by Lisa Cach
“Don’t pretend not to want it. I see it in your eyes . . . By Wotan, what happened to your eyes?” he asked, his own going wide. “They’re glowing copper.”
I drew my knees up and kicked madly at him, trying to roll away and scramble to the side. I almost made it, but then his stupor broke and he grabbed my ankles and flipped me on my belly, my face buried in the dirty straw. He jerked my legs apart.
“Those eyes can’t hurt me if they can’t see me,” he said. “I’ve never fucked whatever gods-forsaken sort of wench you are before, but I won’t pass up the chance to try.”
Minerva help me, I wanted him to do it. My gates pulsed in welcome, even as I got my hands under me and tried to lift up. I could not let him see those tattoos.
“Oh no you don’t.” He knocked my arms out from under me and took both wrists in one hand, pinning them in the small of my back while he wedged his thighs between mine. I struggled and cried out, but it was for naught; I was a small woman, and gave him all the trouble of a bird caught by a cat.
“Now let’s see what we have here,” Jax said, and raised the hem of my tunic. “What in Hades—?” he had time to say, before chaos leapt upon us, growling and snapping, shouting and swinging a shovel.
Jax reacted instantly, with the deadly reflexes of the pirate he was. As I rolled over I heard the thud of a fist on flesh, and turned my head in time to see Balmort fall sideways, his head hitting the edge of an upturned wooden pail as he landed, crumpled and silent, on the stable floor.
Bone Cruncher launched himself at Jax, who was drawing a blade from his boot. “No!” I screamed.
Bone knocked Jax down, and I threw myself on the dog, pushing him out of the way of the blade. “Bone, no! No!”
The dog lunged and snarled, but obeyed my arms around his neck. Jax’s eyes went from the dog’s jaws to me, and then to Balmort. I turned to look, too, and a sob rose in my throat.
Jax, one eye still on Bone, one hand holding the blade raised in warning, moved to Balmort and held his hand in front of Balmort’s nose. After several long moments—I didn’t see the old man’s chest moving—Jax felt his throat, pressing his fingertips along it, seeking a pulse that I already knew was not there.
“Shit,” Jax said, sitting back on his heels, his face slack with surprise.
Bone sensed the shift in the tension, and his snarls lowered to growls, and then when he looked at his motionless master, he fell silent. His dark eyes looked from Balmort back up to me, and when he moved toward the fallen man I let him go. He sniffed at the peddler, and then licked his face. He put a paw on Balmort’s chest and whimpered.
“It was an accident,” Jax said. “You know that, right?”
I nodded, but then lowered my brows. “Why do you care what I think?”
“I’m guilty of plenty, but I won’t have murdering harmless old men who try to protect women added to my slate.” His eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t exactly your virtue he was trying to protect, was it? Those tattoos. Your eyes. You’re the slave I’d get ten soldi for turning in, aren’t you?”
“Bone,” I commanded in a low voice.
The dog raised his head, ears perking.
“To me.”
Bone obeyed at once, leaving Balmort and coming to lean his immense frame against my hip.
Jax looked at the dog as if considering how hard it would be to get through him, then shook his head and sheathed his blade. He stood and retrieved his belt, buckling it around his waist as I inched backward, wondering how fast Terix and I could run, and whether it was even possible to escape.
“I won’t take you to Britannia.”
“I guessed as much.”
“You could have let that dog kill me.”
“I was protecting Bone, not you.”
“Yet still, here I am, alive. And your friend is dead. I find myself . . . not as happy as I should be. I am a liar, a thief, a pirate. A cheat and a murderer. And yet . . .”
I stared at him, my hand on Bone’s scruff.
“And yet . . . I have my own sense of justice. I’ll give you until dawn to get far away. But no longer. I don’t think my sense of justice will hold me from ten soldi longer than that. In truth, you’ll be lucky if you make it to today’s sunset.”
I turned to go, not needing to be told twice.
And then I stopped.
