Lady of the Light Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - The Province of Germania Superior 105 CE, the Kalends of Aprilis

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 - Rome Seven days before the Kalends of Junius, 105 CE

  Chapter 13 - Four days after the Kalends of Junius

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17 - The Fortress of Mogontiacum

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23 - The Ides of November

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25 - Dacia Three days before the Nones of December

  Chapter 26 - The Fortress of Mogontiacum The Nones of December

  Chapter 27 - Germania Libera, The West Forest Early Spring

  Chapter 28 - The month of Maius

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32 - After the passage of thirty days

  Critical Acclaim for THE LIGHT BEARER

  “Gillespie’s grasp of the daily social, religious, and political lives of Germanic tribes and urban Romans alike, and her understanding of the way human deeds are woven by time into myth, keep The Light Bearer rooted in historical plausibility . . . keeps the reader engaged . . . The Light Bearer taps into one of the most popular themes in historical fiction today, the unsung woman who takes a hand in the shaping of history.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “Much has been written of the cold-blooded shenanigans of the Roman way of life, but Gillespie weaves her tale in a way that brings new color and excitement to the era . . . [She] gives crisp and detailed descriptions of the fighting methods of the well-trained Roman legions . . . As powerful as Gillespie’s action writing can be, she shows a deft and almost musical quality in more passionate interludes . . . Throughout this monumental story, Gillespie constantly increases the excitement and intrigue. There are no flat passages in The Light Bearer, only a fast-flowing stream that erupts into a full-scale torrent in the book’s conclusion.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Gillespie immersed herself in the lore and legends of the Roman way of life and emerged with The Light Bearer . . . sure to entertain readers in a manner they will not soon forget.”—Orlando Sentinel

  “An intriguing recording of everyday detail, national issues, and more impressively, overarching influences of religion and psychology.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Gillespie spent eleven years bringing this magnificent book to completion . . . replete with excitement . . . Gillespie’s love of the written word is evident.”

  —Marina Times

  “A time-capsule journey into a world of richly embroidered adventure . . . Richly flavored with historical references, the plot, action, and painstakingly developed characterizations make it a treasure—even for those who don’t put historical tomes high on their reading list[s]. Gillespie’s greatest gift is the way she crafts descriptive passages—phrases never sit static on the pages. These words are fluid grace points that translate instantly into living, active images in the reader’s imagination.”—Northwest Florida Daily News

  “Auriane is a true heroine, a woman who stands out from the crowd and who makes a journey of growth and discovery. Her innocence and deep faith make her trials more poignant, her choices more stark . . . The Light Bearer weaves a strong picture of life in the first centuries . . . There are plenty of details that give a feel for the coarse and glorious realities of the ancient Roman world . . . This is epic historical fiction, centering on one larger-than-life woman.”

  —All About Romance

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Donna Gillespie.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / November 2006

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gillespie, Donna.

  Lady of the light / Donna Gillespie.—Berkley trade pbk.ed.

  p. cm

  eISBN : 978-0-425-21268-4

  1. Germany—History—To 843—Fiction. 2. Rome—History—Nero, 54-68—Fiction.

  3. Women soldiers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.I37915L33 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2006048443

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to give a heartfelt thanks to dear friends who sustained me while I was working on this book—Phyllis Holliday, Julie Whelly, Susan Winslow, Lynn Allen, John Mouw, Eileen Malone, and Janell Moon.

  And I owe so much to the insightful comments and suggestions of the members of my writing group as they read through many drafts—Victoria Micu, Karen Caronna, Gene Corning, Ed Gordon, Cliff Young, Leslie Chalmers, Peter Garabedian, Lorrie Blake, and Susan Edmiston. (And to Bart, the writing group’s dog. He knows what he did.)

  I also want to warmly thank Manfred Ohl, for revitalizing a languishing Muse and convincing me to turn The Light Bearer into a trilogy. Here it is at last, Book Two. Just one more to go. Thanks to you.

  And I’m profoundly indebted to my editor, Susan Allison, for believing in this book, and to my agent Robert Stricker, for all his efforts to bring this book into the world.

  And many, many thanks to two creative and generous Web designers: Barbara Ling and
Judy Wilson.

  And, as ever, with boundless gratitude to my writing teacher, Leonard Bishop, who first sold me on the crazy idea that I could write a novel.

