Fire and Sacrifice Read online

  ***

  I hurried back in the hope of a proper look at Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, just as Terentia followed him out the gate and up the street where they might be out of earshot of the priestesses.

  I caught only fragments at the end.

  ‘A foreigner?’ Terentia asked.

  Marcus Aemilius nodded. ‘Someone who will not appeal to her, nor who has affiliations.’

  ‘We are of the same mind then. I thank you for your generous gift, Marcus Aemilius.’ Terentia measured her words.

  ‘Let me respect you by speaking plainly, Terentia: men like me give when their are gains of equal or greater value.’ He walked with his arms loosely behind his back, as though his threat was the easiest thing in the world.

  ‘Aemilia will be very grateful.’

  ‘Good. She has been unexpected of late. The people don’t want the unexpected. They want to know she loves them enough to choose them.’

  Choose them over what?

  ***

  Terentia peeled away from Marcus Aemilius and I scurried into the sacred square, but her voice stopped me dead.

  ‘Secunda, not one more step!’

  Terentia placed herself between me and the open arch to the street, glancing over her shoulder at it, and I realised she was hiding me.

  ‘Look at your feet!’ She fairly hissed the words. ‘And that!’ She made a sharp nod at a trail of unspeakable muddy clumps.

  I got such a shock I dropped the pears and made everything worse. Some rolled into the muck. The rest would be bruised.

  Oh gods. I dirtied the sacred space. (You don’t belong here.)

  ‘Flavia, get the broom,’ Terentia ordered without moving, refusing to reveal to the street my unmentionable mess.

  I dared not move. I tried to stand neatly.

  She looked up and down my scars and let out a heavy sigh. ‘The people rely on us, Secunda, every one of them from the college of priests to the children of slaves. This’ – she pointed at my dirt with her chin – ‘does not look like we have things in hand. Does this look like a sacred space to you?’

  ‘No, mistress.’

  ‘Urgulania will cook tonight. You will clean. That.’ (A nod at my filthy hem.) ‘Now. You may use the well, but you will take your washing to the servant quarters.’

  But I was going to cook for Aemilia!

  ‘Not a foot back in here until that tunic is clean and dry, if it takes all night. You are part of the sacred space now – you will learn to raise yourself.’

  As I walked out the side gate to go round the back way, Terentia followed me with the broom, wiping away my every step.

  Chapter 3

  WATER

  Pompeia

  October 114 BC

  We were on the river dock the day the soldiers came home and with little forewarning tore the tear in the fabric of Rome that began our end.

  The news had come the previous evening that the army ships were to leave the seaport at Ostia and were expected upriver at the Emporium that afternoon, so the weary soldiers could row with the tide.

  Dalmaticus wanted a show of the gods’ support, which was to be us over the other priests because we were also a feminine presence, which the men would need. He blushed, silly bear.

  Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus was a solitary man. He had the calm aura of a survivor, and eyes that seemed unconvinced by the surface of things. He maintained his strength, which, together with sandy, askew hair and features, gave him the perpetual impression of having just stepped away from battle camp. Those same woolly features also had the quality of transforming imperceptibly, on rare occasion, into furry cuddliness.

  He looked at me with his blue eyes from under that deep brow. He leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs so he was all chest and shoulders. I could feel his knee close to me.

  He cleared his throat. He’d been practising this. ‘The men will appreciate a feminine presence,’ he said. ‘But they also need strength. I want you there, Pompeia. Bring Aemilia and Marcia.’

  ‘I think we can do feminine, Lucius,’ I said, hiding my grin by only half. I knew I was teasing him but oh well. I liked teasing Lucius. And I liked saying his given name. It’s a juicy name. Lucius. You see, it was my femininity that he loved. And he did love me, the best of us all. I am not the most beautiful or the slimmest, but I know, just quietly, that my curves are scrumptious. And I know that a man like Lucius most wants a womanly woman, and wants a woman who feels. Not in weakness or drama, but in the way of a priestess. The way a river carries magic in its unseeable depths that make you a little bit afraid to swim but irresistible to dip your hand in. I am his way into the great mystery that is woman, which is completely beyond a man like Lucius, which is to say I am also therefore his way into his own feelings, too. That’s what he craves.