Oh, crazy me. This man, I owed him less than nothing. But I couldn’t go without telling him. Something inside me said that I must tell him, or else I’d live to regret it. I turned again and met his eyes, his brow quirking up in surprise that I had not scampered from the stables like a hare with a fox after it.
“A man with red hair,” I said. “Don’t trust him. He will try to stab you in the back.”
Jax’s chin pulled back. “What?”
I fluttered one hand in the air. “I see things. I know things. Watch your back when the red-haired man is near.”
And then I did flee, Bone at my side.
Where’s everyone going?” I said.
“And why are they all drunk?” Terix asked as a man stumbled into him, patted his shoulder in apology, and followed his fellow weaving townsfolk down the dusty street of Tornacum. There was a gloomy, tense air about this river town huddled inside of old Roman walls. Some of the women looked to have been weeping, and the children were wide-eyed and pale-faced, clinging to their mothers’ skirts as they stood in the doorways of their wattle-and-daub houses.
It had been two weeks since the disaster in the stable. Two weeks of moving fast and hard toward the rising sun, avoiding towns and roads, stopping only at remote farmsteads where Terix traded items from Balmort’s peddler pack for food, while I hid nearby with Bone.
We’d debated leaving Bone, but more for form’s sake than because either of us would do it. The dog attracted notice, and anyone who saw him would remember him—and thus be able to tell Jax where we had been. Terix argued that the protection Bone offered was more important than how he gave our identities away. I agreed, although I knew that wasn’t the reason we couldn’t abandon the dog, assuming the dog would even let us do so.
No, the truth was that we felt less alone with Bone. With his steady stride and calm strength, we found strength and endurance of our own. When fear came out to torture us in the small, dark hours of the night, we would reach out and lay a hand on Bone’s warm chest, rising and falling with his breath, and feel the worst of our terrors recede.
For me, it was even more than that. After nine years of wearing a golden torque inscribed with Touch me not, for Sygarius’s I am, and therefor nine years devoid of the slightest contact of human skin to human skin, I was both starved for touch and frightened of it. I was startled each time I made contact with another person, their living, moving warmth a constant surprise to me: I was used to everything I touched being cold, inanimate. As soon as the startlement passed, however, the hunger raged and I wanted to rub my body against theirs. I wanted to hit, slap, tickle, lick. Hug, kiss, hold hands. Link arms, press cheeks, pat buttocks. I wanted all of it.
And because I wanted all of it so badly, I hung back. I didn’t know how to be normal. I didn’t know how not to be a maelstrom of seeking, reaching hands.
None of that mattered with Bone. The only thing he wouldn’t put up with was not being touched. He’d come up beside me and butt his head under my hand if we’d gone too long without contact.
Abandon him? Impossible.
“Let’s follow the townsfolk, and find out what’s going on,” I said.
“We should find the palace,” Terix said. He sounded as reluctant as I felt.
“A short delay won’t matter. Maybe we can find a cup of wine for ourselves, too. A little liquid courage.”
“Liquid craftiness would serve us better.”
“I don’t think anyone ever found that in a cup of wine.”
“They find lust, though.” Terix gave me a beady eye. “You’re not going to get half drunk and get yourself into trouble again, are you?”
“Gods, I hope not.”
“Hope isn’t good enough, Nimia.”
“Isn’t it? It’s the only thing that’s gotten us here.”
“I give more credit to fear: our fear of a greedy, murdering pirate. We wouldn’t be in Tornacum if there were any other good choice.”
“You may have more hope than I do, Terix, if you think being here is a good choice. So what do you want: to the palace, or follow the herd to the drinking trough?”
“Herd.” He smiled crookedly. “Was there really ever a question?”
So we set our feet in the same direction as the townsfolk, following them through the town that had once been a Roman outpost. Tornacum sat on the River Scheldt, northeast of Soissons, and the walls here had once helped to hold back the Germanic tribes, penning them in their dark, trackless forests that were said to go on without end, swallowing forever any Roman army foolish enough to invade them.
