The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  “Terix,” I said on an exhaled breath. “I think I’m past ready.”

  He shook his head, his hazel eyes glittering behind partially lowered lids. “You’re only halfway there.”

  I rolled my head against the mattress, denying it, but I was enjoying his hands on me too much to escape them. I submitted to his whim, not knowing where he intended to take me, and quickly becoming powerless to do anything to stop him.

  On and on his stroking of me went. He petted, he massaged. He caressed every part of me, except those that a man intent on sex would pursue. And with his denial of those sexual areas, something began to break apart within me. My arousal had me swollen and dripping, my cunny pulsing with hunger, my nipples so hard they hurt; and yet within it all bloomed an awareness that Terix’s touch on me was of a tenderness such as I had never known. I felt his caring for me in every stroke against my neck, his thumb against my earlobe, his palm along my hips. Who but he could know so well what I most needed, and who but he would give it to me, tirelessly, with his own needs set aside?

  Tears spilled from my eyes, and I started to weep. “Terix,” I cried softly, not even knowing anymore what it was I needed or wanted. I was falling apart inside, and reached for him as if he could hold me together.

  “There you are,” he murmured, and gathered me into his arms. He lifted me off the bed and carried me the few steps to the alcove, then stopped at the pillar at its entrance and held me upright with my back against the stone. He lifted one of my thighs over his forearm, lowered his hips, and then thrust up inside me.

  I clung to him, and raised my other leg to his waist; supported now by both his arms under my thighs and the pillar at my back, I dug my fingers into his dark curly hair and gave myself over to his thrusts. The golden swarm arrived with the force of a hurricane, sweeping me out of bodily awareness and into a space of sky blue.

  I saw Clovis, holding the hand of a small boy at his side. A blond boy, with eyes the same icy shade as his father’s. It was Theo. Wasn’t it? But Theo had dark hair . . .

  As quickly as the storm had come over me, the golden swarm blew away as I reached my peak, my cunny clenching against Terix’s still-thrusting rod. I opened my eyes and gazed into his eyes as I came.

  “Nimia,” he moaned, and I felt his whole body harden as he forced himself to withdraw from me. Hot seed spurted over my belly, my breasts, the bottom of my chin. “Your eyes . . .” he said. “Copper fire. For me.”

  He lowered my legs to the ground and we stood, hips pressed to hips, gazing into each other’s eyes.

  I heard movement, and turned. Alaric emerged from the alcove. He was a head taller than Terix. Broader. Stronger. His looming presence and burning eyes made me drop my hands from Terix’s neck. Alaric pulled me into his arms and crushed his mouth down onto mine. He kissed me as if trying to wipe away every touch of Terix’s, even though Terix had never laid his lips to mine.

  I was still throbbing from my orgasm with Terix when Alaric spun me around, my face to the pillar, and took me from behind.

  I turned my head and saw Terix watching us, his expression one of loss and pain. He met my eyes, as if seeking for an answer. I bit my lower lip, and knew my eyes were glowing—for Alaric was taking me with the animal force that my body could not help but respond to. I moaned. I didn’t want to, but I did, and the sound made Terix flinch. He spun round, swept up his clothes, and fled the room.

  It was only a moment more before I felt the pulse of Alaric’s release. He gripped me close, his hips jerking, as he spent himself within me. “Christ,” he swore in my ear.

  I winced as he withdrew, his rod still massively swollen. He pulled a sheet off the bottom of the bed and wrapped it round me, swaddling me like an infant, then scooped me up and carried me to the bed. He lay down with me, spooning me from behind, his arms caging me as if he thought I might try to escape. “Your friend won’t say a word?”

  I shook my head.

  I felt Alaric’s nod of approval, and within moments his hold on me lightened and I knew he was drifting off to sleep.

  I lay awake, staring at the empty alcove. Wondering what—if anything—had changed between me and Terix. Wondering what Alaric would think and feel when he woke, and I was not holding him in sexual thrall.

