The Silver Wolf (26 page)

Regeane began giggling.

“What do you think of this peristyle?” Lucilla gestured at the garden. They paused near a door for Regeane to take in the view.

“Not much,” Regeane said, “rather cold. I hope he doesn’t steal anything from the Saxons. They’ll cut off his hands.”

“Not a bad idea,” Lucilla replied. “The bronzes did belong to the church and they were very beautiful. Still, the pool remains.” She pointed to an enormous reflecting pool in the garden. “I raise carp there.” She indicated a jar near her hand.

Regeane looked down. Two large carp sulked in the bottom, fins waving gently in the still water. “Uuum.” Regeane eyed then hungrily. “Breakfast?” she asked hopefully.

“My!” Lucilla looked a bit taken aback. “Raw or cooked?”

“At the moment,” Regeane said impatiently, “either.”

“Ah, yes,” Lucilla said as she began unlocking the door. “I forgot you’ve been running around on all fours all night.”

She opened the door. The room was small, dim, and odorous with cedar and furniture polish. It opened into a private walled garden.

The first thing Regeane noted was a napkin-covered tray resting on a circular table in the center of the room. She charged.

“Hold!” Lucilla said. “It will not fight back or even run away. Arms up.”

The mantle Regeane was wearing fell to the floor. Lucilla dropped a heavy linen gown over her head.

Regeane got to the table. She found ripe pears, herbed cream cheese, bread, and a pitcher of white wine. She ignored the wine. It was the only thing on the table she ignored.

Lucilla poured herself some wine. She watered it a bit. “How is Antonius?”

Regeane stopped eating for a moment. She had to take a deep breath to talk. “He is … well. You know, not well, but—”

“But as healthy as he ever is,” Lucilla filled in.

“Yes, even his kidnapping by Basil didn’t damage his … composure.”

Lucilla shook her head and sighed. She took her wine,
walked to the porch, and stared out into the garden. “No, of course not. Execution wouldn’t damage his composure … as you put it. Can you help him?”

The question was asked so quietly Regeane almost didn’t hear it. But when it penetrated her consciousness, she stopped eating again. “Yes,” she answered.

Lucilla turned back toward her. “How?”

Regeane said, “Ummmmmm.”

“Regeane, are you in danger of developing the same type of stammer Maxtentus did when talking to Hadrian?”

“My activities require a lot of explaining,” Regeane said.

“Your point is well taken,” Lucilla said. She bowed slightly to Regeane and turned back again to the garden.

Regeane ate. With every bite she felt better. At last, she relaxed, replete, and had the leisure to glance around the room.

Lucilla’s study had a gentle dignity lacking in the over-ornate dining room. Bookshelves lined the walls. Diamond-shaped structures built into them held scrolls, flat shelves held books and, in many cases, unbound piles of papers. A slab of glass in the roof shed a clear morning light on the table where Regeane was sitting. The portico opened into the garden.

A fountain on the wall spurted water into a basin. The fountain head was an arrangement of bronze acanthus leaves combined to suggest the face of a god peering out through the leaves in a forest. The bronze glowed in the delicate gold of the new sun; water sparkled.

The rest of the garden lay in cool morning shadow. Chamomile, valerian, and poppies grew thickly clustered in beds along the garden walls. The smaller chamomile enthusiastically puffing into cushions of yellow and white presided over by drooping violet-throated poppy heads, scarlet and white, mixed with high valerian spikes.

The roof over the portico was a grape arbor shaded now by a thick growth of winter-denuded ropey vines. A few leaves remained, green at the center, crisp and brown at the edges, moving slightly in the first morning breeze.

“What is this place?” Regeane asked.

“A place where I seldom, if ever, invite even my friends,”
Lucilla said. She walked to a bookshelf and lifted a brass scroll from its place and handed it to Regeane.

Grasping the ring, Regeane unrolled it. “It’s Greek,” she said, disappointed. “I can’t read Greek.” She examined the papyrus very closely. It had been glued to a backing of a new vellum to preserve it because the papyrus was very old and already crumbling to dust at the edges.

“Neither do I,” Lucilla said, “but I have a Latin translation here on the shelf beside it.”