  I don’t know what kind of woman his young wife back at the villa was. I knew only that they had their first child, a little girl about four years old, and another one on the way, and that he spent most of his time in the forum with us.

  It was a tinny day at the river. Sky was a sheet of grey cloud, with a subtle cool that seeped into your spine if you stopped moving. Thin somehow, the kind of day gods and demons could easily step through.

  News of the two defeats had arrived before the ships.

  Rome did not lose.

  This army had been in Thrace. Some place far away north and in my mind wild with tribes of hunters with matted hair, and rocky sludgy mountain tracks and pine forests with bears and snow. They were home for the winter but they were home defeated and depleted by a good eight hundred men. It was said that they were ambushed on a mountain pass, consul Cato with them even, and then the brazen Celts came right at the fortress and attacked the rest.

  They’d keep coming, people were sure.

  I was sick imagining so many young men lying in bloodied grass, a mass grave in some bleak foggy valley. Gods, stop it, Pompeia, you’ll make yourself faint. I couldn’t bear to contemplate what the poor lambs had been through. They needed us that day, the soldiers who came home, all thin and dented under their sculpted leather. I remember their magnificent thighs all red raw with bruises and the constant cold of the open sea.

  The souls of their dead clung to them almost visibly, dragged at their ankles begging for life as they did the moment after falling.

  We were always a city of widows when our men were away to war. But this day there was no hoot of celebration. It was a quiet homecoming under the thick quiet of a crowd bound tight by conflicting fixations on death and survival. Wives whispered love to their returning husbands for fear of offending others with their lightness. It was only the blessed children who broke the tension as a little girl in her best dress and ribbons ran with wobbly abandon at a soldier, shrieking, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ At that moment a busker took to his flute and tried with some success to lace the event with joyful tones. Even some of the survivors greeted their family with looks of dread, as if they were the couriers of something awful they could not help but bring with them.

  So there we were, Aemilia and Marcia and me in a line greeting one by one the limp survivors of the army we’d farewelled months ago as they came off the ship.

  One woman, dressed in yellow with rouged cheeks and lips and carefully arranged cleavage, worked her way from one boat to the next and back again. She was hungry-looking and did not seem at all convinced by her own efforts to prepare for a reunion. Back she came, and down the line again. Another line of soldiers walked straight past her and I shot a look at Secunda, who was hovering behind us, and she shook her head sadly, as unconvinced by the woman as me.

  We put Marcia at the front of our line of triage. She would be a good first greeting, anointing the soldiers with the sacred water – and oh how they looked at her otherworldly beauty when she did. She played her part like Licinia had taught her (much to my growling, but I must concede that day it was perfect): let them wonder, let them want, be the untouchable sumptuous thing that can
distract them from the horrors.

  I went at the far end, the big gooey lump clucking over them as I wiped the charcoal paste onto their lovely square, veined hands. You’re home now.

  I shouldn’t have been crying. In my mind’s eye I could see Terentia roll her eyes at me. They think I am the weak one because I cry the most and the easiest. But I learned long ago that I cry the most because I am able to look straight at the thing, and to feel the feeling. Those who stiffen only make themselves brittle. Those who rage only distract themselves. Quietly, with love, I will cry their tears for them.

  Terentia wanted us to be the picture of serenity, unflapped by the events because we trust in the gods. We were to be the very hearth fire that for Romulus’s armies would have burned by the riverside to light their way home.

  You see, in keeping Vesta aflame in our temple we kept Rome balanced between ignition and consumption. We kept the Roman ideal alight with its own possibilities, yet kept it from being consumed by its own ambition. It was a precarious balance in those days. Rome’s dominion grew by the day, pushing ever outwards while all the while its centre grew heavier with all the new people come to partake of the land of possibility.

