B007IIXYQY EBOK

by Gillespie, Donna

  She struck the first rank. It gave way a fraction too late; the impact of her horse broke a soldier’s shield arm and knocked another under iron hooves. The second rank opened, then the third and fourth in rapid succession.

  As Berinhard ploughed through mail-covered men, his hooves sending sparks as they struck the iron bindings of shields, Auriane brought down her sword in a furious rhythm, striking helmets, crossed javelins, laminated iron cuirasses, and occasionally flesh—but no drawn swords. Strong hands reached for her horse’s bridle, and javelins were extended across his path, slowing him.

  She realized then that they were not fighting back. They meant to evade her blows, then pull her from her horse and disarm her.

  “Fight! Fight me! I want to die!”

  Then Decius’ warning flashed into her mind: Promise me you will never let my people take you alive. No admonition he had ever given her had been spoken with such heartfelt urgency.

  How pleased Decius would be to know I died heeding his advice.

  She grasped her sword securely in both hands and raised it high, meaning to plunge it into her breast.

  Swiftly she brought it down. But her sword struck calfskin-covered wooden planks—one of the legionaries had thrust his shield between the sword’s point and her chest. Then powerful hands seized her from behind, dragging her from Berinhard’s back. She struggled blindly. After a short struggle they wrenched the sword from her hand.

  I am disarmed by the enemy. Vile hands pollute Baldemar’s sword. Now, truly, the luck and life of our kin is broken.

  Fria, open the earth for me. I will sleep in it as a bed. I will live on in the roots of trees, in ripe wheat; there I will grow and know peace until it is my time to be reborn. Let my people dance on me at festival time.

  As they held her pinned to the ground, she was distantly aware that they exerted only enough force to subdue her; other than that, they handled her with care.

  Beware. They are saving you for some purpose.

  And still she somehow managed to tear one hand free. She caught her horse’s slender pastern and held it, seeking comfort in the familiar feel of silken fur over bone. It was her last embrace of all she had known. Berinhard seemed to sense something had ended as he bent down and brushed his muzzle inquisitively over her hair.

  Then her arms were hers no more; swiftly they were bound behind her back with strong cord. The bridegroom enveloped her in his pitiless embrace.

  Marcus Julianus had already departed for Rome when Five Wells was stormed and taken, for Domitian had decided suddenly he could no longer bear his festering suspicions of myriad plots springing up at home. And so with the whole of the imperial staff, the Emperor had hastily decamped for his capitol on the day before the final battle.

  It was midmorning. Julianus was riding in his traveling carriage, immersed in the tiresome task of reviewing Domitian’s correspondence with the Governor of Bithynia, who had requested revisions in the province’s criminal laws, when a trusted secretary, the one servant in his confidence in the matter of Auriane, interrupted him with the news that she had spurned his offer of freedom.

  Of course, I should have known you would not be saved while your fellows died.

  He quietly put his head into his hands.

  Magnificent fool! Has such a creature ever lived? How can you possibly live in captivity? How nearly impossible you make my task now.

  ROME

  CHAPTER XXX

  THE SUN BURNED AURIANE’S SWOLLEN EYES. She forced them open. Before her was a strange landscape divided by bars. Every muscle was aflame with pain; the air hurt to breathe. Chill iron encircled her ankles and wrists. She refused to look at her chains but knew she could not hide them from the eyes of ancestors.

  The memories flooded back.

  This is my first morning in the Land of the Dead. They have taken even my warrior’s ring—my arm is naked as a child’s.

  She rode in a mule-drawn prison cart, shackled to nine of her tribesmen. Their chains kept up a monotonous chatter as, one by one, her companions stirred in painful sleep. To this was added the jingling of horses’ bits—files of cavalrymen rode alongside, their faces alien and expressionless. Dully she struggled to make sense of the situation. She guessed the captives and spoil trailed the march of the main body of the army. She assumed they would be sacrificed to the Roman god of war.

