B007IIXYQY EBOK (158 page)

In the instant before Meton touched her, Auriane moved. Meton jerked back.

Wearily, ponderously, Auriane pulled herself up, a befuddled Aphrodite rising from a sea of hair. That simple movement might have been an earthquake for the titanic reaction it produced.

“
Aurinia lives
!” The storm of jubilant noise drove Meton to stop his ears. “
Long live our Aurinia
!”

She held out a blood-caked hand to Meton so he could help her rise. There was no victory-fire in her eyes, Meton saw; only an odd, bright calm, as if she had somehow found a mother’s comfort after a nightmare.

Aristos’ devotees began taking off their shoes and hurling them at him, in a vain effort to make him rise. Of course, he lived on. He laughed at death.

Even after they saw Aristos’ face, and watched as the Numidian boys dropped him into the bier and hoisted it to their shoulders, they refused to believe their king had perished.

“Punish her! Strike her down!”
they cried out, shaking their fists. Some of the more sober members of the crowd laughed at them.

The belief that Aristos was not dead would persist; his was a powerful ghost that would not be put to rest. In coming days people would say they had seen him late at night, demanding a jar of wine at his favorite tavern, or insist they saw him training in secret. This was only his most elaborate trick of all. Aristos would return, if not at these games, then at the next. Even after his grand funeral, which was a mockery of a funeral of state, attended by hundreds of professional mourners, there were still those who said, “They burned another body. Aristos lives.”

As Auriane struggled to her feet, she felt borne up by the crowd’s surging cries. They know nothing of me, she thought, or why I performed this deed, but does the wave need to know the one it lifts?

Meton shouted to an undertrainer, “Bring a horse. It’s the only way we’ll get her through.”

Auriane was unsettled by the draught of freedom that intoxicated her then. For so long the pursuit of Odberht had compressed her spirit and governed her every act that suddenly she felt she had no stable shape—she
might be woman or loping wolf, or mist rising from a lake. She sensed the quiet opening of gates whose existence she had never suspected.
Even enslavement cannot touch this freedom
, she realized. But this new boundlessness was not without unpleasantness—there was, too, the shock of noise and cold and rude light known by the babe freshly pulled from the womb. She wanted to cry out like a wolf. She wondered in one instant if she should choose a new name.

A dark, celebratory mood full of exultant lawlessness possessed the amphitheater. To Auriane it had the spirit of a tribal victory dance. Word finally got about that Domitian had departed in haste from the imperial box; it was said he fled in terror because the Chief Augur warned him his Nemesis would be victor. Surely, many felt, this was an omen—could the tyrant who called himself their Lord and God long survive the death of his favorite?

A sturdy gray cart horse was brought for Auriane. The undertrainers hastily bandaged her wounds with strips of wool, then helped her onto the beast’s broad back. She leaned heavily on the horse’s neck while Meton steadied her to keep her from falling.

A playful voice from the plebeian seats rang out—“The King is dead. Long live the Queen!”
This brought an eruption of catcalls from Aristos’ followers, and another shower of shoes.

In response, from the highest seats a cry thundered out that seemed to come from one defiant throat—“
Aurinia Regina
!”

Had there been doubt in any part of the city who the victor was, it vanished then.

Auriane the Queen.
Auriane felt a soft jolt, remembering Ramis’ strange prophecy—
you will be a queen in death.

A queen with no queendom, she reflected, except in a few minds, and for a time brief as the blooming of a poppy. A negligible thing to the world at large, but not for the world within.

An angry retort was thrown up to the sky:
“Aristos Rex!”
Then the warring factions broke into turbulent motion. As Auriane’s heavy-footed cart horse was led through the Victory Gate, the beast threw up its head and ponderously capered sideways in fright.

