by Jack Whyte
"Move!"
She was too weak. She knew this man would save her, and the knowledge robbed her of any strength she had left. Yet somehow, supported by his arms around her middle, she managed to pull her legs beneath her and then hobble forward like an ancient crone, exhausted and incapable of straightening her back. He took her through a screen of leaves between two trees, and the ground fell away in front of them into a shallow depression. She lost what remained of her balance on the slope and fell forward heavily, so that only the restraint of his arms stopped her from crashing face down. She heard him grunt with the effort of holding her, and then he was turning her, lowering her to the ground, shifting his grip to pull and haul at her until her back was against the sloping bank. Mairidh's mind was spinning, incapable of fully understanding what was happening. She became aware of a sharp, intrusive pain in her left leg, and then she felt a hand behind her knee, lifting and pulling, and another on the inside of her right thigh, doing the same. Stuporous, knowing what he wanted, she spread her legs wide, but he grunted and pulled her knees together again, so that she sat straight-legged. Her head sagged and then snapped up again as he slapped her lightly on the cheek, but her eyes refused to open.
"Mairidh! Mairidh, it's me! Come on now! We have to be away from here."
The voice was coming from very far away, but it sounded like the boy, and that could not be. The boy was dead. Mairidh knew he was dead, because she had watched him go spinning off the cliff. She knew she must be dreaming again. Then she felt someone hauling at her hands, pulling them forward, and the pressure on the ropes that bound them increased. She opened her eyes, feeling the puffiness of them, and peered down to where a knife blade sawed at the knots between her wrists. The ropes fell away, and then two hands began chafing at her wrists, the thumbs digging deeply. The pain overwhelmed her, and she heard herself moaning in protest. A blackness arose within her own mind then, and she felt herself falling into a whirlwind of chaos where she was battered and assaulted by wildly spinning impressions and images.
A short time later, when her eyes snapped open again, she found herself alone. The sky was still grey—lighter than it had been, but the sun still had not risen. Her wrists burned—she raised them and looked down, feeling, but unable to see, the angry rawness where the skin had been lacerated and rubbed away completely. She was filthy, her naked body covered with dirt, some of it dried mud and crusted with scabbed scrapes and cuts. Remembering then, she struggled to sit up, grunting with pain from the effort, and as she did so, she saw a shape running towards her, stooped over as though to avoid being seen. It was the boy. The boy she had believed dead.
He came to a stop in front of her, kneeling and holding out a double handful of clothes—the single filthy, tunic-like garment in which she had been abducted and the long, saffron-coloured gown she had worn at the start of the previous afternoon before the attackers had found them. Mairidh ignored the offering. She merely blinked at him, devouring every detail of his appearance. He was as naked as she was and almost as dirty, but she was mainly aware of his face, remembering how it had looked gazing down on her from above in the sunlight the previous day, the way the thick, black curls had fallen onto his forehead above startling, bright blue eyes and the solid, tanned column of the strong young neck. A beautiful boy.
"You died."
The boy shook his head, smiling quickly. "No, I didn't. I'm here."
"They killed you."
"No, but they will if they find us here now. There's more of them close by. Can you stand up? I'll help you. Here, put these on." He thrust the clothing at her again, but she still frowned at him, ignoring the clothes, dimly aware of how stupid she must seem, sitting there, naked and filthy, gazing up at him. But her last sight of him filled her mind again, his face screwed up in agony as the larger of her two abductors swung him by one leg and the hair of his head and hurled him, screaming, from the edge of a high cliff.
"I saw you die. They killed you."
He shook his head again, his face now betraying impatience. "No, you saw me fly, not die. They threw me off the cliff, and you thought I must be dead. So did they. But the fool threw me too well-—too hard and too far. I flew out and missed hitting the stones of the riverbank. Instead, I fell into deep water and landed on my belly. It drove all the wind out of me, but I swim like a fish, and I made it to shallow water. When I finally was able to walk again, I climbed back up, but you were gone. Here, take my hand, and put these clothes on."
Mairidh took his hand and forced herself to rise, leaning heavily on his supporting arm and weaving gently backwards and forwards until she felt confident enough to release her grip. He was staring at her, his eyes wide and concerned, and she forced herself to look away, back to the clothes he held.
"You brought my robe."
"I knew you'd need it."
She held up the other garment and saw that it was ruined, torn and stained with earth and blood, and she looked down again at her battered body.
"Why did you follow us? You didn't have to . . . You didn't even have a weapon, did you? I know, because the Pig took your dagger."
The boy shrugged. "No, no weapon. But I knew I could steal one from them if they gave me the chance."
She shook her head slightly, as though dismissing some minor confusion, then looked back at the torn tunic and began pulling it over her head. The boy straightened up while she did so and stood gazing back the way he had come, his entire body radiating tension. She spent a moment trying to get the torn shoulder of the tunic to hang properly, then dismissed it and wrapped the long robe about her. It was clean, and it was soft, and it covered her completely.