Regeane closed the scroll very carefully. “It is old and must be precious.”

Lucilla nodded and replaced it on the shelf. “It is a letter written by Queen Cleopatra of Egypt to Julius Caesar on the matter of the calendar. She gives him the best opinion of the Egyptian sage, Sosthumeus, and later, her own views. Then, she makes some suggestions. It is to be noted that he took them. This is believed to be the only letter surviving written in the queen’s own hand. It was salvaged when the library at Alexandria burned.”

“Oh,” Regeane whispered staring into Lucilla’s face, “what else is there?”

“Up on this shelf,” she indicated a higher one, “Arete, one of the first to write a study of natural law as it relates to women. Her fellow citizens at Cyrene are said to have amended their marriage law at her suggestion. She is called ‘Lycergia’ or law-giver.

“Over here are poets Myrtis, Erinna, Anyte. Those are some of the Greeks. Here, a few Romans: Sulpicia—”

Regeane burst into tears. “They are all women.” The tears weren’t healing. They scalded her face, burnt her eyes, and made her nose swell. When Lucilla tried to comfort her, she moved away and finally ended by washing her face in the garden fountain. “All women,” she repeated as she walked back to where Lucilla stood.

“Yes, I don’t banish male authors and, in fact, have many books by them, but not in here. And you may come in to read or study as you please. Only don’t remove any books from this room. Not because I don’t trust you, but because I have no confidence in others. I have seen men who, on finding a book was
written by a woman, made haste to consign it to the flames. I protect what is here, though I cannot think it will survive me.”

Regeane nodded. “I am honored. You haven’t slept.”

“No,” Lucilla said. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her long blond hair was swept to one side and, in the growing light, Regeane could see how much gray was mixed into it.

“I have powers,” Regeane said. “I will try to save Antonius.”

“Yes, I know,” Lucilla said. “There is one poet who is not here. I cannot find one collection of her poems still in existence. The priests have done their work well. Yet, I cannot think she won’t be remembered because she reached out and touched the central chord of loneliness and longing in each human soul. I thought of her often tonight.

Regeane’s eyes burned, but no tears came. Her head hurt. “She killed him. Gundabald helped her. She helped Gundabald … I don’t know if it matters which one of them … He was my father. I got the powers from him. Except she called them a curse and was sure she was cursed … through me.”

“Yes,” Lucilla replied. “That was the ‘nonsense’ you babbled under Pappolus’ drugs. About rose petals steeping in blood. The more fool he and I for not understanding it.”

“I can’t promise you anything specific,” Regeane said, “because I don’t know where my powers will lead me.”

“Yes,” Lucilla said, taking her arm. “Now, come to bed. Your serious training begins this evening. You dine with the pope.”

Regeane slept in Lucilla’s big bed. Lucilla, beside her, passed into unconsciousness as soon as her head touched the pillow. Regeane, however, remained wakeful for one brief, beautiful moment. The wolf visited her.

She and others of her kind were walking down along a narrow beach below high cliffs. The stone was a deep bloody
black, stained faintly red and purple in places, broken along prismatic lines into three-cornered angles like building blocks. The sandy strand was brown stained by long darker streaks from the mineral-rich stone. The sky above was a wrack of torn storm clouds, dark gray where they floated on the air, reaching higher and higher until they became crystal and white thunder-heads, drifting between broken streaks of blue sky. Out to sea, mist floated like smoke on the water.

The waves were quiet, rolling gray far out, becoming blue swells as they approached shore and, at last, deep green combers arching and slapping into lacy foam at the wolves’ feet.

Here and there, they had to swerve to avoid big piles of bone-white and silver driftwood. At length, they came to a headland stretching far out into the water.

Air blowing from the ocean was clear and cold, containing in each breath the essence of eternity. Long shafts of light began to break through the mist. And the wolves stood as one watching the sun rising in splendor … above the rim of the world.

SHE WAS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN REGEANE had ever seen. She surveyed Regeane with aristocratic disdain. “Is this the girl, Mother?”

“Regeane,” Lucilla said, “May I present my daughter, Augusta.”

Regeane curtsied as deeply as she could in the robe of stiff white and gold brocade she was wearing.

