Читать книгу The Passion of Mary Magdalen - Elizabeth Cunningham - Страница 21

The Circus Maximus took up the entire valley of Murcia between the Palatine and Aventine Hills. It could seat a crowd of fifty thousand. By the time Bone and I arrived on foot—he had sent the litters ahead—the huge stadium was almost full. The sound of the crowd was like nothing I had ever heard; the closest comparison is surf, storm surf in a high wind, but without the rhythmic ebb and flow. I had seen plenty of Romans up close; held them as they panted and heaved. They were just flesh, as vulnerable and absurd as anyone else. But to see so many all at once, more people than I had ever seen in my life, was overwhelming—and they were all Romans, of all classes. Slaves and freed slaves were not allowed to buy seats—another rule Domitia Tertia was flouting.

As Bone and I made our way to the top row, I found myself wondering, who are they all, how can there be so many, each one conceived in some heated moment, born of some woman’s wracked body, each one with secrets and passions, each one with a story that might break your heart, if she knew how to tell it, if he knew. Looking into a star-crammed sky was no less awesome, though perhaps more aesthetic. And of course stars do not sweat or reek of garlic, so far as we know.

Only Dido was sitting in our row, looking bored and above it all. I glanced at Bone, but he did not appear concerned about the absence of the others. He gestured for me to sit down, while he stood at the end of the row. I was surprised that he hadn’t berated me when we left the Temple, though I’d caught him casting uneasy glances at me. Something about what happened at the Temple had unnerved him.

“Where were you?” Dido demanded. “I know you’re green, but I didn’t think you were stupid—running down a dead end street your first day out of the house.”

Before I could answer or decide if I wanted to, Berta returned, puffing and sweating, and plopped herself down next to me.

“Three is enough for me!” she mopped her brow with her sleeve. “Succula’s already done five. Where were you, liebling? We were so worried about you. You have to stay with us. You don’t know your way around the streets yet. Dido, did you tell her? Anything we make at the Circus, we keep.”

“I think she better stay put for now.” Dido cut her eyes in Bone’s direction. “Besides, Berta, you know what I think about doing just anybody. It’s not worth it.”

“When I am free, Dido, and you’re still on your back, we’ll talk—or maybe not. I’ll be far away eating roast pig and drinking beer. Oh, here come the mimes!” Berta clapped her hands and laughed at their antics.

Dido had her eyes on other things. “Look across the arena, Red. No, down,” Dido gestured. “That’s the Emperor’s box. The purple is arriving. There! I think that’s the Emperor.” Dido gripped my arm.

Her excitement surprised me. I would have thought she’d scorn imperial Rome on principle. As for me, I had grown up believing I was of divine descent; I was the foster daughter of Bran, a valiant, if fallen, king. A balding dissolute emperor, who had banished his first wife for orgies in the Forum, Tiberius did not impress me. My standard for husbands was King Ailill, a generous man who counted Queen Maeve’s chief lover as his comrade.

“There’s the Emperor’s mother,” Dido continued. I looked at the spare, elegant older woman with more interest. Livia was the first lady of Rome. Widow of the Divine Augustus (as he was called) as well as mother of his stepson, now Emperor, whom the late Augustus had disliked, Livia had masterminded and micro-managed her son’s ascendancy. “And here comes Anecius. He’s sitting in the Imperial box. What a coup. Well, he is spending fortunes on this election.”

“Election?”

“Get with it, Red. You didn’t think this circus is really for his son’s putting on the toga, did you? That’s just the occasion. The man is running for praetor. By all the gods, Red, look, do you see? That’s Domitia Tertia. Sitting in the second row, behind Livia with some of the Vestal Virgins. That whore has testicles any man would die for!”

“Why do people always think of testicles when they admire someone’s nerve?” I complained. But I had to admit, if only to myself, that Domitia Tertia had a certain style. She’d thumbed her nose at the conventions of the ruling class; she ripped them off on a regular basis; she broke laws like fingernails, and they fawned on her for it.

“For the love of Isis!” Dido exclaimed.

Isis, Isis. People called on her an awful lot. Now the name meant something to me. But what?

“Red, see way up there?” She took my head between her hands and positioned it.

“Is that our Helen?” I marveled. “In the box with Aetius? Doesn’t he have a wife who’s some sort of relation to the Divine Augustus? Where is she?”

“Childbed,” said Dido. “When did having a wife ever stop a man from having or flaunting a mistress? Hell, a box is nothing. He’s setting her up in her own house. Maybe you didn’t hear about it yet. He just bought Helen.”

