Red-Robed Priestess
Page 5
“You can’t stop it, can you?” Sarah spoke, aloud this time.
“No,” I said softly. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I hate it when they do that, don’t you?” said Bele to Alyssa.
“You mean have these deep conversations where they leave nearly everything out, so that we can’t possibly understand what’s going on?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m sorry, Alyssa, Bele,” I turned to include them. “I will say this to you, too. Go back, go back to the lives you have made for yourselves. Go back!” I felt a terrible knowledge overtake me. “Or you may never see your homes again.”
“Homes?” said Alyssa. “What are you talking about, Mother of Sarah? Our wheeled tents? We can make those anywhere. We are each other’s home, isn’t that so, Black Sarah?”
Sarah nodded.
“You can’t make this choice for us, Mother. But you could be a little more forthcoming. Who is that man? Who is that man to you?”
I met her gaze as coolly as I could and willed the blood not to rush to my face.
“I don’t know who he is, or who he is to me, Sarah. I will tell you this much. I feel as though I have known him for a very long time, but I don’t know why.”
“I don’t like him,” Sarah almost growled, and if she had been a wolf her hair would have stood up along her back. “I don’t trust him. You told me yourself you warned him not to go to Pretannia. Whatever dreadful thing is coming, he’s part of it.”
“You are very likely right,” I acknowledged. “That is why I am urging you three to turn back.”
“Fat chance,” said Sarah. “I’m going with you, and I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“I didn’t rescue you from prison—twice now,” I rubbed it in, “so that you could be my jailer.”
“Oh, stop it, you two,” Alyssa intervened. “As far as I’m concerned, the matter is settled. If no one is willing to steal a ship with me, let’s take the safe passage. Once we’re on the other side, we ride off into the sunset or the sunrise, whichever (by the way, do we even know where we’re going?) and we will have nothing further to do with the general.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Bele.
I threw up my hands and let them fall back with a splash into the bathwater.
“It’s settled then. And Mother, don’t try anything tonight,” Sarah admonished, sounding exactly like the general she despised. “You’ve done enough.”
“Then try being grateful,” I said between gritted teeth.
“Oh, she is, Mother of Sarah, we all are,” Bele assured me. “Oh, look, there are servants coming with clean tunics for us. There is something to be said for Roman amenities. I hope they give us a good spread. I, for one, am sick of oatcakes.”
CHAPTER FIVE
HOME
AT LONG LAST I was returning from beyond the ninth wave, though in fact there were no waves worthy of the name. The channel was placid, and the weather as unremarkable today as yesterday’s had been ominous. As promised (or ordered) we did indeed set sail at first light on a large merchant vessel, I was relieved to note, rather than a warship. The general had a sizable escort of high ranking officers, but whatever troops he was to command must already be stationed in Pretannia.
I stood with my women on deck, watching the huge chalk cliffs go by, as we headed east along the channel to Rutupiae. Now we were near enough to watch nesting sea birds dart in and out of the folds of the cliffs, diving for food and returning. Their cries filled the air with comforting, familiar sound. I had never walked this shore, but islands, large or small, were holy, were home.
This fleeting sense of rightness and peace was interrupted by the approach of the general. I could feel Sarah’s hackles rising, and Bele and Alyssa’s curiosity. As for me, I was flustered and annoyed to be reminded again that I was returning from exile courtesy of the enemy.
“Will you walk apart with me,” he said abruptly. He had a way of making a request sound like a command.
“You don’t have to,” hissed Sarah in the dialect of the mountain Galatians that only I could understand.
“There’s no reason for me to be rude,” I answered her. “He’s kept his word.”
“So far,” said Sarah, turning back to the view. “He might keep us as hostages on the other side.”
“For what purpose?” I reasoned. “No one knows who we are or cares.”
“Yet,” she added ominously.
Oh, let her have the last word, I thought, and I turned to the general who was waiting more patiently than I would have imagined he could.
We walked from one end of the ship to the other while he held forth on the difference between Celtic and Roman maritime techniques in the Gallic wars. In our short acquaintance, I had already learned that he loved to talk about his relative, or ancestor, Caesar. I didn’t bother to tell him that I knew all about the flat-bottomed boats and heavy-leather sails of the Celts that gave them advantage in storms and helped them hide out in shallow coves. I also knew that the Romans had oar power, because of their endless supply of slaves. Nor did I mention that my knowledge came not only from my cursory Latin lessons but from druids, like my father, who studied and taught military strategy.
At length we stopped and stood together in the ship’s prow as it pointed past the cliffs to a low, green, marshy landscape. Neither of us spoke for a time. In the absence of words, I became intensely aware of his body, not quite touching mine, but close enough so that there was heat lightning in the air between us. Though he probably hadn’t, he smelled as if he had slept outside and eaten something cooked over a peat fire.
“Your daughter dislikes me,” he said without preamble.
“You didn’t make a good first impression,” I admitted, “what with your standing orders to have her mother seized and brought to you for questioning.”