Augusta touched a lacquered finger to her lips and used it to smooth one of her fashionably and artificially high arched brows and then the other, as her two glorious, violet eyes
studied Regeane. “She’s mannerly enough, Mother,” Augusta commented and continued, “pray tell me, Regeane, what is your lineage?”

As she had been trained to do, Regeane began to recite her lineage beginning with one Luprand who had been the son of Charles Martel by a concubine and who, in spite of becoming an abbot, managed to father seven children.

Augusta broke in on her narrative before she was finished with the first generation. “Excellent, my dear girl. I see you have your ancestors at your fingertips. That’s as it should be, an illustrious family, though … recent.”

“Recent?” Regeane choked.

“My husband’s family,” Augusta continued with lofty condescension, “trace their ancestry back to the divine Julius himself.”

“Yes, dear,” Lucilla said with good-humored malice. “We know. You tell everyone sooner or later, usually sooner.”

“Don’t be difficult, Mother,” Augusta said.

“No, dear,” answered Lucilla, “but if you’ll excuse us for a moment, I have a few last-minute instructions for Regeane.”

Augusta managed to look both politely bored and irritated at the same time, then she turned and drifted off down the path, pausing every few moments to admire herself in the darkening waters of the atrium pool.

Regeane thought there was much to admire. Augusta’s slim, curvaceous body was draped in an overgown of pale rose silk, richly embroidered with gold and Oriental pearls. Her auburn hair was piled high, held in place with emeralds and a snood of golden chains.

The face framed by the finery didn’t disappoint the eye. Augusta was blessed with slender, high cheekbones with the characteristic narrow high-bridged aristocratic nose and large, heavy-lidded eyes that hinted subtly and beautifully at subdued passion.

“Oh, my,” Regeane said. “The divine Julius. Is she, really?”

“Don’t be silly, child,” Lucilla said. “She’s my daughter. She boasts of her husband’s family. I must admit, though, that looking at her now, no one could ever possibly imagine that her
grandmother was a peasant woman from the Abruzzi who went to bed every night on a straw tick, scratching her lice.” Regeane giggled.

“Mother,” Augusta called back over her shoulder at them. “Are you saying outrageous things to that girl?”

Lucilla sighed deeply. “No, dear,” she answered sweetly. “Just be patient. We’ll be finished in a short time.”

“Well, be quick about it. If you chatter too long, we’ll be late for the feast. That’s unthinkable, Mother.”

Lucilla bridled for a second; then her irritation expended itself in another deep sigh. “Yes, dear,” she said dutifully. She gritted her teeth. “Damn, but there’s no help for it. I need Augusta to introduce you to Roman nobility. Child, you must be presented to the notables of the city in the company of someone who is eminently respectable. My daughter fits that description perfectly.”

Lucilla gave a snort of fury. “I can’t imagine how I did it. A line distinguished by a peasant woman and a whore, culminating in the paragon of ancient Roman virtue that is my dear daughter, Augusta. Not only has she made an impeccably illustrious marriage, but indeed, no breath of scandal has ever sullied her name.”

“A family related to the divine Julius Caesar …” Regeane began.

“I believe,” Lucilla said, “that the links between her husband’s family and the first Caesar are more mythological than factual. However, one can never tell—the gens Juli was an enormous one—and I suppose it’s possible they are descended from a distant relative of the great man himself.

“But,” she added spitefully, “so are many other people. In any case, they rusticated in poverty and obscurity, living in a tumble-down villa in the Sabine hills, wearing coarse wool. They were only a little better off than their serfs until they were saved by the timely arrival about fifty years ago of a Lombard princess. She had high social aspirations, an iron will, and two wagonloads of gold.”

To her horror, Regeane found herself giggling again. “Lucilla,” she admonished, “if you want me to be respectful, you shouldn’t tell me …”

“Yes. Yes, of course I want you to be respectful—openly, that is. I have undertaken to teach you about the world and it’s imperative you learn a little fashionable hypocrisy. Besides, my little one, it’s important to know the roots of social and political eminence; important that you learn they rise from the same dung heap among the poor where the rest of us come from. So that you aren’t overly impressed by lofty lineages, fine clothes, and exquisite manners. And learn to look through them to the men and women beneath.”