With that swift soldier’s stride, Auriane began stalking down the path that led through the crumbled place in the wall.
Desolation fell on him. She left a draft of bone-chilling emptiness in her wake. Conflicting feelings jostled in him; rapidly he wrestled to sort them out.
What does it mean anymore, to be a traitor? Can a man truly be called one, if his words harm no one?
The word, as he reflected upon it, sounded shrill and empty here, no more than the army’s means of compelling obedience from afar from a man who no longer had anything to gain. The legions seemed more remote with each passing season—that cumbersome machinery that functioned quite well without him and seemed evidently to have forgotten him, with its aristocratic commanders who knew nothing of what it was to carry a hundred-pound pack all day or dig a ditch around a fort, working until the blisters bled….
As for my oath to the Emperor, he thought, it no longer seems a living oath—it was based on a comradeship, however distant, but that ceased with my capture.
Auriane, on the other hand, was vital and close; that she needed him was painfully evident, and, the gods knew, he needed her. She was a brilliant bloom on a plain of ice.
“Auriane!” She did not slow.
“All right, you have it then! Anything! I’ll tell you anything. What do I owe the cursed army anyway? They haven’t even come looking for me. To Hades with them! You’re right. I belong to you. Come back here!”
She stopped and turned. He expected to see a glint of victory in her eyes, but there was only softness and tragedy. She is what we were once, in the days of Romulus, he thought. We fight for pay. She fights for love. I cannot compete with her—not by myself anyway, in this bleak, god-cursed place.
When she settled herself again, he testingly tried a fatherly hand on her knee, and for the first time in his memory, he was not certain of his motive with a woman; he could not say whether this was an artless attempt to seduce or a clumsy groping for companionship. She accepted it more as a child than as a woman, one who badly needed the comforting of an adult.
“First of all, Auriane, he was certainly not a warrior of the Hermundures, nor was he a man of Wido’s Companions. What I see here, I take as certain proof none of them were men of the tribes.”
“How can that be?”
He firmly held her gaze. “That raid was a ruse, Auriane, a trick to incite your people into war with your neighbors. Those raiders were Romans disguised as Hermundures. Do you understand? They inflame you into making war on the Hermundures, both tribes suffer great losses, and the native population is effectively pruned back, without shedding a drop of Roman blood. It’s a trick old Julianus used to talk of, that, apparently, he finally decided to try. These men were drawn from a Roman cavalry cohort, picked because they closely resembled Hermundures in features and size.”
He saw a jump of horror in her eyes, as if the earth cracked open to reveal nothing but blood and rot.
For Auriane the turmoil and uncertainty all about condensed into one form: the Romans. It was they, then, who savaged her mother, who tore them all from the peaceful round of life. It was their coming in disguise that haunted her most. They were shapeshifters who winnowed in, burrowing into sacred places; no spear, no palisade could stop them. Would storms in the sky, would ravaging wolves also prove to be masks of the Romans?
For long moments she sat intent in silence, and Decius knew the course of her life was setting like quicklime.
Finally she said, eyes brilliant with hurt, “We cannot live on this earth with you. We believe ourselves free, but we are your prisoners already, all of us. Your people cannot abide the sight of anyone living in freedom. We do not belong to you, nor will we ever, even if you murder us all.”
Decius thought, they suffer as we do. We are tormenting children, murdering parents. But it has always been so, and a frontier must be maintained. It is my misfortune to view their suffering so close.
“You are right,” he said gently. “It’s just that the world doesn’t particularly care that you’re right. The powers on earth listen only to other powerful voices.”
He picked up the belt. “In answer to your question,” he continued, “I know this man because it was hard not to know him. He was Valerius Sylvanus, prefect of cavalry, a man of equestrian rank—that is, a sort of chief. The words carved here name his cavalry cohort, the First, and here, Legio XIV—the Fourteenth Legion. He was probably the expedition’s leader—which makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose—a man of the rank and file would not have broken off to pursue you.”
“I killed a…a sort of chief?”