I suspected there might be more to her hostility than that, but it did not seem wise to speculate.
“No matter. Her defense of you was admirable, if mistaken. Someone must have trained her well.”
“Not me,” I said.
“That much is obvious.”
I bridled a bit. “I did disarm one of your men, you know. That’s why he attacked me so viciously with his shield.”
“If he’d attacked you viciously, you’d be dead.”
No one had taught this man tact, let alone how to flatter.
“What language were you and your daughter speaking just now?” He changed the subject. “It sounded like a Gallic dialect, but I couldn’t quite place it. I’m just curious,” he added, as if anticipating my resistance to imparting any information. “If I’d had the leisure, I would have done nothing but study languages.”
“You’re right,” I said, cautiously. “It’s a dialect spoken by the Galatians in the Taurus Mountains. The Keltoi, as the Greeks call them, live in many places.”
“Yes, I know.”
Of course he knew. He knew everything, or thought he did.
“I wouldn’t say they ever ran the world, but in their time, they overran it,” he went on, clearly implying that their time was past. “And of course they once made the mistake of sacking Rome. They’ve been paying for it ever since. Still, I can’t help but admire their spirit. Great warriors, none braver, but not much strategy. That’s why Rome always wins in the end.”
Instead of sounding smug and complacent, he seemed curiously regretful, as if he identified with the conquered more than with the Empire he served. That was his precious Etruscan blood, I supposed. Part of me wanted to argue that the Celtic warriors did have strategy, or at least strategists, the druids, the unifying force among the tribes. The reason Gaul fell to Caesar, or so we had been taught at school, was the weakness of the druid presence there. Still, however drawn to this man I might be, I could not ignore Sarah’s intense distrust of him or Dwynwyn’s prophecy about the terrible times to come.
“Have you ever faced Celts in battle?” I tried to sound merely curious.
“I remember,” I said. “That was where you were rumored to have died.”
“Yes, well,” he said after a moment, clearly uncomfortable, “as to that, I am afraid I distinguished myself instead, which had been my intention, but it didn’t mean what I thought it would; it didn’t lead to the life I thought I’d wanted.”
You mean the woman you wanted, I did not say aloud.
“So why do you keep doing it?
“Doing what?”
“Defending the Empire, distinguishing yourself further.”
I could feel him shrug.
“It’s the life I’m suited for now. I once held the office of praetor in Rome. That made me eligible to serve as legatus legionis in the campaign against the Mauritanian uprising. I never went back to civilian life after that. I can’t stomach the sycophants and the backstabbers, the conspiracies, the betrayals, everyone out for himself. Nothing ever changes in Rome.” I could hear the boy again, the one who had been taunted and excluded. “In battle, at least you know who the enemy is.”
Who was his enemy now? My skin suddenly felt damp and clammy, as if the fog had not lifted.
“You never told me,” I ventured. “Why are you going to Pretannia? It’s not just to see your son, is it?”
“No. No one knows about my son.” He paused for a beat. “I don’t care to have it known.”
“You are asking me not to tell anyone,” I spelled it out.
“I am,” he admitted, clearly uncomfortable to be a suppliant, to be, as he might have put it, at my mercy.
“I have no reason to tell anyone,” I assured him, without, as I’m sure he noticed, making any promises. “But you didn’t answer my question. There is no war in Pretannia that I have heard of. Isn’t the invasion long since over?”
“It’s never that simple,” he said. “Or maybe it is. I am sure you’ve heard of the Pax Romana.”
All my life, I thought, refraining from the long-ingrained urge to spit.
“It requires a military presence. I will be presiding over the Fourteenth Legion, primarily. It will be my job to keep the peace and to ensure the safety of Roman settlements. In the south and east, the natives have largely accepted, even welcomed, Roman rule. But there is still resistance to the north and west.”
Mona, I thought, and the territory of the Silures where my late foster father King Bran had been a key part of that resistance.
Despite the calm waters and the fresh sea breeze, I began to feel queasy. It was not as if I’d never slept with a Roman general before. I’d had one as my first client at The Vine and Fig Tree, and at Temple Magdalen we made a point of not discriminating. All our god-bearing strangers, as we called them, came to us stripped of rank—just as this man had come to me on the cliffs. Yet to know now that I had slept with a commander of the Roman forces occupying Pretannia made me break out in a cold sweat.
“Are you all right?”
He turned towards me and touched my shoulder lightly. Damn the man. Why couldn’t he just be an insensitive boor, easy to hate and dismiss as a mindless imperialist?
“I’m fine,” I said, not looking at him.
“No, you’re not,” he informed me, confident that he knew more about me than I did.
“Why didn’t you tell me your rank that night?” I asked.
“Would it have made a difference?”
But hadn’t I known, even then? Known at least that he wasn’t a foot soldier, that something didn’t add up? And it hadn’t mattered. I had opened my arms to a boy, a heartbroken boy.
“No,” I answered. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now.”
“Apparently, it does,” he said.
And neither of us spoke for a time. The silence was loud.
