“Say it quickly!” Athelinda whispered.
“Baldemar lives—”
“They cannot both be living,” Athelinda whispered.
“—but is gravely hurt,” Ganax quickly added. “The medicine women say, though, that he will not die.”
“Not die?” Auriane half rose. “What are you telling us?”
“The tale is a strange one…but I swear by my ancestors, it’s the truth.” Thrusnelda brought the boy a bowl of oxtail broth and a horn of mead. He ignored the broth and drank just enough of the mead to wet his throat. All stopped at their tasks and fell into rapt silence.
“Baldemar met Wido at dawn on the plain of Sheepshead Hill, to try the truth of Baldemar’s words.”
Auriane nodded impatiently.
“All gathered round, Wido’s three hundred and more Companions on the right, and on the left, the people by the thousands, along with Baldemar’s hundred. Baldemar’s greeting was his best blow. It knocked the breath out of all who heard.
“‘Hail Wido, slave of Marcus Arrius Julianus the Governor, and good servant of Rome!’ Baldemar calls out. Imagine the tumult! ‘Tell me, Wido—or is it Marcus Arrius Wido now?—did the Roman Governor tell you he would make you a king?’
“The stupefied look on Wido’s face!” Ganax went on. “I thought he would drop his sword. He stood stiff as a wood image, then took a step backward, looking like someone trying to back out of a snake pit without rousing the snakes.”
“This is monstrous,” Athelinda interrupted, struggling to sit. Auriane was more alerted than astonished, her mind assessing this with great speed, linking it swiftly with what she already knew.
“And then, to the one who calls himself Branhard,” the messenger continued, “who stood by at close hand, Baldemar spoke these words—‘Hail Sextus Annaeus Curtius, Roman spy and Wido’s master.’ Three names the wretch carried, my ladies, this ruinous Roman rat gnawing at the center-beams of all our houses. What perfidy.”
Athelinda shook her head, half gasping, half laughing now.
Auriane whispered, “The viper! All this time Wido has been buying Companions with Roman coin.” She looked suddenly at her mother. “His Companions…Mother, that is who the raiders must have been—Wido’s own Companions garbed as Hermundures. He’s lost all sense of measure.”
Athelinda nodded faintly, more interested in the story than in Auriane’s speculations. Auriane fervently wished Baldemar were here; he would want the speculation as much as the story.
“And Branhard,” Ganax continued animatedly, pleased to be telling such a startling tale and punctuating it with frightful grins that showed knocked-out teeth, “—or Sextus Curtius, I should say—turned white as the hair on old Geisar’s head. He was so terror-stricken he lost all mother wit and approached Baldemar, babbling to him the likes of ‘Come with us, it is not too late for you, it is a better life, I’ll see the Governor honors you,’ and so forth, incriminating himself hopelessly before them all. If there was doubt among any of the people, that trounced it.
“The people began to grumble and shout. Some started to draw weapons. Wido made one bold attempt to take the situation in hand. ‘I am through with children’s games,’ he shouted at Baldemar. ‘You are now my prisoner, Baldemar. You’ll be freed unharmed when you yield up Auriane for one of my sons.’
“What did the people do?” Athelinda asked.
“The bravest among them raised shouts of outrage. Wido called out for his Companions to fall on them with their longswords. They killed like Romans, not sparing the old, the feeble, or the young. It was Baldemar who turned the tide. Someone brought him his horse. When the people saw him mounted, braving all those spears and wearing his fury like a shield, they found their courage. With the whole of the people at his back, Baldemar rushed at Wido’s men. They fear nothing when he leads them. Even the artisans and tale-singers and mothers with children charged after. Wido’s mercenaries shrank back before their fury.
“Branhard tried to escape on horseback, but someone killed the horse beneath him and the people were all over him like wasps. There was horse’s blood all over him and I couldn’t see the rest. But I know they tore him apart. I have his right hand with me, here in my sack—Thorgild took it actually, but I won it from him at dice.” He moved to take out the gruesome token and show it to them, but Athelinda stopped him with a curt gesture.