“Bought her! I thought Domitia Tertia never sold her whores.”

“Oh, she does. If the price is right.”

But Joseph hadn’t bought me. He’d refused. Now he’d gone off somewhere. Where? Where I wanted to go. Where I would give anything to go.

“That’s one way out of the Vine and Fig Tree, but not the one I want,” said Dido.

“Why not?” I asked.

“When I leave there, honey, I am going to belong to no one but me.”

No one belongs to himself, I remembered my beloved’s words again, but I did not speak them to Dido. I just nodded. I knew exactly what she meant.

Succula finally clambered into the row, stepping over Berta and squeezing in next to me, “Red, sweetie, you’re here. I was afraid Bone would send you home.”

“How many bets did you make, Succula?” Berta asked. “The girl’s a sibyl when it comes to the races,” she said to me.

“Trouble is,” said Dido, “she hardly ever gets to collect her winnings. Bunch of crooks out there. She never learns.”

Succula shrugged. “It makes the races more exciting.”

The mimes were now mock-fighting their way out of the arena; the crowd had already lost interest in them. I could feel the collective energy gathering, rising in anticipation of the chariots. Suddenly horns blared from every direction, filling the huge elliptical bowl with sound. There followed an extraordinary moment of hush. Then the thundering of hooves began and the horses and chariots blazed into the arena. The crowd found its deafening voice again, but I could still feel the vibration of the hooves through my seat. No stranger to chariot racing, I leaned forward, curious about the Roman style. From that distance it took me a moment of close scrutiny to realize what I was seeing. Then it hit me. Hard.

“Ow, Red!” protested Dido. “Stop digging your nails into me. The race hasn’t started yet. They’re just parading.”

“Dido,” I said. “The charioteers are Celts, at least two of them are. See that one?” I pointed to a big lion of a man, his bare arms swirling with woad, his chariot built in the graceful style I remembered. At home our warriors fought bare-headed, their hair limed and sculpted into fantastic spikes. Here they wore helmets. That was the only difference.

“Well, of course, Red. Didn’t you know? They use Celts, Scythians, and Thracians for chariot races. Prisoners of war. It could be worse. My people they hunt and capture and use for bestiaries. Wait’ll you see those shows. At least no one is slaughtered or eaten alive in a chariot race.”

I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that the Romans would import their athletes; they enslaved anything that moved. At druid college I had heard horror stories of war captives paraded in chains through the Forum. Most Celts killed themselves if they could to avoid that fate. I had never thought about what happened to prisoners after the parade. I’d assumed they were executed—or died of shame.

I looked away from the ring to my own hands clenched in my lap. I did not want to watch my combrogos (the companions, as we called each other) demonstrate their prowess for the entertainment of Romans. Their shame was my shame. It knotted my stomach; it pressed against my heart. And there was something else, hovering at the periphery of my memory, something deeply agitating. I was torn between wanting to push it away and needing to know what it was.

I closed my eyes, and everything around me receded, except for the sound of the horses’ hooves and the cry of a bird. I was back on Mona, the druid isle, in the teaching grove. Warriors galloped towards us from the Menai Straits still covered with dirt and blood from battle.

“Do you come from my father?” cried Branwen, my friend, my foster-sister.

“Branwen, daughter of King Bran the Bold, your father and my king is still living.”

“Anu!” Branwen let out her breath. For an instant her muscles relaxed; then she braced herself.

“King Bran has been taken captive. Unless—may the gods give him strength and cunning—unless he has escaped, he is on his way to Rome.”

I forced myself to open my eyes again. I searched the field and found him, the charioteer with the broad chest and the arms like big oaks. Arms that could lift you as if you weighed nothing, a chest that smelled of the earth and its goodness, that rose and fell like a gentle sea.

“Red, what’s the matter?” asked Succula. “You’re crying.”

I just shook my head. I couldn’t speak yet.

“I…I don’t…I can’t believe,” I stopped, as if saying it might make it so. “I think, I think one of those charioteers might be my foster-father,” I finally managed, my hands shaking as I pointed. “That stupid Roman helmet makes it hard to see his face.”

“The Gaul? He’s the one I’ve got my money on. Did you say he’s your father? I thought your father was dead.”

