“But why are we running away?” protested Con as I shepherded my household down the road. The maids were weeping, clutching their bundles in their arms, but Brasilia looked grim. “Surely the Emperor will stop the riot before it can get this far.”
“My guess is that the Emperor is dead, and that is why the soldiers are rioting,” I answered. Philip crossed himself, and I remembered that he had been attending the Christian church in town.
Constantine stopped short, staring, and I reached out to drag him along. He knew in theory that most emperors did not reign long, but Probus was the only emperor he could really remember, a man who in his rare moments of leisure had played board games with the child.
“But what about Father?” he said. Now it was he who was pushing me forwards. My son was as close to me as my own heartbeat, but it was Constantius whom he idolized.
I managed a smile, even though that was the question that had been knotting my belly ever since I realized what was going on.
“He is not the one who ordered them to work in this heat. I am sure they will do him no harm,” I said stoutly. “Come along now. The basilica has stout walls, and not much that’s worth looting. We’ll be safe there.”
We were almost in time. The riot exploded with volcanic swiftness, and by the time we reached the Forum, the first bands of maddened soldiers were already rampaging through the town. Some of them might have been from my husband’s command—men whom I had nursed when the flux swept the camp the winter before. But they had already broken into at least one taverna, and the unwatered wine in the flasks they were carrying was speedily drowning what reason bloodlust had left them.
As my little group emerged from the colonnaded cloister that surrounded the square, a band of perhaps twenty men came pounding down the main street, their hobnailed sandals ringing on the cobblestones. In another moment we were surrounded. Hylas began to bark furiously, struggling in Brasilia’s arms.
We should have stayed at the palace! I thought desperately. We could have hidden in the stables— Then I saw Con fumbling for the Parthian dagger his father had given him on his last birthday and pushed myself in front of him.
“Make no move!” I hissed as one of the soldiers made a grab for me, tearing my tunica from the fibula that held it at the shoulder so that it fell, leaving one breast bare.
Abruptly the men grew still, lust transfixing them like lightning as they stared. In another moment they would kill the boy and throw me spread-eagled to the ground. Rape I could endure, but not the loss of the child for whom I had given up Avalon!
“Goddess!” I cried in the British tongue, “save your Chosen One!” And as my arms lifted in invocation, it seemed as if a great wind swept down and whirled my awareness away.
As if from a great distance I heard a voice too resonant to be human calling down curses, coming from a figure that seemed head and shoulders taller than the diminutive beings that surrounded her, a figure that radiated light. A great hound stood beside her, growling like thunder. She swept down her hands, and her puny assailants recoiled, falling over each other in their haste to get away. The goddess beckoned to the ones she was defending, and led them towards the basilica. When she reached its door she turned, drawing a circle in the air as if to claim the place as her own.
In the next moment I felt myself falling, all power leaving my limbs as I returned to my body and crumpled to the ground.
Exclaiming, my servants half-dragged, half-carried me inside. It took some time for me to catch my breath and calm them enough so that I could speak with Constantine.
“They would have killed my mother!” he said hoarsely, clinging to me as he had not done since he was a little child.
This did not seem the time to point out that killing was the least of what the rioters had had in mind. “It is all right,” I soothed him. “We are safe now…”