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Julianus rose and paced.
Curses on him,
Domitian thought,
he has to think about it!

Finally Julianus halted and turned that direct gaze upon Domitian. “I’ve nothing whatever against your father. He is a plain and fair man—most likely he
is
the best choice. It’s…it’s
you
I’m uneasy with.” Regret showed almost at once in Julianus’ face. “I am sorry, but nearness to death makes such things easier to say.”

Domitian laughed a thin laugh that did not disguise the flare of anger in his eyes. “I’ve never seen a man less afraid of losing his head. What must I do for your approval?”

“This is absurd,” Julianus answered sadly. “Change your very nature.”

“Done.
Anything else?”

“Do you want other than the truth? Of what use is it? A lie may succor now, it kills later. There is a vein of cruelty and suspicion in you, and it is not a terrible thing in an ordinary man. But if an extraordinary life claims you, what would you be? Reflected a thousand times your size, daily good humor or bad humor makes you god—or monster.”

“Very well, you are not needed then,” Domitian said with feigned lightness as he spun about to leave. “I have many men around who—”

“As Nero has? Flatterers? To lead him blindfolded and singing to his doom?”

Domitian stopped and turned. In his face for one instant was the quick frantic look of one pushed off balance. He had never thought of Marcus Julianus’ cult of truth as a thing that might keep him safe; the idea, once sown, began to take root.

“Perhaps I do not take your youth enough into account,” Julianus said then. “I mean not to offend. It might be I jump too easily at the least whiff of tyranny because I have seen so much of it of late. And anyway, it looks more and more as though you are inevitable. I will settle for a promise, then.”

Domitian was surprised at the depth of the relief he felt. Why was Marcus Julianus’ favor worth so much more to him than that of other men? “Yes?” he said, carefully reining in his delight. “Ask it.”

“Vow to me that when the supreme power is yours, you will not persecute men of letters or any school of thought, nor burn their writings, nor the philosophers themselves, for that matter,” Julianus said carefully. Domitian found himself transfixed by that sharp, clear gaze. “Give me your word the owners of bookstalls will not be made criminals, nor will anyone who declaims on the street crossings be made a plaything for dogs.”

“A simple matter! I
myself
am
a poet—now
really,
would I persecute my own kind?” He smiled the quick, mobile smile of a pantomime actor.

“That you call it a simple matter causes me to suspect you mouth the words with as much comprehension as a talking magpie. Hades take you if I give you my support, and you turn on us.”

“You have my sworn word! Never will I persecute anyone for his writings, not even the most foul-mouthed of Cynics who beg you to execute them.”

“When the day comes—if it comes and I still live—I will speak for your father.”

As Domitian took his leave, Julianus called after him. “I’ve a question for you! Why does the Emperor waste a rare prize such as Junilla on a man he means to destroy?”

Domitian shrugged. “I wouldn’t look for a normal human motive behind Nero’s acts. Last night at dinner he had all his concubines costumed as fish. By the way, since we are friends again, can I come to the wedding?”

“No,” Julianus said with mock annoyance, “you’ll snatch the bride.”

“I promise to wait at least a month out of common decency.”

“Come if you wish. Sad puppet show that it is, I wish
I
had the choice not to come. The air in this city is foul as an animal’s den—it’s the stench of captivity.”

Domitian then added with a reverence so uncharacteristic of him that Julianus first thought the words were meant in jest, “She has a beauty not of this earth.” Domitian alone had set eyes on Junilla, who was kept in seclusion by her mother; once he had climbed over her garden wall and, in the instant before her maidservants drove him off with rakes and hoes, managed to steal a glimpse of her as she sat reading. “She was Psyche, she was Selene. You are the most fortunate of men—if you live.”

“You love her! Curses, even
you’ve
got a motive for murdering me now.”

