The Forest House (52 page)

Julia turned her face into the pillow, sobbing, "Let me die! I have failed, let me die!"

"That's not true, my poor darling. You still have three little girls who need you. You must not weep so."

"My baby, my little boy is dead!"

"Hush, my love." Gaius tried to soothe her, looking at his father-in-law, who had come into the room behind him, in appeal. "We are not yet old, my dear. If the gods will it, we may yet have many children -"

Licinius bent down to kiss her as well. "And if you have no son, my dear child, what of that? You have been a better child to me than many sons, that I vow to you."

"You must think of our living children now," said Gaius.

Julia felt despair well up in her. "You never paid any attention to Secunda. Why should you care about the others now? You only care that I have lost your son."

"No," Gaius said very quietly, "I do not need you to give me a son. You must sleep now." He got to his feet, looking down at her. "Sleep heals many griefs, and in the morning you will feel differently."

But Julia, remembering the delicately carved features of her little boy, did not really hear.

As the slow weeks of Julia's recovery wore on, Gaius found that he was saddened more by her grief than any feelings of his own. He had been away from home when Secunda was born, and had no great attachment to her. Nor could he bring himself to grieve overmuch for one of four girls.

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Yet when he thought of the son they had lost, he could not help thinking about his son by Eilan. In Roman society, adoption of a healthy boy from another family was a traditional solution. If Julia had no male children, and after a consultation with the physician that began to seem improbable, she was less likely to object if he claimed Eilan's son. And he was fond of his daughters, although he felt no such bond as he had to his first-born boy.

But there was time and enough for that once Julia had her health again. Hoping it would at least distract her from her grief, he agreed to take Julia on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Mother Goddess near Venta, but the journey did little to help her recover her health and spirits, and when he offered to move the family back to Londinium, she did not want to go.

"It is here that our children are buried," she told him. "I will not leave them here."

Gaius privately considered this unreasonable. Despite native beliefs that the land of the Silures held the entrance to the Otherworld, it seemed to him that no earthly place could be nearer or further off than any other to the Land of the Dead, but he gave way to Julia's whim and they remained.

Towards the end of that year news came that Agricola was dead as well.

"As Tacitus is fond of saying,"wrote Licinius Corax, "
'It is a principle of human nature to hate those
whom we have injured.' But even our Divine Emperor could find little in Agricola to justify his
anger, and so our friend escaped official disfavor. Indeed, the Emperor was remarkably solicitous
throughout Agricola's illness, and though there are those who whisper that the General was taken
off by poison; for myself, I think the cause was a heart broken by witnessing Rome's dishonor. It
may be that he is well out of it, and it is we who will soon wish that we had gone on before. Be
glad that you are safely out of sight in Britannia
. . ."

In the following year Licinius retired and came to make his home with them, and so they added another wing to the Villa Severina, and the final year of Gaius's service as Procurator for supplies began. He had hoped that when he completed his term of office Senator Malleus would be able to arrange to have him appointed to a higher position, but that year brought disturbing news. The Emperor was growing ever more autocratic and suspicious. As a military leader he had been reasonably successful, but he seemed to take his successes as proof of divine favor, and was doing his best, wrote Licinius's cousin Corax, to destroy what power remained to the patrician class.

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Gaius wondered if this would be the spark that set the embers of rebellion aflame, but the next thing they heard was that Herennius Senecio and several others had been executed for treason.

Gaius understood that his career was likely to be on hold for some time. His patron Senator Malleus, while not accused, had found it prudent to retire to his estates in Campania. And so, when Gaius completed his term as Procurator, he put off the visit to Rome with which he had planned to follow it and, like his patron, decided to devote himself for a time to developing the productivity of his lands.

Now he began at last to establish a stronger friendship with his remaining daughters, but Julia remained depressed and sickly. Though they still shared a bed, it was becoming ever clearer that she was unlikely to give him a son.