But Rome had retreated, and the tribes had come through. Tornacum now belonged to those tribes, and served as the seat of power for one of them: the Franks. The palace we would soon seek belonged to Childeric, the king of the Franks.
And, by extension, to his son.
Clovis.
My lover. My betrayer.
I clutched at the gold and garnet bee hanging around my neck, underneath my tunic. Clovis had given it to me along with a note: Forgive me. Crucially, he’d given his apology before betraying me. He had used me for his own ends, with regret, perhaps, but no less determination.
I was pinning my hopes now on the sincerity of that apology. Terix and I couldn’t run forever, and Gaul had become too small to shelter us. We needed a protector, to keep us safe from Sygarius and Jax.
We needed Clovis.
Given the chance, Childeric would likely toss us back to Sygarius; after making Sygarius pay, naturally. But Clovis . . . Clovis had different dreams than his father. Clovis wanted war with Sygarius. He wanted Sygarius’s province of Soissons. He wanted all of Gaul.
Who better, then, to protect us?
Except that I nurtured a burning fury in my heart for what he had done to me, and given the chance I would disembowel him with his own dagger and feed his entrails to the pigs.
Or so I told myself. The truth might be something different, and far more shameful to my sense of pride.
“Can you make out what anyone is saying?” Terix asked, as the crowd grew more dense. We had passed through the town now, and reached an open area just beyond its walls. The gathered Franks were too tall for us to see over, and we had no idea what everyone faced, although face something they did. The crowd was forming a semicircle around some activity we could not see.
I listened to the voices near me. Their language bore a resemblance to the tongue of the Visigoth tribe I’d been prisoner to, early in my childhood; it gave me the strange sense that I should be able to understand what was being said, and yet without any visual clues to what was happening, I couldn’t even guess. I shook my head. “I heard Childeric’s name, but that’s all.”
We edged around the half circle, out to the ends where the crowd thinned and we could slink our way forward.
The sight that met us was too stunning, too grotesque, to comprehend. I dug my hand into Bone’s fur, and gaped.
We stood at the rim of a massive pit ten feet deep and fifty feet across, the earth dug out and heaped in hills along one side. Inside the pit lay half a dozen white horses, their throats cut, their beautiful white hides covered in scarlet. In the center of the pit, a gold-bedecked wagon lay empty.
A man led another horse down a dirt ramp to a waiting priest and two soldiers with gilded axes in their hands. The horse shied and pranced, but there was no escape. The blades plunged, blood spurted, and the horse fell. The men moved a few paces around the circle, in time to meet yet another white horse coming down the ramp.
There was room enough left in the circle for another dozen horses.
“Fuck me in the face with a donkey’s prick,” Terix said under his breath, as Bone whined between us. “What in Hades are they doing?”
“Childeric,” I said, my voice so stunned and quiet that Terix could not hear me.
“What?”
“Childeric. The white horses . . . Oh, gods. It’s come true.”
Terix’s eyes widened and he looked back at the pit. “Your prophecy that Childeric would die?”
I nodded. It could be nothing else.
“But no one told us he was dead!” He meant when we had asked people if they’d heard where Childeric and his men were. The only news we’d heard was that Childeric and Clovis had returned to Tornacum, as their relationship with Sygarius was strained.
“It must have just happened.”
We both fell silent, unable to look away as horse after horse fell to the sacrificial axes. It was a gut-wrenching waste of equine beauty.
“Jupiter’s balls,” Terix said. “They must have an entire herd of those horses.”
“Not anymore.”
As the last horse fell—there were twenty-one in all—we heard in the distance the deep rumble of drums, playing a complicated rhythm unlike anything the Romans would have tolerated. Laid on top of their chest-rattling beat was a sound I took at first to be pipes; a moment later I realized it was voices. Women, ululating in grief, their voices piercingly high and otherworldly.
