Avalon - Priestess Of Avalon Part 23

The prophecies of Avalon had foretold a child who would change the world, and with every year it became clearer that Constantine was the one foretold. My rebellion had been vindicated. I wondered why I still felt that flicker of unease even as I rejoiced in my son's victory.

The spring that followed was one of the most beautiful I could remember, as if the entire world were celebrating Constantine's victory. A goodly mixture of sun and rainfall brought out the flowers and the winter wheat produced an abundant harvest.

I was in the garden, talking with the man who took care of the roses, when Vitellia came running out of the palace, clutching a scroll, her cheeks streaked with tears.

"What is it?" I cried, but as she drew closer I could see that her eyes were shining with joy.

"He has made us safe!" she exclaimed. "Your son, blessed by G.o.d, has preserved us!"

"What are you talking about?" I took the piece of papyrus from her hand.

"This comes from Mediolanum-the Emperors have made a policy regarding religion-"

I pulled open the scroll, scanning the words that referred to the earlier edict of toleration of Galerius and adding to it: "...to no one whomsoever should we deny liberty to follow either the religion of the Christians or any other cult which of his own free choice he has thought to be best adapted for himself, in order that the supreme Divinity, to whose service we render our free obedience, may bestow upon us in all things his wonted favour and benevolence ."

The paragraphs that followed restored to Christians the property and freedoms that had been taken in the persecutions, stipulating that all cults should have an equally free and unhindered liberty of religion.

No wonder Vitellia was weeping, I thought then. The shadow that had hung over her and her church was lifted, and the Christians might now emerge to stand beside the followers of the traditional religions in the blessed light of a new day.

I had not seen such recognition of a Truth that lay beyond cult or creed in all my years among the Romans, whose G.o.ds seemed to vie for the favour of their worshippers like magistrates at the elections, or the philosophers, who denounced other schools as errors, or among the Christians, who simply stated that all other religions were wrong.

This recognition of a Power in whose light all faiths might stand as equals reminded me of the teachings I had learned as a child on Avalon, and at the thought, I found my own eyes filling with grateful tears.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

AD 316.

To sit on the sh.o.r.e at Baiae was like being in the heart of the sun. Light reflected with blinding intensity from the white sand that bordered a bay whose waters glittered a clear azure only a shade darker than the blue of the sky. To a child of the north, this light was overwhelming, banishing every darkness not only of the body but of the soul. As I lay upon the couch on the terrace, set between the sea and the freshwater bathing pool, I could feel the heat baking out the agues that a winter in Rome had set in my bones.

It seemed to me that the anxieties of the past few years were dissipating as well. There were still those who challenged my son's authority, but he had proven himself a brilliant general, and I no longer doubted that one day he would rule supreme in the Empire.

For several years the imperial household had been settled in Rome. But the great city, which was plagued by a raw chill in the wintertime, was just as bad in the summer, when a damp, sticky heat blanketed the seven hills. Fausta, who was now in the last moon of her first pregnancy, had complained that the heat was stifling her, and so I had brought the imperial household here, to the palace the Emperor Severus had built beside the Bay of Puteoli in the gulf of Neapolis fifty years before.

Fausta lay on a couch beside me, with two slaves to fan her and a sunshade to protect her fair skin. But I had only a hat to shade my eyes. To me, the heat everywhere in Italia was equally intense, but on the coast the air had a purity that invigorated even as it overpowered, and so I spent most of my time in the sun, listening to the sigh of the glittering wavelets on the sh.o.r.e.

An occasional shout of laughter came to me from the bathing pool, where Crispus was playing with the sons of n.o.ble Roman families who had come along to bear him company. If I turned I could see the flash of their smooth young bodies, gilded by the sun. Crispus was fourteen now, big-boned as his father, with a voice that was, most of the time, that of a man. By the time my son turned fifteen he had already been at the court of Diocletian for two years. Every year that Crispus remained with me was a blessing, as if the years during which Constantine had been lost to me were being restored.

Of Constantine himself I saw little. The defeat of Maxentius had made him undisputed master of the West. Licinius was now his brother-in-law, but the pact the two emperors had made did not last long.

