Tiber Green, Vestal White
Rhea Silvia: A Story of the Mother of Rome, Part 2
The first snow of the year fell two days ago. I can still see a little bit of it up on the moor, gathered in drifts round the rocks of the big tor, when I walk up to the hillfort in the long morning light.
That touch of snow on the hill seems to have changed it. White on the hazel leaves, white on the holly leaves, white on the ivy leaves, white round the roots of the ash trees.
It’s melted now, but I won’t forget the way it opened the wood into elsewhere, into another version of itself, one I hadn’t seen before. Into winter, yes, but also into a dimension of remembering that seemed to hold all winters in it, in a way that no other season or element quite does. It was as if the snow had fallen on World War II trees, on Victorian trees, on Elizabethan trees, on Medieval trees, on Norman-era trees, on Anglo-Saxon-era trees, on Celtic trees, on Iron Age-before-Celts trees, on Bronze Age trees, on Neolithic trees, on Paleolithic trees, on trees that were here when there were reindeer and brown bears in the caves near Torbryan; all at once on all those trees and also on me as I stood panting and grinning in the cold, touching my bare fingers to the snow on the trunks and leaves until they froze and I had to stuff them in my pockets.
This is the hearth of the year, the hollow that snow fills, the still-point. It’s so much more pronounced than I’m used to, being further north like this— the feeling of a circling in, time curving round to rest as a little now comes, and then after it frost, and bright skies. I’m doing my best to savor this rhythm as much as I can. And the way it calls up the very deepest stories in me.
I have a winter-season tale offering brewing that possibly involves the amulet-wearing Parisii of the East Riding of Yorkshire (where it turns out my motherline is from) and maybe a flash of the hunt in Culhwch and Olwen, and more mysteries besides… I’m considering sending out this story offering over two or three winter months (January, February, March?) as I once did my Gray Fox Epistles and other projects more than 10 years ago— in the post, in little brown envelopes, wax sealed and signed! Either that, or I’ll share it here, but I feel drawn to a project that takes us all away from the bright screen… That slows us back down again for the winter to the pace of letterbox and pen and ink and paper… What do you think? Do pop me a message, or share in the comments, if you like the idea!
And also note that at the end of this post there’s a last minute holiday offering of specially painted Venus Years, as well as discounted books— to be ordered by Tuesday December 5th for a Christmas delivery!
And now, without further ado, here is the second and concluding half of my story “Rhea Silvia” (originally published in Our Lady of the Dark Country in 2017). You can listen along through the recording embedded below (from my podcast Kalliope’s Sanctum, story starts after the introduction at around minute 3:20).
If you missed part one last week, it can be accessed here, and of course in the archives!
R H E A S I L V I A a novelette by Sylvia V. Linsteadt + p a r t t w o
My brother and I had chosen a place to sleep a little way off from the fire, among a patch of woodviolets. It took them longer to find us. By then those still alive had woken and fought back with their own hunting bows and knives, with rocks and teeth and fists. My mother’s people did not in that clamor seem wholly human either. In my memory stags and sows and bears and beech trees fought inside the wild smoke and ash between the men and women I loved. The forest fought, but Mars and his men of war won.
My brother and I kept very still among the violets and beech leaves, bellies down. He whimpered but I put my hand on his mouth and held him. Until I die I will keep him there in my heart, warm and sweet smelling, still half the baby he had been, a boy of four who believed me wholly when I whispered to him we will be alright, don’t worry my sweetheart, I will keep you safe, we will escape, a wolf will save us, I will save us, we are the forest’s children, she will keep us safe. I love you I love you I love you.
I said those words into his hair. I put my hands over his ears but I know he still heard the screaming, because he shook in my arms. I tried to shift us further into the forest, into the dark, into some deep fathomless bush, but every movement made the leaves crackle, and fear made me clumsy. I could feel my heart clamoring against my bones, thudding against my brother’s back where I held him.
After a time there was no more screaming, only the sound of a new fire crackling, and men in metal armor moving about, gloating over the bodies of the dead, stripping them for trinkets and rings. Then I held absolutely still, and told my brother to be quieter than any mouse. But the fear was too great, building and building in him, and he let out a helpless whimper when he saw a man shoving through the piles of the dead, searching for something or someone. For us.