The amphitheater was brought once more to terrified quiet when the people saw the bowmen begin to move down from their stations with their catlike creep. But the mob milling restlessly in the open space about the Colosseum was not so easily restrained. Those who loved Aristos, who were fewer in number but more violent, began chanting his name as a war cry and took up whatever they could find in the streets that might be used as a weapon. They set out to roam the city in wolf packs, breaking up and destroying the shops of anyone they believed to be disloyal to their King—for were these not common traitors? But the opposition was quick to seek revenge. They too found weapons—broken amphorae, glass jars, wheel spokes, or bull whips—and, accompanied by the cry, “Long live our Aurinia!” they energetically set upon the loyalists.

Every other street became a battleground. The City Cohorts were called out and bucket brigades were made ready to quench fires. Plancius declared the remaining contests of the day canceled, and soon discovered he was a hostage in the imperial box. Aristos’ devotees held him partly responsible for their hero’s death, and he knew he dared not venture into the street without a small army at his back.

When Auriane entered the barricaded passage she saw why the horse was needed. The people had broken in—but for the stolid and steady beast she rode, she might have been crushed. These crowds, at least, were mostly friendly; they called to her with outstretched hands, pulled at the bridle, and put rose garlands over the bowed neck of her mount. This time no one attacked her clothes with barbers’ razors; it was as though they felt such a great and good omen ought to be reverenced.

To the people she presented an odd sight, one that was strangely unsettling—she looked less like someone who had just quit the well-ordered confines of the arena, more a Bacchante returning from a frenzied revel on a forested mountaintop. She was a vision of the wild unknown that lay in wait at civilization’s edge—her hair was in rebellious disarray, thick with blood-matted tangles; sprigs of green and scattered rose petals were caught in it like wildflowers scattered over a field. The hastily wound bandages were unraveling, as though she had torn her garments while racing through the wood. Those flushed cheeks, those ardent eyes ringed with fading black paint lent her a bright, savage hunting-animal beauty. Now that she had delivered her sign and heralded a tilt of the world order, hopefully she would withdraw to the haunted wilds from which she came.

To Auriane the world shimmered and glowed, as if washed clean after a rain. The air about shivered with pipe music—though she knew it played only in her own blood. Each indrawn breath filled her with the mind of Fria, and she felt lush surges of life-love that left her a stranger to nothing and fearless enough to walk an urn-field at midnight. She felt the drums of Eastre pounding deep in the earth, and imagined she saw, settled in the clouds, Fria exultant on a throne of flowers. As her gaze rested contentedly on the throng, in one moment all perception condensed, and her focus became diffuse. She felt the pricking of an internal ear. And knowledge began to settle upon her. She sat very still, sensing it.

She wanted to cry out, but this knowledge brought with it a strange and not unpleasant numbness.

A cataclysm approached. She knew it as certainly as she knew she sat a horse. She sensed a dread hush, a great gathering for a leap.

Today the earth will shake.

She wanted to say to the people—
Calm yourselves. Still your rioting. You have come already to great good fortune. For when the earth is still again, you will have a hundred years of peace, and good and decent kings.

Then she knew that Marcus Julianus was alive, and poised at the cataclysm’s center. In fact, he was its cause.

Marcus was alive.
She wanted to embrace the neck of the cart horse for joy.

But she sensed dark savagery clinging about him like a bog-mist. She shook her head violently once, as if to fling out a nightmare. When the seeress-state left her, only her exhaustion kept her from shouting out, throwing herself to the ground and pummeling the earth in protest. She tried to assure herself he was not
being tortured. Perhaps her sensing had been wrong. Frantically she tried to remember all the times her sensings
had
been wrong.

Fria, grant that this be one of those times. At least he is alive—and if he lives, he will fight his way out. Has he not always done so before?

But this brought little comfort.

As she approached the arched entranceway of the
Ludus Magnus,
she saw a half-dozen men of the First Hall standing in its shadow, watching her with the bored confidence and riveted attention of large carnivores. The men of the First Hall were a fiercely bonded brotherhood who felt they possessed exclusive rights to killing their own. Many regarded Aristos as a brother or son, but even those who did not felt she had dishonored and ridiculed a member of their guild. It was insult enough that she was a woman; to worsen matters, she had killed him with her hair, denying him his natural right to die by the sword. As she drew closer, one of them met her gaze, grinned, and slowly drew a hand across his throat.