  I liked Alaric; I respected him. He was a good man, in a way that Clovis was not. I could even, for a moment, believe that I was halfway in love with him . . . or at least in love with the fantasy of him. Sexually he had let loose, but in all other ways he was constrained, his passions as tightly bound as I was in this sheet. He did not lose control; he did not let emotion rule him. We had conversed much between our joinings, and in all areas but sex he showed an iron will that shackled his emotions into service to his intellect.

  I was soothed by such self-control. There was something appealing in the strict rules he lived by, and the limits he placed on himself and others. Part of me wanted to put my wrists out to be manacled by the same limits, guided by the same morals. A weary, frightened part of me wanted to worship the same god as he, and let the priests tell me what was right and what was wrong. I wanted to lose myself in him, and cease my struggles.

  But Theo waited in Soissons. And I was Phanne, not Christian: my mother had put these tattoos upon my body so I would not forget. I couldn’t believe my fate was to be concubine to a Visigoth king, my gifts left to suffocate under Christian restrictions.

  I snorted softly. As if I had a choice in any of this. Sygarius, Clovis, Alaric—they were like stallions who clenched the bit between their teeth and ran where they willed. I clung to the back of first one, then the other, and prayed to the nonexistent gods that I would not fall off and be trampled.

  I was no longer a slave, but neither was I free and in control of my own fate. Perhaps no one was.

  But surely some were more free than this.

  Alaric’s arms tightened around me, and I felt him stir. “Nimia.”

  “Mm?”

  “I have been thinking.”

  Uh-oh.

  “This cannot continue between us. It’s wrong.”

  Damn. I sighed softly, and felt tears sting my eyes. Damn, damn, damn. What am I going to do now?

  “That disappoints you?”

  I nodded.

  He rose up on one arm and rolled me onto my back. He gently brushed my tangled hair back from my face. “Are you crying?”

  “A little.”

  “Don’t cry, my love.” He kissed me gently. “All will be well.”

  I blinked, and a tear spilled down my temple. “Will it?”

  He smiled, his large dark eyes filled with tenderness. “It will be. As soon as you are my wife.”

  The tears froze in my eyes.

  Fuck me.

  I hadn’t seen that coming.

  The yellow walls of the small palace shone pale against the dark green oak trees of the hill behind it, and its red tiled roof was bleached by the afternoon sun. We sat upon our horses on the opposite bank of the Ardour River, gazing at the goal of our three-day ride from Tolosa.

  Those yellow walls sheltered Sygarius.

  Alaric had sent Sygarius to this palace in the village of Aire to keep him out of the way until Alaric decided what to do with him. Aire had once been a summer retreat for Romans, as it was cooler here in the foothills of the Pyrenees than in the lowlands around Tolosa. Alaric had spent many of his boyhood summers roaming these forests and rocky hills, he’d told me. It was one of his favorite places; one of the few where he could relax.

  I wouldn’t be doing much relaxing. I felt myself tensing up, with a sick queasiness in my gut at the thought of confronting Sygarius.

  Sidonius Apollinaris rode up beside me. “Are you ready for this?” he asked quietly.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be ready. I don’t want to see him.”

  “We can camp on th
is riverbank for another night.” He gestured at the tree-shaded banks. Our train had already spent two nights camped alongside the old Roman road; I knew no one wanted a third, least of all Sid. Fenwig and my bodyguard were with us, along with Terix, Bone, my maids, Alaric, and thirty of his own troops, plus all the baggage wagons such a mass of humanity required. “We can turn around and go back to Tolosa. We can board a boat and sail back to Burdigala. All without ever having seen him.”

  I shook my head, as he must have known I would. “Life’s like the river, isn’t it? It flows forward. You cannot stop it.”

  “You can stop it. But then it’s no longer a river.”

  “And no longer life.”

  “You can do this, Kitharede. Look at all you’ve done already.”

  “Yes, look at it,” I said faintly.

  Terix had become distant from me. On the surface all was well, but I sensed a wall inside him where before there had been none. It pained me. I found myself turning to him to speak of some silly thought that had struck me, or some fear that tortured me, only to find that he wasn’t there, or that his gaze was turned elsewhere. He had distanced himself from me.