“No. My foster-father.” I said impatiently. Then I reminded myself: Succula had never had a father at all. I could not expect a Roman street child to understand the meaning of foster kinship to my people, how such ties were as strong as blood and wove a complex web of loyalties among the tribes. “And he’s not a Gaul. He’s from the Pretannic Isles. Succula, you placed bets on him. What’s his name?”

“Sia, Sia something with a B. I’m sorry, Red. Those barbarian names are so hard to pronounce. Everyone just calls him the Big Gaul.”

“Bran?” I pressed. “Could it have been Bran?”

“I don’t think so, Red, but I’m not sure. Look, they’re in place now.”

The huge Celt was positioned second from the inside; there were seven chariots in all. If you have ever looked across a crowd, straining to see someone you thought you’d never see again in this life, you have some idea of how I felt. One minute you think, yes, it’s got to be him, and the next, no, it can’t be. For me it was even more fraught. I longed to run to the first man I had ever known, who had adopted me and treated me with as much tenderness as he did his own daughter. I also wanted desperately to be mistaken. I couldn’t bear to think of King Bran as a captive and slave.

And what if it was my fault, whatever his fate, my fault?

Why my fault, you ask? The fate of a king? It was King Bran’s capture that had prompted the druids to offer the Great Sacrifice, to send a messenger to the gods, on behalf of the combrogos. Could that sacrifice have brought Bran home unharmed? No one would ever know. Because of me. I meddled with the mysteries. I stopped the sacrifice. There. Now you know why I was exiled. I am sure you can also guess who was chosen to be the victim.

“Red, what are you doing?” Dido and Succula grabbed hold of me. “Sit down!”

“I’ve got to get a closer look,” I struggled to shake them off. “Don’t you understand?”

“Sweetie, of course we understand. You’re the one who doesn’t. You can’t go wandering around the stadium in your whore’s toga annoying people by blocking their view. Sit. We’ll find a way to see him afterwards. Trust us.”

Impulse control is not my forte, but that’s what friends are for. And they were my friends; I could feel it in the fierceness of their grip. We sat together on the edge of the stone bleacher, like any people from any time watching a race. You know how it is. Your heart races, too, flying out of your chest to light on one particular contestant. Your vision telescopes. The tension in your limbs, the bearing down of your will merge with the one you have chosen. I became one with my Celt, the roar of the crowd receding till I swear I could hear his breath and the steady pounding of his horses’ hooves. After the first circuit, he was holding third place. The other Celt and a Thracian were neck and neck in the lead. By the end of the fourth round, two chariots began to fall behind, and two began to gain on the leads. One of these was my Celt.

Now Succula and I were both on our feet, Succula shouting instructions in street Latin about what he should do with his podex (that’s right, Latin for ass) while I loosed an authentic Celtic battle cry. So authentic and so Celtic that I swear you could hear it above the trumpets and all the bellowing citizens of Rome. My Celt looked up; I was afraid I had distracted him till I realized that he had seen—or sensed—something else: three crows wheeling over the Circus, the noon day sun sending their shadows racing over the ground. For Celts, crows were not just birds; they were the Morrigan, the triple goddess of battle, slaughter, and death. Before it happened, I knew it would.

“Look out!” I screamed. “Look out!”

The next moment, one of the Thracians hurled a spear into my Celt’s wheel—a movement so swift that it could easily have been missed by most of the onlookers. The spear broke, but jammed the wheels long enough to upset the delicate balance of the speeding chariot. The Thracian had timed his move perfectly. The chariots were just rounding the sharp curve at the end of the circus. The Celt’s chariot tipped on its inside wheel. As if by pre-arranged signal, another Thracian chariot sideswiped the outer wheel, and the Celtic chariot went over, spilling its rider onto the track, the spooked horse going wild and thrashing and rearing as it dragged the wreck behind it. The Celt on the ground rolled nimbly in an acrobatic display and dodged the wheels of the oncoming chariot and somehow made it off the track to the median.

He had also managed to keep hold of his spear.

Several grooms scurried out from the stable under the circus and struggled to catch the driverless horse. Once off the racetrack, they swiftly parted him from the wreck and led him away. An eerie calm fell over the circus as the chariots raced towards the opposite end of the ellipse from where the big warrior stood, clearly waiting. I could feel him sinking his roots down into the Roman dirt, sending them across land, across water to gather strength from his own soil, his own gods.