“Hurry on with the tale,” she commanded. The boy looked briefly hurt, then continued.
“Wido’s men closed round him tight as an eggshell round an egg, and the traitor got away. And Baldemar—if only he’d turned round when he had them on the run! But he kept chasing them and harrying them. Finally someone felled Baldemar’s horse with a spear, and the beast fell on his right leg, crushing it.”
“I must go and tend to him!”
“Mother, no. If you travel anywhere, it will be your death.” Auriane, too, felt a sharp fear for his welfare but dared not show it; Athelinda would only suffer more. “Do you know more than the medicine women? All will be well.”
“She is right; Baldemar will be well in time,” Ganax went on, “but this is disaster. The leg is broken in two places. They say he will not fight again before the days of Eastre fires, three seasons off.”
“By that time the Romans will rebuild every fort and signal tower we burned,” Auriane said. “By then, they will own the Taunus Mountain.”
“At the camp, they mourn,” Ganax went on. “A small battle’s been exchanged for a far greater one, and without the war-luck of Baldemar, all say we have little chance. The Companions even sent for Ramis to heal him with her arts, but she sent back one of her riddling replies—‘When the right limb is gone, put forward the left’ or some such thing—plus some mutterings about how it was the will of the gods that she do nothing.”
She is as useless as ever, Auriane thought sourly.
“Wido and his Companions,” the boy continued, “have burrowed into that earth fortification on the plain built by the Ancient Ones, on the east side of Sheepshead Hill—”
“That is well,” Auriane broke in eagerly. She knew the fort; it was ringed by concentric circles of earth with staggered entrances, a device the Ancient Ones used to hinder an enemy’s approach. The fort itself was built of half-rotted wood, its gates in bad repair. “There are many breaches in it. Wido is ever the fool in picking campsites—he’ll need twice the men to defend that place as he would have needed if he’d simply climbed the same hill.”
The messenger paused to look at her, surprised at her knowledge of the terrain. “And now Romans come and go openly from Wido’s camp. He strengthens himself with each passing day….” Athelinda and the boy both paused to look at Auriane, who, unmindful of them, was using a counting stick to make diagrams on the earth floor.
“What is that?” Athelinda asked.
“This is Wido’s fort. Here is Elk Ridge. Here is where the opposing camp should be set, above the plain where Willow Creek runs down, at the very point where Elk Ridge slopes to the south.”
This time the boy was more than surprised; he felt a chill. “That is precisely where Baldemar did set the camp,” he said softly. Ganax had heard some of the talk of it; Baldemar had fought to override the opinions of Sigwulf and several others. The decision had been a complex one, involving close knowledge of the features of the land.
Ganax straightened and went on. “Geisar bleeds more men from Baldemar every passing day by screaming that he is despised of Wodan, and his Companions are saying…are saying that…” The boy slowed, discomfort in his face, fearful he might give offense.
But Auriane calmly finished for him, “…that Baldemar is a man with unavenged dead, and as long as this is so, ill-luck will dog the good. No doubt they whisper: Had vengeance been taken at once, Baldemar would still have two good legs.”
Ganax gave her the faintest nod of appreciation. She is in all matters her father’s daughter, he thought—clear in thought, bold in speech.
Aur
iane thought again of Decius—many times in the last days she had sought for a way to steal off unnoticed to his hut so she could ply him with questions.
He will mock me, but I must go to him. Surely he knows better than all of us how best to battle his own people.
Auriane rose, then went to her mother’s strongbox and took out a silver ring to pay Ganax for his trouble. But before he left, Athelinda gave him a message of her own for Baldemar, a short one full of affectionate words that caused Auriane to feel a jolt of bleak emptiness.
I’ve cast aside all hope of ever knowing such a close and fond marriage. The cold love of the gods will have to be enough for me. My whole life, it seems, will be a preparation for death.
Ganax was quickly gone.