  It hurt all the more because I felt he had given me such a gift with his touch. The ravening hunger for physical connection that had haunted me for so long had eased, taken away by his hands. It was as if he’d found a knotted muscle inside my soul and massaged it away. I still wanted touch; I still lusted for sex; but the need for a hand upon my skin was no longer the desperate inner cry of an abandoned child. He had soothed me. He had changed me. Healed me.

  If the price I paid was to lose his friendship, I wanted the wound back.

  Alaric, meanwhile, had emerged from his fog of lust with one purpose in mind: to secure me to him as his bride. His formidable powers of reason took no time to deduce that Sygarius was an unresolved issue that must be cleared before he could proceed. And then there was my son, Theo: Alaric knew I would have to return to Soissons to fetch my child.

  Alaric had had no promise from me that we would wed, for which his advisors were deeply grateful. They had been eyeing a princess of Hispania for his next wife, not a girl with neither family nor rank except the questionable “lady” that had been attached to her name for no known reason. Alaric had in this one instance allowed passion to overrule sense, and insisted that whether I brought with me an alliance as my dowry or no, I would be his.

  If I wished.

  He acknowledged my silence on my wishes, and took my word for it that I could not think clearly about my future until my past with Sygarius was laid to rest. My hesitation sounded like manipulation, but it was the truth.

  At least in part.

  The full truth was that I didn’t know what I wanted. A king had offered for my hand, and he was a good man, a kind man. A man with whom I could envision happiness. The problem was that he wasn’t the king I wanted most.

  It was a coldhearted bastard I wanted, and I couldn’t help it.

  I feared Terix was right, though, and Clovis would never marry me. Ambition would always rule his heart. What a fool I was to even think of giving up the certainty of gentle, wise Alaric in favor of the dark chaos of Clovis.

  I wouldn’t be deciding anything, though, until the question of Sygarius was resolved. I couldn’t pledge myself to Alaric while he harbored a man who had mistreated me so badly.

  Alaric rode up on my other side. “You don’t need to face him today. Rest, recover from the journey. We’ll handle this formally in the morning.”

  It was a reprieve. I nodded in agreement, grateful to delay the confrontation for a few more hours. Better to face Sygarius when I was rested and bathed, not weary and short of temper. I would need all the inner resources I possessed if I were to appear in control of myself, and impervious to the barbs Sygarius would surely throw my way.

  I wanted Alaric—and Sid, too—to see that for all that Sygarius had been the Roman dux of the last outpost of the Western Roman Empire, he was no noble. He was no great man. His military history and his governorship of Soissons amounted to nothing, for moral depravity trumped all. His treatment of me had shown him unworthy to lick the sole of my sandal.

  That’s what I thought, anyway.

  My imagination put voice to Sygarius’s side of the story, though, and I quailed at the thought of standing in front of Alaric and Sidonius Apollinaris while Sygarius pointed out that I had been his slave; that I had escaped, and then returned to Soissons, where I was still legally his slave. He would say that I had arranged a secret meeting to return to him—so how was it outside his rights to take me into his custody, on either legal or moral grounds? And everyone knew that a slave could be treated however a master wished. Look what he had offered me: freedom, once I became pregnant. What wrong had he done?

  His punching me in the stomach and ordering one of his soldiers to kill me: even these acts were within his rights, he would say.

  Clever Sygarius would quickly guess that Alaric wanted me for himself. Then what might Sygarius say, about how he had trained me to be a sexual toy like no other? He would describe what he had taught me. What he had done to me. How I had enjoyed it. He would drop clues to Alaric, proving that he had known the workings of my body as well as Alaric felt he did now.

  What would Alaric think of me then? Everything I had said about the beauty of sex, the innocence of it, would be tainted.

  It was as Sid had tried to explain to me on the boat: there was more than one way of seeing a situation, and “right” and “wrong” could differ, depending on whose view you took. And among men, the abuse of a woman of no rank was of little consequence against the greater backdrop of the conquest of kingdoms. Justice would only come to Sygarius if men of power decided to “see it” in their best interest.

