Priestess of Avalon

  "You do not train your soldiers for battle by keeping them idle in camp," I told Constantius. "This is my battle, and I intend to go into it as fit as I can."

  And on the twenty-seventh day of that month, coming back up the hill to our house I slipped on a wet cobblestone and sat down hard. As Brusilla helped me back to my feet I felt the gush of warm water from my womb mingling with the cold water that soaked my gown, and the first hard pang as labour began.

  The household clucked and bustled in panic around me, but I had hoped for just such an accident. As one of the maids rushed off to find Marcia and Philip took horse to go out to the fortress for Constantius, I lay back upon the bed with a grin of triumph, until the next contraction came.

  My time had come upon me early, but my womb, once started in its labour, seemed in no hurry to expel its contents. Through the rest of that day and the night that followed the contractions continued. The merciful amnesia that allows a woman who has given birth to face the prospect again has dimmed my memories of most of that time. Indeed, sometimes it is the fathers who remember so vividly that they fear to let their wives suffer so again.

  If I had not been in such good condition I doubt I would have survived, and even so, as the second day drew on and my pangs, instead of becoming closer together, began to slow, the women who attended me looked grave, and I remember telling Marcia that if it came to a choice, she must cut me and save the child. The rain had stopped and the light of the westering sun, coming through the window, flamed in her hair.

  "Nay," she said then. "It is true that once the waters have broken the birth must not be too long delayed, but fear not to let your body rest for a little while. I have a trick or two left in my bag that can get things going once more."

  In my exhaustion I found it hard to believe her. I closed my eyes, wincing as the child within me kicked. This must be hard for him as well, trapped in a constricting bag that was squeezing him into a passageway too narrow for his frame. But he had no choice about it now, and neither did I.

  "Goddess, was it so terrible for You, when You gave birth to the world!" came my silent cry. "I have seen the passion that drives Your creatures to reproduce their kind. Help me to deliver this child! I will give you whatever you ask"

  And it seemed to me then that from the depths of my pain there came an answer.

  "Whatever I ask? Even if it means that you must lose him?"

  "So long as he stays alive!" I replied.

  "You will keep him, and you will lose him. He will trample your heart as he pursues his destiny. The changes that he brings you can neither predict nor control. But you must not despair. Even when they bring pain, growth and change and alteration are all part of My plan, and all that is lost will one day return once more…"

  I was in pain already, and could not understand. I knew only the need to bring forth my child. I made some motion of assent, and abruptly I was back in my body once more. Marcia set a cup of tea to my lips whose bitterness was perceptible even through the honey they had mixed in. I tried to identify the herbs, but caught only the astringent taste of yarrow and red cedar.

  Whatever it was, when it hit my empty stomach it began to work immediately. The contractions returned with a wrenching agony that overwhelmed my intention not to scream. Again and again I was wracked by the pain, but presently I was able to discern a kind of rhythm in it. Marcia got me up onto the birthing stool and gave me a wad of cloth to bite down on. Brasilia braced herself behind me and one of the maids took either arm. I learned later that I had gripped their wrists so tightly I left bruises, but I was not aware of doing so at the time.

  I felt the warm seep of blood and the hot oil with which Marcia was massaging me. "You're doing well," she told me. "When the urge comes, bear down with all your might!"

  Then the giant hand squeezed once more, and I pushed, past caring whether anyone heard my cry. Again and again it came, until I thought I must split in two.

  "I have the head," said Marcia, and then a last convulsion seized me and the rest of the child slid free. A purplish, struggling form swung across my vision as she lifted it, ummistakably male, and then the room resounded to a roar of protest that must surely have been as loud as any of my own.

  Dimly I was aware of being lifted to the bed once more. Women bustled around me, packing me with cloths to stop the bleeding, washing me, changing the bedding. I paid no attention to their chatter. What matter if I was too badly torn to bear another—this child lived! I could hear his lusty cries even from the next room.

  A face appeared above me. It was Sopater, with a man in the robes of a Chaldean priest whom I remembered being told was an astrologer.

  "Your son was born at the fifth hour past noon," said Sopater. "We have a preliminary horoscope already. Mars is in Taurus and Saturn lies in Leo. This child will be a warrior, stubborn in defeat and unyielding in victory. But Jupiter reigns in the sign of Cancer and there also sits his moon—your son will care strongly for his family. But above all, Aquarius will rule, rising with his Venus and his sun."

  I nodded and he turned away, still excited. I heard the clink of glassware and realized that they were drinking to the baby's health in the next room. How unfair, I thought then. All the work was done by me! But that was the custom, when a man claimed his son, and I should be glad for it.

  I was, by Roman reckoning, an illegitimate child, and though my father had acknowledged me in the British fashion, he had never bothered to draw up papers of formal adoption, having always intended me for Avalon. In Roman law, I was Constantius's concubina, a relationship which was legally recognized, but lower in status than a formal wedding. But even had we been married confarreatio, in the most ancient and formal of patrician styles, it would still have fallen to my husband to claim the infant as his own and to decide whether he should live.