It was my uncle who found us in the end. I should have known he would not leave until he had found my brother, heir to Numitor’s throne and a future threat to his sovereignty. He came toward us from the fire, backlit by those terrible bright shadows and a rush of smoke. He was not my uncle but the god of War. War was in him. He was covered in other men’s blood. He saw us clearly, as a hunter does, not for who we were but for what he wanted from us. I struggled up and tried to lift my brother so we might run, but he was too heavy to carry and too terrified to move, and my uncle killed him with one blow. Then all my fear turned to rage and I whirled on Amulius, screaming as the owl screams, as the wolf screams, as the mountains. I threw myself nails and teeth at his neck, trying to choke him with my bare hands. I saw as if through a veil or from a distance; my uncle was and was not my uncle. Another man stood in him, as big and awful as death, helmeted of stars and far more terrible than Amulius. Both would have killed me. Both were on the verge of killing me. But violence is its own kind of lust, and so my uncle and the War in him, and then all of his men after him, did to me what at the time seemed worse than death.
+ + +
After that I felt nothing. When they bound and gagged me and set me on a horse behind my uncle, I looked back at our encampment with unfeeling eyes. I had been broken from my people and my family. I was entirely alone now. I could not weep. I was stone. I had made myself stone the moment War decided not to kill me and took me instead. I felt nothing as I looked, trying not to see in the bodies the body of my father, my mother. In death there was a terrible sameness.
In the last moment as I craned to see what remained of my people, my eyes the only witness or last rite I could give, I saw a flash of red and black. A woodpecker, alighting. Old Picus, god of the wood and the autumn rain. And there among the beech trunks a long-legged wolf whose head was bent toward the earth. There was a man below her. She licked the wound on his neck. The woodpecker cried, calling out his rattle calls. It was my father. I made a sound in my gag. Under the wolf’s tongue I saw him stir.
Then we were galloping, and that place and my mother, my father, my brother, my people, were gone from me forever.
When we returned to Alba Longa and my uncle’s men were sober again, feeling their wounds and the black pall that killing brings, Amulius looked on me as if he could not remember why I was there. My city was no longer my city. The fine farmer’s huts looked hunched and dark. My father’s palace was like a pulled tooth, a terrible white molar. It had never seemed so to me before, but I was not the Rhea who had left it.
Only the Tiber was the same, pale green and gleaming, a broad muscled arm dancing to the sea. For a moment I saw a man standing in it, the water at his hips, bare-chested. He was dark and muscled as the farmers who worked the fields, and slouched the way men slouch who know their own strength and are at ease. A farmer, bathing, I thought, very distant from myself and full of a terrible sadness that touched everything with loss. My father’s farmer. The man looked up and I flinched, surprised. His eyes were the Tiber’s eyes, pale green and startling as his face was—wide-nosed, fierce, a warrior’s face but with none of the violence. A strange thought, a strange sight. He dove straight into the current. I watched for many minutes in the saddle behind my uncle as we crossed the bridge into the city, but the man did not emerge again.
I forgot him. I did not wonder where he might have gone. I did not wonder at anything, because wondering at all about anything save the next step and the next breath, the next bite, was too much for me to bear. I did not think I could survive the horror of what I remembered, and so I was as a shade to myself, and to my uncle, to all men and women, watching as a shadow does.
From that dispassionate place I understood why my uncle had not killed me, why he had stayed his hand at the last and brought me back. He knew my father’s people would be more amenable to his rule with me as a figurehead, their eternal daughter, keeper of the fire. This I became, and the business of Vesta, the sacred hearth, became a different thing than it had been under my father’s rule. More public, more harshly moralistic. More my uncle’s. He got rid of the old matron who had been in charge of the central fire-temple in the palace since I was a girl— my father’s nursemaid and grandmother to dozens—and put me in charge, and three witless girls under me to do my bidding. So he said, but I knew he also set them to spy on me, to make sure I inspired no rebellions nor met in secret with men who might have challenged him. The health of the city was tied to the health of the fire, he said. If it went out, I would be beaten. I was the city’s daughter now and could marry no man, but must tend the fire, carry the spring water, grind the holly emmer flour for offerings, until I was old, entirely chaste unto death. This was a new Vestal service, different from what I had known as a girl, in service to my uncle’s rule.