Athelinda said wearily, “Winter will never leave us. And now my last child is to be taken from me because the Holy Ones are crying, ‘Let us have her to marry to the god.’ What if even this desperate sacrifice is not enough? After that, we truly will have nothing left to give.”
“It must be enough. And perhaps a sacrifice of heirs will”—Auriane’s voice dropped to a frail whisper—“purify my own evil as well.”
“What are you speaking of? Who has said you were evil?”
Auriane looked tensely down.
Ask it. Ask it now.
“Hertha has said it. Mother, I’ve a thing to ask you that I’ve feared to speak of….” Blood pounded in her temple as she edged close to the subject of Hertha’s dying words. Athelinda must convince her they were nonsense, or else they would stalk her like wolves. She fastened her gaze on the gently swinging toad, reaching for the comfort of its modest but beneficent power. “Her last words to me were horrible.”
Athelinda averted her eyes. It put Auriane in mind of a small animal running for cover.
“Mother…, Hertha died because of me.”
Athelinda’s eyes showed unspoken denial.
“Yes. Because of me! She said it as she walked into the flames. She said I brought about the raid. She said the evil has only begun. Were she with us now she would say I caused Father to fall and crush his leg. She said—oh, I cannot speak the words.”
“She was old and sick and bitter,” Athelinda said too quickly. “Be sensible now, and put it from your mind. Hertha was…a trifle mad toward the last days.”
“No, Mother. She spoke with soundness and certainty. She said…” Her throat felt as if someone tightened a rough noose about it. Athelinda looked away, braced, unwilling to help. The sunlight that broke through cracks between the logs touched her mother’s eyes; they were of clearest glass, tinted blue, oracular eyes full of gentle knowing, mysterious as the Holy Ones’ crystal orbs. She knows. Why does she behave as though she does not?
Auriane’s words came in a bruised whisper. “Hertha said I would be the bane of my own father…. She said that Baldemar would be slain by me.”
Auriane saw a start of fear in her mother’s face, but no true surprise. She has heard this before.
Athelinda found Auriane’s hand and pressed it to her chest. “Auriane, Hertha was wrong. You’re not to say it again, while earth is below and sky above. Hertha had her wits about her most times, but on this matter she was addled as a hare at first thaw.”
“You have heard it then! When? At my birth?”
“Yes.”
“It came from Ramis.”
“Of course not! Hertha was…ill with fever just after you were born. Dark spirits whispered things to her while she slept and convinced her their words were true prophecy from the Holy Ones. Now I command you, put it from your mind!”
Reluctantly Auriane relented. She got up, found her cloak, and told Thrusnelda she was going out to the fields to gather thornapple, remembering as she spoke that this plant’s dark green leaves should be harvested in the morning. But Thrusnelda was too distraught by the messenger’s news to notice the mistake, and Auriane found herself free at last to seek out Decius.
Auriane wanted so much to believe her mother’s assurances that for a time she was successful. Why would Athelinda not tell her the truth? Perhaps she hopes it the truth but suspects she might be wrong. Perhaps the truth is too fearsome to look upon.
In the end Auriane got no solace from her mother’s reply; Hertha’s words clung like river mud. Auriane could never feel a tremor of happiness without it being darkened by a sense of evil worming in, spoiling what was fresh, bringing the murky memories, the smell of rot, the shadow of a coming crime greater than Wido’s.
Decius tossed another potful of river water over the thatch of his hut. He was fireproofing it. Last year two thralls had burned to death when a band of raiders bearing the boar standard of Wido threw firebrands at the thatched huts of the thralls who worked Hertha’s lands, and he did not plan to fall victim to this latest war between the clans, the blurred details of which reached him through the gossip of the field thralls. The milder climate of the months of Julius and Augustus seemed especially to incite their savagery—but what were names of months in this god-cursed place? Here there was only heat or cold, dry grass or snow.
