The Day the Fires Died
Chapter 1 —
Aurelia
The hearth had been burning for one hundred and six years, and on the morning the emperor died, Aurelia fed it olive wood and a pinch of salt the way her mother had taught her.
“Your father’s fire,” her mother used to say, kneeling on the cold tiles of the atrium with her sleeves pinned back. “Your grandfather’s.
His father’s.
As long as it burns, the house stands.”
Her mother had been dead four years.
The fire had not gone out once in that time. Aurelia had seen to it.
She sat back on her heels and watched the new wood catch.
The flame rose gold and steady, the color of honey held to the light. Across the atrium, old Phila was beating a rug against the doorframe and muttering at it, as if it had personally offended her.
“You’ll ruin your knees,” Phila said without turning around.
“My knees are fine.”
“Your knees are a general’s daughter’s knees.
They should be on a cushion, waiting for a husband.”
“Then the husband will have to come find them.” Aurelia stood and brushed the ash from her stola. “He’ll know where they are. They’re always here.”
Phila made the noise she made whenever Aurelia was right and she didn’t want to admit it.
The letter from her father still lay on the table by the lararium, where Aurelia had left it three weeks ago. She didn’t need to read it again.
She knew every line.
Livia and Tertia will go to your aunt at Tibur until the roads are safe.
Aurelia will keep the house.
Livia was the beauty. Tertia was the baby. Aurelia was the one who could be trusted with keys.
She had told herself it was an honor. Most days she believed it.
She went down to the Forum a little before midday, because her mother had always made an offering at the Temple of Vesta when her father was at war, and her father was always at war.
Phila came with her, complaining about the cold and the crowds and Aurelia’s shoes.
The crowds were worse than usual.
Something moved through them, a current Aurelia could feel before she understood it. Men stood in knots and spoke low. A baker was pulling the shutters down over his stall in the middle of the day.
“Otho,” someone said behind her. “The Guard has hailed Otho.”
“Galba’s still emperor.”
“Not for long.”
She bought the salt cake for the offering anyway. She had nearly reached the round white temple when the horsemen came.
They poured into the Forum from the Sacred Way, Praetorians, their armor bright, their swords already out.
The crowd broke apart in front of them like water off a ship’s prow. Aurelia saw a litter tilt and fall near the old pool of Curtius, saw an old man in purple-edged robes spill out of it onto the stones, saw him lift a hand.
Then the horsemen closed over him, and she didn’t see anything else, because Phila had her by the arm and was dragging her backward through the screaming.
They didn’t stop running until they reached the Viminal.
Aurelia barred the door herself.
Her hands were shaking. She noticed it the way she might notice rain on someone else’s roof, distantly, without interest.
“The emperor,” Phila said. She was gray in the face. “That was the emperor.”
“Yes.”
“In the Forum. In the middle of the day.”
“Yes,” Aurelia said again, because she couldn’t think of anything else that was true.
She still had the salt cake in her fist. She had crushed it to crumbs. She went to the hearth and dropped them into the fire, one offering as good as another, and watched the flame take them.
By evening, the city sounded like an animal in a trap.
Shouting from the direction of the Praetorian camp. A bell somewhere, ringing and ringing.
Smoke to the south, thick enough to taste. Twice, someone pounded on the door and ran on when no one opened it.
The household thinned as the light failed.
The kitchen girl went first, then the two boys from the stables.
When Aurelia went looking for Glaukos, the steward, she found the strongroom open and the strongbox gone.
She stood in the doorway a long moment, looking at the empty shelf.
Aurelia will keep the house.
“Let him go,” she said, when Phila began to curse him. “If he’s stupid enough to carry silver through Rome tonight, the city will take it off him before he reaches the gate.”
She lit every lamp in the atrium herself. She told herself it was for Phila.
It was full dark when the lamps began to die.
She noticed the street first.
Through the high grille above the door, she had been watching the glow of the torch at the corner, where the night watch usually stood.
It wavered.
It shrank.
It went out, as neatly as if someone had closed a hand over it.
Then the next one.
Then the brazier in the house across the way, which she knew had been burning since dusk because she could smell the charcoal. Dark.