Within two years they began a series of conflicts that was to continue for a decade. Still, my son now felt secure enough to take Fausta to his bed, and at the age of twenty-three she had become pregnant at last.

She swore it would make no difference to her affection for Crispus, and indeed, she had adopted him as her own child as well as Constantine's. Still, I could not help but wonder if her att.i.tude might change when she had a child of her own.

The noise from the pool crescendoed as the children began to climb out, glistening in the strong sun.

Boreas and Favonia, who lay sleeping in the shade of my couch, lifted their heads to watch, feathered tails beating gently against the flagstones. Slaves hurried forwards with towels to dry the boys, while others brought out trays of fruit and little pastries and pitchers of mint-water chilled with ice brought all the way from the Alpes and stored in a deep cellar, wrapped in straw. Brasilia would have snorted at such extravagance, but she had died the year after Constantine's great victory. I missed her plain cooking, surrounded as I was by all this luxury.

Still laughing, Crispus led the others to the terrace and I sat up, smiling as the dogs fawned at his feet. As he grew, he was coming to resemble his grandfather Constantius more and more, save that where my beloved had been so fair of skin he burned at the slightest touch of the sun, Crispus had inherited his mother's complexion, and the sunshine that bleached his hair only turned his skin a deeper gold. Save for the towel slung over one shoulder, he was as naked as a Greek statue, trained muscles rippling, as beautiful as a young G.o.d.But he is only a boy -I told myself, surrept.i.tiously flexing my fingers in a sign against ill-luck, irrationally afraid that one of those deities might hear my thought and resent it.

I have been among the Romans too long, I told myself then, for the G.o.ds of my own people were not so p.r.o.ne either to l.u.s.t for mortals or to jealousy. Nonetheless, Crispus was approaching that age which in these southern lands was held to be the apogee of splendour. Fausta was watching him with an appreciation as great as my own, and I found myself suppressing a shiver.

"Avia, Avia! Gaius says that the lake on the other side of the hill is the place where Aeneas descended into the Underworld. Let's get up a party to go look for it. We can take a lunch, and picnic on the sh.o.r.e, and read pa.s.sages from theAeneid . It will be educational."

"Who will read them?" Fausta laughed. "Not Lactantius!" She tried to sit up, but the great round of her belly prevented her, and she held out a hand so that her maid could help her.

I smiled. The eminent rhetorician had in later life become an ardent Christian and had recently been sent by Constantine to become his son's tutor. The Emperor had made it clear that the Christos was now his patron deity, and those who wished to rise at his court had found it in their interest to become Christian too. So far he had not insisted on a formal commitment from his family, though we were expected to attend those parts of the services open to the uninitiated. I missed Vitellia, who had gone back to Londinium to rebuild the church there in honour of her nephew.

"Do not be so sure!" retorted Crispus. "Lactantius is a great admirer of Virgil, and says that he is one of the virtuous pagans who predicted the coming of our Lord."

"Then I suppose he will not forbid the expedition," I put in. "Very well. Let us plan to set out early tomorrow, so as to arrive before the heat of the day."

Somewhat to my surprise, Lactantius not only made no objection, but decided to come along, a scroll of theAeneid firmly in his hand. Fausta remained at the palace, resting, but the old man and I travelled in litters, while the boys rode little surefooted donkeys from the nearby village up the winding path. A waggon full of picnic gear brought up the rear.

Even in the north of Italia I could find scenes that reminded me of home, but here I knew I was in another land, where the heated air was fragrant with the scent of artemisia and the perfume of the flowers that grew in such profusion in the rich volcanic soil. As we reached the top of the hill above Baiae I called for a halt to rest the bearers and the donkeys and turned to gaze out over the brilliant blue waters of the bay to Neapolis and the perfect cone of Vesuvius beyond. Today no smoke curled from its summit, though the slopes of Vulcan's forum, a half-day's journey away, steamed with a variety of foul smells.

They called this place the 'Fields of Fire', and I could sense the earth-fires below the surface, a constant reminder that nothing was eternal, even the solid ground beneath our feet.

