21. The Prophetess

Laelia Euphrates couldn't deny how she admired the design of Pethens credited to its previous ruler. 

Divided into twelve districts, each representing an hour of the day, the city of Pethens sprawled out in a circle with the Ziggurat of Ra sitting at its center. As the day came forth from sunrise to sundown, the behemoth of four hundred feet height cast its shadow onto each district for all the world to see, marking every hour with its awe-inspiring omnipresence. 

Owing to her respect, the layout of Pethens had remained, despite rampant changes over the stretch of her rule behind the curtain. And as she presided over the bowing courtiers, arrayed in rows by ranks before the Ziggurat, she gazed up at the north star winking from the depth of night. 

Over the distance shrieked a falcon returning from patrol. It swooped down, curling the wings, tawny talons splaying as it alighted with precision on a gold gauntlet Laelia wore on her right arm. 

She smiled, admiring the raptor's majesty, then shot a slantwise glance at her entourage. Two servants rushed to release a flock of pigeons from a gilded cage on wheels about the average height of a grown man. 

"Go get them, my love," she hummed, caressing her pet with the other hand. 

The falcon reared its head at the caliginous night where the pigeons had scattered like feathers, its claws scraping the gauntlet. Adjusting its wings, it waited for the next blow of wind and took off to attend the feast. 

Laelia felt a tug of weight on her arm before it was lifted and mused on the night sky while the cooing and flapping grew distant. She turned her gaze to the flat top of the Ziggurat. Before her, a grand staircase stretched northeast in three folds toward the summer solstice. Fronting the first shaft of sunlight, it led to the shrine of Ra on the highest platform, where secrets that churned the fate of many were kept, as were prophecies declared. Every summer she came to the shrine as the Prophetess of Pethens to hold a seance before all men, invoking the Sun God Ra to sanction the spells of revertible confessions that pardon the sins of their possessors. 

Grains of sand twirled up in an eddy of wind. In the chill of the ziggurat's brooding shadow, a servant brought forth a torch made with a platinum rod dipped in sulfur and lime. Laelia swung an arm as she snatched the torch and began her ascent of the stairs. 

It was a familiar climb. Yet despite the familiarity, every step she took carried no less weight than the year before. The more that time had washed away, the heavier she felt at her feet. 

Ten years ago, she made three prophecies here upon the stairs. One, Marcus Uranus shall reign for as long as peace shall last. Two, in exchange for peace, Renania must return the fertile land of the north to the Gods and the rightful people of Exonia. While each of the two laid the groundwork for the many years to come, neither weighed as much as did the last one, which established her as the Prophetess of Pethens. 

At the front of the shrine behind the stone railing, two other servants awaited with their heads bowed. Laelia disregarded them as if they were the carvings in the stone banisters and walked straight ahead. Lit by a fireband wavering atop a sconce at each turn, the long corridor into the shrine folded like the intestines of a corpse. Chill rattled between breaths. She tightened her grip on the platinum rod of the torch, her other hand clutching the silk of her gown. 

The frescoes on either wall documented all the prophecies declared over the years. Laelia brought her feet to a halt at the turn of the fourth corner. Her hand trembled to reach the fading colors that had painted an infant boy. 

This was the wall that recorded the third prophecy: 

In the year three thirty-seven, as the civil war had drawn to a close, Praetor Uranus named Laelia Euphrates his Consort. In the following year, she would bear him a son, Aelius Maximus Uranus. But the boy was soon to die, as the prophecy foretold. In the fall of the same year, Lady Anatolia Hilaria Liviana, first wife to Marcus Uranus, would fall ill to evil. Bewitched by envy and madness, she would smother the boy Aelius on a tempestuous night and accuse Laelia of murdering her own son. 

Laelia raised a brow, staring at the fresco of a woman cradling the infant boy, supposedly her son. 

I certainly did not look like that! Dismayed by her own image, she turned her eyes to the boy smiling at her. And my sweet boy, did he look like that? 