  I looked at Alaric, sitting tall and strong in his saddle, every bit the vibrant young king. He caught me looking and smiled into my eyes, his own warm and reassuring. “Everything will be all right, Nimia. Rest easy.”

  I could only hope we had the same opinion of “right.”

  I bathed, I forced down a few bites of food, I changed into clean clothes—a simple yellow gown, unadorned. My only jewelry was my labyrinth and bee necklace, the golden weight of it a comfort on my chest. Polina brushed out my hair and pulled the front back in two small braids—a style that kept it out of my face without inducing a headache from the pulling weight of a more elaborate arrangement. She and Winne seemed to sense my need for calm and kept their chattering to a minimum, though they exchanged meaningful sidelong looks that discussed me without words.

  They left me to nap in the late afternoon, and I lay for a time listening to the rattle of the cicadas and the chirps and twitters of birds in the oak trees outside my windows, but sleep was far from my agitated mind. I grunted in frustration and sat up, and my gaze lit on the chest holding my cithara. Music had always given me consolation when there was nothing else to do so.

  I dug the instrument out of its protective coverings and ran my fingers over the strings. The sound was loud in the empty room, and I had a sudden dread of someone overhearing it. I wanted to be alone with my music, and free from interruption.

  Alaric had told me about a long-abandoned Temple of Mars atop the hill behind the palace, where he had played as a boy under the pillared dome with its mosaic of mighty Mars, and in the dried-up pool of what had once been a garden spring, complete with statues of bare-breasted nereids frolicking amidst the lilies and lotus. The temple and gardens, with their aura of forbidden gods and passions, had been irresistible to an energetic boy, the more so because he restrained himself so well all through his days of lessons and prayer.

  The thought of them was irresistible to me now. I took my cithara, donned a pair of sandals, and slipped out of my rooms. The two Frankish soldiers who guarded my door were half a room away, their backs to me, gesturing and trying to make themselves understoo
d to a Gothic servant too alarmed by their hairy, foreign bulk to translate their miming of drinking into a request for water. I smiled to myself and went the other way. The palace was quiet, everyone apparently settled in to rest in this lazy late-afternoon hour, and I found my way out of doors unimpeded. The path that led up the hill to the temple was where Alaric had described it.

  Some of the tension between my shoulders eased as I put foot to the stony path. The oak trees grew just far enough part to allow light to reach the path, and alongside it birds and small creatures rustled among the grasses and bushes, heavy now with seeds and berries. The oak forest was alive with simple creatures, and I envied them their unthinking existence.

  I was sweating and breathing heavily by the time I reached the summit, but any weariness faded away as I spied the dome of the abandoned temple and made my way toward it. Nature had encroached upon it: leaves and dirt blown in by the wind had provided footings for plants, and for a small tree that struggled to reach higher than the carved columns at the entrance. It felt haunted, but by familiar spirits. These Roman symbols were nostalgic to me now, compared to the strange gods of the Franks, or the alien Jesus of the Christians.

  I went down the steps of the temple and waded through the knee-high grasses of the overgrown garden until I reached the cracked, dry marble fountain and basin with the weather-stained nereids. The fountain’s water nymphs had open mouths, and held amphorae tilted toward the basin: water must once have flowed from mouths and amphorae alike. It would have been lovely, both in sound and sight, especially on a summer’s day such as this.

  I cleared the vines from a stone bench and sat, wedging the cithara against my hip and thigh. For a while I did nothing but stare at the marble nereids, crumbling and stained, a hand missing here, a foot or nose there. Yet they were still beautiful, still joyful; one could sense the dancing movement their sculptor had imbued in their poses.

  My fingers strummed the cithara, moving without conscious thought. I summoned a melody that made the nereids dance in my mind’s eye; I sought the source of the spring deep within the hill and called its waters forth, to pour once again from the mouths of amphorae and nymphs. I strummed and plucked and imagined the fountain in its original glory, water splashing in the sunlight. Around me I heard the gathering of my golden swarm.