As Lucian drops to his knees, gladius still in hand but drooping slack, she runs her hands together up the blade, then cups them; black blood fills the bowl of her locked palms and fingers, smoking hot. And Lucian bows his head to drink it greedily, lapping it from the source, staining his mouth and chin—then looks back down at Arcturus where he lies crushed to earth and grins for the first time ever, showing his teeth, unrecognizable. Irredeemable.
One of them, once more . . . and happy, in a way no Roman can ever have known him, to be so.
And: Lucian, he thinks, the hurt of it twisting inside him, worse even than the pain of her touch. Lucian, secundus, my right hand in peace and war. My friend.
Was it nothing but a lie from the very beginning, just some pleasant trick Arcturus worked on himself, all unknowing? Convincing himself the same things he felt might be glimpsed, now and then, in the Briton’s melancholy gaze?
. . . like as be, magistere. Like as be.
(Or not.)
It’s only now, with this madwoman’s grip making his eyes sweat blood, that Arcturus recalls a slander once bandied about concerning another seer-girl, the Oracle at Delphi: That she—maiden, mother or crone, whoever she might have been at the time—was nothing more than a toy for politicians’ aims or Emperors’ decrees, half-mad and mumbling under the influence, evoking only the refuse of an empty mind whenever she yawned her jaws wide to admit “the God.” That there was no God at work in Delphi at all and never had been, just whispers in the dark, murmurs in the sibyl’s smoke-drunk ear; theatre, a peep-show, a circus. All sound and fury, mere ritual entertainment, for the idiot crowd’s delight.
Would it be better to be killed that way, in outright massacre at the behest of human lunatics? Or at the hands of zealots, in the service of their whore-carried Goddess?
Whichever way truth lies, though, it won’t matter, soon enough. Soon he’ll be only another shade lapping at the blood-trough, another fluttering ghost on the Styx’s tide, at best. And at worst—
In the cairns behind him—those he can glimpse, at least—the skulls are split, scooped, emptied. Which evidence suggests they mean to do the same to him, no doubt, before rising to greet the sky next morning; that cold grey sky, mist-hung, screwed down tight as any sarcophagus-lid. A tent with curtains slid and sewn shut, both, to hide a horde of red and dreadful doings.
Lucian, back on his feet, seems to cast him a vaguely pitying glance while the others hover close to hand, their weapons at the ready. Tells him, quiet, as they watch and wait—
“As is owed must be paid, magistere, that’s what; as She tells us, reckon, or thy own Gods tell thee. What we owe, in turnabout, for all thee owes Her.”
So it’s as he suspects: They turned against him long ago, “his” whole cohort, perhaps before this cursed journey’s very outset. Always seeing him not as a leader, a companion, not even as a fellow soldier in the service of strange and distant lords, but as sacrifice only—a Year King to be indulged and protected, steered fate-wards, before being torn apart to irrigate this awful land with his heart’s last, waning spurts.
Well, so be it, then—what can’t be cured must be endured. Let it never be said a son of Roma could not rouse himself to die bravely, no matter the field of battle.
And yet: May only poison grow where my blood falls, he thinks, vindictively. May my bones breed discord, like dragons’ teeth. May my death curse you all, to your sons’ sons’ sons, as much and as surely as this end you plan curses me to wander nameless, without surcease, beyond the reach of anything I’ve known, or loved, or lost . . .
But here she is above him, her stiff hair rayed to frame a face whose own rigidity has started to blur, to soften. To settle once more towards those features he can still recall pressed to his in ecstasy, when the merest touch of her was enough to make him jolt and start in (seemingly) endless hunger.
He remembers her palm with its red-sketched spiral, closing about him in the dusk. Remembers his own lust with the same sick wrench as a wound long-healed, but once green with infection—the kind that takes a red-hot knife to seal and aches forever-after, especially in rainy weather.
“Divius Arcturus,” she addresses him, in perfect Latin—and hikes up her skirts, all unashamed, to show him that place he faithfully hoped never to have to see again.
“Admire your work, Centurion: Her blood and yours have mixed. Maiden to mother, by your seed and my command. You will leave some small thing of yourself behind with us, after all.”
“You,” he says, mouth dry, and stops; swallows spit, and tries again. “You . . . are . . . her Goddess.”
That smile. “Oh yes.” And then, leaning close, rot-soft: “ . . . yours, too.”
Followed by that same voice, so persuasive, inside his narrowing mind: For She is ALL in all, Roman—do you not know it for fact, truly, even now? All darkness. All mothers.
(All Goddesses.)
A flash, a dazzle, then a sudden plunge back to dimness and obscure, threatening motion: Lucian and his brethren stepping closer as her halo douses, blades in hand. Arcturus tries to appeal to Her, helplessly—but the Goddess is gone, leaving only the girl to cup her stomach, stroke his lips with hers. And
whisper, with her more natural, broken voice restored:
“A, tha. Sleep tha, now. She has tha, Roman. She sends tha down. Sleep now, and wait ‘till She bid she call tha name . . . ”
The seer-girl slips her cold hands around Arcturus’s waist. Slowly, carefully, she pronounces his name afresh—and stumbles over it, exactly as he always knew she would.
“Arc-tu-rus, tha’rt she’s now, she—and She. Tha’rt She-own now, Roman-no-more. A-true.”
Oh, Mars Ultor, Roma Aeterna. Roma, and all the Gods of Roma. Where have you allowed me to be taken? Where, where have you—
—sent—