Now the chariots rounded the far curve and began to move towards the warrior again. He remained motionless, but the three crows circled lower and lower till they were only a few feet above the his head. The chariots were nearly on him now, the Thracian just ahead of the second Celt. The crowd held its breath; all you could hear in the whole valley was the sound of hooves and wheels, the cry of the crows. I thought I saw the warrior tap his nose. An instant later the second Celt sprang from his chariot and cleared the track in an amazing series of aerial somersaults. Then the big Celt roared his war cry, a deep bellow that made every hair in the circus stand up, that would have raised the very hackles of the mother wolf of Rome. The seven hills shook with its power. If the Thracian charioteer could have turned back, I think he would have.

But it was too late. The Thracian’s horse reared; the Celt didn’t even need to cast a spear. The chariot careened out of control, and the Thracian hit the dirt. The charioteers still driving headed for the nearest exit. They knew what was coming. The crowd started pouring out of the bleachers, a human flood as dangerous as a burst dam—or a tidal bore.

“Bran!” I screamed. “Bran.”

I started to struggle, clawing and biting the huge restraining force that thwarted my will until I was sobbing with desperation and rage. The arms that held me only tightened.

“Easy, girl, easy.” I realized my captor was Bone. “That’s a full scale Roman riot down there. We stay right up here. Does everyone understand? This is the only place we don’t risk getting trampled to death. Look, the purple’s already made it out. They have a private escape route. Soldiers will be here soon to clear out the rabble. We stay put till then. Red, if you’d stop bawling, you’d see that your man is holding his own. Trained fighter by the look of him. Matter of fact, I’d say he’s enjoying himself. And as far as I can make out at least half the crowd is on his side; they’re brawling with the other half. The rest of ‘em don’t know what they’re doing. We’ve got the best view here.”

I calmed down enough to see that Bone was right. My Celt, my combrogo—yes, I felt a surge of pride—was in great form. What is more, the crows were helping him, swooping down and going for the eyes of his assailants. When the soldiers marched into the circus, most of the crowd turned tail. The charioteers, with nowhere to go, stood quietly and futilely defiant. All except for the Thracian who lay, dead or unconscious, on the ground.

“Ladies, let’s go.” Bone still had both his arms around me. “Trust me, Red, you don’t want to see this part.”

“No, Bone, no. Please. I have to know what happens to him.”

Bone swept me up in his arms and started carrying me down the steep steps as if I weighed nothing.

The Forum Boarium, where we emerged and joined the milling throngs, was the oldest part of the city and the most squalid. There were filthy children everywhere begging or stealing from market stalls. One small boy was aggressively soliciting for a whore—his mother?—who’d set up shop in a fornice. (Now you know the origin of the word fornicate—doing it standing up in an archway.) There wasn’t an alley, recess, or shadow that didn’t have some trade. Every tavern and eatery has its own whores. Bakeries sent whores into the street to sell pornographic cakes and lure customers into cells in back. Bone guided us to a relatively clean establishment off the main thoroughfare and bought us wine and meat pastries, which I felt too sick to eat. All of us were subdued.

“All right,” Bone sighed when we had finished. “Who’s up for a visit to the athletes’ pens?”

I turned to look at him, startled. He avoided eye contact, clearly embarrassed by his kindness.

“Bone,” I said before I could stop myself. “I love you.”

With the dropping of coins along with Domitia Tertia’s name, we gained entrance to the aptly named pens—horses, wild beasts, and men all quartered in the cellars of a huge imperial insularium. Our progress was greeted with whistles, catcalls, and innuendos in all the languages of the conquered. When we reached the charioteers’ quarters I returned some of the insults eloquently and in three different dialects. The Celts were thrilled to have their lineages disparaged in their own tongue—or acknowledged at all, come to that. They promptly fell to their knees before me and begged to be of service.

“Siaborthe might as well die happy,” said one of the men when we told them who we wanted to see.

“Siaborthe?” I repeated. “Die? But he was fighting so well when we left.”

“Sure, he had the battle spirit on him. The rest surrendered, but he took on the whole century with his bare fists. Ah, if any of us here were bards, his fame would be sung and his story told to all the tribes for all time.”

I’m a bard, I almost said. But I wasn’t. I was a failed first year student turned whore and slave. If any bard knew my story, he would be silent for shame.

The men showed us to a cell. My charioteer lay on his side in the straw, his hands shackled, his face turned to the wall. His breathing was shallow and labored.

“Has no one tended him?” asked Bone. “Owners usually take better care of their investments.”

“Not when the purple thinks they’re dangerous,” said one of the men.

