The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Elizabeth Cunningham
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ever known, who had adopted me and treated me with as much tenderness as he did his own daughter. I also wanted desperately to be mistaken. I couldn’t bear to think of King Bran as a captive and slave.
And what if it was my fault, whatever his fate, my fault?
Why my fault, you ask? The fate of a king? It was King Bran’s capture that had prompted the druids to offer the Great Sacrifice, to send a messenger to the gods, on behalf of the combrogos. Could that sacrifice have brought Bran home unharmed? No one would ever know. Because of me. I meddled with the mysteries. I stopped the sacrifice. There. Now you know why I was exiled. I am sure you can also guess who was chosen to be the victim.
“Red, what are you doing?” Dido and Succula grabbed hold of me. “Sit down!”
“I’ve got to get a closer look,” I struggled to shake them off. “Don’t you understand?”
“Sweetie, of course we understand. You’re the one who doesn’t. You can’t go wandering around the stadium in your whore’s toga annoying people by blocking their view. Sit. We’ll find a way to see him afterwards. Trust us.”
Impulse control is not my forte, but that’s what friends are for. And they were my friends; I could feel it in the fierceness of their grip. We sat together on the edge of the stone bleacher, like any people from any time watching a race. You know how it is. Your heart races, too, flying out of your chest to light on one particular contestant. Your vision telescopes. The tension in your limbs, the bearing down of your will merge with the one you have chosen. I became one with my Celt, the roar of the crowd receding till I swear I could hear his breath and the steady pounding of his horses’ hooves. After the first circuit, he was holding third place. The other Celt and a Thracian were neck and neck in the lead. By the end of the fourth round, two chariots began to fall behind, and two began to gain on the leads. One of these was my Celt.
Now Succula and I were both on our feet, Succula shouting instructions in street Latin about what he should do with his podex (that’s right, Latin for ass) while I loosed an authentic Celtic battle cry. So authentic and so Celtic that I swear you could hear it above the trumpets and all the bellowing citizens of Rome. My Celt looked up; I was afraid I had distracted him till I realized that he had seen—or sensed—something else: three crows wheeling over the Circus, the noon day sun sending their shadows racing over the ground. For Celts, crows were not just birds; they were the Morrigan, the triple goddess of battle, slaughter, and death. Before it happened, I knew it would.
“Look out!” I screamed. “Look out!”
The next moment, one of the Thracians hurled a spear into my Celt’s wheel—a movement so swift that it could easily have been missed by most of the onlookers. The spear broke, but jammed the wheels long enough to upset the delicate balance of the speeding chariot. The Thracian had timed his move perfectly. The chariots were just rounding the sharp curve at the end of the circus. The Celt’s chariot tipped on its inside wheel. As if by pre-arranged signal, another Thracian chariot sideswiped the outer wheel, and the Celtic chariot went over, spilling its rider onto the track, the spooked horse going wild and thrashing and rearing as it dragged the wreck behind it. The Celt on the ground rolled nimbly in an acrobatic display and dodged the wheels of the oncoming chariot and somehow made it off the track to the median.
He had also managed to keep hold of his spear.
Several grooms scurried out from the stable under the circus and struggled to catch the driverless horse. Once off the racetrack, they swiftly parted him from the wreck and led him away. An eerie calm fell over the circus as the chariots raced towards the opposite end of the ellipse from where the big warrior stood, clearly waiting. I could feel him sinking his roots down into the Roman dirt, sending them across land, across water to gather strength from his own soil, his own gods.
Now the chariots rounded the far curve and began to move towards the warrior again. He remained motionless, but the three crows circled lower and lower till they were only a few feet above the his head. The chariots were nearly on him now, the Thracian just ahead of the second Celt. The crowd held its breath; all you could hear in the whole valley was the sound of hooves and wheels, the cry of the crows. I thought I saw the warrior tap his nose. An instant later the second Celt sprang from his chariot and cleared the track in an amazing series of aerial somersaults. Then the big Celt roared his war cry, a deep bellow that made every hair in the circus stand up, that would have raised the very hackles of the mother wolf of Rome. The seven hills shook with its power. If the Thracian charioteer could have turned back, I think he would have.
But it was too late. The Thracian’s horse reared; the Celt didn’t even need to cast a spear. The chariot careened out of control, and the Thracian hit the dirt. The charioteers still driving headed for the nearest exit. They knew what was coming. The crowd started pouring out of the bleachers, a human flood as dangerous as a burst dam—or a tidal bore.
“Bran!” I screamed. “Bran.”
I started to struggle, clawing and biting the huge restraining force that thwarted my will until I was sobbing with desperation and rage. The arms that held me only tightened.
“Easy, girl, easy.” I realized my captor was Bone. “That’s a full scale Roman riot down there. We stay right up here. Does everyone understand? This is the only place we don’t risk getting trampled to death. Look, the purple’s already made it out. They have a private escape route. Soldiers will be here soon to clear out the rabble. We stay put till then. Red, if you’d stop bawling, you’d see that your man is holding his own. Trained fighter by the look of him. Matter of fact, I’d say he’s enjoying himself. And as far as I can make out at least half the crowd is on his side; they’re brawling with the other half. The rest of ‘em don’t know what they’re doing. We’ve got the best view here.”
I calmed down enough to see that Bone was right. My Celt, my combrogo—yes, I felt a surge of pride—was in great form. What is more, the crows were helping him, swooping down and going for the eyes of his assailants. When the soldiers marched into the circus, most of the crowd turned tail. The charioteers, with nowhere to go, stood quietly and futilely defiant. All except for the Thracian who lay, dead or unconscious, on the ground.
“Ladies, let’s go.” Bone still had both his arms around me. “Trust me, Red, you don’t want to see this part.”
“No, Bone, no. Please. I have to know what happens to him.”
Bone swept me up in his arms and started carrying me down the steep steps as if I weighed nothing.
The Forum Boarium, where we emerged and joined the milling throngs, was the oldest part of the city and the most squalid. There were filthy children everywhere begging or stealing from market stalls. One small boy was aggressively soliciting for a whore—his mother?—who’d set up shop in a fornice. (Now you know the origin of the word fornicate—doing it standing up in an archway.) There wasn’t an alley, recess, or shadow that didn’t have some trade. Every tavern and eatery has its own whores. Bakeries sent whores into the street to sell pornographic cakes and lure customers into cells in back. Bone guided us to a relatively clean establishment off the main thoroughfare and bought us wine and meat pastries, which I felt too sick to eat. All of us were subdued.
“All right,” Bone sighed when we had finished. “Who’s up for a visit to the athletes’ pens?”
I turned to look at him, startled. He avoided eye contact, clearly embarrassed by his kindness.
“Bone,” I said before I could stop myself. “I love you.”
With the dropping of coins along with Domitia Tertia’s name, we gained entrance to the aptly named pens—horses, wild beasts, and men all quartered in the cellars of a huge imperial insularium. Our progress was greeted with whistles, catcalls, and innuendos in all the languages of the conquered. When we reached the charioteers’ quarters I returned some of the insults eloquently and in three different dialects. The Celts were thrilled to have their lineages disparaged in their own tongue—or acknowledged at all, come to that. They promptly fell to their knees before