They would kill her, she knew, in the arena or out, at practice or at dinner. As soon as they found a chance. If she lived on in Rome she would not live long.

Meton shouted to her then, “We’re taking you up to the Second Hall barracks. We’ll have to lock you in with a guard day and night. I do not know what’s to be done with you after that.”

Auriane nodded; then suddenly she remembered Erato. “You might save me from Aristos’ friends, for a while at least,” she shouted down over the din, “but who’ll save me from Erato? He must be ready to set me out as the target for javelin practice. The gods grant me time to regain strength before I must face him!”

Meton started at this, as if he expected that she knew. A flash of grief showed in his eyes, to be replaced quickly by his usual cynical distance. He grasped her arm and pulled her closer. “You’ll not have
to face him, Auriane,” he said in a covered voice. “Erato’s paid the Ferryman. And knowing Erato, probably wore him down on the price.”

“What?”
she whispered, suddenly still, as if the wind were knocked from her body. Slowly, black sadness wormed its way in. “Is this some cruel jest?” she protested hoarsely. “It cannot
be.”

This
she had not foreseen.

“It is true, Auriane. The news was brought to me near the end of the bout.” He pulled Auriane still closer, glancing suspiciously to the right and left as if he feared spies. “Plancius’ thugs did it. He was whipped to death in the custody of the City Police.”

Tears quickly overfilled her eyes; a series of shudders passed through her as she suppressed sobs. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, trying not to envision the scene.

Erato.
Not you! You were a good man, to whom I owe much. You gave me a scrap of hope when I had none, a bit of air to breathe. You were fair, when you’d no need to be. It is impossible that you are gone. How surprised you would have been to see me cry over you. I know you thought I had hardly a thought for you at all.

Fria, be kind and gentle to his soul, though he nearly forgot you and knew you only as Nemesis.

She laid a hand on her belly, and for a moment the budding life within acted as a balm.
One life is snatched, another is given. It’s never equal, it’s never enough, but it distracts us. Fria, you sly and merciful mother.
But the chaotic sadness returned, bringing Marcus to mind again, and now she cried silently, unashamedly for both.

Marcus, this is past bearing. Yet still it is far better than if our short time together had never been.

What will become of me, and of Sunia? I want to cry out to the moon. I am weary enough to sleep through nine seasons.

As the crowd clamored after, the cart horse and its disheveled rider melted into the darkness of the yawning entranceway of the school. A common thought hung on the air—
She could not have done what she has done.
It was easy to believe, suddenly, that she never was, that she was some collective delusion, one of the phantoms that materialize at crossroads to mark the turning of times.

CHAPTER LX

A
S THE BOUT CAME TO A
close, its victor still unknown, the eighty Praetorian Guards posted in double rows along the vaulted corridor that served the imperial bedchamber paid little attention to the bestial roars issuing from the Colosseum. What was one more victory for Aristos on a day such as this? Especially in some bizarre match with a woman? It all seemed but one more reason for ridding themselves of Domitian, who had debased the honor of the games by filling the arena with women.

The ninth hour loomed close. Sweat dampened every back, plastering woolen tunics to flesh. Palms slipped on javelins. All flinched at the ringing shout of a guard change that issued from the distant peristyle courtyard at the center of the vast multistoried Palace. Their part was uncomplicated: They were to stand silent and still while the deed was done, no matter what alarming sounds might come from the imperial bedchamber. They believed the plot was conceived by Petronius and went no further; this was to ensure the safety of Nerva, should one of this company of eighty prove disloyal. All were young recruits whose first loyalty was to Petronius; he had promised promotions to every one, and rich money gifts. Still it was a dread and awesome thing to defy a sacred oath to protect the Emperor. Most thought privately that were they offered a chance to back out of the affair even now, they would seize it in a moment.