Ten years it had been since that tempestuous night. After Marcus Uranus passed out in an inebriated torpor on their sojourn in a town nearby, Laelia returned on the fastest destrier. She snuck back to their summer house, close to the residence of Lady Anatolia, where she had kept Aelius on purpose. The baby was sound asleep when she looked long and hard at him for the last time. She vowed to the Gods that she would never forget his face. In the same breath she dropped behind the crib the handkerchief embroidered with Anatolia's initials, she buried the boy in the tenderest spot of her memory with what might have been love. Every year on the anniversary of his death, she wept for all the Renanians to watch while each tear she shed nourished the belief that the end shall justified the means.

Aelius' death enraged Marcus, who condemned his wife to be hung for her bewitchment. 

With her gone, Laelia ascended as the Prophetess of Pethens. She prosecuted Anatolia's followers, and those she couldn't prosecute, she drove them to the periphery of power. She established the Triumvirate, naming the three most important generals as Triumvir to have them contain each other. But it still wasn't enough. Domitian Gordianus Uranus had remained a thorn in her flesh.

A bastard he might be, Domitian was Marcus' firstborn and entitled to the name of the house. To have him removed, Laelia deployed her poisonous charm in the bedchamber to have her husband swayed, planting in him a seed of suspicion of his son. When Marcus sent men after Domitian, they sleuthed out all the foreign bribes Laelia had plotted that the bastard couldn't turn down. 

Charged with treason, Domitian fell out of the Praetor's grace. When the guards dragged him out of his residence, the manchild clung to dear life, throwing his flaccid arms tight around a pillar in the vestibule. 

"We had a deal!" he cried, eyes searching desperately for Laelia. "You gave me your word!"

She had. 

Knowing that Anatolia was also a threat to Domitian, she went to him first and offered her overtures of an alliance. She wouldn't have discovered Anatolia's hideaway so easily without Domitian's contribution.

And so, too, did she keep her words, looking out for her ally. Like a doting stepmother, she begged for Domitian's life to be spared before the courtiers. Marcus' fury at Domitian would cease over time. But once they proceeded with the execution, there would be no turning back. She begged for only what Marcus covertly wanted but was too proud to confess. 

The prophecy that would have ended Domitian's life was altered. In exchange for his life, Domitian was decreed to exile. 

In the east wing of the Palazzo where Marcus took his pleasure, he was lumbering after his whores when she arrived. Garbed in nothing but an open robe, he slapped the whores' jiggly butts and wheezed with a terrible guffaw. His pot belly glistened in sweat. Upon seeing Laelia, he sent off the women and plopped in an expansive chaise, slung with red velvet and adorned with tourmalines. He beckoned Laelia to the cushion next to him with his eyes. 

She complied. Wearing her imperturbable smile, she entertained the thought of how much her husband had yet to devour before he finished himself off with a burst stomach. 

No longer young or willing to keep up with Marcus' nocturnal rhythm, Laelia, however, had her ways to keep the man indulged, and his mind off ruling. Every year, she had the Scipio brothers pump young blood to the capital through their talent recruitment, sold to the Renanian youth as a solemn promise of an equal shot at fame and fortune. 

"I want Domitian back," Marcus croaked. "This year's seance for revertible confessions, use it as a chance." 

"It wouldn't be wise going back on a decree made years ago."

"Make up a reason, I don't care! He's my blood, after all! One I can trust!" 

One look, she knew he had made up his mind and no word could change it. Like Marcus, she, too, had sense a nameless threat closing in. But if Domitian was pardoned from exile, Aelius' death would be for nothing! All she had done would have been for nothing! Never had she faltered when it came to clearing the way for Dracus, her firstborn, and keeping him safe. Everything she'd done, she did it for him; and that ungrateful child, all handsome and almost a man now, wanted nothing of it! 

And how dare he abandon me! 