I did it all at a great distance from myself. I hardly remember the details of those months save the cold clarity of my hatred. I plotted to kill my uncle I think, though not with very much foresight. I would stab him with the firepoker; I would gather hemlock seeds from the fields and offer him a Vestal cup. So I planned, so I dreamed, but the life was so thin in me those days that mostly I went through the motions of wood-gathering and the baking of offerings as if in a dream, and wept cold, un-relieving tears on my pallet until I slept.
But despite my distance, the people of Alba Longa flocked to me. My uncle had been clever, knowing that my presence would distract them, appease them. Hands touched my white dress in the street when I passed, coming or going on an errand for the sanctuary. On such errands I was followed at a little distance by my uncle’s guard, but this did not perturb the people in the least. They pressed gifts upon me as if I were an idol carried from the temple, as if they were making wishes on my body. Apples, walnuts, quince, a lucky bit of amber, a red scrap of cloth.
In truth I think that those loving touches and small offerings helped to keep me living. In their hands they told me that they did not care so much about the hearth as they did about me, the daughter of their lost king, daughter of peace, daughter of fearlessness, of that time when young women still ran free and safe in the lanes, and their sons were not imminently to be mustered for a new war. They knew some treachery had occurred and were desperate, I think, to ask me of it, but I rarely spoke in that time, and anyway it was too dangerous. So the fruits, the nuts, the ribbons, the charms, were give instead of words, a language of hope over me—do not, oh gods, take her from us too. See, it is all right, it must be, she is still here.
I might have run away if I had been less listless, but the damage done me in body and in mind was a terrible kind of chain for the first months. It would have been a gamble anyway, for my mother’s people had been the last of the old tribes and I did not know where I might go to be assured protection and not yet more ill use by men. But everything changed in the second month of my uncle’s rule when my bleeding did not come and I found that I was pregnant.
It was impossible for me to say who the father was among the many who had killed my family, though sometimes in a sick malaise I feared it was my uncle. But I could not know. I never will. War was their father. This is what I tell myself now, and it is true. What War did to men—He was the unwanted father of my sons, and yet I pitied the babies who grew in me after hating them at first and trying to rid myself of the pregnancy using the herbal knowledge my mother had carefully taught me. My sons were little fighters even then. I bled dangerously and the old nursemaid who had once tended the Vestal fire helped me not to die, so that I kept both my life and my fierce twins.
It was she who first told me I carried twins, though I had felt in my fatigue their twoness, and in my daily sickness which I struggled to hide from my handmaids. Out of sheer desperation I managed to do so by going down at dawn to the river, to the spring where I gathered the Vestal water. There I would be sick in the deep shade of the sycamore trees where once I had played a little elder flute to Tiber and danced naked on a rock. A woman’s place, that pool, the spring under a limestone rock, the shapely tree. Only the cold, clear water from that spring could soothe me on those mornings. I’d drink with my mouth right in the current, lapping with my tongue.
Once or twice I saw a man’s face down near the clear bottom, where the white stones were round and the floating bronze leaves cast their shadows. I didn’t pay it much heed, for my closed eyelids were so often full of the faces of my uncle’s men. I did not want to look very closely, neither at the memory of them, nor the memory of my father and brother. I drank the cold water and it always settled my stomach enough that I could sit quietly for a time before I thought I would missed, and watch the leaves float, the small fly-catching birds flit and dart, and listen to the Tiber’s low, sweet sound.
I brought some of the gifts the people pressed upon me to the river, to that water which had never deceived or betrayed me, and by whose side I had always been safe. Coppers, quince, red ribbons, walnut shells full of tallow and a wick. There by the water under the sycamore I came to love my unborn sons. I felt their tiny knees and elbows, shifting like the flutter of birds. A woodpecker often came to the tree and tapped while I sat, half-dreaming, hands to my belly. They were innocent. This I saw and knew when I sat there—innocent as I was, unspoiled though not unstained.
In my uncle’s presence I still hated them sometimes, and thought of them like two leeches draining me, taking from me, put inside me when I had not wanted them, and yet my body cared for them with the absolution of Earth for all her creatures, making them beautiful, making them forgiven. After a time, thanks to the river and the tree, I loved them even in the face of my uncle, in defiance of him, of his men, of his wars. I thought if I loved them well enough I could protect them, I could will them to be other than what had brought them to me. But it wasn’t enough. A mother’s love for the sons nine months in her womb is not enough to keep them from the wars and deeds of the world of men, without her the other eighteen years until they are grown.