When but two days remained before the hastily arranged marriage, Marcus Julianus began yet another night of studying his father’s military correspondence and records, going through these documents in order of year. Earlier that day he remembered his father’s wish concerning the sorceress’s black amulet; after retrieving it from the strongbox in the
tabularium,
where the family records were kept, he placed it once again about his neck. He could see no reason not to humor a ghost. The amulet felt right there, as though a tessera taken from a mosaic were returned to it. It brought a rush of memories—of running with bleeding feet on cobblestone streets, of hard moldy rye bread and rough vinegar water, Grannus’ leering grin, the fiery agony of the lash.

Three times during the night he had to pull the wick of the lamp as he read ever on, struggling against a downward pull into deathlike hopelessness. If his father could not survive in this world, why did he presume he could? Names blurred and became confused. One treaty with Baldemar began to look like the next.

But all he had read so far vindicated his father. It was apparent at once that enlisting Wido was an attempt to get by with very little—rarely was his father granted what he needed to train new recruits.

It was well past midnight when Julianus realized that the years his father was acutely short of funds corresponded with the time Veiento acted as minister of the Military Treasury. Suddenly he was sharply awake.

Could Veiento have thieved from the Military Treasury during his time in that office? It would explain why he was so intent upon avoiding a public trial.

But how to confirm this? Somehow he must obtain the military records from the Palace and compare the figures to his father’s, to see if divergences appeared. He remembered then that one of his poorest clients had a cousin who was a freedman accountant in the military records room and had access to confidential documents. No, he could not ask. The fellow, if caught, would be executed.

But what was the alternative? The world would continue to think his father incompetent and a traitor. Perhaps if the theft were carefully planned, and the fellow royally paid for his risk….

He felt a small jolt of hope. He
must
somehow procure a public trial. But how to get Nero to pay attention to his plea?

He read on, gathering more proof his father had used Wido solely as a means of controlling Baldemar, going through individual journals of soldiers, quaestors’ reports, his father’s private letters. As the night became ever more still and the hour of spirits approached, the uncanny lands of Germania seemed to hover about, vivid and close, that dark ocean of wild forest where trees trapped the spirits of the dead, magic mists swallowed armies, human sacrifices dangled in groves, and quaking bogs digested generations of dead. Who knew what flourished in such places? Barbarous mysteries bloomed everywhere like flowers in the dark. In one report his father recorded the words of a northern sybil called Ramis after one of the treaty meetings, and to Julianus’ amazement she spoke words on the rebirth of souls that closely echoed the sayings of the Pythagoreans—yet this was an illiterate tribal woman who cooked over open fires and at night lay down on earth. What could account for this?

And he wondered if he had not found, in this northern waste, humans in the idyllic state, living what many philosophers called the natural life. It seemed they lived in a sort of extended innocence, were cruel only of necessity, and uncorrupted by the worst temptations of power and greed. Was it of these people that Isodorus had spoken when he said,
“In the wastes beyond the North Wind they live still as in the time of Saturn”?

Again and again through the letters and reports he found references to a mysterious maid who bore arms. She confused him at first; it was not clear if she was a woman of flesh and blood, or a local manifestation of one of their earth goddesses, or possibly some nymph of a spring or well, described elsewhere in his father’s writings. She could shift shape; she could shield a warrior from the bite of weapons and outrun a deer. “Her hair is full of spirits, and she is clothed in night” were the words of one Chattian captive.

In one treaty it became clear she was quite mortal—and was that same daughter of Baldemar whom his father had sought to see married to Wido’s son. Her name appeared, then disappeared, wending its way through the records, taunting, elusive, twisting sinuously through tale after tale like a wild vine:
Auriane.
The name conjured up so clearly the woman—surely it was the lateness of the hour—but there she was unabashedly before him, so clear and close he could see the shadow of a lash, the dew on her hair, a creature who in some archaic way coupled beauty and strength, not unlike the heroines of the oldest tales of the Roman people—Camilla the warrior or Tanaquil the queen. She was the spirit of streams breaking through rock, the numen of primeval places.

