“Fermented mare’s milk,” came the reply in Hellene. “It’s a rare favor to be given it—cow’s milk is easier to obtain, and usually subjected to the same process. They say it’s safer to drink than water.”
“Fermented?” Antyllus said, smiling, and took the skin from her, drinking from it. He gave the skin an evaluative look, and then took another quick swig before passing it along. Selene had no idea how his expression hadn’t changed either time. “Apparently, they want to see who I am when I’m drunk, eh?”
And as the night wore on around the bright bonfire, various of the nomads’ women came over and . . . there was no other word for it. They flirted with him. Touched his short-cropped hair and shaved face. And said things that their translator choked on his mare’s milk before rendering into Hellene. “That one says that you should sell your little wife, and let a real woman take you to her bed,” the Hellene man said, very obviously choosing not to look at Selene. “She asks what good your wife is, since she carries no weapons, and does no work, not even setting up your tent?”
The slow burn of humiliation passed through Selene, and no amount of telling herself that she was a daughter of the Julii and a princess of Egypt, and that these barbarians who smelled of horse had probably never heard of either place, did any good. She turned her face away, and stared into the fire. Pretending that none of them were there. Pretending that she wasn’t there, herself.
Antyllus shook her arm gently, and, roused, she looked back at him. “I said,” he repeated patiently, “I sent Hebe for your kithara. Perhaps you could play something for them.” His lips quirked at the corners. “There isn’t a tribe anywhere that doesn’t know music. It’s as close to a universal language as there is.”
When Hebe returned with the instrument, Selene took in in numb hands. She hadn’t been able to play in over a month, but the strings felt like the hand of an old friend, taking her own. She’d never played for so many people before, but put them out of her mind resolutely. If she could just immerse herself in the music, they’d . . . go away. She wouldn’t have to watch them touching Antyllus anymore. Or hear what they were saying, translated so carefully.
She struck the strings. Invoked the quiet ripple of a stream over rocks, and then switched modes into a hymn to Poseidon, with the strings wavering and wailing, like the first breath of a gale. Another shift, to a hunting song, usually sung in praise of Artemis, but she didn’t feel like celebrating the maiden goddess of the moon right now, so her fingers shifted. Caught the last note and wound into another song—one she’d heard in Egypt, with the elaborate, serpentine progressions favored in that land. Which triggered another association, this time the lonely pipes of the shepherds of Cappadocia.
By the time Selene looked up, her hands ached, for she hadn’t played in so long. I’m surprised I didn’t strike more false notes, she thought, and as the strings stilled, she was startled to realize that the various herders had gone respectfully silent. Unnervingly so. And when the last note no longer shimmered in the ear, they gave voice to ululating cries that she desperately hoped were approval, and slapped their thighs, which certainly seemed to be applause. They were smiling, anyway. And their guide translated one of the elders’ comments, “They ask if you are a poet, as well as a keeper of songs?”
“Tell them that I have memorized some of the poems of my father’s people, and those of my mother, too, for they are the history of two great peoples, but that I am no poet. I have no gift for words.” Selene looked away.
A moment, and then the translation came back. “They say that remembering the deeds of the past is what every singer must do, and that it is good that you remember the great deeds of your ancestors. They respect that, and your gift for song.” The translator’s smile showed white through his dark beard. “They also say you must drink more mare’s milk. That you are too small and thin, and will have much difficulty bearing your husband healthy children if you do not make yourself stronger.”
Selene flushed, grateful that the firelight washed away the color. And, when Antyllus, laughing, put the skin of horrible drink back in her hand, she resignedly took another sip. A very small one.
By midnight, Antyllus was slightly tipsy from the fermented mare’s milk, and he took her off to their tent, smiling and telling her when they reached its confines, “You did very well tonight. They were testing us. They respect skill, honor, and strength. And these are Sarmatians, if you didn’t catch all the conversation while you were playing. They told me all about the Goths that are on their western flank, pushing them east, into the Scythians. They don’t share a language with the Goths, but there are . . . similarities. All those female warriors.” He picked her up off the ground and twirled her. Selene, her stomach lurching from the mare’s milk, roasted veal, and everything else, pushed at his arms and begged him to stop. Which he did with a laugh. “They liked you, my lark. I think that tomorrow, they’ll be willing to talk trade.”
