Fire and Sacrifice Read online

  Fire and Sacrifice

  Victoria Collins

  Copyright © Victoria Collins, 2018

  Published by the author. E-book edition.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a database and retrieval system or transmitted in any form or any means without the prior written permission of the owner of copyright.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permissions to reproduce segments the works referenced throughout this book.

  Cover photography by Lori Cicchini. Cover design by Marlon Joshua Namoro.

  Author: Collins, Victoria

  Title: Fire and Sacrifice

  ISBN (ebook): 978-0-9875898-1-1

  For Aemilia.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapters

  The second ending

  Notes from the author

  Connect with Victoria Collins

  About the author

  Foreword

  This book is based on the true story of Rome’s priestesses of Vesta.

  It is 114 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. It is before Caesar, before Antony and Cleopatra, the emperors, the Colosseum and before Pompeii was buried in volcanic ash.

  The goddess Vesta harks from a time before the Capitoline and Olympian patriarchs, back to a time when divinity resided in the earth and elements, and all living things. Vesta was thought by the Romans to occupy the hearth fire, an essential part of every household.

  For at least six hundred years, her temple in the Roman Forum, far smaller than the rest, housed the fire that represented the sacred hearth fire of Rome. Just as a campfire signals to the soldier, explorer, nomad that home has survived and waits safely, so the hearth in the Temple of Vesta symbolised no less than the very survival of the Roman empire.

  Ruins of the temple still stand today in the Roman Forum. So do ruins of the priestesses’ house, though it’s a much later, grander incarnation of the one in this story, of which we have only fragments.

  The stories of the Vestal Virgins can be told only in fragments, because fragments are all we find, and fragments are all we remember.

  Chapter 1

  FIRE

  Secunda

  October 114 BC

  Our time together began on the day of my first execution. We had longer together than it sounds, but not much. By the end of it, she would be written about for two thousand years. Never me. It was my job, I discovered, to be there for her. To light her way home.

  She is Aemilia.

  I am Secunda, or I was then, at the start. No one can see me anymore but imagine a face half mashed with scars from a fire, which go all the way to my knee. Don’t look away, it’s only your imagination. The other side? An ordinary face, I suppose. I never looked. Olive skin and mouse-brown hair I never knew what to do with. Imagine, too, a voice burned out to a smoky crackle.

  Much of the time this was fine with me, when I was happy to not be noticed. It doesn’t help, though, when you are screaming bloody murder.

  I fought all the way to my execution, naturally. I screamed bloody murder. Because it was. I screeched and thrashed and roared as though I could wake the gods, and the sky would rip open to show the world that this thing should not be allowed.

  But the sound was just an ugly coughing thing, and my thrashing only made people turn away.

  I remember clearly how hot and heavy the ropes were on my wrists. I’d thrashed about so much when they were trying to tie me up that they resorted to winding almost the full length of rope round and round in a big knot. Events had flared quickly, no time to have irons forged. No trial required for a slave.

  The master’s Son Number One had the rope and wrenched me along like a dog. Son Number Two prodded me from behind, all the way from the villa through the streets and finally into the great Roman Forum, with all the rich men and Togas and temples to witness the master’s great triumph over a slave girl.

  I threw myself backwards, putting all my weight onto my elbows and forcing Number Two to hold me up while I kicked his brother hard in the back.

  Number One swung and backhanded me. But the sky stayed quiet.

  It was nothing new for people to turn away from me, but surely this was enough to move someone. Anyone.

  It was my face, you see. You either turn from me or are mesmerised by me. It’s alright. It is what it is. I fell into the kitchen fire as a child; I liked to think I carried the image of the flames in my skin.

  The master kept me hidden away in his dark little kitchen so no one would have the displeasure of looking upon me. I’m told he chained me there when we had guests and I was too little to be trusted with full obedience. I don’t remember. There’s a shadow of it in me somewhere but I don’t look.

  For want of ability to make enough noise that people would look, I tried glaring at those who were close on the side of the street. I glared so hard I turned myself red and made myself cry with the effort of willing them to do something. I was red and wet like a skinned animal, bleeding insides on the outside for all the streets to see.

  I screamed the word they would not say for me: ‘No!’ But the sound thinned to nothing, like smoke, and anyway, a master can kill his slave any day. It’s law.

  ‘I am not a slave!’ It was not the truth. But I yelled it to the streets again and again because it was the truth of my being, and the truth I’d prefer to die with. I had screamed it all the way from the villa and I would scream it all the way to the cliff they meant to throw me off.

  ‘Almost there,’ Number One snarled and yanked again. I threw myself back and sideways, kicking so violently that I found myself rolled up in Number Two’s arms, like an old carpet. He dumped me on the ground. Pig.

  ‘I didn’t do it!’ I rasped, on my knees. But I did. But I didn’t mean it and I didn’t start it and I didn’t deserve this. He was going to take me on the table right there in front of you, you saw! ‘You are my brother!’ Number One slapped me for that but it was the truth. It’s the way of masters and slaves. I said it more to stab him with than to appeal to him. I think this ‘brother’ of mine even took my mother once, trying to prove himself. She came back to the kitchen green with disgust. She would not speak for days.