The crowd lowered to its knees, and we did the same, nudging Bone down as well.
Across the pit from us, the procession came into sight. The wailing women were naked, except for ragged black veils covering their heads and shoulders. Their sagging breasts and bellies bore red, smeared finger marks, as if they had tried to claw through their own bodies. Their straggling pubic hair, visible even at such a distance, was soaked in red that spilled down their inner thighs.
“They’re not going to kill them, too, are they?” Terix asked in horror.
“I don’t think so.” Raw and frightful as the women’s appearance was, some part of me understood it. They were the embodiment of every mother who had lost a child. They were Mother Earth herself, mourning her son, a king among men.
There were thirteen of the women. They arrayed themselves along the edge of the pit, dropped to their knees, and raised their arms to the heavens. Their ululations grew louder and more piercing, and the assembled Franks joined in, their cries of pain cutting into me like a sharp blade slicing upward along my spine. Bone howled along with them, his plaintive notes in sorrowful harmony to the human wails.
The drums gave one extra loud beat, and then they and the women fell silent. Several moments later the wailing of the Franks died down—and Bone’s, too, thank the gods.
A tense stillness fell over the scene: kneeling, naked women; dead, bloodied horses arrayed in a circle in a pit; a thousand Franks with tears on their cheeks. Even the skies held motionless, a cool silver haze of light that cast no shadows.
In silence came Childeric’s body, lying in state upon a board covered in red cloth, and carried on the shoulders of six richly dressed men. The first of them was Clovis.
The rest of the scene blurred out of my vision, and I saw only him. He had refused to leave my thoughts and my dreams these past two months, but even as I’d held imaginary conversations with him, I’d been unsure of his face. The harder I tried to draw his features exactly in my mind, the more they had shifted and changed, until I doubted I would recognize him should I see him again.
And yet here, from across the gruesome pit, his face bowed down so all I saw was the top of his head, I knew it was he. My heart raced, and sweat broke out over my body. I felt light-headed.
They carried Childeric down into the pit, and placed his body inside the waiting wagon.
The king looked . . . dead. His face was sunken, the flesh pale and purpled. His cheeks sagged, while his lips seemed to have shrunk, peeling back from his yellow teeth. His beard looked weirdly spry and lively on such an obvious corpse.
One of the naked women spoke in a carrying voice, reciting words I could not understand; the rhythm and rhyme were almost musical, though, as was the synchronized, spoken response from the other twelve women whenever she paused. Her prayer continued as resplendent soldiers came down the ramp next, bearing two long swords that they laid crossed over Childeric’s chest. I recognized both the men, from their time at Sygarius’s country villa.
I could see Clovis’s face clearly now—his profile was to me, no more than thirty feet away. He looked absent, as if his thoughts were a thousand miles from here. I tried to control my emotions, and to look at him as a stranger.
Did he not care that his father was dead? Did he not grieve? Maybe he rejoiced, and that was the emotion he would not allow on his face.
I remembered then what Sygarius had said: that if Childeric died, there was little chance Clovis would take his place as king. The Franks chose their kings based on which man was left alive after a bloody fight for the crown. Clovis was too young, too inexperienced, to survive the tricks and politics of men ten or twenty years his senior. His faraway look might be acknowledgment of his doom.
I doubted it. He was probably considering which of his rivals to kill first.
The soldiers laid a shield over Childeric, and then all the men filed back up the ramp, replaced by men carrying down foodstuffs and amphorae. My eyes followed Clovis; now was the time to try to catch him—he was so close. But I could not stand and run after him while all around me knelt. They’d likely slit my throat and throw me on top of the horses if I did.
A regal woman with graying ash-blond hair entered the pit next, accompanied by a pretty blond girl near my own age, and two more women carrying coffers. The naked women continued their prayer as the women in the pit opened the coffers, revealing a treasury’s worth of gold. Piece by piece they distributed it on and around Childeric’s body.
