B007IIXYQY EBOK

by Gillespie, Donna

  “The gods know,” Athelinda said with bitter calm, patiently stroking Auriane’s hair. “The earth delivers up monsters, the enemy knows no law and the Wheel of Yule spins backward.” She put an arm about Auriane and they walked toward the open door. “Perhaps it’s world’s end. He lives longest who knows when to hide.”

  They entered the cozy gloom of the hall. It smelled as always of tanned hides, fresh-mown hay and day-old leek-and-venison stew, mingled today with the smell of wet ash from the freshly doused hearth fire. Auriane began with a calf, pushing on the creature’s haunches to coax it outside to safety. Athelinda herded chickens with a broom, striking at them with motions that were frantic and sad, her eyes bright and intent.

  Auriane looked at her. “Mother, there is something else. What is it?”

  Athelinda hesitated and then said, “A message came this morning from your father. He’s gotten an order—an order, if you can believe it—from the Roman Governor. As if we were his subjects. Marcus Julianus, high chief over the whole world—” Athelinda was abruptly silent, as if she decided at the last moment to spare her daughter the truth.

  “Mother, tell me. I am not a child.”

  “Very well then. He wants you married to one of the sons of Wido.”

  Auriane made the peculiar discovery that the heart could feel nausea. She gave the calf an overly rough shove that speedily propelled it into the yard.

  “How dare he?” she whispered. No enemy the forest might spew forth seemed so vile as the Romans with their dark purposes and invisible snares.

  “They dare anything that suits their purpose.”

  “Mother, I am far too young.”

  “Not to them. I have heard it said that in Rome they marry girl children of twelve.”

  “But…what of Witgern?” Chickens pecked at her feet. “This cannot be. I’m to marry Witgern, the Holy Ones have given their blessing on it.” She said nothing of Hylda and the oracle, for it was too unsettling to the order of the world and this day was plagued already with too much disorder. “There was an outcry, I hope, at this monstrous insult to Witgern’s family?”

  Athelinda’s silence was more eloquent than any reply. Finally she said, “A meeting of the Assembly was called to settle the question. Geisar convinced them this was the one certain way to end the warring between your father and Wido.”

  “That priest is Wido’s pet dog. I guessed it before. Was the Assembly with us?”

  “Not nearly enough so. That in itself is odd. But then Wido has more new Companions than rotted meat has flies. Their voices were louder than ours. So many Companions—soon, with them, Wido shall have whatever he wants. Now help with the animals, have you not the wit to work and talk at the same time?”

  Auriane obligingly began dragging a cow by its bell rope. “What did Father do?”

  “He soundly chastised them. He said we would be unwise to back down and allow the Romans to usurp the right of parents, and promised he would make war on the Assembly itself if he had to, to prevent this loathsome means of settling a fight that was never his,” Athelinda said between heaving breaths as she recaptured the goat that escaped earlier. “And then he strode off, followed, of course, by his Companions and all the kin of Witgern.”

  “Loathsome means! Well said!” Auriane smiled with satisfaction as she imagined Baldemar thundering the words. “Father is right in what he said—Wido’s always the one to begin the disputes. But something is troubling here. The Romans have always encouraged us to war among ourselves. Why suddenly do they want peace between Father and Wido, and marriage, unless there is some common cause between Wido and the Governor?”

  Athelinda set her broom upright and gave Auriane the forbidding look that would have sent Mudrin off whimpering. “Do not even speak those words. Wido is a scoundrel and a cattle thief but no Chattian chief has ever betrayed us to the Romans. That is different. Where is your pride in your people?” The sharpness in her voice awakened Arnwulf, who began softly to cry.

  “I have pride, Mother. But you cannot escape from a trap if you do not know how that trap is made.” The cow butted her, taking advantage of the fact that she was not paying attention. “The Romans do not like to lose face. They would not give such an order unless they planned to enforce it.”

  “That is why Baldemar is sending Witgern here at once. It won’t be a proper marriage, of course, you’re far too young, only an oath of promising—you’ll be married at the proper time when you’re twenty. But it will prevent the Assembly from marrying you to anyone else.”