Then he came upon a report made by a soldier who had witnessed an incident deep in the interior of Chattian lands. The soldier had a tendency to florid words, but Marcus sensed a core of truth in the tale, and it was the beginning of a haunting that would flourish through the years.

He was a cavalry centurion with the detachment that accompanied the native army of Wido’s son, Odberht, and he had witnessed the maid’s capture.

They were surrounded by us and set to fight to the last,
the Centurion wrote,
but she held out the sign of peace and brought a stillness everywhere, and so sacrificed herself to the enemy that her tribesmen could live. Who since the time of the Kings has seen such hallowed devotion? She passed close by me, and she had the aspect one who walked easily with the powers of Night. And she was full of Magic, for within days she escaped, taking the form of a doe. She manifested again at the final siege, where she assumed raven shape and opened the gate to victory.

Without knowing why, avidly he searched for more. He came upon another text transcribed from the words of a deserter who made it clear she had led the final engagement itself.

Of course. Baldemar was injured. Why was her story so obscure? His father mentioned her hardly at all, perhaps out of embarrassment that his plans were foiled by a half-grown maid. The tale stirred Julianus like some powerful dirge or lay. She demanded to be known. She haunted his thoughts like a god-sent dream. Her image released something in him, a crying out for another world.

Marcus Julianus felt an obscure strength gathering in him then, muted and small like a campfire in the distance, but numinous, alive. He no longer felt so keenly the pain of Lycas’ death, his father’s destruction, of fighting tyranny alone. She was a wild ghost, fighting nearby, and despite the vast space between them and the distance between their customs and ways, he sensed their enemy was the same. It made little sense in the full light of the sun but was triumphantly obvious in dreams. Near dawn he fell asleep amid the rolls of records.

He dreamed he trod a winding path in a dense elm wood. His way was barred by a solemn crone on a white horse; her face glowed softly like the lunar disk. The wood was littered with bones. She beckoned him to follow, silently sounding the words,
Die now, and let me show you life.

He awakened, shuddering with cold, thinking he smelled damp pine forest and oak fires. Who was that frightful hag?

It is the amulet.
It is sending strange and powerful dreams. No, such thoughts are for men ruled by superstition.

It was as though that pouch of earth bid him look long at the lamp flame. And in one moment he melted into it, shedding resistance naturally as a serpent’s sloughing of skin. Then came an earthy and sensuous sense of the rightness of all things; he could not fall or die, and life and death dwelled in him together. Sacredness did not stop at temple doors; it was infused into everything, it lived in mud, in dust. What was this sublime spell? This brilliant sense of things mocked all attempts to seize it with words. He had flown beyond the philosophers; he could see them far off, huddled about their words, poking them, pushing them, prodding them to do what words could not.

The amulet, he thought, tearing his gaze from the fire and looking at it. The cursed thing has worked some witchery.

He fought a powerful urge to fling it into the fire.

CHAPTER X

A
T MIDMORNING ON THE WEDDING DAY
the household was alive with preparations. Servants washed down the walls, garlanded pillars, and strewed green boughs lavishly over polished floors. The kitchen women muttered prayers to Juno as they set the wedding cake of wine-steeped meal on its nest of bay leaves; boy-servants waved feather fans to keep off the flies, while the chief cook shouted orders as he prepared a feast of peacock, pheasant and suckling pig. Diocles worried himself into fits of trembling over the proper order of the guests on the banquet couches. As if it matters now whom we offend, Marcus Julianus observed with dark amusement as he passed the morning drafting another plea for an open trial. It might have been a wedding among the Shades, so grim and silent was the household; he had not needed to overhear a kitchenmaid whisper, “The month of Mars is an evil time for a wedding—it will be fraught with battles,” to know what the servants thought of this union. The vast gardens seemed a place of ghosts; the cypresses planted along the gravel walks on the day his father was taken to the pyre swayed faintly in the wind as if moving to the tones of wailing for the dead. Everywhere the fountains were dry; only the dolphin fountain managed a feeble trickle; the water dribbling from that gaped bronze mouth was like softly shed tears that would not stop.