  Our Aemilia, Pet, was our centrepiece, with the brazier beside her, all task and tact, no tears, just warmth. Again, apparently come to life outside the stone square that was our home. It was Pet’s idea to take the brazier and purify the soldiers with the smoke, a mix of air and fire.

  ‘At the river? A purification should be done in the temple,’ Terentia said.

  ‘They need to know Vesta is with them always, anywhere. It is precisely the message Dalmaticus wants.’ Aemilia beckoned to Secunda to come to her. ‘The goddess was not born in the temple.’

  Seeing Aemilia’s arm link into Secunda’s, Terentia sucked in. ‘Aemilia, you know the reaction. Leave it for today.’

  ‘The more we hide her, the more people think there is something to hide.’

  We couldn’t argue.

  We had taken a little brazier of charcoal lit from the sacred hearth, and from it she lit a wad of green laurel, bound tight so it would only smoulder and not burst into flame, then washed each man in its smoke. They looked at her as though she was the goddess herself. She lent to the soldiers everything they needed to be. I could’ve thrown myself on her for pride.

  In truth, I think it’s us the people prefer to see than the gods. We are safer.

  In truth, I believe the aim for the people, and us, is no response from the gods at all. Then we go safely through our days in continuity and repetition. It’s the ritual that reassures us more than the gods.

  One soldier looked at my tears and let one of his own fall with them. Just one.

  I could feel Lucius on the platform above, watching me, his hunger feeding my strength. We wore our veils as we always did for rituals, and that day also for effect, so I had to fully turn and look up to see his approval. I couldn’t help myself.

  Just at that moment, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus sidled up to Lucius and I spun back away.

  Scaurus, though a friend to Lucius and a proud enough man, was to me a wasp. His spine rose in lumps between his shoulders, and he settled beside Lucius with his arms folded inside his cloak; wings in, going nowhere.

  ‘You are without your lictors again,’ I heard him say.

  Lucius hated travelling with lictors; it insulted him to have guards. He preferred the discreet strength of Cor nearby. ‘They’re guarding the priestesses today.’

  ‘Mmmhmm. They give your position gravitas.’

  There was a pause in the conversation in which I could imagine Lucius shut him up with a blue look.

  ‘Many will be wondering what on earth we did for the gods to so abandon us,’ said the wasp.

  ‘Every army loses sometimes.’

  ‘Not the Romans. If the commanders are not to blame then it must be a failure in the communion with the gods, a ritual that failed to please – in short, your College of Priests . . .’

  I could feel Lucius’s eyes on me again. ‘That’s why we’re here, friend.’

  Scaurus ignored him, intent on his point. ‘As soon as your nephew Gaius Caecillius is in the consul seat in the new year they will send him to Thrace to clean up this mess. Let’s hope he has inherited the Metelli military talent. Otherwise it’s him or you. The consequence for the Metelli of laying their touch on every position in politics and religion, dear Metellus Dalmaticus . . . you cannot then escape blame.’ The wasp ruffled his skeletal wings with satisfaction.

  ‘This is not about the family. And that sounds like a threat.’

  Scaurus chuckled. ‘You are tense. Good. You know our friendship is stronger than that but perhaps it would not be unwise, Metellus, to feel a little threatened. The people are the most insolent and bold they’ve been in a decade since their dear Gracchus was murdered for trying to redistribute the wealth in their favour. Romans have long memories. They will be easily tipped. Men of less integrity can make use of such a climate.’

  His words sent the chill of truth through me.

  I was distracted by a new wave of soldiers as the last ship disembarked, but my attention was drawn back by Scaurus calling to Lucius’s brother, the augur.

  ‘Quintus Caecillius! We were just remarking on the task before your nephew when he takes office in the new year.’

  ‘He’s his grandfather’s son. He’s been preparing for this since birth!’

  So many consuls were career politicians who suddenly found themselves at the head of an army someplace far away, but military prowess seemed to be in the Metelli blood.