  Witgern here at once? Auriane thought, disliking the idea suddenly. She had nothing against Witgern himself, but Hylda’s words were beginning to stir in her blood like some slow-acting draught. Marriage to anyone had begun to feel like a fence about a wild place. But, of course, marriage to Witgern is what must be.

  They pushed out four ewes, the last of the animals. And Athelinda noticed for the first time what lay in the yard next to Brunwin’s saddlecloth.

  “Auriane, what is all that? Whose spear is that? What’s in that gamebag?”

  “I killed one of the raiders.” She said it without enthusiasm; she no longer cared.

  “Fria, Mother of us all, you could have been killed!” Her mother edged toward the enemy spear, then stood in silence, her expression strangely sad.

  “What is it, Mother?”

  “Nothing. I just did not expect this…so soon. No, don’t ask me what I mean. Everyone’s underground but you. Go now!”

  “Mother,” Auriane protested, “if they do burn…here, father’s weapons must be gotten out.”

  Athelinda made a despairing gesture. “My daughter is mad. That cursed sword in the cradle’s to blame for this. There isn’t time.”

  “There must be time!” Auriane darted back into the hall and made her way to the high-seat, over which the weapons were mounted. She hesitated before the sword of Baldemar’s youth, with which he took his first man—she had always feared to touch it because she was taught that in it lived the soul of every enemy it had slain. As her hand closed round the bone handle, she was certain she felt a kick of angry life within. In one moment there was something strangely familiar in the weapon’s feel, as if she had been reunited with a lost limb. Then she took up the hunting spear with which Baldemar felled his first boar, and started for the door. But before she stepped out, she looked thoroughly about, from her sleeping-hides to the looms, to the dead hearth fire to the beloved walls, full of a sense of pinched and painful longing, not letting herself fully know it might well be a final look. Then she concealed Brunwin as best she could in the juniper bushes behind the cowsheds and hurried to the souterrain.

  Because the hall of Baldemar had many dependents, two souterrains had been dug into the earth behind the mead shed. Each was cut deep and wide enough to shelter twenty people. Wattlework hurdles were fitted over them; these were carefully covered with brushwood to disguise their presence. In peaceful times these rectangular pits were used for storage, but in time of raids they became places of refuge.

  Auriane knelt by the nearest of them and handed the weapons down to Athelinda. Then she lowered herself into the earthy dark, finding with her feet the notches cut into the soil and clinging to roots as she descended. She pulled the frame in place, then dropped the rest of the way. The rank smell of many bodies enveloped her. She settled between Athelinda and a mead cask. No one spoke. Speckled light filtered through the interlace of hazelwood branches above. After a time Athelinda held a skin of mead to the baby’s parted lips—he must not awaken and cry now. Arnwulf seemed to drink in his sleep.

  Auriane gradually discerned Hertha’s resolute profile in the half-light. Her grandmother sat rigidly erect on a small wooden bench, holding her counting stick before her like a spear, in stiff denial of her helplessness. Auriane saw something pathetic in those relentlessly judging eyes, the beaked outline of that commanding nose, held up like a small blunt weapon against the world. Set before her grandmother was a chest
filled with the treasures of a lifetime. Hertha was remote from them and it was more than silence; it had the quality of one who readied herself for death. Indeed, Auriane saw, she even wore her finest cloak and the saffron-dyed dress that she meant to be buried with, and her arms glowed with her richest rings. Auriane found it almost brought her to tears, even though Hertha never had any love for her.

  “What of Charis?” Auriane whispered finally to her mother. Charis was Theudobald’s wife. “And the baby?”

  “No one has seen them,” Athelinda replied.

  Hertha addressed Athelinda in a whisper that Auriane knew she was meant to overhear. “For the weal of us all, she should marry one of Wido’s sons. Nothing but sorrows will come from that child.”

  “I will not speak of this now.” Athelinda’s sharply whispered reply concealed a note of pleading.

  Mother does not put her down soundly enough, Auriane thought miserably. I know she fears Hertha, who knows the magic of raising the dead, but she should not bow down. And how dare Hertha speak of me and not to me, as if I were a dog.