  The air was heavy with the odor of terebinth resin and blood. Slowly she realized the man who lay next to her as Vangio, a middle-ranked warrior of Sigwulf’s Companions. His shrieks of the night before still reverberated in her mind. An army surgeon had come to remove the head of a javelin from his thigh. The surgeon worked swiftly and savagely, using a variety of odd iron implements; to keep the wound from festering he had applied the resin. Vangio lay now in the heavy stupor that comes before death; his eyes, opened barely, had a milky glaze.

  Auriane saw that the surgeon had left behind one of his sinister implements—a curved, needle-sharp tool of iron. She covered it with one foot and dragged it within reach. The cart jolted to a stop. She dared not move her foot lest it be seen.

  The stillness hummed with flies drawn to the feast of wounds. Slaves appeared bearing skins of water and grimy wooden bowls filled with a bland, cooked grain unknown to her. She ate slowly, ashamed of the pleasure she found in the enemy’s food.

  She saw that Vangio had not stirred. He must have water, at least. She nudged him gently, but he only made a sound like the lowing of cattle.

  “Vangio!” she whispered. The whole of her lost world resided in this man only slightly known to her. He must not die. She held the water to his lips and was elated to see it course down his throat.

  The haze cleared from Vangio’s eyes. “Auriane…it is you …. How do they dare—”

  “Eat this. Please try.”

  “It is no use….” He breathed like a woman in labor. “The pain…it rages like a hall afire…. Give to me what is under your foot.”

  He had seen. The nearness of death must have given him a sorcerer’s sight. “Vangio, do not leave me.”

  “A god could not endure this pain. How can a man?”

  She knew she should not beg him to live. It would be cruelty to refuse him simply because she could not bear to go into the darkness alone.

  “End your pain,” she said softly, helping him position the surgeon’s tool between his knees, for his hands were manacled behind his back. “Go in peace to the Sky Hall. Greet my father. Tell him I tried to go to him, but Fria closed the gate. And…ask the gods’ help for those of us condemned to live…even though we leave them for a strange land.”

  She turned her head away as Vangio pressed his body onto the sharp implement. Then she regarded him without tears, thinking only: How efficiently the surgeon’s tool kills.

  That is good. It is a fine weapon.

  She wiped the tool clean of blood and hid it in her battered shoe-boot.

  Night came, leaving her to the boundless desolation and terror of the babe exposed on the midden. She drew out the surgeon’s tool and felt its point, hungry for death.

  Avenahar! Be quiet now, cry no more. Your mother comes to you. She shook violently, the deadly point poised before her heart.

  Then another memory came. A man of the enemy had tried to save her at the last. Why? She might have understood, had he wanted her for a warrior’s prize. But it seemed he meant only to set her free. This inexplicable act of kindness haunted her, for it accorded with nothing else she knew of these people.

  She knew then that it was not her time. She was too full of bitter questions for both men and the gods.

  And there was yet hope for vengeance. Not against Odberht, perhaps, but against their Emperor, who had Avenahar’s blood on his hands.

  Let this surgeon’s tool drink other blood than mine.

  She had as well a more formless reason for choosing to live. All her life she had felt a gentle current ceaselessly pulling her outward, down the narrow river along which her p
eople dwelled, toward the greater sea with its unimaginable depth, its peoples and ways both wondrous and monstrous. Before she met death, she wanted to look once upon what defeated them, to see the lands and dwellings of that terrible race of men who stood in back of Decius. The cart moved with that steady current, giving her a dim sense that she traveled in the right direction.

  She sank into sleep, then awakened to the harsh shouts of the cavalrymen, the brutal sun, the curses of the slaves when they discovered Vangio’s body. They dragged him out like a dead animal. She was relieved they did not examine the body too closely; Vangio’s wounds were so many, no one questioned that he had died of them. Her weapon was safe.