I managed by some miracle to hide the pregnancy from my women until it was seven months along. The robes we wore were loose, and I kept myself private from them when I changed, and I had always been small. But twins do not hide well, and when the cleverest of them, a girl called Mia, found me out at last, my suspicions of their daily treacheries to my uncle were confirmed. She had ambitions for my position as head Vestal, or perhaps aspired to be queen. In any case, when I saw her eyes on my belly in the sanctuary one day as a betraying wind blew my robes taut against my body so that the outline of my sons could not be hidden, I expected the worst. My uncle had proclaimed loudly to us, and to all in the city, that his Vestals were virgin, chaste, the city’s pure vessels, a sign of the divinity of his ascension. Pregnancy was therefore punishable by instant death—drowning or burning outside the city wall.
Two days later I was seized and thrown into the dungeon. I still do not know what my uncle recalled, or suspected, or knew, whether he believed it when he called me slut and whore and accused me of intimacy with one of the guards, some seduction right in the Vestal sanctuary. When I said, to defy him, that the god of War had done it, he spat at my feet. Sometimes I think he really didn’t remember; that he and his men had been too drunk on the violence they had done, so that everything around them that night was of the same matter, indistinguishable, I no more to any of them than the bodies they had slain. I don’t know which is worse. That he did not remember, or that he did and still treated me thus.
What Amulis didn’t reckon was the fury of the people of Alba Longa at my imprisonment, who by the following morning were gathered around the palace walls, chanting for my release. My uncle had not reckoned the law of the matriline among the ancient laws of our people. That the children of a daughter of Numitor had more right to the throne than his brother. I was a daughter of Alba Longa, Vestal priestess and, thanks to my uncle’s rhetoric, not a whore in their eyes but a miracle, a virgin conception, the lover of a god, and therefore the mother of gods, or at least great heroes. Amulius, seeing the sticky place he found himself and the very real danger of revolt—and not wanting the blood of an entire city on his hands, not when he needed my father’s farmers to take up arms for him come summer to conquer the neighboring Sabines, to bring more and more wealth to Alba Longa—did another clever, cruel thing in order to get what he wanted. Of course, it seemed benevolent to the people of Alba Longa, which was exactly what he intended. He released me from the dungeon and kept me on house arrest for the final two months, saying to the people that he was giving me the finest treatment as mother of a deity’s child.
He allowed me once or twice a month to walk, heavily guarded, to the city center and back, just enough to appease the people that I was alive and well. On those days he dressed me in finery and had my maids apply lip paint to my mouth and kohl to my eyes, so that I appeared just as the people longed to see me—a beautiful auspicious thing, a quince tree bearing golden fruit, a nymph who might bless them if they only touched her round belly.
I bore it in numbness. Those final months were the worst of all. Hate alternately burned and numbed me. I remember mostly just the haze of it, like what’s left behind after a fire. I hated the people of Alba Longa as much as my uncle by the end, for prolonging my humiliation. Let me die, oh let me my sons when you are born. I prayed this way, terrible prayers. I prayed pestilence and fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption, plague, all upon Alba Longa.
But at night I dreamt only of the Tiber and the cool spring water in my mouth. I dreamt I was swimming in the river, the water carrying my body, holding me, my round belly a buoy, a boat. I dreamt the eye of the river, as pale green as the water with its limestone banks, seeing through me, watching me tenderly.
I thought these were dreams of my death but they were not. They were dreams of something far stranger. They were dreams of what was to come.
Plague indeed struck, a terrible smallpox that took many of Alba Longa’s children and left mothers and fathers desperate for someone to blame. My uncle was only too happy to supply that someone before they thought to blame him as the true cause, to blame the squalor his rule had created thanks to the taxes levied to support his many invasions. I became the blame, the source. The unclean daughter of Alba Longa, a whore after all. I had invited ruin on the city, just as he’d warned. I became scapegoat, spectacle, sorceress, no longer goddess.
