Second Session: Saturnalia Sixth Post: Blood and Wine
The initiates gather and form themselves into kneeling ranks, with the higher orders at the front and Metellus and Llyr still towards the back. A perfectly white young bull is brought before the altar, and the Eldest Pater tells the story of the youth Mithras’s combat against the great Bull-God. The room is gradually illuminated as rays of the morning light shine through the holes in the domed roof, but all the priests are still masked, and rich incense fills the air, clouding the senses.
Meanwhile, Cornelia, Heilyn, Wena, and Meloch have gotten up early to get good seats for the theater that day, as the performances begin at dawn. Meloch returned at dawn to Drusus’s house, and informed Cornelia privately that he was almost certain that Hadriana had conceived successfully. As pygmies were known to be experts in such matters, Cornelia congratulated him and promised to reward him if he was correct. The play is Euripides’ Bacchae, and a difficulty quickly becomes clear in the fact that only Cornelia and Wena out of the four know Greek, and Cornelia’s Greek is somewhat limited. However, the actors are clearly aware of the incomprehension of the audience and are doing as much as possible with gestures and highly gory sets. The mood of the audience is tense; the seats for Romans and their guests have been roped off from those reserved for the native Britannians, and even among the natives people are sitting very clearly by tribe, and some have obviously hidden weapons. The Governor Cimbrus and Hadriana have not yet arrived, although they are expected. I like plays, except when they throw blood on the audience, which gets in my fur, but Meloch says Cornelia wouldn’t take us to a play like that anyway, and this is great Greek art, which I should appreciate.
The Eldest Pater takes his ceremonial gold-edged knife and slits the throat of the bull over a large shallow bowl, decorated with strange runes, which is held by the Second Pater. After the bull has drawn its last breath, several Heliodromi remove the carcass for later feasting, and the Eldest Pater motions to the Third Pater, who brings forth a small ivory box. As the Second Pater raises the bowl of bull’s blood above the altar, the Eldest Pater sprinkles something from the box onto the surface and chants in an unknown language. Marcus, kneeling directly in front of Metellus and Llyr, quietly explains the importance of this ritual. Raw bull’s blood is naturally a deadly poison, but the blessing of the priests purifies it so that the initiates may all safely drink of the sacrifice and share in the glory of Mithras. The Eldest Pater finishes chanting and takes the bowl from his Second. He raises it to his lips and takes a large ceremonial sip, before passing it to the Second.
The Bacchae begins, and fairly soon it is clear that something is slightly odd about the performance. The Bacchantes are dressed in Iceni colors and wearing Iceni battle paint in addition to their grapevine wreaths and smiling masks. When Pentheus, the doomed King of Thebes, enters, his mask bears a startling resemblance to Cimbrus. The tribal sections of the crowd, particularly the Iceni and Catavellauni, cheer loudly whenever the Bacchantes sing and hiss at Pentheus. The crowd is growing more and more restless. Heilyn suggests that our group leave, now, before this turns into another riot. He notes that it is still raining, and that the storm centered over the arena, some distance away, has only gotten blacker. This seems like a good idea to me, despite my affection for theater, but Cornelia insists on remaining, suggesting that they may be able to quiet things down. The play continues, and soon reaches its climax. Queen Agave, a Bacchante and Pentheus’s mother, who is wearing a mask that Wena recognizes as intended to evoke the memory of Boadicea, the great rebel Iceni Queen, enters, brandishing the head of Pentheus in mad exultation. Cornelia, who has seen this play before, is quite certain that the last time she saw it the head was represented by a mask with some stuffing and red paint. About half a second before the rest of the audience, we realize that this head is most definitely not a mask, and the gore dripping down from the neck is not red paint.
The bowl of bull’s blood is passed down the aisle of four Paters and is handed to the Heliodromi. When the second Heliodromus is drinking, the Eldest Pater suddenly grasps his own throat and tries to speak. He falls to the ground, choking, and the other priests start to rush forward. A few seconds later, the Second Pater also falls to the ground of the temple, unable to breath. The Heliodromus, aghast, has the presence of mind to drop the sacred bowl before he, too, feels his throat constricting.