  If I had been prettier they would have taken me and mother might have been spared.

  I stayed on my knees, stalling as long as I could, but he yanked me forward so I had to pull my feet under me or fall on my face.

  And then there she was.

  Rushing at us, upon me before she could stop, a crush of whitest white linen like looking into the sun, all curves and drapes.

  ‘Stop it!’

  My executioners withered before her.

  ‘Stop it!’ She was beautiful, and crumpling with distress as though she herself were bound. Something in her knew this thing. Something in her hated this as much as I did, for whatever reasons of her own.

  She smelled of smoke.

  ‘Priestess –’ Number One called to her.

  ‘Unbind her!’ she said in a panicked voice.

  None of us knew what to do.

  Then came the voice of Dalmaticus, as I came to know him. I remember that moment clearly because it tore her attention away from me.

  Dalmaticus had a voice like rock fall, that made you want to run even when he wasn’t raising it. ‘Ever killed anything but kittens before, junior?’

  Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus. The Pontifex Maximus, head priest of all Rome. Head magistrate. Former consul. Military honours. Sandy face, square like a battle shield. Crushed nose. Leaning against a doorframe beside the road, talking to Number One.

  The wool robes seemed too soft for him. In my head he was in armour, and that scar on
his cheek surely puckered over a metal chip left by an enemy’s sword. We were all sharper in Dalmaticus’s presence.

  ‘Careful this one doesn’t grab you on her way down, take you with her.’ He crossed his arms casually and nodded at me. ‘She’s got fight.’

  The sons turned white. ‘This slave is condemned to death at the Tarpeian Rock for crimes against the House of Peducaeus, your eminence. Sir. Pontifex Maximus.’

  ‘This woman is touched by Vesta,’ the priestess snapped.

  ‘Aemilia,’ Dalmaticus warned.

  Aemilia. Priestess. I managed to think properly about her whites and realised she was a priestess of Vesta, the sacred fire. Looking at me. And I am wet and red and feral and I cannot bring myself to protest any more in her presence, she is too clean. To look directly at her was to look at a candle flame, so luminescent it’s impossible to focus on. She was older than I expected of a priestess, fine lines in the corners of her eyes, but she held the grace of ancient wisdom. I tried to breathe nicer. Oh please! Please, please!

  ‘Look at her scars.’ (The priestess to Dalmaticus.)

  ‘Aemilia.’ (Dalmaticus again.)

  Aemilia inhaled sharply: a decision. Quick as fire she stepped in and laid her palm on my cheek. She touched me! She wiped dry my eye, looking at me as though I were her own child, or her child self, and I was in that moment reduced to a lost child with big hot eyes.

  And then she was gone.

  She withdrew her hand, closed herself, raised her chin, cupped her hands together, cocked an eyebrow at Dalmaticus: job done.

  Dalmaticus sagged.

  As she stepped back she pulled with her my insides and a torrent of hot child’s tears hit my cheeks. Because she was gone. Because she was there. Because no one ever touched me. Because touch, for me as a child, was the hot sting of my mother’s hands tending my weeping burns. For the earliest winter of my memory I slept on the stone step, facedown in the frost for the relief of the cool on my sores. Scabby infections kept me in pain for years. I spent the rest of my days away from sight in the kitchen, grateful for the scars that spared me the touches of men.

  But Aemilia is a priestess of the sacred fire. That day my skin met hers like a flame leaping joyfully from one branch to another, having found a kindred spirit with which to dance.

  I was lost to her then. Then and forever.

  I felt a tug on my ropes. Dalmaticus was cutting them off.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Number One’s voice was shrill. He hopped ridiculously on the spot, barely suppressing the urge to stamp his feet.

  ‘The touch of a Vestal will pardon any condemned prisoner. It is law,’ Aemilia said. Then to me: ‘You are free of this fate.’

  ‘She can’t!’

  ‘She did,’ said Dalmaticus.

  ‘This is a slave of Sextus Peducaeus. Pardoned or not, she has embarrassed the House of Peducaeus, and she still belongs to me.’ Son Number One turned on me and growled. ‘I will have your punishment.’

  ‘Then the House of Vestals buys her freedom,’ Aemilia shot back.

  Oh gods, Vesta, please.

  I shot a look at Dalmaticus. ‘Of course, if this girl is touched by Vesta, surely Peducaeus would be proud to make her a gift to the temple,’ he said with a threat in his voice.

  The ropes dropped and Dalmaticus gave me a secret nod toward the street: run.

  EARTH

  Fragments

  The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, with an English translation by Earnest Cary on the basis of the version of Edward Spelman, Harvard University Press, London, 1937, Book II, p. 507, 503.