He took my sons from me the moment their cords were cut and gave them to a solider to drown. I was bound and gagged and weighted down with stones inside my dress, my breasts searing with milk ungiven, blood still on my legs from the birth, and thrown in the river. A public spectacle, a sacrifice, an offering.
If she floats, she is divine, pure after all, and she will save us all. If she sinks, she is a curse, the cause, and it is I who have saved you. So my uncle said before the gathered crowd.
Needless to say, with so many stones in my dress and my limbs bound, I sank. Also I did not fill my lungs enough to even attempt to float. I sank to the very bottom of the deepest bend in the river where I had been thrown, a mile outside the city so as not to bring ill luck too near. The people of Alba Longa threw flour and coins in the water after me to appease the evil I carried. I saw this as I thrashed and sank. Then I hit the smooth river bottom, and it was a relief. Darkness filled my eyes, and I remembered my mother by the fire in the beechwood and how she danced. I saw the young singer I had loved for a season, and my brother running until his dark hair flew among the rows of wheat and red poppies.
After that, I knew no more except arms carrying me, warm and strong. The Tiber bore me out of time and into darkness, into a place of rich and woven shadows, a place of roots. The arms carried me into the river’s unending time.
I drifted without name, without fixed form. I was a wolf, fur of sky-gray, suckling the sons I had lost. I was a woodpecker, red-capped, knocking at the trees for word of my children. I was the wife of a shepherd in a humble clay house on a mountain, raising foundling boys as fierce as wolf-pups. I was a sycamore tree with my wide roots in the river and my trunk curved as a woman’s body, my leaves filling and filling with sun. I was the beech forest of my childhood, and the oak, and the mountain’s white stone.
+ + +
It was only when, much to my surprise, I actually woke up still Rhea, though entirely naked, that I realized those arms had been real and not the arms of death. They were familiar arms, belonging to the man by the fire. I had seen them before. This I thought vaguely as I woke in a deep holt in the riverbank among the smooth roots of a tree. A place like an otter’s home, only bigger, drier, polished with light.
I lay warm under a nest of carefully braided rabbit skins, on top of a dense ram-skin and a bed of dry reeds. Light came from the fire in a hearth, and from the man who sat, somewhat hunched and big-shouldered, at the far corner, mending something green as beech leaves in his lap. A light came from him that was not the fire’s glance, but something deeper, veined, green as the Tiber in sun.
I remembered him then.
He was the man I had seen the day my uncle brought me as a captive back into my own city, who dove into the river and did not emerge. He felt my eyes and looked up from the needle and cloth in his lap. How can such a large hand thread such a small needle? I thought, still vague. I knew his face too. Wide-nosed, eyes pale as river water and deep-set, hair short and dark as an otter’s. He smiled when he saw me wake, a smile that turned all that was harsh in his features to something gentle. It was the face I’d seen in the Tiber’s pool when I drank from it to ease the sickness my sons had brought me.
My sons.
I don’t know if the words came out of me or stayed in, but the one who sat green-eyed by the fire spoke to me as if I had said them aloud.
“Your sons lived. I made sure of it.” His voice was as smooth as the river that had carried me, and as deep. “I am sorry I could not bring you to them. I am sorry I could not carry you all elsewhere, to another land. But to keep you from death I had to take you far away, and it took many turnings of the world before you would come back to yourself.” He stood, holding the green cloth out, and came toward me, moving as a muscle of water and yet steadily, so as not to frighten me. But I was frightened still, for he was a man, the river’s god, and some of the memory of before was in my body still, though not as much as there had been. I flinched, and he stopped halfway to me from the fire, holding out what I saw was a green dress. His face hardened, but not at me.
“I have yet to forgive what was done to you, daughter of the wood. Know that I drowned as many of your uncle’s men as I could manage, though not your uncle himself. Another who hated him just as well got there before me.”
“You’ve—what?” I think this was the first thing I actually spoke aloud, and my voice was hoarse with disuse. “Why have you done these things for me? And—who are you?” I knew the answer to that part already, but I wanted to hear it spoken just to be certain.
“Surely you know me. I am the Tiber, and I have watched over you since you were young. You who never failed to bring me honey and milk and wine. You who sang my secret names, and danced on the stone.”
“Did I?” I said faintly, trying to remember what it had felt like to be a girl carrying jugs of milk to the riverbank, and singing to the current.