Selene certainly hoped so. The sooner they did, the sooner they could leave.
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Antyllus didn’t think of himself as an idiot or blind, and it would have taken being both of those things not to realize that there was something amiss with his pretty bride. For him, marriage hadn’t fundamentally altered the nature of his existence; he could still largely go anywhere and do anything he wanted, so long as it wasn’t illegal, and didn’t interfere with his duty to his family or his duty to Rome. The biggest change had been a welcome one—ready access to a female body, without having to worry about disease, unwanted pregnancies, or the issue of payment. And he did his best—and thought he usually succeeded—in making that a pleasure for her, too.
But still, something remained . . . amiss. He’d pondered once, in Rome, asking Caesarion who’d beaten her, but he knew that no such thing lurked in Selene’s past. At first, he’d put it down to a lifetime of being overshadowed by three brilliant, accomplished elder siblings, two of them god-born. More recently, he’d made himself slow down with her, yet again. She’s left home for the first time. I did that at fourteen, myself—a year younger than she is now, surely, but I’d also been in at least five different castrae by the time I was ten, all in my father’s command tent. I’d already seen more of the world than she has. He still didn’t think that was the whole of it, however. Also, she’s . . . well, she’s not alone. I’m here, after all. But she doesn’t have anyone at all familiar around her. When I joined the legion, I had all the other young nobles around me, fresh tribunes and young optios, for the most part. I might not have known them all, but they all were my brothers. Some for better, some for worse. She doesn’t have that.
He reminded himself of those facts night after night. Tried to do little, considerate things for her, making sure that she had a lady’s maid with whom she was at least comfortable, to help her with all the female necessities with which he was wholly inexperienced. Gave her small gifts now and again. Not trying to buy her love—he thought he’d made fairly good progress on wooing her in Rome and Alexandria, and love couldn’t really be bought—but trying to show her that he cared.
But the longer their journey lasted, the more Selene seemed to shrink in on herself. He’d pull her out of the tent at twilight to show her a magnificent sunset throwing the stark mountains of Cappadocia into inky black cutouts against the horizon, and she’d silently drink it in for a while. And then she’d go back to the tent. There had been areas where he wouldn’t let her play her kithara or allow a fire to burn, but that had been at the recommendation of the guides, and only a fool hired guides to ignore their advice. So there had definitely been danger along their route . . . but she didn’t leave the tent even in safe areas.
He’d tried asking her to sit with him under the stars at night, something he’d loved since he was a boy. But with the wide band of the Milky Way trailing across the sky above them, she’d seemed uneasy and uncomfortable. Antyllus had shaken his head over it all, repeatedly, where she couldn’t see him. I never aske
d for a grand passion, he thought, tiredly. I’ve spent my entire life watching what passion usually leads to, reflected in my father’s life. All that anger at his first, faithless wife. A solid marriage with my mother, till she died. The embarrassing incident with the actress, who, freedwoman or not, still owed her loyalties to her former owner, one of Caesar’s political rivals, so Caesar told him to drop her, resulting in one of my many illegitimate half-siblings. All the infidelities with Octavia—not that I can blame him, honestly. Whatever happened with Cleopatra, years ago, and now a stable marriage with her. All of that tumult. I never wanted any of that. Just . . . contentment. Peace. Someone I could love a bit, and someone who might love me a bit, too. I didn’t think there’d be this constant effort to get her to smile—and those smiles seem to be dwindling, day by day.
And I have no idea why.