By now Eilan's child would be ten years old. Even a father who was not precisely in the Emperor's favor could guarantee the child a better future than a British priestess who must hide the very fact of his existence, and surely Julia would rather raise a son of his than a stranger's child - although he could never be quite sure what Julia would feel. But after all, Gaius could assure her - and it would be the truth - that the boy had been fathered before he ever set eyes on her.

The Forest House was scarcely an afternoon's ride away. His son could be living just over the next hill, reflected Gaius, gazing southward through the trees. But he found himself oddly afraid to face Eilan again.

Did she hate Rome? Did she hate him? The girl he had loved when he was a boy was gone, transformed into the terrible priestess of Vernemeton. Sometimes it seemed to him that the woman he had married was gone too, all the playfulness that had attracted him dead with her son.

Gaius had been reasonably successful in his career, though he had hardly fulfilled his father's dreams. But it occurred to him that he had little to love. In his life he had often been lonely, but his father's discipline, or that of the army, had kept him too busy to worry about it. But as the year wore on Gaius found that though managing the estate exercised his body it left his mind free to roam, and he was haunted by dreams of his childhood.

Perhaps it was all the time he was putting in on the land that was stimulating his memories from that age when all the world was wonderful and new. He had not allowed himself to think about his mother when he was a child, but he dreamed of her now. He felt her holding him, heard her sweet lullabies and woke in tears, calling to her not to leave him alone.

But she had gone away to the Land of the Dead, and Eilan had left him for the Goddess she served, and now Julia was withdrawing from him as well. Would there ever be anyone, he wondered, who could
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simply love without trying to change him, whose love would endure?

Then Gaius would remember how he had felt when he held his son in his arms. But whenever he began planning how to find the boy, he would flinch from the possibility that when they did meet, his son would not care after all. And so he did nothing.

One day when Gaius was riding out after the wild pigs that had been rooting in his gardens he realized that he had reached the woodland above the Forest House where Eilan had given birth to their son and found himself reining his horse down the path. He knew that Eilan would not be there, but perhaps there was someone who could give him news of her. Even if she hated him, she could hardly refuse to give him news of their son.

At first he thought the place deserted. The promise of spring was blushing in the branches with their hard buds of green, but the thatched roof of the hut was ragged and weather-bleached, and the ground littered with sticks blown down in the last storm and last year's dead leaves. Then he saw a thin haze of smoke filtering up through the thatching. His pony snorted as he reined in and a man peered out at him.

"Welcome, my son," he said, "Who are you and why have you come?"

Gaius gave his name, eyeing the fellow curiously. "And who might you be?" he asked. The man was tall, with a sun-browned face and night-dark hair, dressed in a coarse goat-hair robe above an untidy straggle of beard.

Gaius wondered if he were some homeless wanderer who had taken refuge in the unused building; then he saw the crossed sticks that hung from the man's neck on a thong and realized he must be some kind of Christian, perhaps one of those hermits who were, in the last two or three years, springing up from one end of the Empire to the other. Gaius had heard of them in Egypt and Northern Africa, but it was strange to see one here. "What are you doing here?" he asked again.

"I have come to minister to God's lost ones," the hermit answered. "In the world I was known as Lycias; now I am called Father Petros. Surely God has sent you to me because you are in need. What can I do for you?"

"How do you know it was God who sent me to you?" Gaius asked, amused in spite of himself by the man's simplicity.

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"You're here, aren't you?" asked Father Petros.

He shrugged and Petros went on. "Believe me, my son, nothing happens without the knowledge of the God who set the stars in their places."

"Nothing?" Gaius said with a bitterness that surprised him. He realized that at some point during the past three years, perhaps when he heard of the death of Agricola, or perhaps while he was watching Julia's suffering, he had ceased to believe in the gods. "Then perhaps you can tell me what kind of deity would take a son, and a daughter, from a mother who loved them?"

"Is that your trouble?" Father Petros pulled the door wider. "Come in, my son. Such matters are not explained in a breath, and your poor beast looks tired."