“You did,” he replied, low, still smiling, still perfectly motionless in the middle of the room with the green dress in his hands.
“Very well,” I said. “But I do not remember your secret names now. Tell me, Tiber River, why it is you speak of my sons in the past, and my uncle? Tell me, where are we, and how long have I been… not myself?”
Keeping one eye on me like one might a frightened deer, he stepped nearer once more, and again, and sat down on a smooth seat, not too close but close enough to lay the green dress quietly on the bed.
Then he told me the story of Romulus and Remus, my sons.
As he spoke in his low, riverstone voice I remembered the dark, formless time that had seemed like death. I felt the many seasons that some part of me had passed through, not my body but some other piece of me, while the Tiber held me in the bank, keeping me warm, keeping me safe.
He told me how the soldier had not killed my sons as my uncle had ordered but, taking pity on the tiny newborn things, set them in a covered basket given him by his wife and put them in the river, where Tiber carried them in his arms just as gently and effortlessly as he had carried me. He brought them to a deep bank of reeds where a wolf whose cubs had been killed by hunters found them and loved them at once, and took them back to her cave. There they were all three watched over by a red-capped woodpecker. One day a woman named Acca followed that woodpecker because she had dreamed of him, and found my infant boys in the wolf’s cave, wild as cubs and covered in sticks and leaves. She took them when the wolf mother was hunting, and she and her husband raised them as shepherd boys who knew no violence save the necessary slaughter of sheep, and much happiness among the seven hills of that valley where the Tiber ran most beautifully toward my mother’s mountain.
It is a story well known, the story of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome. How my father, the old king Numitor, having survived the slaughter, returned from a long time hiding in the mountains to find a contingent of young angry men eager to avenge the murder of his family. In his loss he had become honed for vengeance too. How my boys, full grown by then, became leaders of that pack of youths who were hungry for justice, for freedom from Amulius’ harsh reign, but mostly hungry to be heroes. How Remus was captured at Alba Longa and Romulus led the men in his rescue. How Numitor and Amulius both recognized their own faces in the faces of my sons. How Amulius was killed, and Numitor restored to the throne of Alba Longa, and the boys, my boys, my young sons, went home to the place of seven hills where they had been suckled by the wolf and raised by the good shepherds, full of their own virility, their own power, and the blessing of support and resources from their grandfather. How they decided with the exuberance of youth to found their own city, the greatest city in the world.
They had many followers, Romulus the most, being the bigger and stronger and more daring of the two. Remus had become troubled after his stay in his great-uncle’s dungeon. I do not like to wonder what befell him there. He cowered at the sound of metal brushing metal, and liked to be alone. Wolves came to him and treated him as brother when they had long since abandoned Romulus.
The Tiber told me my sons quarreled about where their city should be founded, which of the seven hills in the great valley should be its center. Remus preferred a wilder hill, the one where they had roamed as shepherd boys, while his twin favored a hill more gently sloped, more open. It was a stupid quarrel. They sought auguries, watching for birds, so that the gods might show them who was right. Romulus had become a little cruel in his arrogance, and Remus a little cruel in his pain. Killing did not sit easily on the latter, and all to easily on the former. Still, I do not believe that it was Romulus’s hand that struck the killing blow in the end, but rather one of his followers, eager to put Remus in his place when he tried to argue against his brother’s vision for the city and how they would begin. They’d need women, being a lone band of men, Romulus had reasoned. Why shouldn’t they just steal some from the Sabines? This was met with hilarity and excitement both, save from Remus, who hit his brother square on the jaw at the idea. Young men and drink and bloodlust and knives, alone among seven hills, dreaming of cities and glory.
It ended with Remus dead. His grieving twin buried him in the hill he had preferred, the Aventine. Wolves sang that night in mourning, and never showed their eyes to Romulus again.
+ + +
“Bring me to them, bring me to this city called Rome,” I said to the Tiber when he was finished. I spoke through tears that were many, so many they had begun, without my realizing it, to carry off the stains of before.
“We are in it Rhea, daughter of the wood,” he replied, saying my name softly. “But this was long ago, these stories I tell you about the lives of your sons. A hundred years, a thousand, I do not count in human time. I only kept track for your sake, to carry the story to you when it was too late to carry you to your sons.”
