But Artorius’s practices were increasingly laced with a primitive darkness.
Regina knew the old beliefs, spouted by Myrddin and others. To take the head of your enemy was to possess his soul, so when these Saxon heads were mounted on stakes around the walls of the hill fort their souls would keep out danger. Regina wasn’t sure how much of this Artorius believed, but she could see how he used its symbolism, working on both friend and foe, to cement his victories.
Regina lived with barbarians, and was the mistress of a warlord. But she could live with that until, as she always promised herself, things got back to normal, and the Emperor returned with his legions to sweep out the Saxon marauders, dissolve the petty native kingdoms — including Artorius’s — and restore Roman dignity and order, so that this brief and bloody interval would come to seem no more than a bad dream.
Now here came the riothamus himself, at the head of his army.
At the gate, Artorius embraced Regina. He was hot, his armour scuffed, and she could smell the stink of his horse. “We have won great victories, my Morrigan. Everywhere the Saxons lie slain, or they run away at the sound of our trumpets. They are falling back to their fastnesses in the east, but perhaps next season—”
“Your deeds will live on for a thousand years, riothamus.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You sound like Myrddin. However I hear a ‘but’ in your voice …”
“But your collection of severed heads would have appalled Vespasian.”
His face clouded. “The Caesars aren’t here. They abandoned us to the Saxons. I do what I have to do. In fact—” Artorius turned speculatively, looking east, the direction of Europe and the rump of the Empire. “Perhaps, in fact, now that we are strong, we should be planning what to do about the Caesars and their betrayal of Britain.”
She studied his face, alarmed, uncertain; she had never heard him talk of such plans before. But he was lost in his proliferating thoughts of future battlefields.
One of his lieutenants came to him. “We are ready for the show, riothamus.”
The “show” was the execution of the Saxon chieftain. It was a triple murder, a sacrifice to the ancient Celtae veneration of the number three.
Artorius himself raised his axe, and slammed its blade into the back of the Saxon’s head. But the man was not killed, and Artorius gave his limp form to his soldiers. Next a cord was tied around the Saxon’s neck and tightened, by the twisting of a piece of wood, until the bones snapped. And finally, and most ignominiously, his face was pushed into a vat of water, so that he drowned. Regina couldn’t tell how long the Saxon stayed alive, for the crowd of soldiers around him bayed and yelled.
Artorius grinned at Regina. “I wonder what your Caesars would have made of this…”
Chapter 21
A week after her encounter with the mother-grandmother, Rosa sent Lucia out for a study day in a library in the Centro Storico area — not far from the Pantheon, in fact. Pina accompanied her.
The two of them had finished their day’s work by three. They decided to take a walk toward the Tiber, and perhaps make for the gardens of the Villa Borghese, across the river. They set off along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, heading west. It was a bright December afternoon, and they were walking into the sun.
The Centro Storico was the medieval heart of the city. It was enclosed by a great eastward bend of the Tiber. Rome’s ancient core had always been the seven hills, where the great forums and palaces had been built. But after the collapse of the Empire, the ancient aqueducts had broken down, and the dwindling population of Rome had gravitated toward the river, seeking drinking water. The ruins in the area had provided building materials for houses, churches, and papal complexes. Later, as Renaissance families competed for power and prestige, the area had become cluttered with grandiose monuments, and it grew into a center for craft guilds, filled with botteghe, workshops. To some extent that was still true, Lucia saw as they walked down the Via dei Cestari, filled with shops selling clothes and equipment for the Catholic priesthood.
In the low, dazzling light, the streets swarmed with cars and the pavement was crowded with chattering schoolchildren, slow-strolling tourists, and office workers yelling into their cell phones. The crowd was purposeful, agitated, and continually noisy, and Lucia felt out of place.
“You aren’t saying much.” Pina walked beside her, bag swinging at her shoulder, phone in her hand, sunglasses on her nose.
“I’m sorry. It’s just all these people. It’s the way they talk. Everybody is so intense — see the way their muscles are rigid — as if they are on the point of shouting the whole time. But what is it they are shouting about?”
Pina laughed. “You know, we’re spoiled in the Crypt. We emerge as helpless as nuns evicted from their convents.”
“I don’t know.” Lucia pointed to a group of three nuns in simple pale gray vestments. Chatting brightly in a small pavement cafй, they all wore sunglasses and expensive-looking trainers, their cell phones set among the cappuccinos before them. One wore a baseball cap over her wimple. Rome always seemed full of nuns, here to visit the Vatican, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the pope, El Papa. “ They seem all right.”
Pina linked her arm through Lucia’s. “Come on. When we get to the Villa Borghese I’ll buy you an ice cream.”
Lucia remained unhappy. As usual when out of the Crypt, she longed for its calm and order, where every direction she looked she would see a face like her own. But she knew that even back in the Crypt, even in her dormitory, she would have trouble finding peace. She was layered with secrets now — the painful mystery of her menstruation, Rosa’s peculiar pursuit of her with her hints of an assignment to come — secrets, huge painful bewildering secrets, in a place where you weren’t supposed to hold any secrets from those around you, not even the smallest.
Still, she was relieved when they reached the river, and the crowd thinned a little.
They crossed over the Vittorio Emanuele bridge and walked northeast, following the great curve of the Tiber. There were houseboats moored to the banks; Lucia saw people sunbathing, laid out over the boats’ decks like drying fish.
The Villa Borghese was in an area where wealthy Romans had built their country estates since imperial times. It had been saved from the twentieth-century property developers when the state had bought it, and preserved it as a park. Lucia had always liked these gardens, with their winding paths and half- hidden flower beds; she and her sisters had been brought here when they were small. It was best to avoid the weekends, when the population of Rome moved in here en masse, overwhelming the place with yelling children, chatting mothers, fathers with radios clamped to their ears for soccer scores. Today, though there were plenty of children, brought here by their mothers after school, their shouting seemed remote and scattered.
Lucia and Pina found their way down to a little circular lake, bounded by a path. On the edge of the water stood a small temple, dedicated to the Greek god Aesculapius. They sat on a wooden bench that had seen better days. People were rowing on the lake, sending shimmering bow waves across the dense green water and disturbing the reflection of the god’s statue. It was always a calming place, Lucia thought; she had been disappointed to find that the temple was only a reproduction. Pina fulfilled her promise by buying an ice cream cone from a cart — not very reputable looking, but drawn by a patient horse, irresistible in his battered straw hat.