I felt much better, now that my stomach was empty. I hoped, for our guests’ sake, it was not anything I had eaten. I washed out my mouth with water from the fountain and leaned back against a column, gazing up at the open sky above the atrium where the young moon was already high.
And as I contemplated the moon, I realized that by now I should have had my courses. My breasts, too, had been unusually tender. I touched them, acutely aware of their new weight and sensitivity, and began to smile, understanding at last what was wrong with me.
A shadow moved among the potted shrubs. I recognized Constantius and stood up to meet him.
“Helena—are you all right?”
“Oh yes…” My smile grew broader. “Were your negotiations successful, my love?” I put my arms about his neck, and he murmured something into my hair as his own tightened around me. For a moment we stood locked together. He smelled of good food and wine and the spicy oil his slave rubbed into his skin at the baths.
“You may congratulate me as well…” I whispered into his ear. “I am about to bring you a greater profit than any trader. Oh, Constantius, I am going to bear your child!”
As spring ripened into summer, and my own body began to ripen with pregnancy, for the first time in my life I tasted true happiness. I even knew it, a gift not always allotted mortal men. I had defied, if not the gods, at least the priestesses of Avalon, and now I carried the child the oracle had foretold! It was not until many years later that I questioned that prophecy, or reflected that in order to obtain the right answer it is necessary first to have asked the correct question.
It was a smiling season, and Eburacum was the queen of the north, where traders from all over the Empire brought their wares.
Merchants prospered here, and shared their good fortune with their gods, from Hercules to Serapis. The square before the basilica was studded with dedicatory altars, set up in payment of vows. I paused sometimes to pay my respects to the matronae, the triple mothers who guarded fertility, but otherwise I had little to say to the gods.
With Eldri trotting at my heels, every day I would go out of the gate by the bridge and walk down the path by the Abus River to its confluence with the Fossa, where the boats that came up from the coast to the wharves disputed the right of way with the swans. In the evening, the white walls of the fortress were reflected in the water, and the setting sun overlaid the shining surface with opal and pearl. In the past year the little dog had slowed down, as if age had suddenly come upon her, but these expeditions, when she had a chance to nose through all the fascinating detritus left at the water’s edge, were the high point of her day. I hoped that it consoled her a little for losing the freedom of Avalon.
But more than trade goods came in with those ships, and though the western and eastern parts of the Empire might be politically divided, news travelled freely between them. Just after midsummer there came two arrivals which were to alter our lives: a messenger with a letter from the Emperor, and the first case of plague.
We were sitting in the atrium, where I had asked Drusilla to serve the evening meal. I was just beginning to enjoy food again, and our cook delighted in finding ways to tempt my appetite. I was not certain whether it had been diffidence on my part or the lofty scorn of an old family retainer for a native-born concubine on hers that had initially created the distance between us. But my incipient motherhood had clearly elevated my status in her eyes.
I had made my way through several of the appetizers when I noticed that Constantius was not eating. After a year in his company, I could see the man in him as well as the hero. I now knew, for instance, that he was at his best in the mornings and increasingly irritable after sundown; could be honest to the point of tactlessness; and except when he was in bed with me, lived more in his head than his body. What some people perceived as coldness I would have called focus. He could not abide shellfish, and when his interest was engaged in some project, he had to be reminded to eat at all.