“But—why is it too late? Why did you take me away from them?” I said with a wolf’s ferocity, almost snarling. He did not flinch.
“You were so near to death, I had to take you out of time. I had to make you other than time, or woman, in order to save your life. You may be what you choose now, but you, like me, will never walk within time among human beings again. You may walk beside them but you will be apart and only some will believe in you enough to see you, like you have always seen me.” His pale eyes held mine, and he let fall his long arms to his sides. “I am sorry.”
“Why was my life so worth the saving to you?” I whispered. “When it was not even to me? When I would gladly have died, rather than know what sorrow met my sons?”
“Because,” said the Tiber, and he looked at me with a look no man had ever given me. A look that saw me not as Rhea Silvia, not even as a woman, but as a mystery equal to the night. A vast brightness within a skin. Something that was only temporarily held by banks. Something immensely beautiful, and precious. “Because,” he said again, lower yet, with a twitch of muscle in his jaw.
And I saw for an instant what he too was without the shouldered strength of riverbanks. How I, as a young woman, had danced right at the edge of him, without fear, and recognized all of him then.
But he said no more. A great ripple seemed to move through him under his skin. Of longing, of sorrow, of patience. He turned away and went out of the holt into the daylight, leaving me there alone.
After a moment, watching him go, I reached for the green dress he had laid on the bed, the dress he had been stitching. It fit me like a wolf fits her skin. It was made of no material I knew, not wool or linen or leather, more akin to beech leaves than to any of these. Dressed in it I stood up, a little tentative. But when I felt the weight of my body, my bare feet, my hips and breasts, I felt the life of me rise up from the roots below the riverbank and return to me, to the center of me, where nothing had stirred or lit for what seemed an eon. I stood alone and felt how I had been wolf and woodpecker, shepherd’s wife and tree, as well as Rhea daughter of Silvia, princess of Alba Longa, mother of twins.
I went slowly to the fire and placed one hand on the seat where the god of the Tiber had sat sewing. It was warm still where he had been, and I smiled to myself. It had been many seasons, I think, since I had smiled that way. I set a log in the flames and felt the last pieces of humiliation and shame and pain in me settle into the fire with it, on their way to becoming ashes as all the ones I had known or borne or loved were ashes now. Save one.
Then I went to the mouth of the holt and looked out across the Tiber’s pale water upon the city of Rome.
+ + +
They call me Mother of Rome, and though it is true that the boys who began it were of my body, there were equally of the body of War. If I had been their mother after the first second of their breathing, if I had been their mother and brought them to the mountain and showed them the ways of my mother’s people, and the peace that their grandfather once carried, I wonder, what of Rome? Would other men have made it, or none? Would Remus have lived to watch his own granddaughters come running down the hill, hands full of crocus and chestnut? We will never know.
But this I do know, as I knew that morning when I first looked out the Tiber’s holt and saw it—I am not mother of Rome the city, Rome the empire, Rome the conqueror whose way is still eating up the world. But I have become mother the trees that men cut, and I have become mother of the stones men hew. I am mother of Rome the soil, Rome the seven hills, the wolf cave, the fertile valley beneath, mother of the sacred fire women held for a thousand generations back to the first, back to the stag in the beechwood and my mother’s dryad hands. And I am no longer mortal but the wife of the Tiber that runs through it all, from a spring in a mountain to the mouth of the sea.
These days, my Tiber aches in his stone canals, ugly with the iridescence of petroleum, the plastic wrappings of despair. But I still know him as he knew me that day when he looked into me and saw the night. We have held each other long now, tree-root twined through river-bend. And we will be here still when the buildings have all fallen and are a crumbled skin of metal and marble at the feet of the seven hills. When the cities of humankind are ruins and the shepherds graze their goats on hills once made of trash, and the Tiber’s flood at last breaks down every levy that has held him.
Then, no woman will ever be held down under the hands of War, and no man turned into them, again.
© Sylvia V. Linsteadt from Our Lady of the Dark Country (2017)
S E E M Y S H O P F O R H O L I D A Y E D I T I O N S O F T H E V E N U S Y E A R order by December 5th
Oh, I would love to be taken away from the screen!
I loved receiving Gray Fox Epistles and would definitely love to receive a story in the post again. Thank you Sylvia for this suggestion.