  The Roman Province of Germania Superior 104 CE A Letter to the Emperor

  To the August and Beneficent Trajan, Emperor of the Romans, noblest of princes, conqueror of Dacia and, for the fifth time, Consul, into whose divine hands the immortal gods have put our nation,

  From your devoted servant Valerius Maximus, Governor at the Fortress of Mogontiacum, Germania Superior,

  I am troubled to report that the martial ardor of the Chattian tribe, lately humbled in war, is in these days being rekindled. Though reduced to direst penury, the tribe has amassed a formidable hoard of longswords, said to be secreted into a cave in the West Forest sector of their lands. I am reminded that the historians of war have cautioned us that the barbarian’s memory is short when it comes to recalling defeats by Roman might.

  To learn who is supplying these longswords I ordered the seizure of ten natives of the region, taking care that the interrogators questioned them separately. One died under the questioning and gave us nothing, but nine gave us matching tales.

  There is a benefactor of the Chattian tribe, likely a person of tribal birth who dwells on imperial lands. That none gave us his name even under expert interrogation proves to me they do not know it. This source sends silver coin of an older type, minted in the reign of Nero, before the devaluation, into the hands of hostile Chattian chieftains, who then purchase swords of native Ubian manufacture. The insolent disregard these German savages show of your wise law forbidding them to possess weapons of iron is exceeded only by their cunning, for the swords are transported beyond our imperial border in sacred carts dedicated to their Grain Goddess, which natural piety would render anyone reluctant to search. As all confirm the coin makes but a short day’s journey on the rivers, it is likely the malefactor we seek flourishes in the very environs of my own Fortress, not far from the confluence of the rivers Rhenus and Mosella.

  His name remains an urgent mystery.

  I have commanded the search of all wine-merchants’ vessels, for this is the means by which this coin-for-arms is ferried north. And I have let it be popularly known in the province that a sum of one million sesterces will be awarded any freeborn Roman citizen who gives us intelligence that enables us to find and seize this unknown benefactor of the Chattian tribe. That same sum and the citizenship will be given should the person be of native birth; five hundred thousand and his freedom, should the informant be a slave. I pray you think fit to give me your opinion on these actions, as I would have every deed of mine receive the sanction of your divine authority.

  On this day we prepare to celebrate the anniversary of your Ascension, through which you did preserve the Empire and the whole of the human race.

  Chapter 1

  The Province of Germania Superior 105 CE, the Kalends of Aprilis

  This was the borderland between worlds. Darkness ebbed up the ravines, and the river Mosella softly sought the wide Rhenus, as it had for aeons. The Mosella held fast to the last light of day, which transformed its sinuous length into a silvered mirror, fathomless as the sky. Flocks of elegant swan-attendants lifted off it like a mist, veiling this serpentine crack between the worlds. The Mosella was loved by those who lived off her, for the river’s spirits were said to be generous and mild. As merchant vessels began to light their lamps, a constellation of ruddy stars formed on the river. Along much of the Mosella’s serene length, stately villas were mirrored in its stillness, and Roman towns stood as stern guardians of the banks. But in this place was but a towpath edged with meadowsweet grasses, a yew grove, a dusky sky. A day’s journey north would take a traveller to the Limes, or limits of Empire—the imperial frontier—where an intermittent wall of Roman forts formed a breakwater preserving the still, deep waters of civilization. Beyond that lay world’s end, home of the Chattian tribe, a place of no roads, where ancestors’ names were not written but sung.

  A Chattian woman rode a lean black mare at a steady canter along the beaten towpath that followed the Mosella. She carried a short ashwood spear, the common weapon of her tribe. Medallions of Minerva glinted on her horse’s harness—the emblem of the vast Roman estate over which she was mistress. The hood of her cloak had been whipped off by the wind, revealing hair of dark bronze gathered into a single heavy braid at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were steady and gray; in them, the passion of a holy woman mingled with the calm authority of a war-leader, and the sorrows of more than one life. A historian chronicling her life in peace and in war might have filled ten bookrolls. A revered Chattian seeress had foretold she was to be “a thorn in the paw of the Great Wolf ”—her people’s name for Rome. A Roman nobleman once said of her, “Witness the humor of Providence, imprisoning the soul of a philosopher in a native woman of the northern wastes.” A master trainer at a gladiatorial school in Rome had proclaimed of her skill with a sword, “If a cat had human genius it would fight as she fights.” An emperor once complained he’d seen twenty-year army veterans with fewer scars. She was called Aurinia by the Romans, Daughter of the Ash by the native hosts she once led in battle, and in her birth village, Auriane.

