Part 30 (2/2)

I pulled my veil down to hide my features. ”I understand.”

The house of Lena's parents was in a quiet street near the outskirts of Treveri, lined by well-kept houses, though the area where we stood had not been swept recently, and there was a chip in the plaster of the wall near the door. It seemed a long time before our knocking was answered, and the door was opened by a girl with her hair tied up in a rag as if she had been cleaning.

Cunoarda and I traded looks. We had been admitted by a doorkeeper when we were here before. But from somewhere deeper in the house I could hear the happy laughter of a child.

”Is your master or your mistress at home?”

”Caecilia Justa is lying down. She has been ill.”

”Or the Lady Helena-is she here?”

The girl looked at us with sudden suspicion, and then, evidently deciding that Cunoarda had an honest face, nodded. ”She is in the atrium, with the child.”

As we pa.s.sed through the hallway I glimpsed the altar to the ancestrallares with an oil lamp burning before it, and realized that like many in the old aristocracy, the family held to the traditional religion.

Though they had clearly fallen on hard times, the household was trying to maintain decent standards. The worn flagstones that paved the atrium were clean, the flowers in the earthenware pots had been watered and pruned.

On the other side of the fountain a small girl was playing, her fair hair flas.h.i.+ng from gold to ash as she skipped in and out of the sunlight. By now she must be almost four years old. This, I thought, was a true child of Constantius's line. What would her future be when Fausta's black-browed offspring came to power?

I wanted to scoop her into my arms, but I remained hidden behind my veil. ”I am dead, I told myself,I have no right to her now .

As we entered, the woman who had been watching her turned on her bench to greet us. Crispus's wife was even thinner than she had been when I saw her before, but she was still beautiful. Her shadowed gaze fixed on Cunoarda.

”I remember you. You came here with the Empress.”

Cunoarda nodded uncomfortably. ”My mistress charged me to fulfil certain commissions she did not wish recorded publically in her will. I have brought you a draft for a banker here in Treveri to provide for the little girl.”

Lena's eyes rilled with tears. ”Blessed be her memory! I am sorry now that I did not reply to her last letter, but I was afraid. Crispus is avenged, but that woman won. Everyone knows that we are in disgrace, and we have been ostracized. My father died last autumn, and we have had to learn to sc.r.a.pe by.”

”Then I am glad to bring you the Empress's legacy,” said Cunoarda. We sat down on the other bench, and the maidservant brought a tray of preserved fruit and a pitcher of barley-water, very welcome on so warm a day. Though Lena might be thin, she no longer seemed so fragile, as if adversity had brought out a strength she had never needed before.

”I wish money was my only concern,” said Lena. ”With my father dead, my mother is under the authority of my uncle. He is willing to take her in, but Crispa and I are a liability which even a legacy cannot negate. I fear it will only make me more attractive to one of the farmers to whom he has offered me... I no longer care what happens to me,” she added bitterly, ”but what about my little girl, when her only choices are safety as a farmer's drudge or death if she tries to claim her heritage in Rome?”

I could bear it no longer. Cunoarda gasped as I leaned forwards, throwing back my veil. ”She has another heritage...”

Lena's eyes grew huge, and for a moment I thought she would faint.

”But you died in Rome...”

”I died to Rome,” I corrected. ”By revealing myself now I place my life in your hands. Listen to me, Lena-you and Crispa are all that is left to me of my grandson, who was the beloved of my heart. I am going where even the Emperor will not follow. Do you have the courage to come with me?”

I could feel Cunoarda radiating disapproval at my side. She had never really believed we could escape together, and no doubt counted our chances even smaller burdened with this fragile woman and a child.

A flush of colour suffused Lena's cheeks and then drained away, leaving her even paler than before. ”I always wondered,” she whispered, ”why Crispus wanted to marry me. He was so glorious and brave, and I was always afraid. But I see that the time has come to prove myself worthy. We will go with you, my lady, whether it be to the Hesperides or Hades!”

”It is to the Hesperides that we shall travel, my dear,” I said softly, ”to the apple isle of Avalon...'

Crispa, sensing her mother's emotion, came skipping over to stand at Lena's knee, her gaze straying from our faces to the candied figs on the table and back again.

”Crispa,” I said softly. ”Do you remember me?”

She frowned a little, and then for a moment I saw an ancient soul looking out of her blue eyes.

”You are my mother,” she lisped. Lena and Cunoarda exchanged worried glances, but I reached out to take the small warm hand.

”Yes, perhaps I was, but in this life I am your otheravia , little one,” I said softly. ”Would you like to take a journey with me?”

