After leaving Getorius, Arcadia decided she needed to think out this latest disappointment. Three weeks had passed, her husband was still under arrest, and no lawyer had come to counsel him. Senator Maximin’s offer of legal advice seemed to have evaporated like the morning mist on the surface of the Bedesis River.
Instead of going directly home, Arcadia walked along the Via Honorius toward the old forum. It was early evening, when people were indoors eating supper, so she found the area deserted. Looking at the surviving cluster of derelict buildings, which for four centuries had been at the core of civic life in Ravenna, added to her sense of dejection.
Arcadia paused across from a small temple to Fortuna. Because the building had been dedicated to a personification of good luck—especially for married women who wished fertility and a safe delivery of their child—it had been the last one closed by the bishop. Its barred bronze door was visible in the gloom beyond the six porch columns, a mute indication that the goddess, who was once worshipped for bringing good fortune, had been powerless to protect her own shrine.
Arcadia recalled seeing the cult statue as a child. The goddess had been graceful and beautiful, as she imagined her own mother to have been. Fortuna, her father had explained, held a brimming cornucopia in one hand. The other rested on the rudder with which pagans believed the goddess steered the course of their lives. Was Fortuna still inside the temple, neglected, or had her statue been smashed off its pedestal to feed the limekilns? Perhaps thrown into the sea after the bishop’s order to close the shrine?
Drawn to the temple, Arcadia crossed the street, then stopped short at the curb.
Mother of God, am I desperate enough to imagine that some connection with the spirit of a pagan goddess who once was honored here might inspire me?
She came closer to the temple steps and saw that someone had placed a pitiful offering of bread and a wooden cup half-full of wine on the lowest stair. The crusts were recent enough not to have attracted pigeons. Perhaps the supplicant was a slave desperate for luck in some way, Arcadia mused, then impulsively pulled the Celtic case out of her cloak and touched it to the temple stair.
Getorius is under arrest on a charge that could have both of us banished from Ravenna. But at least he’s still alive. Maximin could be using his chicken farm as a center for a conspiracy that’s connected with a forged will. Aetius might be briefing officers loyal to him for a palace take-over this month, when Nativity celebrations will put everyone off guard. Theokritos has been testing the two papyri for almost a month. Is he stalling, involved in the plot? Will he declare the documents genuine, then demand that the will be released?
Arcadia shivered and pulled her cape tighter around her shoulders, fighting a desire to cry. The possibility that Theokritos might be involved had not occurred to her before. The conspirators don’t have the will, yet a duplicate copy might have been made, and be ready to be announced by whoever forged it. Yet I don’t know any more about how that might be done than I did on that night of the November ides.
She wiped her eyes and glanced up at the weathered inscription on the temple architrave, above the columns. “Divine Fortune Smile on Us,” she read aloud, then suddenly recalled a comment Getorius had made about someone coming from Gaul. “Fortuna, is there one other hope? My husband said that a person from Behan’s abbey should have been here last week. No one came but…but, goddess, give them safe passage. Let them arrive quickly.”
A gust of wind blew the crusts of bread off the step. Arcadia tucked the case back under her cape, wondering if anyone had watched her impromptu ritual. She looked down both sides of the street. Except for a man relieving himself against a wall of the baths, no one was nearby.
In the deepening twilight Arcadia grasped the cylinder tightly against her body, then turned and hurried back across the street, to the security of her walled home.
Chapter eighteen
An exhausted Brenos of Slana reined his horse to a halt under a soggy pine tree atop a knoll that was about a mile west of Ravenna. He pushed back his broad-brimmed leather hat, sucked rain off the scraggly moustache on his upper lip, and dismounted to peer at the mist-blurred walls of the capital city.
When a reflexive shiver shuddered through his body, from fever as well as the cold weather, he hunched down, to hoard whatever warmth his wet, mud-spotted robe might still retain. The effort was painful. The raw wound on his side from the leather case chafing against his skin, was now an angry red sore suppurating with yellow pus. Fiachra had tried to heal the inflammation with a solution brewed from dried symphytum leaves, but the medication had not stopped the hot redness from spreading.
The abbot stood again, wiped a damp sleeve across his face, and slipped his pilgrim’s staff from its retaining strap, fingering the final notch he had cut into the wood that morning. There were thirty-two marks in all, one for each day of his journey, through what he had come to consider the realm of Satan, toward the Final Judgment. He had lost track of the date, but counting the markings a second time showed that it should be the twenty-first of December; the voyage from Gaul had taken much longer than he had estimated. Brenos imagined that he looked as wet as the otters he had seen in hunters’ traps on the Icauna River. It was an apt comparison.