“I knew you’d smile again one day. He must count for at least forty or fifty ordinary soldiers, no?”
“It makes the deed’s power greater, if that is what you mean. Decius…, when I travel to the Assembly, I would have you accompany us. You must tell these things to my father.”
Decius carefully controlled his delight. He knew how close to the frontier line the place of the Assembly was.
“I will come willingly.”
“Too willingly, it appears. I see your thoughts clearly as I see that pot. You plan to desert me once we’re there.”
“I’ll see you get whatever it is you want first. You are the one who should not go, lest you blunder into Julianus’ net and find yourself joined in marriage to that blustering lummox Wido calls son. Why do you not flee to the north?”
She was silent a moment while she met the gaze of the moon’s soft sleepy eye as it nested in the tops of the firs. In one mad instant Decius imagined some swift communication between the moon and Auriane.
“You know me little, Decius. I would never, never leave her.”
Decius assumed that her referred to Athelinda, but Auriane did not know as she spoke whether she meant her mother or the land.
She then announced with a drunken mockery of queenly calm, “I have not asked you for the gift or spoken of its terms.”
“The gift. Right. You should ask for a fast horse. Auriane, my troublesome pet, you’re missing a useful element of human nature—honest, healthy fear.”
“The first part of the gift is this—I want you to teach our armorers precisely how your Roman short swords are made, and the shields of bull’s hide, and the far flying javelins. Of course, before you begin, I must persuade my father to convince the Assembly to agree to this. And the second part must reach no one’s ears, not even those of your fellow thralls. It is this, Decius. I want you to instruct me in the art of the sword, exactly as your legionary soldiers are taught.”
As she spoke, her eyes ignited with soft fire. She might have been a maid at a first tryst, catching sight of her lover.
“No more of this for you,” he said, putting the flask of wine out of her reach.
“Ask me tomorrow, without the wine, and I will speak the same words.”
“I’ve seen all kinds of pitiful madness in my time, but this is a novel sort.”
“Your churlish jests, Decius, will not sway my mind.”
He reached up and took her hand. “You’ve got it all backward and inside out, Auriane. Will you let me be a schoolmaster for a moment and give you a very brief lesson in military science and history? Listen, pet. It’s not the weapons, they’ve little or nothing to do with it. You’ll not chase the Romans out of your country with a few miserable copies of legionary arms—even if you could persuade your people to actually use them in battle instead of stringing them up in trees. It is our people. We fight as one. We obey our commanders, even in time of peace, a thing your people call slavery. We’re not hobbled by a thicket of sacred laws—we do whatever brings results. It’s discipline, not weapons. The whole world is with us now and has been for over a century. You might as well go armed to the seashore and do battle with the waves. Give it up. Certain races were ordained by the gods to rule, and others, to be used by them and knocked about, and we poor fools in the middle of it all have little choice but to stand out of the way and make the be
st of it.” He paused and sighed. “I can see clearly I might as well be speaking to a rock, but I’ve done my best. So much for lessons in military science and history.”
“I want you to begin instructing me at once,” she went on, eyes intent. “By next spring, Decius, if I am adept, you may have anything you wish of me—anything, that is, that is honorable.”
By next spring? he thought. If I agree, I scuttle my chances of escaping from Baldemar’s camp.
He was aware suddenly of how swiftly light drained from the sky, blackening the trees, shrinking the world to the size of the warm bright place around his fire. In one moment he envied her that she belonged in this world—to her the nighttime forest was a womb. To him it was bleak, and malignly alive.
“All right, you have it then. I guess I have less sense than I thought. If I can help one sparrow become a hawk, where is the harm? I’ll attempt to turn you into a fair copy of a legionary soldier, as well as I’m able given your certain appealing physical limitations, if that is what you truly want. But here is what I ask, and I’m sure you know it already. I want out of this pestilential swamp.”
“Decius—you belong to the whole tribe. If I help you escape, I would be stealing from the whole tribe. It is not done among us.”