  As I lay in the bed, too exhausted to open my eyes, yet still tense with excitement, it seemed wrong to me that the man should have that power. It was not he who had formed the child out of his own flesh, nor he who would nurse it. A memory came to me of Avalon, when I sat listening with the other maidens while Cigfolla taught us the midwife's skills.

  The woman of ancient times had possessed a strength we no longer claimed. If she had too many children, or not enough strength to rear another child, or if feeding it would deprive the tribe at the wrong time of year, she could look into the face of the child and put forth her hand and send that child back into nowhere and nothingness as if it had never been born.

  Lying in my bed, listening to the murmur of talk from the men in the next room, I understood her meaning as I had not when I was a girl. I realized then that a woman is never free to bear a child unless she is also free to abort it. A man must know that he is breathing because his mother looked on his face and saw that it was good and chose freely to nourish him. This child, who lived because I had given up so much in order to conceive and bear him, must never be allowed to forget that he owed his life to me.

  And then the men came back into the bedchamber, and my little son was laid in my arms. Constantius looked down at us. His face bore the marks of an anguish which I suppose must have been the echo of my own pain, but his eyes were shining with joy.

  "I have given you a son," I whispered.

  "He is a fine boy," Constantius answered, "but I would have considered him a poor trade for you! We will call him Constantine."

  I looked down at the fuzz of golden down on the baby's head, whose curve repeated the round of the breast against which he nuzzled, already hungry. In law he might be his father's, but it was I, who by my care or my neglect, would determine whether he survived.

  And he would survive! For the sake of this child I had suffered through this birthing, and abandoned Avalon and everyone there that I loved. He must be worth saving, to justify my pain! Nonetheless, as I put him to the breast I took a secret satisfaction in remembering that every woman has within herself this tremendous power to give life… or to deny it.

 
* * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  « ^ »

  AD 282

  In the year that Constantine was ten years old, we took up residence in the old palace in Sirmium. Since his birth, we had moved regularly as Constantius was shifted from one posting to another, contriving not only to survive but to rise in rank through the turmoil that had followed the assassination of the Emperor Aurelian when Constantine was two. That first imperial death had shocked me, for I had come to respect the little man whose order had wrenched us from Britannia into this new life. But by the time Aurelian had been followed by Tacitus, and Tacitus by Florianus, and Florianus by Probus, we had all learned to give the current wearer of the purple no more than a wary courtesy.

  Probus was proving to be an effective emperor, suppressing barbarian invasions in Gallia and recruiting the defeated Burgunds and Vandals as federati forces which he then sent to Britannia to put down a revolt led by its current governor. With my mind, I understood the military necessity, but my heart wept at the thought that a Roman had loosed a barbarian horde against my native land. When Probus chose Constantius as one of his tribunes and ordered us to Sirmium I found it hard to rejoice.

  Constantine had been quite excited to hear we were going to live in a palace. But by this time I had some experience of administrative housing, and would have been much happier with a snug little villa on the outskirts of town. A newly-built villa. The palace which Probus had chosen as his headquarters had been constructed originally by Marcus Aurelius a century before. There was no telling when it had last been repaired. The frescoes on the walls were disfigured by ominous stains where the damp had got in, and the hangings had holes where mice had done the same.

  But here, the Emperor had decreed, was where he and his staff would live, and since Constantius was the most senior officer whose wife was with him, it had fallen to me to make the place habitable for us all. I wiped perspiration from my forehead, for it was one of the hottest days in an exceptionally warm summer, and directed the maidservants to change the water with which they were scrubbing the wall.

  "When I am a man, I am going to build new palaces," Constantine had told me when we moved in. I believed him. When he was little he had constructed fortresses out of the furniture. These days he bullied the children of the other officers into helping him erect buildings in the gardens—pavilions and play-houses, guarded by fortifications laid out with military precision.

  I could hear the sound of young voices raised in laughter, and my son's bellow of command overriding them all. Atticus, the Greek whom we had bought to be Constantine's tutor, had given them an afternoon's holiday, saying it was too hot to do lessons indoors. Play was apparently another matter. The boys seemed to be working more willingly than the soldiers whom the Emperor had set to digging ditches through the marshes below the town.

  "Perhaps he will be an engineer for the legions," Constantius had commented when he came home the evening before, evaluating the design with an experienced eye.

  But I did not think our child would be satisfied with building walls to military specifications, or draining marshland, either. Whatever Constantine created would reflect his own vision of the world.

  The doors of the dining chamber had been thrown open to the gardens in the hope of letting in a little air. At least here, on the higher ground at the southern edge of the city, we could expect a breeze. Beyond the garden wall the ground fell away to the River Savus. Down there, where several hundred legionaries were sweating in the sun, it must be stifling. At least Constantius did not have to labour with a shovel, but I knew that he would be hot and thirsty by the time he returned.

  Even the boys might be grateful to stop their play long enough for a drink of something cool. I told the maidservants they could rest for a little and sent one of them to bring the earthenware jug of barley-water from the kitchen.