By the time we arrived at Ganuenta, there were new silver threads in Cunoarda's red hair. But if the Emperor's agents were watching us, they had orders not to interfere. When we reached the Rhenus at Mogontiac.u.m we sold the horse and carriage and took pa.s.sage on a barge carrying timber. It was a pleasant way to travel, and the drama of the gorge just north of the town moved even Cunoarda to wonder. The greatest danger was that Crispa, who clambered all over the barge with the agility of a monkey, would fall overboard.

The Rhenus carried us swiftly past the outposts Rome had built to guard the border. As we drifted by Colonia I gazed at the wall where Constantius had told me we must part, and realized that the old wound to my heart had finally healed. These days I had only to close my eyes to call up his image, and relive the times of our happiness.

Sometimes, when I sat thus, I would hear Lena whispering to her daughter to be quiet, for old people sleep often and should not be disturbed. But these days it was not sleep that claimed me, but the waking dream called memory. Crispus cuddled, warm and golden, in my arms, as real as the little daughter I saw when I opened my eyes. When I lay in my bunk on the barge, Constantius stretched out beside me, telling me what he had been doing during our years apart. Even Constantine came to me at times in the shape of the boy he had been before he became infected with that disease called Empire. And as our journey continued, I was visited more and more often by the folk of Avalon.

Very quickly I learned not to mention these ghostly encounters. At worst, my companions thought my mind was wandering, and at best it made them uncomfortable. Fortunately Lena had improved in health and strength with every mile away from Treveri, and she and Cunoarda had forged an alliance. Anyone who resisted Cunoarda's blunt competence could usually be impressed by Lena's aristocratic manner, and I found that I could leave the ordering of our journey in their hands.

Why had no one ever told me that old age held gifts as well as pains? As a child, I had wondered why the old priestesses looked so content as they dozed in the sun. They knew, I thought, smiling. And sometimes, as I hovered on the threshold between sleep and lucid dreaming, I seemed to glimpse people and scenes that I recognized from some other lifetime. Little Crispa was the only one I could talk to when these far-memories lay heavy upon me, for the very young have just come in over the threshold which the old are about to cross, and at times she remembered the life we had shared before.

Then the moment would pa.s.s, and she would be darting away, Leviyah panting at her heels, to hang over the rail and watch the green waters rush by, and I would be abandoned, though not alone.

In Ganuenta I had hoped to visit Nehalennia's shrine, but they said that a flood some years back had damaged it, and the ground was unsafe now that the river's course had changed. My first thought was to endow a new temple. After contributing to so many Christian churches, surely that was the least I could do for the G.o.ddess who had guided me for so long. But such an act might have aroused unwelcome questions, and the funds that remained to me were needed to support the two women whom I now spoke of as my daughters, and the child.

If Nehalennia was being forgotten, I alone could not restore her wors.h.i.+p. I reminded myself that the G.o.ddess is ever constant and ever changing. When in the slow cycle of years men realized their need for her once more, surely Nehalennia would return. But that night I wept in the darkness, grieving for something lovely and precious that had gone out of the world.

We came to Britannia in the season of harvest, when the air was scented with curing hay and the songs of the reapers rang across the fields of nodding grain. The crossing had been a rough one, and even I found the jolting of a carriage a relief after being tossed about for three days at sea.

”Britannia seems small,” said Cunoarda, looking out at the gentle alternations of wood and field beyond the rounded shoulders of the downs.

”I suppose it is, considering how far we have come. No doubt Londinium will seem little, compared to Rome. But I know the scent of that hay, and the way the power flows through the land.”

”This is still a very different country from my home,” she said with a sigh. ”I was taken in a raid by a rival clan when I was not much older than little Crispa. I have memories of slopes purple with heather, and the baaing of the sheep as they came down from the hills. But I cannot see my mother's face. I think perhaps she died when I was small.”

”Then I shall be your mother, Cunoarda-”

”Oh, but that was only a part of our disguise, while we are on the road-” She flushed to the roots of her hair. ”You are-”

I laid a finger to her lips. ”I am only Eilan, now, and I have reason to know that the children of one's body are not always the children of one's heart.” Gazing at that familiar strong-boned face, I was amazed that through all those years when I had thought myself dest.i.tute of love, I had not noticed the treasure that lay beneath my hand.

”I never imagined... I never dared...” She shook her head, sniffing and wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

”Oh my lady-my mother! You gave me my freedom, but I was still empty. Now you have given me a soul!”

I opened my arms then and held her until her sobs had ceased.

In my will, I had bequeathed the house in Londinium to Cunoarda, and she had written from Treveri to tell the tenant she was coming there to live. When we arrived, the place was empty-indeed, it was practically without furnis.h.i.+ngs, and Cunoarda and Lena spent a busy day in the market-place purchasing bedding and kitchen gear.

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