He’d been delighted by her music for the Sarmatians; she’d played a panoply of different styles, all alien to the herders, invoking a variety of moods, from solemn grandeur to elegiac sorrow. But Antyllus had also noted that none of the songs had exactly sounded cheerful. And again, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. There’s fresh air around us, beautiful scenery, new people to meet. No buccinae to wake us up in the morning, and no duty, except to get to Britannia with the weapons I’m here to buy. If it weren’t for how withdrawn she’s been, I’d have called this the best two months of my adult life so far.
So, for the next six days, in and around haggling with the locals—who sent outriders to fetch people from the spring camps of neighboring tribes—he tried to draw Selene out of herself. Took her around the camp of the Sarmatians. Pointed out the thick, beautiful, elaborately woven rugs with which they covered their dirt floors. “Looks like a mosaic floor at home, but so much more portable,” he pointed out, trying to make her smile. “Quite a few more flowers, too. Think we should bring some back with us?”
Then he found a group of women weaving, and when Selene stopped to watch an activity he’d never put any thought into at all, he paused with her. “What do you think?” he asked her, trying to draw her out.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she admitted, staring. All three of the women were working on the same rug, kneeling on the ground. The loom itself was vertical, as most looms in the west were, but it stretched across the ground, rather than being an upright mechanism. As such, the women knelt right on the bottom edge of the carpet as they worked, on hands and knees, rapidly moving threads and combing them down. “My back aches just watching them.”
He nudged her gently, and disentangled her hand from his arm. “Why don’t you go talk to them?” Antyllus asked. “You know about weaving. I’m sure they’d enjoy talking with you while they work.”
Selene’s eyes went wide. “I can’t speak their language! How can I talk to them without a translator?” she protested, looking around for their guide.
“I think interest speaks a language all its own. Go on. I’ll wait over here. I’m sure there’s something around for me to look at.” Please work, he thought, and withdrew. Glanced over now and again, as Selene hovered near the women, finally kneeling down beside them to look more closely at their work, though clearly trying to stay out of their way and their light. Inside of ten minutes of her trying to gesture at them, they’d pulled her down with them, and were showing her how they tied the knots—and then handed her a comb, letting her pack down their work, rather than risk her inexpert hands damaging a pattern that clearly might take a year to finish.
“Was that at least interesting?” he asked a half-hour or so later, and got a quick nod. And, gods be praised, a slight smile.
“It seems almost a sacrilege to offer coin for something that must take so long to make,” she told him. “And yet, I suppose they must sell them, because once a family’s covered the floor of their own tent, what else is there left to do?”
The answer, however, lay inside each of the tents that they visited. Because the rugs weren’t just used on the floors. They hung from poles inside the tents, creating divisions and rooms. Hung beside the actual walls of the tent, too, offering more protection from the winds of the steppe. Entering any tent, however drab it was on the outside, was to experience a cacophony of conflicting colors and patterns, with no uniformity or structure at all, which dazed a Roman mind accustomed to balance, harmony, and simplicity in interior design. “There’s your answer,” Antyllus told her, chuckling, and took her faint smile as his reward once more.
______________
Everything took time, and Selene tried not to chafe visibly with her desire to leave. Bows like the one Antyllus wanted weren’t just lying around; they were made to each warrior’s measure, and if a man or woman died, their bows were often buried with them.
Their hosts sent riders to the spring camps of neighboring tribes, who brought back more Sarmatians, and even some Scythians—Selene wasn’t really sure how to tell the difference, except that the Scythians seemed to wear more gold clasps and pins and studs on their clothing.
With Hebe to walk beside her, she might have been free to wander around the Sarmatian camp. But she’d shrunk from the idea initially. She didn’t speak the language, and the herders and warriors—particularly the female warriors!—frightened her. Their voices were loud, and even the women who carried weapons tended to walk with a certain swaggering confidence, that to her sensibilities, seemed to border on braggadocio. Yet when she ventured that opinion to Antyllus, he chuckled and said, mildly, “You haven’t been inside of an enlisted barracks often, then. Because I see plenty of swagger and bluster there, too.”