I knelt beside the charioteer. As soon as I touched him, I could feel that he was in critical condition, bleeding on the inside.

“Is he, Red?” Succula whispered. “Is he your father?”

I shook my head, because I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t Bran, thank the gods, but it was one of my combrogos, one of my people, big and brave as Bran had been, but much younger. And he was dying, dying in pain in a Roman prison.

“Can you do anything for him?” asked one of the Gauls.

“She’s a whore not a healer,” said Bone. “I’m afraid he’s past needing her services.”

“I think you’re wrong, man. She’s one of ours. Look how she’s feeling of him, like her hands have eyes. She’s had training. She has the healer’s touch. I’ll swear it.”

He was right. I called it the fire of the stars; it started in my crown like a swarm of honey bees, burning through my body like strong drink, only sweeter and hotter, burning me clean as it went, burning in my hands, burning unbearably until I had learned what it was for. I followed the fire into the man’s body, found the places where the blood stopped and pooled instead of flowed. The fire poured from my hands—redirecting, mending, shoring up, restoring life and strength.

“What if she is, then?” someone spoke bitterly. “What’s the use of his being saved just so someone can stick a blade between his ribs or hand him a cup of poison?”

“Ssh,” said Berta. “Let her be. She must do what she can.”

“So he’s a marked man,” said Bone. “What’s he done?”

“It’s not what he’s done, it’s what they think he’ll do. Best not to speak of that, if you get my meaning.”

No one did speak after that or if they did, I didn’t hear them. I was far away inside the warrior’s heart, which grew stronger and steadier. I breathed with him slower and deeper. At last I rose. He was out of pain; he would live. But I didn’t feel eased or happy. He might have planned this chance to die in battle, and now I had ruined it.

Before we left, I described Bran to the other Gauls—for so they were; none of them came from Pretannia.

“He was before my time in the pens,” said one man; he was older than I was, older than Siaborthe, more slightly built, with a curved scar on his face. “I remember hearing about him. One of the Silures, you say?”

“King of the Silures.”

The man shrugged. “King doesn’t mean much in the pens. It’s how a man carries himself. I heard that Bran was a fierce fighter but fair. Men trusted him. Purple doesn’t care for that.”

“What does it matter to them?” I asked.

“Name Spartacus mean anything to you?”

There was an uneasy silence. All of us here were slaves, however well or badly off. All of us lived on that edge of rebellion and hopelessness.

“Was Bran killed?” Without meaning to, I lowered my voice.

“No one knows. At least I’ve never heard for certain. He just disappeared.”

“He might be alive then?”

“I’m sorry I don’t know more, lass. Your foster-father, was he?” he asked, gentleness overcoming the wariness by which he survived.

I nodded. If I spoke, I’d weep. The pity I saw in his eyes was unbearable. Worse, I knew he felt shame for me, the foster-daughter of a free King, now a Roman whore in a filmy red toga. He was ashamed, too. We were both ashamed for staying alive at all, for in some degree choosing life as a slave over an honorable death. When did the moment come and go when we could have killed ourselves but didn’t? Or did it recur again and again? Poor Siaborthe. What had I done to him?

“Come along, Red,” said Bone. “There’s nothing more for you here.”

“When he wakes up, give him bread softened in wine, if you can,” I said over my shoulder to the Celt with the curved scar as we left the pens.

Would I ever see a free Celt again?

Berta and Succula walked with their arms around me. No one spoke as we made our way out of the pens, but the silence held a charge. It was Dido who finally confronted me, stopping our party just before we went out into the noise of the streets.

“Red, I’m sorry. I can’t ignore what just happened in there. Something came into you or over you. I don’t know what. I mean that man was dying, and you brought him back to life.” She fixed me with her blackest gaze. “Who are you, Red? Why have you been hiding from us?”

I returned her look as steadily as I could. I didn’t know how to answer her questions. Or maybe I didn’t want to.

“I told you my story,” I said shortly.

“Hmm,” said Dido, narrowing her eyes. “Then I guess your story ain’t over yet.”

As we made our way through the streets, Dido’s words resounded in me. I thought I had lost my story, as I had lost my mothers, my child, my people, my gods, my love. But today some goddess had found me in a tacky Roman temple. The fire of the stars had come to me in a prison and healed a man through my hands. Lost. Found. Dido was right; the story wasn’t over. Maybe I would find my way again. Maybe, just maybe, I was on it.

“Watch your step!” Dido called.

A moment too late. Not everyone in Rome had plumbing.