When she looked up from tying the sash about her waist, he had vanished again. For a flashing moment, filled with fear, she thought she must have imagined his being there, but she was free and alone, and the clothes she had put on were real—her own clothing. Weaving on her feet again, she looked around, but there was no sign of him, and she sat back down against the bank to wait, convinced that he would return for her. Moments later, he did, reappearing silently from the fringe of bushes on her left.
"Can you walk?"
Mairidh nodded meekly. "I think so, but I don't know how far I can go."
"Far enough to stay alive?" He smiled again, a small, very tentative smile, but she was amazed that he could. "We need to put some space between us and the shore over there, and between us and those two dead men."
She looked at him and nodded her head again, still uncertainly. He was wearing his own clothes again—the rich, white woollen tunic and the leather overshirt that had first caught her eye and which the Pig had stuffed into a sack before fleeing the scene of what she had thought to be the boy's murder. The sack itself now lay at his feet, stuffed with whatever contents the Pig had found to cram into it. The boy had also cleaned the axe and thrust it into his belt, and he had recovered his own long dagger from the Pig's belongings and his bow and arrows from where they had lain beside the other dead man. The dagger now hung at the boy's left hip, opposite the axe, and he had slipped the strung bow and the full quiver of arrows over his shoulders with the taut bowstring and the strap of the quiver crossing in the centre of his breast. The right side of his tunic was thick with blood, and he glanced down as he saw her notice it, touching the clotting mass with the pad of one fingertip.
"It's not mine," he said. "I'm not hurt at all. Ready?"
She drew a deep breath and nodded firmly, and he reached out to take her hand and pull her to her feet before leading her away from the clearing, deep into the undergrowth. There they found a wide and well-used game path that led them through the densest thickets of the forest. They made good time then, and the urgency of their progress diminished as the sea coast fell steadily behind them, so that the boy eventually stopped pulling her along and fell back to walk behind her, allowing Mairidh to choose her own pace.
Mairidh's exhaustion waxed and waned as she moved forward, sometimes threatening to overwhelm her co
mpletely and at other times fading into the background of her awareness. As long as their route was level and straightforward, she could function with an appearance of ease, but whenever the going became heavy, when they had to force their way uphill or through brush looking for another trail, the weight of her legs and feet seemed to increase dramatically, and the sound of her heartbeat grew loud in her ears.
At those times, she wanted merely to fall down on the grass and sleep, and invariably, when she was close to yielding to the temptation, she found herself wanting to weep. Yet it was that very awareness of her own weakness that forced her to keep forging ahead each time she had determined to give up.
At one point, on the summit of a low hill that had seemed far higher when they were climbing it, she stopped and turned to the boy.
"How long have we been walking?"
He glanced around him and shrugged. "Three hours . . . something like that. It's mid-morning."
"Then we must be almost there."
"Almost where?" He was gazing at her quizzically.
"Back. Where they found us. I gauged we had travelled for about four hours yesterday before they made camp."
He shrugged his shoulders and nodded. "Hmm, but we're on a different route, and we've been moving at about half the speed they maintained yesterday. Remember, they had a horse."
"Remember? I had to run behind the thing. But why are we not riding it now? Why did you leave it behind?"
"Think about that for a moment, and you'll know the answer. If we had taken the horse, we would be tied to the road or to pathways that the horse could use. Once those raiders find their dead companions, they'll turn the place upside down looking to discover who killed them. We have left no tracks behind us, but had we taken the horse, we would have, and they would have come running after us."
He stopped talking and stood squinting at her. Mairidh could barely keep her eyes open. He nodded. "Hmm. You need rest."
"No, rest is not enough. I have to sleep, even if it be for no more than an hour. I barely slept at all last night and had no real rest. Now my body is screaming for sleep. Please?"
Again he looked around him, as though checking for signs of pursuit, and then he grunted and nodded, looking down into the valley ahead of them, then up to the sky, where the rain clouds that had threatened them all morning were beginning to scatter, showing broad tracts of blue.
"Aye. We'll be safe enough now. I know where we are, but we're still half a score of miles and probably more from where we want to be. There's a pool down in the valley there that you will love, I promise you, and you can sleep there for a few hours. While you are doing that, I'll find us something to eat."
Chapter EIGHT
It was the smell of food that finally awakened her. Mairidh lay for a long time, watching the boy as he crouched over the fire he had built. Above it, on a framework of green twigs, he had skewered a hare. As she watched, he reached out and carefully turned the spitted meat above the flames, and she heard the hissing sound of fat dripping into the coals. Her mouth filled with saliva, and she swallowed, but she took care to make no move that would alert him to the fact that she had finally awakened.
The boy had stayed with her while she bathed in the miraculous pool of naturally hot water that he had promised, which welled from an underground spring like the famous one she had visited in Aquae Sulis many years earlier. She had been incredulous, at first, watching the wisps of steam that rose from the gently roiling surface of the water, and the boy had told her then how he had sat in it one day, warm and wonder-struck as snowflakes drifted down from above and chilled his skin with tiny icy pinpricks.