  Close behind her rode her half-grown daughter Avenahar, clad in a short cape fashioned of the skin of a hart she’d hunted herself. Avenahar’s gently rounded face was a close copy of her mother’s, but fallen under a shadow: Her black-brown eyes, when roused to wrath, turned to hot puddled ink. Her hair, smoothed back into a single, disheveled braid, was the glossy black of wood burnt to a sheen; against it, her brow was pale as the river swans. Auriane’s first daughter was a righter of wrongs, a seeker after injustices who often found them. The face she showed the world was brash and unafraid, but as she rode she moved in time with her mother, as a dancer follows music. On this eve, Avenahar was as exhilarated as a maid at a first midsummer festival—never before had her mother taken her on these mysterious night journeys to the shrine.

  Both were born in the deep forest; both lived now in a sumptuous riverside villa—the richest and most majestic in all the Roman province of Germania Superior. They were half a family—the native half; at home was Auriane’s younger daughter, Arria Juliana, her Roman child, born of her union with the aristocratic Marcus Arrius Julianus, the celebrated statesman who had served as advisor to four Emperors, and planned the assassination of one.

  Auriane halted her mare at a way mark of heaped river stones. She was still as a listening elk, straining every sense to determine that no one was about. Were she discovered, this time, there were two lives to be lost—one more treasured than her own.

  Nothing but windy silence.

  She tied a strip of blue cloth round a low branch of an alder, a signal readily visible to an alert rower on the river. Then she guided her mount onto a nearly overgrown path leading into an old stand of yew trees. There before them loomed a modest marble monument, startling and wan, as though some ghost materialized in their path. Its peaked temple-roof framed three women modeled in high relief, seated in a stately row. This was a shrine dedicated to the Mothers, benign ancestral spirits beloved of all the tribes of Germania. On the offering stone before the lonely monument’s base were scattered traces of barley, butter, and cheese. Each Mother cradled a loaf of bread. They looked out on the world with profound patience, their mild countenances opening the mind to dreams of a paradise of bounty and increase under a regal mother’s gentle rule. They were women and gods.

  Auriane dropped from her mount and placed her spear before the shrine, feeling coated in the warmth shed from the amiable trio of mothers, drawn up into a life larger than her own. The blood that coursed through the Mothers, once mortals with milk-giving breasts, now flowed through her and into her daughter Avenahar. She placed a tied bundle of vervain on the offering stone, and lit it.

  The flame perished at once, as if the wind formed a fist and stamped it out.

  “The Mothers don’t want us
here,” Avenahar said, more effervescent curiosity in her voice than true concern.

  “Nor do our enemies,” Auriane said, smiling. “Shall we heed their gods or ours?” Ignoring a sudden prickly sense of disquiet, Auriane began unbuckling the strap that secured two great leather sacks slung across her horse’s withers. “Avenahar,” she said, holding fast to her daughter’s gaze. “I hope you’ve grown steady enough to hear what I’m about to tell you. You’ll be a woman soon and you’ll be making your own offerings at our shrines. It’s time—” One ponderous sack unexpectedly slipped free of Auriane’s grip; its mouth gaped open as it struck the ground. Avenahar saw its contents—dully gleaming silver coins.

  The blank startlement in Avenahar’s face sharpened gradually into understanding. Her eyes became effulgent with awe. She might have stepped through a portal into some magic mountain full of light.

  “By all the nether gods,” Avenahar whispered. “You are the one—”

  “Yes,” Auriane said, “I fear it’s so.”

  “—the one everyone’s been hunting,” Avenahar said. “. . . You—my own mother.” Avenahar began to shiver, overfull with a foaming brew of feeling that was one part alarm, nine parts wild joy tamped down.

  “I’m surprised it surprises you so,” Auriane said with a try at nonchalance. She let the second cumbersome pouch slide to the earth.

  “Well, it doesn’t, really. But . . . I thought you’d pulled a silk curtain over the horrors committed against our people . . .” Distress overtook Avenahar’s face; she feared she’d gravely misstepped. “I mean, I’d always thought it wasn’t like you to sit by and do nothing, and . . . I’m gladdened to see I was right! But are you not greatly afraid? The charge against you is the worst they’ve got, ‘enemy of the state . . . ’”