  A short time afterward, two cavalrymen stopped alongside her cart. One pointed her out and gave a terse order; the other crisply nodded. Moments later she was unchained, separated from the others and put into a cart by herself. This better treatment was mystifying. Was it because they realized she was a woman of rank? She was also given a blanket, and what she supposed they believed was better food—wheat, the ration of the common soldier, rather than the unidentifiable mush. The Romans she saw seemed rarely to eat meat. How had a people who subsisted on horsefeed managed to subdue the world?

  They traveled a road that was relentlessly straight, no matter what the terrain; such a path, she realized, was made not for animals’ hooves but for the feet of marching soldiers. She clung as long as she could to the last of her land’s maternal hills, crying softly at times as she held out her hand to them, tracing their outline so she would have a clearer picture of them in memory.

  After many days they came to a place where the forest no longer ruled; it submitted quietly to impious settlers who hacked down the gods’ groves to make tidy clusters of villages and plant small, brave fields. Rivers here were sturdily bridged. Another road, also arrow straight, intersected the one on which they journeyed. What insult, she thought, to the boundlessly roaming earth, the turning hills, the snaking rivers. Everywhere cocks crowed and well-fed cattle kept up a constant medley. She had entered the Roman province of Gallia Belgica. The openness of the land made her increasingly uneasy. Trees were Fria’s house and dress—how she must despise these people who strip her naked.

  Occasionally when they halted, villagers would collect about her prison cart and gape, sometimes with amazement or hatred in their faces, sometimes with simple bovine docility. Their children, ruddy cheeked and cruel, pointed at her and cried her name. She could scarcely believe they knew it even in this distant place. To them she was a savage predator who, to their relief, was finally trapped and taken.

  When they had traveled for one complete cycle of the moon and were seven nights into another, she learned from the slaves’ talk that they were but halfway to Rome.

  The country grew harsh and mountainous; here the earth was ruptured and angry. The world was cleaved by savage gorges that disappeared into a blue-gray mist, and graced with impossible peaks, nobly high, streaked with long fingers of snow. These frightful heights were laced with narrow paths; it seemed to her they rode through clouds like the gods. Once, the cart in front of her own veered off the track, pulling its mules after; the screams of the captives as they plummeted into the misty abyss sounded in her mind for days. And yet there were times when she fiercely envied them. Their passage through the world was done.

  When the land flattened again, it began subtly to change. Soft gray-greens dried to reds and browns, and sometimes rock punctured the earth. The farmer’s fields became vast as seas. In many she saw the playful coil of grape vines. There was gaiety in the fine gold light, though it was not meant for her. The sun was far bolder here, and its shadows sharp. In the distance walled towns arose; she stared with great curiosity at these fantastic aggregations of human dwellings dominating the hills. Here the forest was defeated utterly—the cypress trees, plane trees and olives scattered about were but a whispered memory of the majestic groves she knew. The cobbled roadway behind her was crowded now with merchants and travelers; at every halt laughing camp followers gathered around. She heard no birds’ chatter here; instead, there was a constant jangling of donkeys’ bells, each with its own distinct voice, their notes alternately clashing and harmonizing. She loathed the look of this land: To her it was not colorful, but garish; without its heavy garment of trees it put her in mind of a pitifully thin body she would have preferred to see clothed.

  This is emptiness without end. I cannot feel Vangio’s ghost anymore. The beloved land-spirits of home have vanished, too—they could not cross those sky-touching mountains.

  Surely they could not travel much farther. They would plunge into the stream of Ocean that girded the whole of Middle-world on which all nations of mortals dwelled, and be swallowed by the Great Wyrm. She saw the cavalrymen were suddenly in better humor, shouting jests at one another, as warriors will when coming near to home. That anyone could call this place home was a wonder. She guessed the army must have taken on provisions, for dried figs and dates were added to her fare, and wretched wine worse than that which Decius used to give her.

  Again and again she tried to learn from her sullen servitors where they were and how much farther they had to go, but they laughed at her stumbling Latin and turned away. Finally she got a reply from an amiable boy hauling water buckets for the horses. “Not much farther,” he called out to her. “Seven days at best.”

  “What is this place?”

