David Drake: To Bring the Light

“By the very gods. ”

“All praise to the gods who rule men’s lives,” Faustulus said, in what he thought was agreement with his guest.

Herosilla sat on the roots of a pine, looking down over the moonlit plain where some day the Circus Maximus would seat a quarter million Romans watching horse races. There wasn’t a single horse in present-day Palatium. Presumably there were a few in the royal town of Alba.

A thousand years. A thousand years.

The villagers must all be asleep by now. The occasional gust no longer brought snatches of speech as folk chewed over the marvelous events of the day. The arrival of a Greek woman from Cumae was as amazing to them as the truth was to Herosilla herself.

A thousand years.

Footsteps crunched behind Herosilla. She stood and turned, stepping around the tree. Romulus was walking down to where Herosilla had gone to think after awareness of the situation struck her like a second thunderbolt.

She could easily have gotten home from some rural valley outside Rome. There was no way back from the past, except as bones.

“No one believed me when I told them my destiny,” Romulus said. “They didn’t laugh to my face, but I knew what they were thinking. Now they have to believe.”

“I’m not—” she said. But Romulus was right: he was destined for greatness. It just had nothing to with what had happened to Flavia Herosilla, gentlewoman and scholar.

“I’m the son of Numitor’s daughter,” Romulus said. “The king is my granduncle. Some day I’ll be king myself, but a great king—not a worm like Amulius!”

“The king’s brother Numitor is the rightful king?” Herosilla asked. She’d always assumed the stories of the founding were legend; that they had no more reality than similar tales of Olympus or Thule, written by folk to whom the truth would only have been a hurdle to leap in the course of their fictions. “Amulius ousted him?”

“What?” said Romulus. He was a tall man; only in the company of his brother would he have looked stocky. “Really? I wouldn’t have thought Amulius had the backbone. The gods told you this?”

Herosilla opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d never understood how a king who’d let his brother depose him had gained the manhood decades later to take his throne back. But then, she hadn’t believed any part of the legend.

“But you and Remus are Rhea’s twin sons, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Oh, not him,” Romulus said scornfully. “He’s just a shepherd like the rest of them here, Faustulus’ son by Acca. But I’m the son of Mars, just as Rhea claimed. The king said Rhea’s son had died with her in childbirth, but really he had me set out on a hillside because he was afraid. Faustulus found me and brought me here to be suckled with his own son.”

Facts were all Flavia Herosilla had ever cared about. The thunderbolt had destroyed her previous certainties along with all other aspects of her former life. Parts of the legend passed to her down a thousand years were perhaps true; other parts were certainly wrong. Romulus couldn’t rationally be sure about things that had happened before he was bom... but perhaps a god really had whispered them in his ear! She couldn’t prove otherwise.

The only thing Herosilla could be sure of now was that she stood on a hilltop and the winter wind was cold.

“So you see I’m descended from a god also,” Romulus concluded. “Therefore it’s proper that you and I should mate.” He put his hand on her arm.

“What?” said Herosilla. She backed away. “Don’t be an idiot!”

Romulus laughed with the confidence of a strong man fully conscious of his power. He caught Herosilla by the arm again, above the elbow. “Goddess you may be, but I’ll bet you’re a woman as well. Don’t try to run or you’ll get hurt and spoil your part of the fun.”

Herosilla knew better than to run. She stooped, caught Romulus’ unloaded ankle, and twisted as he tried to shift his weight. He went over her back and hit the rocky slope with a crash and a bellow.

Herosilla started toward the huts at a brisk pace, stooping once to grab a handful of dirt to throw in Romulus’ eyes when he caught her. It was mud rather than dust or fine sand, but it would have to serve. From the sounds behind her the big man had rolled some way while stunned from landing on his head.

Acca, Remus, and several others trotted from the village. The moon behind Herosilla’s back lit them brightly. “Lady?” Acca called.

“I’m here!” Herosilla said.

“We heard you…” Remus said doubtfully. Romulus, panting like a blown horse, caught up to them.

“Your brother slipped,” Herosilla said. “I was coming for help.”

She turned. Romulus looked at her with slitted eyes. There was a dark blotch on his forehead. “That’s right,” he muttered. “But I didn’t need help.”

Herosilla threw down as much of the dirt as she could and tried to wipe off the sticky remainder between her palms. She wondered what served the village for a water supply. Puddles, she feared.

“I’d like to sleep now,” she said. “Is there a bed I could use?”

“Ours, lady,” Acca said. “My husband and I will give you our house and sleep with our sons.”

“If you wouldn’t mind, Mistress Acca,” Herosilla said, her eyes on the lowering Romulus, “I’d prefer that you remain with me tonight.”

“I’m going to bed,” Romulus said. “We’ll get an early start for town.”

“Why of course, lady,” Acca said.

Romulus stalked up the path, pushing aside villagers who didn’t get out of his way in time.

In her own day Herosilla had visited the villas of wealthy friends around Lake Albana, twelve miles from Rome. That hadn’t prepared her for the experience of hiking to the region over a track surfaced in mud and sheep dung. The only vehicles in Palatium were wheelbarrows. There wasn’t a mule or donkey to ride, much less a horse. The risk of being carried in a litter by herdsmen who’d never done anything of the sort before was greater than the discomfort of walking.

But the discomfort was worse than anything Herosilla’d experienced since she spent her first and only sea voyage leaning over the ship’s railing and wondering whether it wouldn’t be preferable to drown.

“That’s it?” she said as they reached the top of the hill. She’d thought the huts glimpsed from the bottom of the long final climb from the lakeside were Alba’s outskirts: the shanties beyond the walls occupied by poor people.

There were no walls. There was no more street plan than there had been in Palatium. Muddy tracks meandered between hovels much like those of the village. A few had a stone foundation course; a few had a small courtyard separated from its neighbors by a fence of twigs woven on a frame of vertical posts. Some houses were oval and perhaps contained two rooms instead of one, but they were the exceptions.

“Makes you feel cramped, doesn’t it?” Remus said, mistaking Herosilla’s shudder. “They’ve got tens of tens of tens of people here. It’s too much.”

“A real king would have a real city,” Romulus said. “Like Troy, with stone walls. And think of how great Agamemnon was in Mycenae, to have conquered Troy!”

“Men aren’t meant to live like that,” his brother retorted. “Wars are because folk go mad when they’re pressed too tight. They act like rats in a basket.”

The first spikes of winter-sown grain showed in the fields below Alba. The town’s immediate vicinity was cultivated; the pastures were around outlying communities like Palatium because live animals could be driven a greater distance than vegetable crops could be hauled over what passed for roads.