I was, by Roman reckoning, an illegitimate child, and though my father had acknowledged me in the British fashion, he had never bothered to draw up papers of formal adoption, having always intended me for Avalon. In Roman law, I was Constantius’s concubina, a relationship which was legally recognized, but lower in status than a formal wedding. But even had we been married confarreatio, in the most ancient and formal of patrician styles, it would still have fallen to my husband to claim the infant as his own and to decide whether he should live.
As I lay in the bed, too exhausted to open my eyes, yet still tense with excitement, it seemed wrong to me that the man should have that power. It was not he who had formed the child out of his own flesh, nor he who would nurse it. A memory came to me of Avalon, when I sat listening with the other maidens while Cigfolla taught us the midwife’s skills.
The woman of ancient times had possessed a strength we no longer claimed. If she had too many children, or not enough strength to rear another child, or if feeding it would deprive the tribe at the wrong time of year, she could look into the face of the child and put forth her hand and send that child back into nowhere and nothingness as if it had never been born.
Lying in my bed, listening to the murmur of talk from the men in the next room, I understood her meaning as I had not when I was a girl. I realized then that a woman is never free to bear a child unless she is also free to abort it. A man must know that he is breathing because his mother looked on his face and saw that it was good and chose freely to nourish him. This child, who lived because I had given up so much in order to conceive and bear him, must never be allowed to forget that he owed his life to me.
And then the men came back into the bedchamber, and my little son was laid in my arms. Constantius looked down at us. His face bore the marks of an anguish which I suppose must have been the echo of my own pain, but his eyes were shining with joy.
“I have given you a son,” I whispered.
“He is a fine boy,” Constantius answered, “but I would have considered him a poor trade for you! We will call him Constantine.”
I looked down at the fuzz of golden down on the baby’s head, whose curve repeated the round of the breast against which he nuzzled, already hungry. In law he might be his father’s, but it was I, who by my care or my neglect, would determine whether he survived.
And he would survive! For the sake of this child I had suffered through this birthing, and abandoned Avalon and everyone there that I loved. He must be worth saving, to justify my pain! Nonetheless, as I put him to the breast I took a secret satisfaction in remembering that every woman has within herself this tremendous power to give life… or to deny it.
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CHAPTER TEN
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AD 282
In the year that Constantine was ten years old, we took up residence in the old palace in Sirmium. Since his birth, we had moved regularly as Constantius was shifted from one posting to another, contriving not only to survive but to rise in rank through the turmoil that had followed the assassination of the Emperor Aurelian when Constantine was two. That first imperial death had shocked me, for I had come to respect the little man whose order had wrenched us from Britannia into this new life. But by the time Aurelian had been followed by Tacitus, and Tacitus by Florianus, and Florianus by Probus, we had all learned to give the current wearer of the purple no more than a wary courtesy.
Probus was proving to be an effective emperor, suppressing barbarian invasions in Gallia and recruiting the defeated Burgunds and Vandals as federati forces which he then sent to Britannia to put down a revolt led by its current governor. With my mind, I understood the military necessity, but my heart wept at the thought that a Roman had loosed a barbarian horde against my native land. When Probus chose Constantius as one of his tribunes and ordered us to Sirmium I found it hard to rejoice.