Then we were jolting our way down towards the round blue mirror below. The white columns of the healing baths built on the sh.o.r.e by the first emperors gleamed in the summer sunlight, but we halted in a shady grove in the lee of a hill, and the slaves began to lay out our meal. The boys were already running about, dashing down to test the water, daring each other to dive in.

"Are you sure this is really Lake Avernus?" asked Crispus as Lactantius and I settled ourselves in wicker chairs. "Look, birds are flying across it without harm, and though the water smells a little stagnant, it did us no harm."

"Virgil must have known it was all right," said one of the other boys. "They say that Julius Ceasar himself visited those baths."

"Well, perhaps things were different when Rome was founded," I said, smiling. "After all, it was over eight hundred years ago. And this is bright summer, remember. In the winter, with a storm coming on, this place might look much more menacing."

"But where is the 'wide-mouthed cavern' of which Virgil tells us?" asked Crispus.

"Perhaps there was once a chasm which has now closed," answered Lactantius, "for they say that this is a land of changes." He stretched out one arm in the pose of an orator. Even in this heat he wore a I long robe, and with his white beard flowing over his chest, looked the part of an ancient sage as he unrolled the scroll and began to intone: "There was a wide-mouthed cavern, deep and vast and rugged, sheltered by a shadowed lake and darkened groves; such vapour poured from these black jaws to heaven's vault; no bird could fly above unharmed ..."

"And when the ground begins to shake, it was an earthquake and not Hecate coming at all?" asked Crispus.

Lactantius nodded, smiling. "Such evil spirits are no more than dreams and delusions, made demonic by men's fears. When the earth shakes, it is by the will of the Lord G.o.d who made it, but it was necessary that Aeneas, who lived long before the light of the Christos came into the world, should be led to found Rome."

"Yet Virgil himself was a pagan," I observed.

"He was," answered Lactantius, "but so n.o.ble in soul that the light of G.o.d was able to reach him, as it did so many of our greatest poets, men of the highest genius. Seneca and Maro and Cicero, of our own Roman writers, and Plato and Aristotle and Thales and many another among the Greeks, all touch upon the truth at times, and only the custom of their times, which insisted that G.o.d was not One, but many, caused them to continue to honour false G.o.ds."

"If there was a chasm here, perhaps it closed when Christ was born," said young Gaius, whose father was one of the few senators who had converted wholeheartedly to the new religion.

"Indeed, it might be so," said Lactantius approvingly.

By this time, the food was ready and the boys, who were at that age when a meal was always welcome, were attacking it with their usual gusto. In addition to the hard breads and olives and cheeses, the cooks had included a crock of the seafood stew that was a specialty of Baiae, featuring various sh.e.l.lfish cooked with sea nettles and spices. I eyed it dubiously, but the cooks had packed it with snow from the cellars, and it seemed to be good.

"What is the temple whose dome I see shining above those trees?" I pointed towards the top of the hill behind us.

"It is the Temple of Apollo that crowns the hill of c.u.mae," answered one of the slaves.

"c.u.mae!" exclaimed Lactantius, gazing upward with interest. "But of course, it would be, for the Sibyl gave her oracle to Aeneas from her cave and then led him down to the lake to enter the Underworld."

"Is there still a seeress there?" I asked, remembering how Heron had prophesied the coming of Constantius and wondering, with a remnant of professional curiosity, how the oracle was conducted here.

"Oh no," replied Lactantius. "Have you never heard the tale? In the time of Tarquin, the last king of Rome, the seventh seeress of c.u.mae brought to him nine books of prophecy. When he, considering her mad, refused to pay her price she burned three of them, and then another three, and then at last the king bought the remaining three for the price she had originally asked for all of them. And after that the words of other sibyls were collected from all the cities of Italia and Graecia, expecially those of Erythraea, and the leaders of Rome have been guided by them from that day to this."

"So there is no sibyl resident at the shrine of c.u.mae?"

"No, n.o.ble One," replied the slave. "Only the priestess who tends the temple of Apollo. But the cave in which the sibyl gave her oracles is there still."

