Up the Kronion Hill she ran, invisible, the patter of her bare feet lost in raucous cicada-calls, the scent of oaks sharp in the hot August night. At the summit, she stepped from the shadow of the trees into a circular clearing where overhead blazed a river of stars – innumerable, glorious – that became as she watched a carpet of gold, a thousand yards in length. Upon it walked a joyful company: eighteen souls, wearing shackles of silver.
Back and forth across the sky she rushed, touching each glowing prisoner with the ivory wand she had found in her hand. The chains fell away and a red flame bloomed over each head as she did so: eighteen red flames. As for her, she rose up and up, vanishing into light…
Ourania awoke with a start in the chilly half-light of morning, listening the galloping of her heart. Stretched across the ceiling of her little prison she still could see her strange vision. Eighteen people in chains; why does that seem important? she wondered, feeling she ought to know. And perhaps the flames were a sign of Pentecost, a revelation of God? What of the golden carpet, “a thousand yards in length?” How odd!
It had been a beautiful dream, and she longed to go back to it, but sat up with a sigh, setting her small feet onto the cold planks, shivering in her thin linen night-dress. Her mute servant Evander would soon arrive with bath-water and breakfast; another solitary day would begin, locked in the Pyrgos, the Women’s Tower of Villa Appia.
One great luxury remained to her: the roof beyond that ceiling. From the top of the Pyrgos, she could watch the changing light and weather across the width of Latium, glimpse through the trees of Villa Appia the traffic moving up and down the great roads: the Latina to the
north, the Appia to the south, and the humble Asinaria between the two, winding along the Almo Valley. On the parapet she marked the passage of time with a white stone, one stroke per day. Today would complete two sets of five.
It was the Kalends of December, first day of the month in which fell the feast of Saturn, god of the good old days when all folk were equal, a day when masters fed their slaves and gave each other gifts of cloth, or candles, or trinkets made of lucky silver. The month was not called “December” any more, of course, but “Amazonius,” after the emperor’s twelfth nickname, and she would miss the feast of Saturnalia, cooped up here!
Ourania took up the woolen cloak from her single, unsteady chair – the wreck of a graceful kismos, inlaid with patterned woods – reflecting as she often did that the chair, the cloak, the house itself and lands around it, all had come down to her from her murdered former mistress Annia Regilla, Kyria of Villa Appia before her, whose slave she once had been, and whose fate she might soon share, imprisoned in the same tower.
Westerly loomed the pale Temple of Mars, marking the boundaries of the City proper, and at its feet the locus caedis, a field of rubbish and bones from which she and her husband Secundus had stolen the bodies of saints, to be buried under Villa Appia.
In the distant east rose the Alban Hills, wreathed in cloud, where her foster brother Bradua was hunting even now with his kinsman, Caesar Commodus.
How lovely if the emperor were saying, just now, “No, no, my dear fellow, I could not possibly accept your sister’s beautiful villa as a gift, even though it does adjoin the huge villa I took from the Quintillii after killing them both… No, I no longer need to sell the goods of wealthy victims to pay the army, now that I have begun taxation again! What do I care for the gratitude of the merchant class?”
Rain curtained the air between her tower and the Hills, drawing ever closer. She thought of her brother’s envoy Atrectius Phoenix, travelling towards her down the long roads from Britannia, the deed to Villa Appia in a satchel at his hip, that she must sign away or…
Or die?
She was prepared to fly away to Paradise, to join Secundus there, but what of the Hell she left behind: her family of slaves, sold to lead mines and brothels, arenas and galleys, or to plow endless wheat-fields in Sicily, under the pitiless sun? What of the ancient house itself? Who would farm its lands or feed the homeless folk, sheltering in the trees of the valley?
In despair, she sank to her knees. She must free them all, but how?
How, without asking her factor Felicius Victor to countersign the necessary tablets? How to find the money to send them to her farms in Canusium, in desperate need of settlers, after the plague, and far from Commodus? How to sell her autumn fabric shipment, or to know if it had even arrived in Rome? Made from the golden fleeces of her rare Canosine sheep, it was more like spun gold than cloth, desired by ladies from as far away as Parthia and the Land of Silk and worth a flood of silver, more than enough to pay her former slaves’ passage to the south!
How? How? How? Ourania rose to her feet again, pacing in agitation.
Were these not the End Times? Perhaps the world would end today, and save her all this trouble! But last year, when the earthquake had come, then the fire and plague, no angels had snatched them home. The End Times were more of a dismal gloom, apparently, the sense that nothing was as it should be, nor ever would be again. How had her friend Claudilla – whose lands the emperor took, last year – put it in her suicide note? I can no longer bear to watch the corruption of the world’s most honorable and courageous nation by a shameless tyrant whose lewd acts shock plebs and senators alike.
The rain had reached the Temple of Jupiter, down the Appia. She turned to go down.
Here came a young woman’s voice from away by North Gate: “Mamma! Mamma!”
On a rise beyond the Little Appia, two small figures were waving: a man and a woman she knew at once: it was her daughter Caris and the young tribune Lucius Cocceius Hasta, her new husband.
She waved back wildly.
Caris cupped her hands again. “A gift…!” she called, as Hasta raised his arm, flinging something into the air that flew to her on sickle-shaped wings, landing on the parapet with a dusty scent of feathers: a big hunting-falcon with speckled white breast and long yellow legs appraised her with keen dark eyes. Above one yellow claw a heavy double-fold tablet was tied, a bronze stylus tucked beneath its leather ribbon.
“Open it!” yelled Caris.
Gingerly releasing the falcon from its burden, she opened the tablet. Out fell a curl of papyrus that read in flowing cursive: THIS IS NEMESIS. WE HAD MEANT TO GIVE HER TO YOU LATER BUT HERE IS A LETTER FROM FELICIUS VICTOR THAT CANNOT WAIT. GOOD NEWS! THE BABY KICKED FOR THE FIRST TIME TODAY AND BRADUA SENDS WORD YOU ARE ALLOWED DOWN FOR SATURNALIA, FOR ONE DAY ONLY. CARIS SECUNDA & L. COCCEIUS HASTA
With shaking hands, Ourania opened the tablet, and saw clearly printed in the yellow wax, after the usual salutations, “RECEIVED THIS THIRD DAY BEFORE THE KALENDS OF AMAZONIUS FIFTY BOLTS OF CANOSINE CLOTH OF FIFTY YARDS EACH, A TOTAL VALUE OF TWO HUNDRED FIFTY SILVER POUNDS, NOW IN YOUR APPIAN ACCOUNTS. MARK ACCEPTANCE HERE _____ NOTE DOWN INSTRUCTIONS BELOW. (SIGNED) G. FELICIUS VICTOR.”
Let’s see – she did the calculation in her head – I will need one silver pound to make eighteen silver gifts out of, one for each of my slaves... then froze, her signet ring in hand.
A thousand yards of cloth, eighteen silver manacles, an ivory wand, red flames…
She had enough silver now to give each of her slaves a five-pound cuff to start life with! She would ask Felicius Victor to fetch the ivory wand of Gens Appia from its scented box, buy eighteen red felt caps and enough food, drink, wreaths and flowers for the whole Almo Valley!
A new vision arose in her mind: Having handed out the silver, she was giving out red caps of freedom, touching each slave lightly with the wand of Gens Appia, and saying te manumitto (“I free you!”), then reclining to join their feast: the final act that sealed their manumission. After that…
The rain whipped down at last, and she lifted her face to it, laughing. After that, she might sleep until the End Times, free as the falcon Nemesis!