  “Nothing but ill, I say,” Hertha whispered on as if Athelinda had not spoken. “Why not use her to make a peaceful alliance? I feel sorry for Witgern…. He knows he’s getting a wife fouled with a water-demon’s blood and dares not protest.”

  “I will not listen to this!” Athelinda whispered with more spirit.

  Soon I will burst into flame when Hertha talks so, Auriane thought. I do not care if she curses me nine times and I die. Why has she always despised me so? Mother, I think you know more than you tell.

  Hertha could never let Athelinda’s words be the last. “Our haughty chief’s daughter thinks to refuse, I’ll wager. Once again, she escapes up a tree. Once again, Athelinda, you’re too much the feather-hearted fool to use the axe.”

  Unknown to Hertha this last taunt worked against her purpose, for her words reminded Auriane of the generosity of her father’s love. Once when Auriane was seven, she had scrambled up a pine tree to escape Hertha’s birch rod, and for a day she refused to come down, struggling against hunger and exhaustion so she would not fall out of the tree. Hertha had shouted threats until she became hoarse and finally sent for Garn, a field thrall, to cut down Auriane’s tree with an axe. But Athelinda dispatched a messenger to Baldemar, who left a victory feast and came at once, arriving at the same time as the axe. Auriane was ready to go down with the tree. But Baldemar rode up with fifteen slightly embarrassed Companions and coaxed her down with a wise word or two. Hertha shouted at him to punish her, saying Auriane had trampled the seed corn, galloping over it with her pony—which she had not—and helped a thrall escape whom Hertha planned to thrash with her birch rod, which was true. But Baldemar forbade it, and Auriane always remembered his words—Better a spirit that does not quite fit in this world than one that is broken.

  Athelinda said nothing in reply to Hertha; she just moved closer to Auriane and put a reassuring arm about her daughter’s shoulders. For long, no one spoke and the silence above began to madden Auriane; it was like the indrawn breath of a dragon. In the unnatural quiet she felt closely the presence of the Hermundures. Sadly she looked at Arnwulf.

  Poor fragile nestling. Why do the gods make us so helpless? We cannot fly, nor have we claws—we are pushed naked into a world that would devour us at every turn.

  Now Auriane could see the thralls in the gloom. Mudrin, Fredemund and the five women who worked the looms sat on a ledge of earth, the place of greater honor. Beneath them on the moist ground were the field thralls, pressed close together. Garn, who was chief over them, sat a little apart. The field thralls farmed their separate plots and were required to hand over half of what they produced to the tribe. Among them was a former Chattian warrior who disgraced himself by dropping his weapons in battle and running off—for this, the Assembly had condemned him to slavery. There were five women of the Hermundures, taken during the repeated skirmishes between the tribes that erupted over the disputed ownership of salt springs. And then there were the two Romans. One was a Gallic slave trader caught by her father’s men with a cartload of Chattian children bound for the slave markets. The Assembly had not sacrificed him to Wodan because they felt such an offering unworthy. The other Roman was Decius.

  It was Decius who fascinated her, for he was a captive Roman legionary soldier. There before her, tamed and close, was one of that terrifying race of men who built stone dwellings like mountains and enslaved all the peoples in their path. Often she studied Decius in secret, watching him as he pulled weeds from his miserable plot or threw mock spears at imaginary targets to keep his body youthful and strong. She searched for signs of unusual mettle and strength, and was sharply disappointed when she found none. Decius was just a man. He threw a spear no farther than a Chattian warrior, and his courage was no greater; he was even smaller in stature than most men of her tribe. He revealed nothing of the war mysteries of the all-conquering tribe of the South.