“You spoke to me in Aramaic yesterday,” he said at length. “Where did you learn it?”
The same place I learned Greek and Latin, I did not say. In a cave on an island in the Otherworld, with an ancient shape-shifting human goddess as my tutor.
“I lived in the Galilee for a long time.” That seemed an innocuous answer, but there I was wrong.
“In the Galilee? My father was stationed there around the time when I was born. In a town called Sepphoris. Do you know it?”
I knew about Sepphoris, all right. It’s where all the bad boys from sleepy, pious little Nazareth went to booze it up. Jesus had done his share of that in his younger days, distressing his mother and outraging his brothers by disappearing for weeks at a time.
“Sepphoris is in the hills,” I said carefully. “I lived in Magdala, right on the shore of the Gennesaret.”
“I don’t know the country,” he said, “though I’ve always wanted to see it. My father died there of an illness. I never knew him.”
I turned to look at him. But I wasn’t seeing him; I was remembering a cliff at the outskirts of Nazareth, where the boy Jesus had gone to be alone. He had been taunted by the other children, called “son of Miriam,” sometimes “son of crazy Miriam,” who might have been pitched over that cliff herself, if it hadn’t been for Joseph’s protection. When I was there with him in that desolate place, I had suddenly known that Miriam had met Jesus’s father there, the father she would never name, the father that merged in her mind with the god she called the Terrible One.
“You’re staring,” the general said. “Are you seeing ghosts again?”
I nodded, then shook my head. It couldn’t be. It was absurd even to think it. They did not look alike, and yet he was so familiar, his voice, his touch, his acute powers of observation.
One of these the least of my brethren, my beloved had said, just before he left me on the cliffs. Damn.
“I think I am going to faint or be sick,” I said as calmly as possible.
It was all too much. I turned and heaved over the side.
To his credit, the general was unperturbed and showed no signs of distaste. He even held my hair out of the way and kept a hand on my shoulder until I was done.
“I will escort you back to your women,” he announced.
“No need. I am perfectly capable of walking.”
But he paid no attention and kept his arm around me as we walked, an arrangement that would not endear me to Sarah, I knew.
“The domina has a touch of seasickness,” he said, as if he sensed he better explain why he dared to touch me.
Sarah ignored him and gave me one of those eloquent looks that I could translate all too easily. Right, seasick on a flat sea, my mother, who has spent seven years on ships in all weathers. I don’t think so.
“I will leave you then,” he said awkwardly. “We will be landing soon. I have much to attend to on shore, but if you need anything, send word to me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Alyssa and Bele exchanging glances that involved raised eyebrows. Sarah continued to glare.
“Wait,” I said as he turned away. “I don’t know your name.”
He turned back.
“Gaius Suetonius Paulinus,” he said, “the newly appointed Governor of Pretannia, at your service.” He paused for a beat. “Who are you?”
“Don’t you tell him anything, not anything,” muttered Sarah.
I felt suddenly rebellious. This was between me and Gaius.
“Maeve,” I answered. “My name is Maeve Rhuad.”
“Maeve the Red?” he translated.
I nodded. Inadvertently, I touched my hair. He looked at me curiously, as if trying to remember something, then smiled (a rare smile) and walked away.
“Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” said Sarah.
How nice of her to ask instead of order. I considered. Let’s see. Tell Sarah that the man who has so aroused her animosity, the Roman Governor of Pretannia, just might be her uncle?
“No.”
“I doubt we will have any need to,” I answered, noting with both admiration at myself and alarm that I had become as adept as any druid or pharisee at evasion.
I should have been more prepared than I was for the sight that greeted us on shore. I knew the Romans had invaded Pretannia almost fifteen years ago. I had lived in Rome itself and visited Romanized cities all over the Empire, but it was still a shock to see a see a busy Roman port town, no different from any other, encroaching on land that had once no doubt been wild marsh with a few homesteads here and there. I stopped myself from saying to the others: It wasn’t like this when I was a girl. And I reminded myself that I had never been to this part of the Holy Isles anyway. No need to get sentimental or indignant. So I just stood with the others, watching as our ship found its berth at the end of what appeared to be the main street of the city.
“This ship has been expected,” said Alyssa. “Look up the street. There’s a parade of officials coming towards us.”
“Not towards us,” corrected Bele. “They’re here for Mother of Sarah’s boyfriend, the newly-appointed Governor of Pretannia, my dears. Always good to have friends in high places.”
Sarah said nothing, but I swear I could hear her grinding her teeth. I thought it wisest not to protest too much.
“We’ll probably have to wait until the damn ceremonial greeting is over before we disembark,” grumbled Alyssa. “I hope there aren’t going to be any orations.”
I watched as the dignitaries approached, flanked by soldiers, but headed by a civilian in a formal gold and purple-trimmed toga. He appeared to be in his thirties and was already beginning to run to fat or maybe it was just that he hadn’t lost his baby fat yet. He wasn’t young, but there was something petulant about his expression that made him appear so.