  “That walled town there?”

  “No, the whole land.”

  The boy’s eyes widened in amazement, then narrowed with scorn. “Surely these Chattian beasts have cabbages for brains. You do not know Italia, the land that lies at the center of the world?”

  CHAPTER XXXI

  THE IMPERIAL PARTY REACHED ROME AT the time of the festival of Vinalia, celebrated in honor of the bringing in of the year’s first wine. The morbid August air brought fever, and the whole city seemed to grow listless. Domitian remained outside Rome in his rambling villa set into the side of the nearby Alban Mount, for it was the custom that a conquering general not enter the city gates before he did so in his triumphal procession.

  Domitian’s agents brought him daily reports of what was said in the streets and taverns about his victory over the Chattians. He learned quickly that the city seemed not to care that the war was over, or that it had ever begun—the people cared only that the wine was not free at this year’s Vinalia Festival, but his agents dared not put this so bluntly to him, for Domitian nursed a belief that the common people saw him as their savior.

  Julianus on his return spent long days at the Palace undertaking those imperial duties Domitian found distasteful—hearing petitioners from every province in dull cases, or corresponding with provincial governors concerning routine legal questions. At the same time Domitian made use of his First Advisor’s knowledge of the art of the architect-engineer, giving to Julianus the task of counseling the magistrates who were preparing a case against three contractors accused of substituting inferior materials for the precious marbles ordered for the construction of the Emperor’s new Palace. In this last matter, as far as Julianus could see, both sides were guilty. The contractors’ deviousness was surpassed only by the government’s brazen attempts to underpay the laborers by cleverly miscalculating the number of days worked. Life at the Palace was starting to seem like a daily draught of poison. Whenever he looked into the bitter, avaricious faces of both the magistrates and the accused, or passed some ruined noble who could scarcely afford to feed scraps to his slaves riding to the theater in a hired litter so all would think he still had his wealth, or heard the sharp shouts from a fish market as a fight erupted over the price of an eel or a pike, or paused on the Palace steps to give alms to a starving beggar right after hearing yet another tale of same dissipated gourmand who had squandered half his patrimony on a single dinner party, it seemed to Marcus Julianus the solemn dignity of the northern forest and the warrior-maid it produced were some vision from a fever dream.

 
Dreaming fool, he thought. Auriane does not exist. This marble-sheathed cesspool about you is the only world possible.

  In these times Domitian’s victory over the Chattians emboldened him, and he began to make demands upon the Senate he would not have had the mettle to make before the war, for fear that august body would believe him guilty of impious presumption. First, he pressed them to declare that the month of his birth, October, would henceforth be called Domitianus, implicitly challenging the Senators to dare count his reign less magnificent than that of Julius Caesar or Caesar Augustus, each of whom had had a month renamed in his honor. The proposal was made by Veiento, who introduced the matter casually, as if it were open to debate—but all had noted how a Senator’s fortunes had a way of taking a wretched turn once he voted against a measure Veiento put before them. Next, Domitian compelled them to name him Censor for life, an ancient office the Emperor usually shared with the members of the Senate. This empowered him to degrade in rank at whim any Senator he felt was “morally unfit,” and was considered by the Senators to be the gravest step he had yet taken toward autocracy.

  Immediately following the close of that day’s session, Licinius Gallus and Saturninus sought out Marcus Julianus and demanded a confidential meeting. By this time Saturninus too knew of Domitian’s list of men to die—and that his own name was listed last on it—and he had wholeheartedly joined the conspiracy. They met in the garden of Julianus’ great-house. Old Diocles conducted the two men down the garden’s labyrinthine gravel paths. They found Julianus deep within its recesses, standing calmly with his back to them, lost in contemplation among the garden’s pomegranate trees, gazing into a greenish octagonal pool glimmering with golden carp.

  Gallus burst out without a proper greeting: “Julianus! Could you not have stopped him?” His voice soared in pitch. “He’s one edict short of having us fall down and kiss his feet like some Persian satrap.”