Later, reclining in the hot water, beginning to feel clean again, Mairidh had wept silently, tears of thanksgiving for her rescuer and for the fact that his life, too, had been spared. By the time she had climbed out of the pool, he had built up a roaring fire in a sheltered angle between two large, flat stones that someone had set on end in the past. She had dried herself in front of it using a large, soft woollen cloak from the Pig's sack as a towel. Then, with a solicitude that had seemed more suitable to a father or an older brother than a young lover, he had helped her tend to the worst of her cuts and bruises, gently wiping those she could not reach herself. Afterwards he had lowered her gently down onto a thick bed of newly gathered moss, wrapped her in her saffron robe and covered her with his leather overshirt, and over that with the woollen cloak. She had fallen asleep almost immediately, overcome with feelings of peace and well-being and the release from danger.
Now, judging by the westering sun, she knew it must be late in the afternoon. Knowing that he thought her still asleep, Mairidh allowed herself the luxury of simply looking at the boy and wondering.
He was tall and strongly built—as big as any full-grown man, in fact—and yet she judged him to be no more than fifteen years old, perhaps sixteen. More than that, however, he was beautiful, in a time and a place where male beauty, in the classic Roman sense of the word, was something seldom seen. It was his . . . what was it? She sought the word . . . his wholesomeness, the cleanly proportioned, hairless Roman look of him. Of course, she knew he was no Roman. There had been no Romans left in Britain for more than a decade and a half since the legions left. Moreover, this boy was clearly a local Celt, with his black hair, fair skin and bright blue eyes. But he was tall for his people and strong, with wide shoulders, long arms and a narrow waist. He was also clean in the fastidious way of the Romans, with a glowing, healthy, well-scrubbed look to him. The combination of that cleanliness with the clearly muscled shape of his lithe young body had caught her eye and her fancy in a way that seldom happened to her nowadays.
She had first seen him swimming in the river with several friends of his own age, and he had glittered among them like a jewel among broken glass. So she had watched him from afar, perched high on a cliff and concealed from their view by a screen of low-growing shrubbery. She remembered her surprise when he had finally emerged from the water and dried himself with a thick towel produced from a leather satchel, then dressed in what she could see was rich and well-made clothing. The knowledge that he was thus obviously the son of a wealthy and powerful man had intrigued her and enabled her to pretend she had another reason altogether for returning the following day to watch the boy again, this time without the young woman who, acting as her companion, had first led her that way.
She could not have given a coherent reason, even to herself, to explain why she might be content to crouch alone for the better part of a day, spying on a boy who must have been at least ten years her junior, but she had felt no desire to justify anything she did, least of all to herself. The watching gave her intense pleasure, and she had long since learned never to spurn such gifts.
Her husband, Balin, was no longer a young man, and his interest in sex for its own sake had begun to wane. A few years earlier, when he and Mairidh first wed, he had been more than able to acquit himself handsomely and had taken lustful and glorious pleasure in the voluptuous blandishments of his lovely young wife. He no longer had the potency with which to express his feelings, but his wife had, and he would never have denied her the right to express and enjoy her sexuality. Balin's beliefs were his own, gathered and assimilated throughout a lifetime of travel, observation and discussion of various religions, including Druidism and Christianity. Sex, he believed, was an elemental part of religion and religious fervour. Men and women were born of sex, he maintained, and therefore owed the gods their gratitude, which they could express through sex, irrespective of age or gender. He believed implicitly that Mairidh's love for him would be unaffected by her enjoyment of casual, normal sex with others. Love was ineffable, Balin believed, and sex was nothing more than private prayer.
Bolstered by that knowledge and having come to share her husband's beliefs over the years, Mairidh now felt no fears at all about the way Balin perceived her. She knew that his love for her was secure.
Even when she returned the third day and the boy had not
appeared, Mairidh had smiled wryly to herself before admitting that she was more disappointed than she might have thought possible mere days before. But she had had nothing better to do, and the boy was beautiful enough to justify her efforts, so she had resolved to return on the fourth day.
The boy came swimming once again, accompanied this time by only a few companions. Once again she watched from the concealment of her high ledge, this time hoping against all logic that his friends would go away and leave him alone, since it was inconceivable that she might make any approach to him while they were present. They were mere boys, younger-looking and far less mature than he appeared to be, loud, boisterous and irreverent, with the bruising noisiness that all boys of their age possessed. Mairidh had no difficulty imagining their prurient reactions should they discover her spying on them, and she smiled grimly to herself and remained in hiding.
And then, quite suddenly, between one moment and the next, they vanished without warning, their presence and their noise dwindling until finally engulfed by the surrounding forest. For whatever reason, the boy had remained behind, alone, floating tranquilly on his back in their waist-deep swimming hole. She waited for a long time, her heart pounding, before she was able to accept that the others had really gone away and were not sneaking about through the undergrowth, playing some boyish game of raiders. Once she did accept it, however, she moved quickly, wasting no more time.
She descended quickly to the riverbank, careful to move quietly lest she betray her presence, and then she paused to collect herself, drawing several deep breaths in an attempt to calm her suddenly racing heart. When she was sure that no sign of any kind could betray her appearance of unsuspecting innocence, she began humming to herself very quietly and stepped forward, allowing her long-skirted clothing to brush audibly against the bushes lining the narrow riverside path.