  The only thing extraordinary about Decius was his arrogance. When she observed him, he stared back with more boldness than anyone would expect from a thrall—a look that said: I am better than you, even enslaved. Even now he seemed to watch all about him with amused contempt, as though her people were unruly children who had somehow upset the natural order of things and had temporarily gotten the better of him. He learned as little of their language as possible, as though the Chattian language defiled the tongue. He kept his hair clipped short and his face shaved in the Roman fashion, and Auriane knew it was because he did not want to look like them. Scorning mead, he preferred wine so poor it looked like brown river mud. Once she had caught him seated before his hut, holding up a thin, rolled sheet, staring at it intently; she wondered if he had gone into some kind of trance. She described what she had seen to Baldemar, who patiently explained that the language of the Romans was marvelous; every word of it could be represented by a series of marks, not unlike runes, and what Decius had been doing was called reading. For nights after hearing this, Auriane had hardly been able to sleep, considering this. With this talking paper you could hear the words of someone a great distance away, or even a thousand years dead. But it seemed a thing that could breed confusion: How did a person who could perform this reading know precisely what was meant when he could not hear the musical tones of the voice?

  Then she tensed with excitement. Why had she not thought of this at once? The letters on the belt she took from the slain warrior must be in the language of the Romans. She must seek out Decius and get him to interpret the words.

  Decius saw her watching him and grinned. It was a smile that snagged her and held her, playful and scornful at once. He was young still, not much past twenty, and had the sort of face she imagined made life easier in cities: smooth, finely made but not overly so, formed like a boy’s, yet with the resolution of a man’s, with swift, impenetrable eyes that were adept at keeping the world at bay, but could not conceal the restless sadness lurking underneath.

  She summoned a mildly haughty glare—she did not want him to think himself capable of upsetting her overmuch—but he only broadened his grin.

  Then from above, they heard the wail of a child, the quavering singsong cry of one who has given up all hope of help and given in to a world of dread.

  “Mother, that is Thusko. He is alive!” Thusko was the child of Theudobald and Charis, and her own cousin. He had somehow escaped the attack on his home and wandered to the one other place familiar to him. From the sound of his broken cries they guessed he ran stumbling and falling toward the abandoned hall, thinking he fled to safety.

  While Auriane cast about for some means of safely signaling to the boy, Athelinda shot from her place, scrambled up the dirt wall and dragged aside the wattlework hurdles, not even pausing to take Arnwulf from her back.

  “Mother, no!” Auriane called out softly. She tried to grasp Athelinda’s foot but lost her hold.

  Hertha roused herself from her fiercely private meditation. “I command you, At
helinda, come back!”

  “Ignorant barbarian sow,” muttered Decius. Fortunately for himself he spoke in Latin—or Auriane would have been at his throat with a hunting knife.

  But Athelinda was gone. She followed the white-blond head of Thusko as he ran in a ragged path beyond the feed-troughs.

  Auriane now had such a strong sense of the enemy about she imagined she smelled their sweat and blood. Mother, she cried in her mind, you walk into the open jaws of a serpent.

  She heard her mother’s fast footsteps grow fainter.

  And then the silence was pierced by a single trilling war cry, penetrating as an iron needle thrust into the brain. It ignited others, and the air was chaotic with cries. Then abruptly the war trill ceased and from every side came the sound of bodies crashing through brush to the accompaniment of soul-shredding shrieks as hundreds of warriors climbed the low palisade and broke in on the yard, entrapping Athelinda in their midst. Auriane heard cracking pottery, the snorts and neighs of terrified horses, and the pitiful yelps of guard dogs as the Hermundures killed them with clubs.

  Soon after came the crisp crackling sound of fire eagerly devouring brushwood. The sound gathered force quickly, erupting into a hot rush of noise as though a pillar of fire were sucked up to the sky. And Auriane knew the hall of Baldemar was burning.

  Then she heard Athelinda’s scream. It was full throated at first, then became a stifled moan, as if someone covered her mouth. It sent wildfire through Auriane’s limbs.

  She withdrew Baldemar’s sword from its sheath and sprang to her feet. Swiftly she began to climb out, struggling a little with the sword’s awkward weight.

  But a man’s hand shot over her mouth and an iron arm encircled her waist, holding her firmly. She writhed furiously, but gradually her captor succeeded in dragging her back.

  It was Decius. “Crazed whelp,” came his casually commanding voice in her ear as he spoke between gritted teeth, half in Latin, half in badly pronounced Chattian. “You can throw your life away if you want, but you’ll not throw away mine.”