  Constantine stood near the back wall of the garden, directing two other boys as they lifted a framework of wickerwork to roof the structure they had made. As always, the sudden sight of my son could make my breath catch, and now, with the strong sunlight blazing on his fair hair, he was like a young god. He was going to be tall, like my father, but he had Constantius's sturdy bones—he was already bigger than most boys his age.

  He would be a magnificent man. Drusilla had tried to console me when it became clear that I would never bear another child. But in time, seeing women of my own age made old by constant pregnancies, I had realized I should be grateful. And why should I wish for other children, with such a son?

  "No, it is not quite right—" Constantine stood with hands braced on his hips, head cocked to one side. "We must take it down."

  "But Con—" protested the younger of his helpers, a son of one of the centurions who was called Pollio, "we just got it up there!"

  I smiled to hear the nickname. It was an obvious shortening of the Latin name, but in my own tongue 'con' was the word for a hound.

  "And it's hot," added the other boy, Marinus, who came from a merchant family in the town. "We can rest in the shade until sunset and finish it then."

  "But it's not right…" Constantine gazed at them in incomprehension. "The slope has to be at an angle or it will be unbalanced—"

  My heart went out to him. He could see the desired result so clearly in his mind, and reality kept falling short of his dreams. Well, life would teach him soon enough that one cannot always order the world to one's liking, I thought, remembering my own girlhood. Let him enjoy his illusions while he could.

  But it was hot. Even Hylas, who usually frisked at my feet like a puppy when we went outdoors, had flopped down in the shade of the disputed wickerwork and lay panting.

  "I have brought some barley-water to cool you," I interrupted, taking pity on the two younger boys. "When you have drunk it perhaps the task will seem easier."

  I poured cups from the sweating terra cotta jug for the boys and took my own to the garden wall, pausing to pour out a few drops before the image of the nymph of the garden in her shrine. It had taken me some time to become accustomed to the Roman preoccupation with images, as if they needed markers to tell if something was holy. But the shrine did serve as a reminder, and sometimes, in the evening, I would come into the garden to spend half an hour in her company.

  Beyond the wall, the ground fell away in a tangle of greenery. Between the slope and the gleaming curve of the river the marshland shimmered in heat-haze, distorting the shapes of the men who laboured at the ditches and the tall column of the siege tower the Emperor had ordered brought in so that he could observe their progress. In this weather even the iron-clad tower could not offer much comfort.

  I could imagine Probus standing there, thin and intense and as obsessed with his project in the marshes as my son was with his work in the garden. Another idealist—everyone had heard of the Emperor's plan to hire foreign auxiliaries to guard the frontiers. If Probus had his way, there would be no need for the Empire to tax its citizens to maintain a standing army. If so, perhaps I could persuade Constantius to retire to Britannia, where my friend Vitellia and her husband had gone.

  In the shade of the linden tree the tiles that topped the wall were cool enough to lean on, though the sunlight that filtered through the leaves was making me perspire beneath my thin gown. Even slaves should not be made to work in such heat, I thought, shading my eyes with my hand. I wondered how Probus had persuaded his men to do so.

  But the men in the marshes were moving with surprising vigour—it was hard to see clearly, but there seemed to be some commotion around the tower. My heart began to race, though I could see nothing wrong. As I watched, the wavering of the tower became more pronounced, for a moment it leaned, then dust billowed in a dun cloud as it fell.

  "What is it?" asked Constantine at my elbow, as that sense that had connected us since before his birth had communicated my unease.

  "Listen—" The clangour of the iron plates that had covered the tower still reverberated in the heavy air. But now another so
und was growing, a many-throated roar that I had heard the one time I had gone with Constantius to see the gladiatorial games at the amphitheatre in Naissus, the sound a crowd makes when a man goes down.

  It seemed to me that the mob of moving men was swirling towards the road. Suddenly I turned.

  "Pollio, Marinus, there is trouble down at the marshes. I want you to return to your homes now!" Unthinking, I had used the voice of command in which I had been trained at Avalon. My son stared at me as the boys, eyes widening, set down their cups and hurried away.

  "We can't stay here," I told Constantine, thinking aloud. "They will know where the Emperor keeps the pay-chest. Go—pack a change of clothes and whatever books you can carry in one bundle." I was already calling to Brasilia and the maids.

  "But why are we running away?" protested Con as I shepherded my household down the road. The maids were weeping, clutching their bundles in their arms, but Brasilia looked grim. "Surely the Emperor will stop the riot before it can get this far."

  "My guess is that the Emperor is dead, and that is why the soldiers are rioting," I answered. Philip crossed himself, and I remembered that he had been attending the Christian church in town.

  Constantine stopped short, staring, and I reached out to drag him along. He knew in theory that most emperors did not reign long, but Probus was the only emperor he could really remember, a man who in his rare moments of leisure had played board games with the child.

  "But what about Father?" he said. Now it was he who was pushing me forwards. My son was as close to me as my own heartbeat, but it was Constantius whom he idolized.

  I managed a smile, even though that was the question that had been knotting my belly ever since I realized what was going on.

  "He is not the one who ordered them to work in this heat. I am sure they will do him no harm," I said stoutly. "Come along now. The basilica has stout walls, and not much that's worth looting. We'll be safe there."