut away by Perseus’ blade—was her trust in her body’s inviolability. It was no longer whole. It was a wellspring of pain, vulnerable and unlovely.

She looked about and saw the room was full of gifts from lowly admirers—terra-cotta figurines of humbler gods whose powers promoted healing, dried flowers and honey cakes, cups of colored glass, bronze Celtic mirrors, silver necklets, pots of incense, slender-necked green glass bottles of perfume. The richer gifts, she later learned, had been removed, but whether they had been stolen by Anaxagoras’ servants or impounded by the financial officers of the school, she never determined.

She quickly learned she had passed from slavery’s anonymity to a dubious and precarious renown. Whether they ridiculed her or thought her wondrous, the people knew her name and invoked it to some purpose, most often to slyly express their loathing of Domitian. Since the time of Nero women had been regularly exhibited in the amphitheater, often in a spirit similar to that of the contests of monkeys that fought with javelins—as a mockery of the shows in earnest to follow. She was accorded more honor than this, but still there was no recognized place for her; she was intruder, talisman, prodigy, or emissary of fate, but never a common veteran of the Third Hall. And in the First, she was a low jest of Erato’s, a novelty run amok who had better not overestimate her worth. She had made a place for herself that was uniquely her own.

Her new status brought small comforts—meat and fowl were served in the Third Hall’s dining chamber and wine that did not burn the throat. The cell that housed her was twice the size of the former one, and its narrow window was set low enough so that she could even look out on the city. Sunia was brought to it and so lived with her once again, without Auriane having to ask. The pallets had cushions stuffed with feathers instead of straw and there was even a lamp, though no one ever brought oil so it could be put to use. And the rats seemed unwilling to climb this high. Never had either of them since their enslavement known such comfort. And still gifts came steadily—jars of honey, cloaks of softest wool, gaudy birds, and love poems penned on fine vellum.

How odd, Auriane reflected, to be celebrated and a slave at once. Status in this place was like hollow bangles that glittered and caught every eye—no one believed for a moment that they truly had value. It was so unlike her own country, where status was a thing of sober weight and low luster, like a bar of gold.

In the months to follow she hid her wound from all eyes, even Sunia’s; it was her secret horror, a puckered, livid thing that marked her as broken, infirm. Victor or no, its lingering pain made her feel only defeat. Her mangled body made her spirit sense itself as mangled also, as if the one impressed itself on the other—in the deeps of the mind, she knew the two were tied. And did not the gods determine such misfortunes? The damage must also embrace her soul. There began then a slow, festering conviction that Marcus Julianus did not know just how pitifully marred she was—a growing certainty that when he saw, he would not want her.

These new doubts drove her to observe carefully the Roman women who crowded the street beneath her newly acquired window. She began to torment herself with the ways that they differed from her—their plush white arms, dimpled and jeweled. Their boneless hands that had never grasped a rein, a hoe, a spear. Their smaller, more delicate constitutions, coupled with that worldly lift of the chin that caused idlers to make way before them. The lilting gestures, practiced as a dancer’s, that accompanied their exuberant speech. Their boundless, mysterious stores of knowledge—of the language of the great-houses, of how to decipher a love message or cleverly drape and wind bright clothing, of all that occurred in this city, and why.
They are his people. They are far more suited to him than I.

These doubts fed and grew fat in the days that followed, in spite of the fact that Marcus Julianus sent her small gifts—useful things, well made but not too fine, to prevent their being stolen—a well-woven blanket, or fur-lined slippers—so that she would not feel he had forgotten her. For he made no arrangements, as he had promised, to pass a night with her. Before the wound, she might have persuaded herself there was some good reason for this. Now, she could scarcely hear her own assurances.

The news of Auriane’s recovery was conveyed to Aristos as he was being massaged in the warm rooms of the school’s baths. He rose up in a fury and strode off to a grimy tavern on Tanner’s Street frequented by veterans of the First Hall. From a Samnite fighter called the Cyclops he learned the name of a fearsome Etruscan witch, a woman named Haruna, along with uncertain directions to her dwelling in the Subura district. Her services were dear. But she was so effective in laying curses that the Finance Minister Musonius Geta once employed her, as did a certain Senator whom the Cyclops would not name for fear of being accused of defaming a member of the nobility.

The following day Aristos found Haruna with great difficulty, for she had moved again, as she was forced to do often, because her neighbors drove her out when they tired of the stench of her noxious potions. She was nearly bald and shriveled as a dried fig. Her rags were ready to rot off her body, which he thought unaccountable, for she could have purchased decent garments with the fortune in gold about her arms and throat. The warts on her hands, she told him, were the result of powerful curses that rival witches had tried and failed to lay upon her.

“Of course I can undo a runic curse,” she assured him. “But I will need the leg marrow and brain matter of a red-haired infant. They don’t appear often on the middens so one must be stolen. Can you pay for it?”

He dangled in her face a greasy leather pouch heavy with silver
denarii.
As she reached for it greedily, he snatched it away. “First, the infant, foul daughter of night.”