“Horseballs! I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Everything I see you do ‘isn’t done.’ Why draw the line at me, you capricious wench? You boasted before you were a woman full grown. Well then, prove it and act on your own. Do you think I care less for my family than the Chattian warrior who kills himself when he’s captured so he can return to his? A thrall’s not born a thrall. Restore me to my family, and I’m a thrall no longer.”
“Decius, please, I am wounded for you, but I cannot do this thing. We would say, you have the fate and luck of a thrall, so you were born a thrall—”
“Then send me back, and you change my luck. Admit to it, I won that throw!” He saw doubts collecting in her eyes, so he pressed harder. “This is curious. Suddenly, I’m forgetting everything I ever knew about swordsmanship. It’s all leaving me. Who’s going to instruct this testy Amazon?”
She looked at him challengingly, then turned away, eyes in ferment. He waited tensely. Part of her dwelled with her people, and a part of her dwelled—where?—in an empty place, a land without laws or roads, a world where rivers had no banks. She is a strange creature, he thought, so unlike her fellows. To this void she seemed irresistibly drawn. I pray it draws her now.
“I judge that you are right,” she said at last, “and not because of your threat to not teach me, which dishonors you. It is a larger tribe you speak of, but the law is the same. You lost your family. I will try to bring you to them. Decius, I will help you. I will get you a horse and guide, but not before next thaw.”
“Blessed Fortuna. You had me worried there a moment, little dove. Now how do we prevent you from being carried off by my countrymen? If that happens, I’m still in prison.”
“That is in the hands of my family and the gods. Just be ready to travel south with us at cockcrow, on the day after the morrow.”
“Curses. You’ve scarcely given me time to settle my many affairs and pack up all my belongings.”
She swiftly rose, and he caught an amused smile as she turned, a smile she did not mean for him to see. He kept his eyes on her, watching her protectively—yes, protectively, he realized—until she made her way through the break in the stone wall with that stalking stride and became a fluttering gray ghost that melted into the blackness of the forest.
He realized he was as unsettled by her troubles as he was by his own. He found this utterly bewildering. How can she, in such a brief time, have made me care for her so much?
CHAPTER VI
THE COMPANY OF COMPANIONS MOUNTED THEIR horses by torchlight before the skeletal frame of Baldemar’s unfinished hall. They waited impatiently while Thrusnelda’s novices completed their ministrations—working swiftly, two rubbed the nine-herbs ointment onto the horses’ legs to ward off injury, while two more wound wolf’s hair round the browband of every bridle to protect the party from ambush. There was little talk among the twenty-five Companions; to Auriane their faces looked haunted and gaunt in the cold predawn light. In every eye she saw the question: How long can Baldemar hold the people’s love if he is too broken in body to lead them?
Auriane sat a lean, long-limbed bay gelding—a captured Roman cavalry horse, as were all the mounts of Baldemar’s Companions. At the withers the beast was nearly as tall as a man, and Auriane was uneasy with this new, greater distance from the ground. It matched the way she felt about all life in these times—I am thrust up into the world of women and men before I am ready.
As they left the yard at a brisk trot, Auriane stole a furtive look at Decius, who rode in the rear among the pack animals, appropriately mounted, she thought, on a mule. Her mind was aflame with his words—the raiders were Romans. Her mothering forest roused a new wariness in her; before, it had been a temple demanding difficult worship but giving all in return. Decius, in a few words, transformed it into a lair of monsters.
As they set out, Witgern rode at their head with Maragin, a seasoned Companion whose beard was flecked with gray, and the feast-loving, golden bearded Coniaric, a newly made Companion recognized by all for his formidable feats of strength. Alongside them rode the pathfinder, a man of mixed Batavian and Gallic blood recruited from the canabae. In the next rank were the Holy Ones—three swans taking flight in their billowing robes of snowy white. One was Hylda, who came to stand as witness to the Ash Grove slaying; the middle rider was an apprentice in attendance on her. The third was Auriane in disguise, the hood of her cloak pulled well forward to conceal her face. Witgern looked back from time to time to torment himself with longing glimpses of her, dulling his pain with the thought that Auriane’s circumstances were now at least as pitiable as his own—for when next the moon was full, Wido might well call her daughter.