A little guiltily, Gaius remembered how far the pony had carried him. When he had tethered the animal with a long enough lead to let it reach the dry grass, he went in.

Father Petros was setting out cups on a rough table. "What can I offer you? I have beans and turnips and even some wine; the weather is such, here, that I cannot fast as often as I did in a warmer climate. I drink nothing but water, myself, but I am permitted to offer these worldly things to such guests as come to me."

Gaius shook his head, realizing he had happened upon a philosopher. "I will try your wine," he said, "but I tell you plainly; you will never convince me your god is either all-powerful or good. For if he were all-powerful, why can he not prevent suffering? And if he can and does not, why should men worship him?"

"Ah," said Father Petros, "I can tell by that question that you have been trained in the Stoic philosophy; for the words are theirs. But the philosophers are wrong about the nature of God."

"And you, of course, are right?" Gaius's tone was belligerent.

Father Petros shook his head. "I am only a poor minister to such children as seek my counsel. The only Son of God was crucified and returned from the dead to save us; that is all I need to know. Those who
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believe in Him will live eternally in glory."

It was the usual childish oriental legend, Gaius thought, remembering what he had heard about the cult in Rome. He supposed he could see why the story appealed to slaves and even a few women of good family. Suddenly it occurred to him that this fellow's ramblings might interest Julia, or at least give her something to think about. He set down his cup.

"I thank you for your wine, Father, and for your story," he said. "May my wife call upon you? She is devastated with grief for our daughter."

"She will be welcome whenever she comes," Father Petros replied graciously. "I am only sorry I have not convinced you. I haven't, have I?"

"I'm afraid not." Gaius was a little disarmed by the man's regret.

"I am not much of a preacher," said Father Petros, looking somewhat crestfallen. "I wish Father Joseph were here; I am sure he could convince you."

Gaius thought it highly unlikely, but he smiled politely. As he turned to go, there was a knock at the door.

"Ah, Senara? Do come in," the hermit said.

"I see you have someone with you," a girl's voice replied. "I'll come another time, if I may."

"It's all right, I'm just leaving." Gaius pushed aside the flap of leather that covered the door. Before him was one of the prettiest young girls he had seen at least since his first sight of Eilan, so long ago. But of course he too had been very young then. She was about fifteen, he thought, with hair the color of copper filings in a blacksmith's fire and eyes very blue, dressed in an undyed linen gown.

Then he looked at her again and realized where he had seen her before. Despite the Celtic coloring, there was a distinct look of his father's old secretary Valerius in the line of her nose and jaw. That would
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explain her knowledge of Latin.

It was not until he was untying his horse that he realized he could have asked - what was it the hermit had called her, Senara? -how he might arrange a meeting with Eilan. But by that time the doorflap had closed behind her, and one of the few things he knew about women — not that he knew that much, and since his marriage he felt he knew even less — was that it was never wise to ask one woman about another.

It was well past sunset by the time Gaius reached the villa, but Julia's greeting, if subdued, was friendly.

Licinius was already awaiting them in the dining room.

Macellia and Tertia were playing with a toy chariot on the veranda; they had dressed Julia's pet monkey in baby clothes, and were trying to stuff it into the chariot. He rescued the little animal and handed it to Julia. Sometimes he wondered how three small girls and one woman, with only seven servants, could make so much chaos in one house.

The little girls screamed, "Papa! Papa!" and Quartilla came running to join them. Gaius hugged them all round, called for Lydia to take charge of them, then went into the dining room with Julia.

She still had the monkey on her shoulder; it was about the size of a baby, and for some reason, seeing it dressed in baby clothes annoyed him. He couldn't imagine what Julia wanted with the creature; it was a hot-weather animal and had to be cosseted as if it really were a child. Of all places to keep such a pet, Britain was certainly the worst; even in summer, he supposed, it was too cold for the little animal. "I wish you'd get rid of that wretched beast," he snapped irritably as they sat down to the meal.