And having ventured that opinion, she found her arm taken, and Antyllus marched her around the camp several times. It felt like punishment at first, but meeting the weavers had alleviated some of that reaction. After that, she did ask Hebe to walk with her back to the weavers several times. And once, managed to get the attention of their Cappadocian guide, and brought him with her, so that she could actually speak to the women. Ask them what they used for dye—common madder for the reds, onion and chamomile for the yellows and browns, acorns for black, as it turned out. Cautiously pulled out her own, very limited sewing kit, and showed them silk thread and linen, which they touched in wonder at its fineness, but told her, through the translator, “Cloth woven with such thin thread must be quite useless, except perhaps in the warmest days of summer. Wool is better. Wool is warmer. But this is so soft, and it shimmers so.”
Not knowing what else to do, Selene gave them the silk thread. “Perhaps they can embroider with it,” she told the translator.
“My lady, I don’t know that word in their language,” he said, looking annoyed with the whole conversation. As if she were wasting his time with all these women’s dealings.
Selene nodded, and simply pressed the loop of silk thread into the hand of the nearest woman. “Tell them that I thank them for letting me watch how they work. Their rugs are beautiful. Each one a labor of love.”
The translator conveyed that, clearly trying not to roll his eyes.
Selene was quite startled the next day, when one of the women appeared at her own tent. And gave her a tiny rug, worked in similar fashion to the huge one that the three had been making all this while. A babble of words in Sarmatian—no translator around to help interpret—and a little bow. And then the woman turned and walked away, leaving Selene to stare after her. I don’t think that this is a fair trade at all. I gave them silk threads. They gave me something beautiful.
From what little she could see, the nomads had a layered, hierarchical culture, with the warriors on top, priests either co-equal or slightly above the warriors, skilled craftsmen like the goldsmiths and the weavers below that, and slaves below that, with farmers—drawn from the sedentary parts of the population—occupying a nebulous place below the craftsmen. Still, they were generally treated with respect, and the nomads traded with them for vegetables, fruits, and grain.
Women could be priestesses of their various goddesses, as
well as warriors or wives or craftsmen. Selene had read her Herodotus on the way here; she’d expected the male priests, called enarei, to be somewhat like galli. Of course, Herodotus had claimed that the enarei were hereditary priests; a full caste all to themselves, they had been granted the gift of prophecy by the Scythian gods, and that male children of this caste underwent certain rituals in adolescence that barred them from becoming warriors, and forever after, wore women’s clothing.
Since it would be rather difficult to have a hereditary priesthood without propagating that lineage, and since Selene couldn’t see any distinction between men and women’s clothing, since they all wore the ubiquitous trousers, she rather thought that Herodotus might have had some bad information mixed in with the good. With the high status of women, a male-only caste that dressed as women to set themselves apart—when the women could have status as warriors!—made little sense at all. But she couldn’t ask such questions; their interpreter was usually busy with Antyllus. And even if their Cappadocian had been at hand, Selene couldn’t think of a single way to start that kind of conversation with the people standing around their carts. At least not any that wouldn’t cause serious offense.
And then Antyllus told her, behind his hand, that he’d figured out the mystery at the privy trench dug at the side of camp. “There’s one of those enarei here, a very old one. Woman’s breasts and, as I inadvertently found out while pissing, the genitals of both sexes. They’re full hermaphrodites,” he told her, shaking his head a bit. “Not eunuchs. Either it’s the gods’ will, to set them apart, but it only seems to occur inside their caste, and only once, maybe twice in a generation. Like red hair, maybe it just runs in some families. I asked. Politely, you may be sure. They’re regarded as prodigies, the same way they would be in Rome, and considered to have great magical powers. Though I have seen magic, and this elderly enarei has yet to do so much as light a lamp with it here in camp.” He shrugged. “Their beliefs, not mine. They’d probably find great portent in the birth of a two-headed calf, too.”
Children of Tiber and Nile (The Rise of Caesarion's Rome Book 2) Page 41