"I should like to see it," I said then, "if the bearers have finished their meal." Cunoarda, the little Alban girl who had become my maid after I freed Hrodlind, went off to the water's edge where the slaves were eating, and returned with the eight strong Germans whom Constantine had given to me. Her red hair reminded me of Dierna, the little cousin I had loved so long ago.

"It should be safe enough," Lactantius said seriously. "There is no wind, and the demon Apollo will be still. And perhaps the spirit of the Sibyl who proclaimed the unity of G.o.d will speak to you. I will stay to watch over the boys."

I refrained from raising an eyebrow. After so many years, the crescent of Avalon had nearly faded from my brow, and I had no wish to explain to the old man why I did not fear the voice of the daimon of c.u.mae, whether it were that of a spirit or a G.o.d. Lactantius had never questioned me about my faith, but he knew that I was not a communicant of his church, and Crispus had confided to me that his tutor worried about the state of my soul.

I have never resented the prayers of anyone who wished me well, no matter what G.o.d he prayed to, and Lactantius was a kindly soul, as well as a learned one. If my grandson must be tutored by a Christian, he was fortunate to have the old man.

An hour of travel brought us to a bare cliff of golden sandstone, pierced by a shadowed tunnel that was the entrance to c.u.mae.

"Do not tell them who I am," I cautioned Cunoarda as she helped me to descend from the litter. "Say to the doorkeeper that I am a widow from Gallia called Julia, and will make an offering if they will show me the Sibyl's cave."

I sat down on a bench beneath an oak tree, glad that we were now high enough to catch the sea breeze, and watched the sunlight glisten on the girl's russet braid as she made her way to the gate. When she returned she was smiling.

"They have sent for the priestess of Apollo herself to guide you. I think they no longer get many visitors to the shrine."

A few moments later a middle-aged woman in a white tunica emerged from the tunnel. As she drew closer I could see that her gown was growing threadbare, but it was scrupulously clean.

"Holy One, I will offer this golden bracelet to the G.o.d in the name of my husband, who honoured Him, but my deepest interest is in the cave of the Sibyl. Can you take me there?" I had not brought a purse with me, but the heavy cuff bracelet I was wearing had enough gold in it to feed this woman for some time.

"Of course, domina. Come this way." The priestess turned towards the cool shadows of the tunnel and I followed her, Cunoarda at my heels. As we emerged into the light, she pulled the gauze veil up over her head and I did the same.

Before me was a court paved with worn sandstones, and a plinth bearing a statue of the Sibyl, arms uplifted, with wildly waving hair.

"When Aeneas came here, he called upon the oracle. The Sibyl was standing there, before the doors, when the power of the G.o.d came upon her suddenly," said the priestess. She pointed to an oddly-shaped door in the side of the hill, like an elongated triangle from which someone had cropped the point.

"She seemed taller," the priestess went on, "and her voice boomed. It is the nature of a human to resist when such power tries to take possession-they say the Sibyl rushed to and fro like a frightened mare, until the G.o.d overwhelmed her. And then, they say, His power rushed through the cave like a great wind, and all its doors were flung open, carrying her words to the waiting men."

"A hundred gates, was it not, in Virgil?" I asked.

"There are not so many as that, but there are openings all the way," said the woman, smiling. "Come, and you will see."

She lifted the bar, touched a sliver of wood to the lamp that was kept burning by the entrance, used it to light a torch, and pulled back the door. Now I could see that this was no natural cave, but a pa.s.sage carved into the solid stone. To the right a series of bays had been cut through to the sloping surface of the hill. A little light filtered through their shuttered openings.

To the left a long trough ran along the side of the pa.s.sage, through which water flowed. As we moved forwards the flickering torchlight glittered on the water and sent strange shadows dancing along the dusty floor. After the bright heat outside, the air here seemed damp and cool and very still.

Apollo might not be present, I thought as I followed, but I sensed power of another kind waiting within the silent stone. Was it indeed Apollo who had once spoken through the oracle here, I wondered then, or had Virgil, writing five hundred years after the last of the sibyls of c.u.mae had departed, simply a.s.sumed she served the G.o.d who had taken over most of the other oracles in the Mediterranean world? I reached out with senses long unused, wondering if the force that had once dwelt here retained enough coherence to respond.