  ‘Experience in the field is essential to success as a consul,’ I had heard Lucius say to Tristan in that rock-fall voice like rock fall that dropped every word right to the bottom of you where it would sit for ever more. He had heard these same words the same way, I was sure. There were stories that Lucius had campaigned in Spain, survived shipwreck in Gibraltar and found his way to a Roman camp after two months on foot, hunting his own food. He led a legion to victory in the east after their true commander was cut down, and he survived being run over by a carriage that broke almost every bone in his body.

  Whatever the case, when he was consul he won great victory in Dalmatia and secured it for Rome. For that he got a wondrous triumph parade through the city, which we attended before knowing he would be our head priest, and the infamy of the name Dalmaticus.

  ‘A wise display of the gods’ support, brother,’ Quintus said, I supposed meaning us.

  Dalmaticus grunted noncommittally.

  ‘You realise, however, if we hold the favour of the gods then Cato will be the one to bear the defeat?’

  ‘Cato has but one month left of his year as consul; it will do him little harm. They’ll make a show of it and let him off lightly and it will be done. It is easier to fix the problem of one man than read the minds of the gods.’

  ‘Careful,’ Scaurus interjected. ‘A consul becomes a senator. We of the senate are already judged alongside those who look after their own interests over the people’s.’

  ‘And what do your augurs say of this?’ Dalmaticus addressed his brother.

  His brother smiled conspiratorially. ‘The same as Uncle would have: that the gods can only do so much if we will be so arrogant as to advance on tribes whose very existence is to battle with mountain neighbours when we send a front line of farmers who wish only to be left in peace, whose minds are back in the fields, and who have a career politician for a military commander!’

  ‘Speaking of –’

  I saw the consul coming off the boat at the same moment and spun to Lucius for guidance, only to see Scaurus and Quintus slide away.

  We were careful to serve the consul with the ritual exactly the same as every other man.

  Lucius came to my side to greet Cato, shaking his hand and nodding at him in that loaded, awkward way men do when one needs to hear what the other can’t say.

  ‘Thank you,’ Cato said to Lucius.

/>   The look in Cato’s eyes almost broke my heart. I turned to Lucius after he’d gone. ‘What did you mean, “They’ll make a show of it”?’ I asked, not really sure I wanted to know the answer.

  ‘Cato will be brought to trial.’

  ‘For what?’

  Lucius sighed, resigned. ‘Losing. Whatever poetry of law is recited around it.’

  EARTH

  Fragments

  Dustin Wade Simmons, From Obscurity to Fame and Back Again: The Caecilii Metelli in the Roman Republic – A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University, Brigham Young University, Provo, 2011, pp. 115–118.

  By 115 the Metelli of this generation had already supplied Rome with four consuls and two censors, and they would add two more of each before they were done. Indeed it appears that the mere name Metellus was enough to secure election to the highest magistracies in Rome.

  However, their success in numbers does not appear to have translated into any real achievements for Rome. Since Macedonicus, the men of the Metellan family had garnered two triumphs, and by 115 were in many powerful positions. However, the members of the family may have been acutely aware of their shortcomings and sensitive to any real or perceived slights, which could have led to the banishment of theatrical performances in Rome.

  115 also saw Metellus Delmaticus become pontifex maximus, replacing P. Mucius Scaevola who had held the office since 130 . . .

  The most important event for the Metellan family in this busy year was the death and funeral of Metellus Macedonicus. He had served Rome for a long time and had done a great deal for the empire. Metellus Macedonicus glorified those two things which were most important to a Roman noble: his country and his family. His military campaigns saw Macedonia and large parts of Greece proper come under permanent Roman control and his fighting in Spain was not unfruitful. He was personally responsible for bringing his family to the forefront of Roman politics. Before Macedonicus’ exploits on the battlefield and in the political arena the Metellan family had established themselves firmly within the Roman aristocracy, but they were merely one aristocratic family among many. Metellus was able to elevate his family to the upper echelons of Roman politics.