And Auriane from time to time glanced farther back to snatch looks at Decius. The man, his stores of knowledge, and his Romanness were mingled in her mind, enhancing him in her eyes until what began as sharp curiosity became a full-blown seizure of youthful awe. In spite of the fact that he was an initiate into the mysteries of the greatest power on earth, still he was close and real with his world-weary look, that face so like a devilish boy who had missed a night of sleep, that quick, disarming smile coupled with warning eyes that pushed you away. A hundred times she cautioned herself: He is a foreigner and a thrall. You cannot allow yourself to care for him, or even worse, desire him. Yes, desire him. There, you have thought it. Are you staring mad? Remember what another man of Decius’ race did to your mother.
They moved into a loping canter when they came to the grassy avenue that separated her family’s field of einkorn wheat from the pine forest. The close, moist pine smells embraced and comforted her. A soft white ground fog lay contentedly on the forest floor; the trunks of the trees were pale, slender stalks rising, smooth and bare, from dreamy mystery. Pools of blackness remained, the lingering tidepools of night. Occasionally she saw the flick of white that she knew was the tail of a doe, and for an instant she fiercely envied all forest creatures. They, too, have destinies that bring them to suffering and death—but it is their good fortune not to know them.
By noon she was miserable and wet—they were forced to avoid the common river-fords because these were places where ambushes were likely to be set; twice they swam their horses across flooded creeks. As they traveled, their ranks became less distinct, and when she could do so without attracting much notice she rode near Decius and besieged him with a fresh volley of questions about warfare. That night they made no fires and dined on rations of dried venison and hard rye bread. She slept with her head pillowed on moss, blanketed by the sky’s soft black, cradling a fire-hardened spear at her chest like some child at the breast. She begged Fria to send her sleep without nightmares of Arnwulf’s soulless body and Hertha melting in flames.
; On the second day of steadily journeying southward, as the sun found midheaven, the pathfinder slowed. Auriane heard Witgern mutter a curse, and understood why—this was no place to pause; the country was too exposed. The pathfinder shaded his eyes, staring bewildered at Fallen Pine Hill. A lightning-struck tree he employed to find his way was gone without a trace. He frowned. Auriane sensed fear and confusion in his jerking movements as he looked from side to side.
Had he turned too soon after the three willows at Red Fox Lake? Or had some witch temporarily thrown the land out of joint?
Witgern and the pathfinder exchanged sharp words. Then they led the company into a thick elm wood, down a narrow, twisting path edged with smooth stones.
At once Auriane sensed something disturbing in this wood. It seemed to hum with secret life. It was a place where gnomes might venture out in the light of day, where the galls on the trees were watching eyes, birds peered at you with intelligent interest and you knew an ancestor’s soul was imprisoned within. Desolate faces appeared just out of sight, and when you turned, they vanished. Those spiraling branches above—surely they came alive at night and struck like serpents. She heard a Companion behind her mutter, “Pathfinders do not get lost. Wido’s had a sorceress bewitch him. There’s enchantment about, I say.”
The horses seemed to confirm this; Auriane’s gelding tightly bowed its neck, fighting the reins with nervous snorts, while its coat darkened with sweat. Then came a rushing of wind that sent the boughs high above into a frenzied swaying dance; it was as though the wood itself erupted with rage at the intrusion. At a turn in the path Auriane saw, half hidden in the trees, a lichen-covered stone tall as a man and carved with rune-signs traced in blood. And as they traveled on, suddenly all about them, hung from every bough, were myriads of bronze chimes shivering with each wind-breath; their thin ghostly chorus filled her with an aching, dreamy sadness.
I remember this place. What am I saying? I’ve not been here before. Yet somehow…it is all familiar as an owl’s cry, as a night wind bearing the scent of yew fires….
B007IIXYQY EBOK Page 16