  The virgins who serve the goddess were originally four and were chosen by kings according to the principles established by [the king] Numa, but after wards, from the multiplicity of the sacred rites they perform, their number was increased to six, and has so remained down to our time. They live in the temple of the goddess, into which none who wish are hindered from entering in the daytime, whereas it is not lawful for any man to remain there at night. They were required to remain undefiled by marriage for the space of thirty years, devoting themselves to offering sacrifices and performing other rites ordained by law. During the first ten years their duty was to learn the functions, in the second ten to perform them, and during the remaining ten to teach others. After the expiration of the term of thirty years nothing hindered those who so desired from marrying, upon laying aside the fillets and the other insignia of their priesthood. And some, though very few, have done this; but they came to ends that were not at all happy or enviable. In consequence, the rest, looking upon their misfortune as ominous, remain virgins in the temple of the goddess until their death, and then once more another is chosen by the pontiffs to supply the vacancy.

  . . . There is some doubt, however, what it is that is kept in this temple and for what reason the care of it has been assigned to virgins, some affirming that nothing is preserved there but the fire, which is visible to everybody. And they very reasonably argue that the custody of the fire was committed to virgins, rather than to men, because fire is incorrupt and a virgin is undefiled, and the most chaste of mortal things must be agreeable to the purest of those that are divine. And they regard the fire as consecrated to Vesta because that goddess, being the earth and occupying the central place in the universe, kindles the celestial fires from herself.

  FIRE

  Secunda

  October 114 BC

  I ran like a wild thing, flapping and flailing like a hen before the axe. I ran to the Tarpeian Rock, on the hill above the forum. I don’t know why. I threw up there. I ran from the rock to the Temple of Jupiter, looming behind me big as a god. I ran round behind it, away from its glare, back along the massive foundation stones and down the escarpment, through the bush like wildfire, leaping over logs and onto rocks, jumping hollows and charging through shrubs, sliding crawling falling all the way down to the road. I followed the road round the outside of the city walls then round the old market to the boats. There were too many people there. I kept on across the inlet to the swamp at the bottom of the hill, with its back to the city and the people and the noise broke away and there were trees and cliffs and caves and quiet.

  All I wanted was that cave.

  There’s a big cave low down, overlooking the marshes, but another one above the treetops, small and higher and more away, less likely to be searched. All I wanted was that darkness and aloneness to shut my eyes. Empty. Done.

  I could work a lifetime for the house and never be anything to them. One step too big for myself and they would stomp me out.

  I threw up again.

  There was some powder-soft dirt at the base of the cave wall, just a bit deeper in than the sunlight, where I wouldn’t be seen if the sons looked in. I lowered myself into that dirt for its softness. I curled my face away from the day or night or whatever it was by then, I didn’t care, only that the world could move around me, without me, pass all the mess I had left.

  I still didn’t quite know what had happened. It wasn’t my fault. But I’d fallen.

  I’d just been freed yet I ran for my life. I think. Or I ran to protect the priestess from the mess I was making.

  There was no escaping it. I would never have been able to pretend for long to be the good girl while the prats pranced round me pretending their shit smelled better than mine, and locked me away in the kitchen every night to keep me from view. My mother managed it. My sister too. But I could never. I burned for more.

  Fire spirit lives in the potential, the promise, as well as the flame. In the embers beneath the cool ash that just need to be nursed – or kicked – into fire. They knew somehow that me and my fire were as one. They only had to kick me once too many and I’d ignite. It was always going to come to this, I knew now.

  It dawned on me vaguely in the darkness that I was back at the Palatine Hill, the same hill Aemilia’s temple nestles into, round the other side, somewhere behind me through the dark.

  ***

&n
bsp; Hunger finally pulled me from the cave some immeasurable time later. I wanted desperately to go round the other side of the hill to Aemilia but I could not allow it. I had brought something awful that made her panic, something other than my ugly face and I had no idea what.

  I went to market and for the first time ever I could go slow and smell the fruits and maybe someone would say hello if I gave them enough time and tried not to look too scary. Would they see what Aemilia saw? The markets were across the river and I went early in the morning when it was still a little dark. From the cave I’d watched the thousands of little lamplights across there during the night. They were towers of rooms for all the newcomers. Rome has hundreds of thousands, they say now. Alleys and stairwells full of new shops and bars popped up as though only yesterday. People from far away arrived with nothing, suddenly hungry like me.

  I stood, wobbling, at a barrow of yellow pears because the little patch of sunlight felt good, warming me softly, slowly in the thin winter morning. The fruit lady smiled at me and I said, ‘I have been freed,’ mostly just to taste the words. She smiled again and gave me a pear. I carried it all day, sniffing it as I sat in my cave, each time like pulling a blanket up round my chin.

  I was out of the master’s dark little kitchen for the first time and forever. I was a freedwoman.

  I pondered in my cave about a name. Freedwomen got names, sometimes. I had always wanted a real name. Being given a name, even better than a family name but a name made up just for you, a name that meant someone saw you.

  I lit a fire. (I’d worked the kitchen all my life; I could get a flame.)

  She is touched by Vesta.

  I lit a fire.

  EARTH

  Fragments

  Robert Graves, Greek Myths, Penguin Books, London, 1955, p. 6.