The darkness came up the hill like a tide.
Lamp by lamp. Window by window.
No wind she could hear, and yet the air through the grille had turned bitter cold, and it smelled of pine resin and snow and something else, something animal and old.
Behind her, the oil lamps in the atrium guttered.
One by one, from the doorway inward, they went out. Phila made a small sound in her throat.
The lamp on the lararium shrank to a bead of blue and vanished.
The one by the impluvium. The one in Phila’s hand.
The atrium was black except for the hearth.
The hearth fire bent.
It leaned away from the door as if from a blow, flattened almost to the coals, and Aurelia was on her knees beside it before she knew she had moved.
“No,” she said. “No, you don’t.”
She didn’t know who she was speaking to.
She cupped her hands around the flame, close enough that the heat stung her palms, and she felt something push back against the cold.
Something in the fire. Something that did not want to go out any more than she wanted to let it.
The flame straightened.
It burned gold.
Outside, a horn sounded.
It was nothing like a Roman trumpet.
It was low and long and it went into her chest and stayed there.
“Domina.” Phila’s voice cracked. “Domina, we have to go.”
“Go through the garden. The back gate. Get to your sister’s on the Quirinal.”
“Not without you.”
“Phila.” Aurelia did not look away from the fire. “Someone has to keep the house.”
She took her mother’s bronze fire-pan from its hook by the hearth and scooped the coals into it, flame and all.
The flame came with them. It sat in the bronze bowl and burned steady in her hands, and the metal handle should have been too hot to hold, but it wasn’t.
Then she went to the chest by the lararium and took out her sling and the pouch of lead shot she had cast herself, two summers ago, because her father had laughed when she asked him for a bow.
Phila was crying. Aurelia pressed her toward the garden and listened to her footsteps go, and the gate creak, and then nothing.
She stood alone in the atrium with the fire in one hand and the sling looped around the other wrist, and she waited.
They didn’t knock.
The door was oak bound in iron, and it came off its hinges in one blow. It fell flat into the atrium with a sound like a building coming down, and the cold came in with it.
So did they.
She had heard the stories, the way every Roman child heard them. The orcs of the high Apennines, who had lived in those mountains before Romulus drew his furrow.
Her father had burned them out of the passes when she was two years old.
He had come home with a triumph and a scar and a story he never told twice the same way.
The stories had not made them big enough.
The first one through the doorway had to stoop.
He straightened inside the atrium, and his head nearly brushed the beams. Gray-green skin.
Tusks capped in iron.
A war-axe hanging loose in a hand the size of a shield boss.
Two more came behind him, and more behind them, filling the doorway, filling the vestibule, and every one of them stopped when they saw her.
They had no torches.
They had come through a dead city in the dark. Hers was the only light in the room, and every eye in that room turned to it.
Nobody moved.
Then the ones in the doorway parted, and he came through.
He didn’t have to stoop.
He was not taller than the first, but he took up more of the room somehow, the way a storm takes up more of the sky than its clouds. Long braids, bound in iron rings.
A scar running down the line of his jaw.
Eyes the pale gray of river ice, and they went first to the fire in her hands, and stayed there a long moment, and only then rose to her face.
He looked at her as if she were a problem he had not expected and did not yet know how to solve.
“Severus,” he said.
His voice was low and rough, and it filled the atrium the way the horn had.
“My father isn’t here.” She was pleased with how steady it came out.
“No,” he said. “I see that.”
He took one step forward.
The fire in her hands rose to meet him, bright gold, and he stopped. He looked at it again.
“But you are,” he said.
Historical note:
On January 15, 69 AD, the emperor Galba was murdered in the Roman Forum near the Lacus Curtius, an ancient pool by then paved over, which marked the spot where legend said the earth had once opened. Galba, then about seventy, had taken power only seven months earlier after Nero’s death.
He quickly lost the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard by refusing to pay the bonus they had been promised. Five days before his death, he adopted the young nobleman Piso Licinianus as his heir, passing over Marcus Salvius Otho, who had expected the honor.
Otho bribed the Guard, who hailed him emperor that morning. Galba was cut down when his litter was overturned in the Forum, and soldiers carried his head through the city on a pole.