With a quiet sigh, she shut her eyes. To keep rumors at bay, she had kept his running away a secret and sent only her own house guards to look for him. They found nothing yet. Shaking her head, she cast one last glance at the wall as she opened her eyes, her henna-painted nails scratching across the fresco of Aelius' cherubic face. 

She resumed her pacing. 

In the main hall of the shrine, four clay lanterns sat in each corner girded by whiffs of incense smoke. At the center sculpted the Sun God Ra in his barque, enclosed by a narrow waterway carrying candles on wood plates. Upon the altar against the wall facing Ra, a set of four jars made of chalcedony quartz kept the embalmed viscera of Aelius Albanus Uranus for his second life. Rumor has it that the boy later became the first prodigy of Kish, the lord of the underworld, who decided whether the soul should go into the life of eternity or the final death. 

Laelia despised the rumor that chilled her marrow nonetheless. She had the reoccurring nightmare of her baby boy next to Kish as a faceless man consigning her soul to the final furnace. It woke her in a cold sweat. Resolved not to fall prey to fear, she turned the rumor to her own advantage. 

She created the spells of revertible confessions, each of which absolved a sin, and sold to the Renanians of all classes hellbent on entering the second life a conviction that if they collected the spells, their heart would pledge allegiance to their soul when facing the judgment of Kish. It would not betray a word of truth when the soul lied to Kish about its innocence. Once passing the judgment, it would reclaim the organs preserved in those canopic jars for the life of eternity. 

To renew, strengthen, or add a revertible confession – a few of which had been auctioned for over twenty thousand denarii – each year, on the first night after the last day of summer, she would go through the rigmarole of coming here between Ra and the altar. And this year, she would also have to add her husband's unreasonable request to the mix. 

Holding the torch over her head, she looked upon the altar. From her left, the jar of the stomach was pale blue with streaks of rose gold, kept safe by Asphaleius, the God of the firmament.

"May you stomach as much as the sky could hold," she pronounced, her voice soft and aloof. "May your return to life ease Asphaleius' wrath." 

Next to the stomach perched the jar of the lungs. Cream white webbed with gray pith, it was guarded by Horus, the God of wind, who kept things on the move, and whose counterpart, Hera, was the mother of plantations. 

 "May the sweet and salubrious breeze brim in your lungs for eternity, where all you have dreamed of comes to fruit." 

Watched by Naana, the God of the moon, the third jar stored the spleen and its dark green surface glittered with silver swirls. Legend had it that the moon was once part of Earth before the arrival of men, who invoked Ra to light up the night. Ra kneaded the moon with a piece of land from Earth and tossed it into the sky. Seething at the slight and betrayal, Naana took with the land its fertility and appointed Nemesis as the lord of soil and loathing to wreak vengeance on the Renanian men. 

Laelia despised the legend as resignation garbed in finality. Desisting from a snort before the Gods, she narrowed her gaze. "May the sun shine eternally on where you rest, away from Earth that vents spleen." 

The last one was obsidian as if the dead of night, burnished with bronze flecks, whose glimmer came and went with the moving of light. This was the jar of intestines, protected by Thoth, the god of reason and all the stars, countering Dionysus. 

"And may you be no less complex as is the world. May you favor wisdom and still rejoice."

Sore from holding the torch, she switched hands and gazed up at the stone of Ra. It took her aback how often she didn't need to win an argument to win an audience. Between iron logic and incendiary lies, people always chose the latter, and their choice left nothing but a sea of flames to be remembered at the end of the day. Yet while fear and fury of the masses fueled her reign, she knew all too well that the power with which she played could backfire at even the smallest misstep. 

Once she left the altar to rejoin the world, she would have to pardon Domitian from exile under the witness of all Gods. But Domitian shall never return. If anything, he had only his own father to blame. 

A snort rose to her throat as if letting out the steam of the plots brewing in her head. 

She doubled back.