Every Sacred Thing: Epilogue: The Fate of Empires

[aithne]

In my earliest memories, my mother is a small woman who blazed with a fierce internal light, and who I loved with a single-minded devotion.

That light never went out, and my love for her never faltered, not once through all the years while I grew up and she more or less ran the Roman Empire from behind the scenes. Of course we fought sometimes; she and I are both passionate people, and my adolescence was rough on both of us.

Then again, my adolescence was rough on everyone around me. I caught Faydren--known as Iunius after the Tower fell--sometimes looking at me during my lessons as if he couldn't believe what he'd gotten himself into, agreeing to be my teacher. My stepfather Darius looked at me like that too, when he caught me getting into something I shouldn't have. While my mother had an unerring knowledge of when I was hiding secrets, Darius had an excellent instinct for when I was about to get myself into serious trouble.

I grew up in and out of palaces and abodes much less grand; when the prohibition on pagan priests was lifted, Linaeus set up a clinic within the city, and I'd often go down to watch and help him. Lukas rededicated Hagia Sophia as a church; as I write, forty years later, we are preparing to turn the Tower back over to the Sassenids. I considered Lukas more or less my grandfather; he told the best stories, and he generally had a piece or two of candy for me.

Linaeus I remember best as a blind man who could nevertheless see right into the human soul. The demon was removed with only a bit of damage to him, mostly centered around him losing his sight, and many of his memories of how things looked. I think the thing that bothered him the most was that he could not remember colors--he remembered the concept of color, but not what actual colors looked like. He and Thalea married and had four children in quick succession. One, the youngest girl, inherited both Linaeus' blindness and his gift for the priesthood. They occasionally dropped off their children at our house for the day and would disappear off into the desert. I heard Mother murmur to Darius once, "Off to the oni oasis again, I see!" and they both broke down laughing.

Constantine officially died a few years after he really died. I only learned that little tidbit after my mother's death, that for the last three years of the emperor's life, he was really a mage named Hadrius. Hadrius occasionally visited after Constantine's death, and was introduced to me only as "an old friend of Lukas", which he was, in a manner of speaking. Diya and Constantine's son Cyricus did marry, just before the time my mother married, and they eventually had four children.

I don't think my mother ever really retired from running things behind the scenes. She guided Cyricus and Diya in their decisions, doing her best to make sure that Cyricus would be remembered as a good emperor--and training my sister to do the true work of running the Empire, since Cyricus wasn't really interested.

Several people who were causing trouble conveniently disappeared; I loved my mother, but if I had been her enemy, I would have never turned my back on her. She looked very sweet and kind and gentle, but she had a quick mind and a sting like a scorpion. She was utterly ruthless when she needed to be, and she had a seemingly supernatural ability to tell what people's intentions were.

My mother and Darius married just after my younger sister Statilla was born. She never admitted to anyone that Statilla (named after my great-aunt, of course) was not my father's child but Darius's, though there are a number who guessed--Statilla looks quite a bit like Darius, and like him she never says ten words when one will do. They had two more children, both boys, in the years following, and remained very happily married until the end of their days. My mother was a difficult woman, and I can't imagine anyone but Darius dealing as well with her as he did. When I was eight or nine or so, I took to calling him Father.

My brothers and sisters are all mages of some sort. Now that I know what she was before she shut away her past, I am completely unsurprised. Power ran thick in Livia Neria Aulia's veins, that's for certain.

She never spoke to any of us about who her father was, and that Geras had been her half-brother. There was never any indication that she thought about it at all, except for the fact that once a year she would go to visit the grave of Geras's son.

My stepfather left the politics to my mother for the most part, though I know they talked over everything she was doing. He never stopped being her bodyguard, and would never hear of entrusting her safety to anyone but himself.

There were those who thought that he controlled her from behind the scenes, not understanding how a woman could wield so much power. Some of them even tried to curry his favor, thinking to skip having to deal with Livia entirely. He always seemed amused by these attempts, and occasionally played along when he felt like it. But he was not a politician at heart, and was generally more than happy to let Livia run the Empire as it suited her.

I remember Darius as being a large and quiet man who felt many things very deeply, but let little of it show, and very rarely talked about himself. When I grew up, I occasionally went to him for advice; during those talks, I found out much more about him than I would have ever found out otherwise.

I remember one chat in particular. I must have been seventeen or so, and struggling with entirely inappropriate feelings for a boy my age, a soldier, whose name I can barely remember now. I interrupted him in his workroom, I recall.