Between one breath and another, I felt the familiar dip and shift of consciousness that signalled the approach of trance. Cunoarda took my elbow as I stumbled, but I shook my head and pointed towards the dark bay at the tunnel's end.

"Yes, that is where the Sibyl is said to have sat when she gave her answers," the priestess said then. "We do not know what sort of a seat she had, but we have always kept a tripod there, as they have at Delphi."

I was moving fowards on feet that scarcely felt the ground, but the three-legged stool at the end of the pa.s.sage seemed to glow with its own light.The belief of centuries has made it sacred , I thought then.

"I will sit there," I said in a voice that did not sound like my own. I pulled off the bracelet from my other wrist and held it out to the priestess. For a moment she was taken aback, glancing at the tripod nervously, but this was not the temple of her G.o.d, which she would have been bound to defend from any possible sacrilege. It was clear that she could not feel the power that was beginning to make my head spin.

Shivering, I sank down upon the three-legged stool, and the veil slipped away, leaving my head bare.

The position awakened memories buried in my bones; my trembling became a convulsive twitch as my body tried to adjust to the influx of power.

"Lady, are you unwell?" cried Cunoarda, reaching out to me, but the priestess prevented her, and that part of my mind that was still my own noted with relief that though the woman was no seer, she had enough training to recognize what was happening to me.

"Do not touch her," she cautioned, and then: "This is all highly irregular. She should have told me she had the Gift, so I might take precautions, but there is no help for it now."

But indeed, came a thought that was swiftly being pushed into the background, I myself had not known that the trance skills in which I had been trained long ago would awaken so swiftly here.

"So, daughter, will you let Me in?" came an inner voice, and with a long sigh, I relaxed into that bright darkness as into a mother's gentle arms.

I was distantly aware that my body had straightened, my hair coming loose from its pins. My arms extended, fingers flexing as if Someone were rediscovering the sensations of wearing flesh once more. I was only sorry that this body, which had endured for sixty-seven years, was all I had to offer her.

"Who are you?" whispered the priestess.

"I am the Sibyl..." my lips moved in answer. "I am always the Sibyl. In Erythraea I have spoken, and in Phrygia, in Samos and Libya and many other holy places in the lands of men. But it has been long, so long, since there was anyone to give Me a voice in this shrine."

"Do you speak with the voice of Apollo?" the priestess asked suspiciously.

"Go to your temple that stands upon the heights and open your doors to the wind and the sunlight and He will speak to you. But my power comes from the depths and the darkness of earth, and the perpetually upwelling waters of the sacred spring. I am the Voice of Fate. Would you seek an oracle?"

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then the Sibyl's laughter.

"Woman, you have served the G.o.ds your whole life long. Why are you so surprised that a Power should speak to you? Ah well-I read in the mind of this old woman who carries me that many things have changed. Rome still endures, but among her people there are some who have abandoned their ancient G.o.ds."

"It is the fault of the Christians!" exclaimed the priestess. "They say that there is only one G.o.d-"

I felt my consciousness shift once more, deepening and expanding as the persona that had overshadowed me was itself overwhelmed by a blaze of illumination that swept all mortal awareness away.

"Indeed, the Divine Source is a single deity of pre-eminent power, who made the heavens and sun and stars and moon, the fruitful earth and the waves of the waters of the sea. This is the One, who alone was and is from age to age."

"Are you telling me that the Christians are right?" the voice of the priestess sharpened in horror. "And their G.o.d is the only one?"

"No mortal, save in the utmost transports of ecstasy, can touch the ultimate deity. You who live in flesh see with the eyes of the world, one thing at a time, and so you see G.o.d in many guises, just as different images are reflected in the many facets of a jewel. To each facet you have given a form and a name-Apollo or Ammon, Cybele or Hera, who once gave oracles at this shrine. Jahweh of the Jews watches over only one people, and this Jesus blesses those who call on his name. They desire to touch the One, but their human limitations allow them to see only a single face, which they identify as the whole.

Do you understand?"

In that moment I did comprehend what she was saying, and prayed that I would be allowed to remember these words.