When one was procured, a frightful ceremony was performed. That night a prostitute from the Circus stalls cried out in vain for her red-haired infant, stolen while she slept. Aristos watched it all to make certain he was not cheated. Haruna boiled a potion composed of the human remains, along with the lung of a white sheep and the urine of a black goat; to this she added a pinch of henbane and Thessalian honey. Next she burned a figure of wax modeled to represent Auriane. Then, while muttering in Etruscan and daubing blood on his forehead and hands, she bade him drink part of the horrible mixture. Aristos drank as much as a sparrow might have, then spit it out and gagged. He was relieved to see that she ignored this. When the ceremony of cursing was done, Haruna proclaimed that not only had she nullified the power of the runes; she had as well ensured that Auriane’s heart would freeze before the next celebration of Saturnalia.

Six months passed; Saturnalia approached. Aristos hoped that by this time Auriane was at least feeling slightly ill. He wondered if the curse might have partly turned against himself—his hair was falling out in patches, and he had boils that would not go away. And then he saw her on the festival’s eve. She had returned to light practice, and to his dismay she appeared sleek, spirited and healthy.

He sent two of his henchmen to seek out Haruna and strangle her.

For the first time he thought—perhaps I should just
answer
her challenge. It might be the surest and perhaps the only way of getting rid of this scourge.

You think like a half-wit. This city loves you like a god—overnight you’d have them laughing at your back.

Then he began to dream of her. Auriane would beckon with an encouraging smile; she wanted to lie with him. He became aroused in his sleep. But when he moved toward her to take her, her face began to melt and distort, until it was transformed into the rigid, waxen face of Ramis. His muscles became paralyzed, and he collapsed and lay helpless on his back while that Hel-hag mounted him, tore into his chest and pulled out his heart to boil in a potion. He would awaken panting and bathed in sweat.

He began to drink neat wine to stifle the dreams, and soon, when Meton did not push him to practice, he was lurching drunk by midday. When a wart appeared on his right hand, he knew Haruna must have cursed him in dying. And so after a month of boils and bad dreams he thought once again of disposing of Auriane in the arena as she begged him to, calling on Wodan to show him a way to do it without inviting the world to heap ridicule on his head.

Domitian would have counted Aristos’ complaints as gnats next to what he faced. The Dacian War had gotten away from him utterly, and the measures that his military council assured him would bring swift victory he dared not consider. The first of these—that of assembling a sufficient number of legions to efficiently humble the Dacians and leading them to the Danube in person—meant leaving Rome untended for years, and he was now convinced the Senate was infested with men who lusted for his absence, waiting their moment to usurp the throne. The second, that of choosing a man of senatorial rank to command them, was even more unthinkable—for there was no man of the senatorial class whom he dared trust with such a massive fighting force. What was to prevent his appointed commander from turning his back on Dacia, marching home and making war on him? And so repeatedly he sent out forces that were too small in number, subjecting Roman forces to a series of humilating defeats. In one engagement in the Danubian wilds, the Dacian king surrounded an entire legion and annihilated it with all its cavalry and auxiliaries. The imperial councillors saw with alarm that for the first time Domitian’s obsessive distrust of the men about him began to compromise military strategy. Domitian knew the good will of the army, hard won in the Chattian War, was rapidly eroding, and this only served to increase his certainty that half the members of the Senate were courting its favor with bribes, hoping to seduce the legions away from him.

He calmed his nerves by rewriting the laws, curtailing the freedoms of the humble, solidifying the privileges of the great, imagining he resurrected the glorious old order and made his domains a safer place for himself. A freedman who did not pay proper respect to his former master could be re-enslaved. A plebeian who usurped the seats reserved for Equestrians and Senators in the theater or Circus could be scourged and fined. He limited further the number of slaves a man could legally manumit at his death. Prostitutes were prohibited from accepting inheritances.

Gradually his moral sternness slid into the perverse. He accused the Chief Vestal, Cornelia, of taking a lover and had her tried in secret at his Alban villa. Then he horrified the city by ordering her buried alive. This was the ancient punishment for unchastity among the Vestals and had not been employed for two centuries. At the last, however, he became anxious that she might be untouched in fact—in which case the gods might vent their wrath on him
for persecuting so sacred a personage. And so before Cornelia was led into the underground chamber and sealed in darkness forever with but a measure of oil and one loaf of bread, he had her brought to him and took her by force, lest some future tribunal of gods charge him with the slaying of a virgin.

In these days Julianus observed a shift in Domitian’s behavior that alarmed him greatly: His ability to turn Domitian’s mind on a subject seemed strong as ever when he was in the Emperor’s presence. But once he took his leave, he lost all
hold on him; Domitian’s suspicions were a wild gale that buffeted him about, and no human voice could be heard above its shrieks. It happened that Domitian ordered the execution of one of his freedman-secretaries, a man named Epaphroditus, simply because the man had helped Nero to commit suicide more than twenty years before—guiding the dagger when Nero lost courage. Domitian by this means meant to terrify all his freedmen in advance, should they contemplate any act of violence against him. Julianus argued that this act would accomplish the opposite of what he expected. Its cruelty—for Epaphroditus was ill and aged—and its unreasonableness—for Nero had commanded this freedman to do the deed—would only serve to unite Domitian’s own freedmen against him in common cause. Domitian had nodded, and there even came into his eyes that intent look that signaled he agreed. Julianus considered the matter settled, but on the next morning Epaphroditus was dragged off to death. Domitian had him beheaded in the crowded Old Forum rather than on the regular execution ground so the Palace servants could take heed.