I asked him, "When did you know you were in love with Mother?"

He blinked and set the book he was making notes in down. "There's a question I never thought you'd ask of me. Why do you want to know?"

I suppose my shrug and guilty look were eloquent enough for him. He chuckled. "I met Livia just after your father died. I don't know how much you remember of that time in your life."

I shrugged again. "More than you probably think." Which is true; I was young, but that part of my life left a very deep impression on me.

"Well, then. I can't say it was love at first sight; she wasn't at her best when I first met her. I could see that she was doing the best she could, and she was managing to make it through each day, if only for your sake. After we discovered part of what was going on back then, I saw her come alive again. I can't say exactly when I realized that my feelings for her had become more personal, but it was sometime during that time. She was--and still is--beautiful when she's on the trail of a secret." He was speaking candidly now, looking away from me as if he were staring into his own memories.

"How did you know you loved her?" I asked. "What made you realize it?"

He frowned, lost in thought. "There wasn't really any one thing, Optata. It was thousands of things. I think I finally realized how much I felt for her when she came to me with--a proposal."

I raised my eyebrows. "What kind of proposal?"

He laughed. "That, dear heart, is between me and your mother. Let's just say that it wasn't something I ever expected from her, and had I not felt for her how I did, I never would have agreed. As for how I knew, I think it was when I realized that it wasn't enough any longer for me to die in the service of my cause. I wanted to live, to see what life with your mother might bring." He gave me a sharp look. "Does that answer your question? I'm assuming you're asking because of your soldier boy."

I grimaced. "You and Mother have spoiled me. He wants to marry, I'm not so sure. I want what you and she have for myself, and nothing else will do."

Father shook his head. "You have the luxury of not needing to marry for political or financial reasons, Optata," he told me seriously. "Your mother and your older sister have made sure of that. Use that freedom wisely. I know your mother would like to see you married, but she and I also want you to be happy."

"I know. We'll see what happens. Thank you, Father." I kissed him on the cheek and left him there in the workroom.

As I turned to close the door, I caught him with a look on his face that I had never seen before, and would never see again. His eyes were distant, and he had a look on his face of intense joy and wonder, as if he were remembering something that still amazed him, even years later.

I did not marry my soldier, and in the end I was very glad I had made that decision. When I was twenty-three, I renewed by chance my friendship with Julian, one of the boys that I had been trapped in Constantius's house with after my father Sextus died. He had become a priest of Athena, studying under Lukas before the old priest's death, and one of the Hagia Sophia senior priests had sent him with a message for my mother one day. I happened to take the message from him, and we fell into conversation--a conversation that lasted most of the afternoon. It was evening before we had realized how much time had passed. We parted that evening with a promise to meet again the next day and continue our conversation.

Six months later, we were married. And still are, quite happily. I overjoyed my mother by having three children. I have to say I'm an indifferent mother at best; I didn't inherit my mother's love of babies and small children, and I fear that my children mostly remember me as an absence until they were old enough to have a reasonable conversation with me. Fortunately, with my extended family, the children had more than enough love and attention from every quarter. One of them, the youngest boy, was adopted by Faydren and Aranis when he was three. He still knows I'm his natural mother, of course, but Aranis was beyond her childbearing years when she was brought out of her madness, and adopting my son gave them an heir.

Diya, I'm afraid, was not nearly so lucky. Cyricus was far more concerned about where his next bottle was coming from and when he would next get to go out riding with his friends than about either the empire that was nominally under his care or the happiness of his wife. Diya bore him with good grace, but shed few tears when he drank himself to death when their oldest son was ten. The boy was named emperor, and Diya regent for him.

I know Diya took lovers after Cyricus died, but she never confided in me who they were. I noticed, though, that the men in her personal guard were all reasonably easy on the eyes.

Time went on, as it does. Aunt Aphe appears in my life now and then, though it's now been about seven years since she's appeared, and I'm starting to wonder if her last visit to me was her final one. Lukas died when I was eighteen--he complained of a headache one afternoon, lay down for a nap, and never woke up. Linaeus followed his father into death scarce a year later. His body finally gave out on him, all of the damage he did to it as a young man finally catching up with him. After he died, Thalea sank into a deep silence out of which she has never really ventured; she has discovered some of the most amazing things in her research, but it takes a team of horses to pull her new knowledge out of her.