He could not guess when this latest spasm of violence would end and he looked for no cause. Barbarians were more of nature than of man; they stormed and were calm in elemental rhythm. As a legionary soldier at the fortress at Mogontiacum he had learned to view them as vermin infesting the frontier whose numbers needed periodically to be thinned. “Take no prisoners” was the order given before every campaign. “They’re too savage a breed; they make poor slaves. Spare neither the females nor the young—or in a generation’s time they’ll replenish themselves and our labor will be undone.”
But after two years of enslavement by them his view of them had softened somewhat. Now he saw them as a lower order of man, a child-people capable of a surprising amount of human feeling, brigands and borrowers who nibbled at the edges of civilization, seeming half eager to be let in. Some of their traits amazed him, such as their laws of guest-friendship, which declared that a wayfarer who sought shelter under your roof must be protected even if he were a fleeing murderer. Or their profound—and to his mind faintly absurd—reverence for their mothers: The most celebrated and bloody-minded warrior often would not act in war or in peace without first seeking her counsel. Their relationship with their gods was so intimate it called up lost longings in him. Unlike Roman deities, who were the remote partners of emperors, the spirits of the Chattians haunted the humblest hearth fire and hovered over every ripe field; the stalks shivered with their breath. Every act of their daily lives was homage to a deity; even as they harvested their crops, they imagined they relieved their earth goddess of the heavy fruit of her womb. Their minds seemed innocent of impiety; it would never occur to them to cheat their gods in the way his own people often did.
And they were exceedingly faithful; often he mused what excellent soldiers they might make if that willingness to die in battle for their chief could be transferred to a legionary commander. His final judgment of them was that with patient care and perhaps a generation’s time, they might be brought to accept some of the benefits of Roman civilization.
It was a task far too large for himself, however. He wanted only to quit this prison of trees and set eyes on a marketplace again, to hear running water issuing from a fountain, not from untamed earth. The rigorous, sensible routines of the army seemed a sort of ritual prayer torn from his life forever, leaving him adrift in a formless place. He ached to hear the sound of true human speech, not the barbarian barkings that ravaged his nerves every day. He felt shame when he looked at his hands—once they had borne a soldier’s calluses; now they were the burnt, roughened hands of a field slave. Most of all he missed the sense of moving forward in life, of bettering things. In the army, as in all life, there was always some circumstance to change or improve—whether it was the draining of a swamp to create a healthier climate, the returning of a shipment of poorly made catapult bolts that did not fire straight, or the conditioning of fresh recruits into units that fo
ught as one man. In the old life his restless need for change was always gratified. Barbarians, like all lower creatures, knew nothing of this need; they moved not in a straight line with eyes upon a goal but in endless, unknowing circles, prodded by the revolving seasons, blindfolded by their traditions. They never expected conditions to worsen or improve; they feasted, fornicated, farmed and fought without wondering why, and their lives were as fixed as the stars. It deeply mystified him.
Decius’ life until his capture had been a succession of minor successes interspersed with moments of amazing good fortune. His first post was as a common legionary soldier in the remote province of Britannia. He came with carpenters’ skills and a more sophisticated education that was given most shopkeepers’ children in the small Etrurian village of his birth, because a celebrated naturalist had happened to settle there and found a school that took in boys of modest means. Decius’ first month of provincial service fell in the year of the great revolt of the Britons. He had scarcely completed his training when some nameless superior decided men with carpenters’ skills were needed on the Rhine frontier. An order for his transfer came, and he set sail just one day before the rebels of Queen Boudicca burned his fort, massacred the inhabitants of a neighboring veterans’ settlement and slaughtered every man of his cohort. From that day forth every night before he retired he poured a libation to Fortuna and swore to do so until the end of his life.
He was sent then to the great fortress of Mogontiacum and put into a century of the Fourteenth Legion composed mostly of illiterate farmers from lesser villages of Gaul. The ceaseless violence of the Rhine frontier aided his rapid advancement, as it presented many opportunities for acts of reckless courage. After one ambush he was awarded the corona civica for saving the life of a fellow soldier. As he was as well the only man of his century who could read, he rose quickly to the rank of Centurion. Though he was a lowly one, his promotion incited comment because he was but twenty-three years old.
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