Chaos erupts in the temple. Metellus rushes forward to the front of the temple, where the six bodies lay. Marcus draws his concealed dagger and notes, without surprise, that he far from the only initiate of Mithras to have illegally smuggled a weapon into the ceremony. Several initiates seem to be rapidly leaving the temple. Llyr and Marcus begin following them, and Marcus grabs one who seems to be acting particularly suspiciously. When the voice inside the mask crying out in protest seems somewhat higher than normal, Marcus acts on instinct and tears off the mask, revealing a young Roman woman. Having established that it is not Cornelia, but merely a voyeur wishing a look at the secretive male ceremonies, Marcus remains on guard in the anteroom while Llyr takes off chasing the several initiates who dropped their masks and robes in the anteroom and hurried out of the temple. He catches a glimpse of the farthest one ahead, and thinks that it might match Marcus’s description of the Tribune Titus Minucius.
Meanwhile, the six bodies have been laid out with honor, and Metellus, with permission from one of the Heliodromi remaining, removes their masks. Two of the Prefects of the three Legions in Britannia lie dead on the ground, including the commander of the Sixth Legion, to which Metellus, Llyr, and formerly Marcus belong. The others are a Legate of the 12th Legion, a primuspilus centurion of the Third, and a chamberlain on the governor’s staff. As one of the spectators note, ranks within the cult of Mithras often strongly correspond to military and social ranks in the outside world. The result is a minor disaster for the hierarchy of the Legions of Britannia, who in one stroke have lost much of their high leadership. The bowl is examined, and on careful testing the bull’s blood is found to be poisonous, despite the ritual. The only priests who knew the full details of the purification ritual and the origin of the powdered herbs within the ivory box were the Paters, all now dead, but Metellus, after some investigation, believes that the culprit was the powdered herbs, which themselves had been desecrated by someone within the temple, probably during the night in the ritual pits. This has the minor advantage of completely clearing Metellus himself from suspicion, as he was tied to a ladder of smoke and under view throughout the entire night; the Heliodromi thus let him continue his attempt to determine the source of the catastrophe.
As the audience realizes that displayed before them is a real human head, bearing a certain resemblance to Cimbrus, even more so than the earlier mask, they go wild. At this point, Heilyn begins dragging the rest of us out of the theater, rather sensibly. Cornelia looks around trying to spot any particular troublemakers, and Heilyn points out that one of the loudest native shouters is the man he saw the day before with an aura of unavenged blood hovering over him. As the steady footsteps of the Legions, hurrying to maintain order, are heard approaching the theater, Cornelia sends Cato to swoop down on the identified rabble-rouser. As Cato swipes the man on the head, the man begins to glow brightly. He begins to flee, and Meloch takes off after him, with Wena following.
Llyr continues chasing the man who resembles Minucius, managing barely to keep him in sight amidst the crowded streets of a Londinium Saturnalia at full swing. The fleeing man ducks through crowds and finally vanishes into a small parade of slaves and freedmen celebrating their brief power. Before he does so, however, Llyr manages to get a good look at his face. Upon returning to the Temple in frustration, he consults with Marcus and Metellus and confirms that the man was Minucius, alive, well, and causing trouble. Metellus theorizes that Minucius must somehow have gotten access to the ivory box and desecrated the herbs, causing the ritual to fail and the bull’s blood to poison the initiates. Luckily, it was stopped after only six victims.
Meloch and Wena have slightly more luck with their chase, and finally corner the brightly glowing target, which has made their task easier. He admits that he was hired to foment disruption and chaos in the theater, and that he knew that there would be something in the play to further incite the Iceni. He tells them that he was hired by a man who fits Minucius’s description to incite the crowd and also to kill a few particular people in the last few days, including the actor playing Teiresias the prophet, whose head then appeared so prominently in the play.
Cornelia and Heilyn, trying to investigate the source of the disruption after the Legionaries have evacuated the theater, causing numerous civilian deaths by trampling in the process, discover a headless body stuffed into one of the small changing rooms backstage. Upon interrogating the other actors, they discover that they were paid a large sum of money to wear the costumes provided for them, but were unaware, as a largely Greek traveling troupe, of their significance. The actor playing Teiresias was a recently hired local man, who spoke Greek fluently and said he wanted to join their company as a way of getting out of Londinium. His name, according to the troupe records, was Gallus Metrodoros. Cornelia concludes that he must be another freedman of the forgotten Imperial brother Gallus. Meanwhile, the storm over the arena begins to spread again.