Neera was freed by Faydren's "death", and my mother gave her quite a sum of money to start her out on a new life. She traveled the Empire for years, playing her way from town to town. I beleive she did some spying for my mother as a sideline to her music, and she would come to visit every once in a while. She would always play my mother to sleep when she was here, but as far as I know Mother never used her as Faydren had.

Faydren and I continue to have a strong working partnership. Once he had taught me all he knew, I struck out on my own. We still meet every week or so, to discuss what we've been doing. I still see occasionally flashes of the man my mother knew--the cunning, ruthless mage who would stop at nothing to achieve his aims--but those are rare, now. He is not aging like everyone around him, and when I ask he simply shrugs and says that his mother's people are long-lived.

Oddly enough, I am not aging at the rate one would expect, either. I am midway through my fourth decade, and I still appear to be in my twenties. Julian is occasionally mistaken for my father or uncle rather than my husband. Faydren refuses to say why this might be, but I have my guesses.

Aranis, Faydren's consort, died about ten years ago. She was much mourned; she was loved dearly by everyone who knew her. She had not an unkind fiber in her body, except for some lingering anger at the people who had kept her confined for so long.

When I found out what my mother had been involved in when I was younger, I asked Faydren how much he had known of her activities. He chuckled softly. "When Sextus Nerius gave me the gem she wore, I modified it slightly, so it acts as a beacon to me. Aphe was following her almost every step of the way. I showed Livia the images I captured of her stealing the gem from my library a number of years ago. It took her six months to say more than a bare word to me after that." He smiled, a bit ruefully. "Your mother surprised me in more ways than one, Optata."

And that was all he ever had to say about the subject to me. He and I never discuss her, even now.

When I was thirty-five, I woke in the middle of the night with the sense that something was very, very wrong, threw on some clothes, and ran to my mother's house. In the courtyard, I discovered Darius lying very still, not breathing, and my mother lying across him. Father's death wasn't surprising; age had taken him harshly in the few years prior, as it does many gladiators who are lucky enough to live out their natural lifespans. His body was failing, though his mind was sharp as ever. But my mother--she was still healthy as a horse, and I thought she was planning on living forever.

Then I saw the goblet of wine that had fallen from her hand, spilling what little remained of the contents on the tile, and understood what she had done. Mother stirred, and murmured, "I'm so sorry--didn't want you to see this--" Her words were slurred, and she could barely hold her head up.

"I'll get someone, one of the priests--" Silently, she shook her head, and in her eyes I saw a vast grief. That look brought it all back to me, the time when I was a small child and she had lost another man who had meant the world to her, all of the suffering that she had tried to hide from me. She put her head back down on Darius's unmoving chest and closed her eyes.

I held her hand and cried as she died.

I do not believe, as the priests of Christos would have it, that what she did was a sin. She likely would not have lived much beyond Father's death, any way I look at it. The pair of them were two halves of a whole, and I believe that the thought of life without Darius was truly unbearable for my mother. She had finished what she had set out to do, and she chose quite deliberately to follow Father when he went. It took me some time to come to terms with that, but I finally managed it. Diya, unfortunately, never has. My older sister still grieves our mother bitterly. Of all of Livia's children, Diya was the one who clung the hardest, who never took her love for granted, who was always hungry for more. Our mother gave to her unstintingly; if there was one thing she had in abundance, it was love.

About three weeks after she died, I was taking care of my mother's effects and saw on her desk the funny little birdhouse that she had always kept with her. I touched the sparkling entrance and was taken to the giant room on the other side of the birdhouse door. And there was the keeper, a woman who looked very much like my mother, missing only that essential spark, that light in her that was visible for all to see.

My mother had spent much time talking to the previous keeper, and she had many stories to tell. I learned so much that I never suspected, especially about that time right after my father Sextus died. She and Father kept their secrets very well.

I began to write down her story, talking to the keeper and those still alive who were around then. It was about then that I started learning about the powers of the other bequest she left to me, the bracelet with the stone that she wore constantly until she died.

I have not put it on. Honestly, I am a little bit afraid to. I'm too much like her, sometimes.

I do not know what the future will hold. All of my divinations tell me that there is a troubled time ahead, one that will change the Empire forever if it does not destroy it.

But it is the fate of empires to fall.

And it is people like me, like my mother, who keep them from doing so, for the time that we have.


By my own hand,
Optata Neria Aulia Constantia
a mage of Constantinople.