The Lion and the Lark

by Doreen Owens Malek

  “You will do it, and you will enjoy it,” he murmured, setting her back on the bed and kissing the silken tip of one breast, then the other. “I promise you that.”

  She fell silent as he stroked and caressed her, nipping and teasing until she was clutching him and turning restlessly, aroused again and silently begging for more. His mouth moved from her breasts to her navel to the tops of her thighs, leaving a trail of fire in its wake, and when he bent his head to move lower she was too stimulated to resist.

  Bronwen went rigid at the first touch of his lips, then gradually relaxed as a wave of pleasure washed over her body, leaving her weak and yearning helplessly. She sank one hand into his hair and the other gripped the sheet as he drove her into a mounting frenzy.

  “Please,” she finally gasped, barely able to speak. She dug her nails into his scalp, her eyes squeezed shut.

  “What?” he muttered thickly, raising his head. He kissed her hip, her belly, trailing his tongue along her superheated flesh, his eyes still closed, as lost as she was. He moved up next to her, taking her hand and placing it on him again.

  “I want...” she whispered.

  “What do you want?” he said hoarsely, opening her eyes to look at her face. Her lips were parted, her brow dewed with perspiration; a pulse was running riot in her throat.

  “I want you to take me,” she moaned. “Take me now.”

  He obeyed, pulling her into position and entering her in almost the same motion. This time she relaxed and helped him; they both gasped aloud with the exquisite sensation.

  He was still for several long moments and then began to move slowly. She held him tightly, locking her legs around his hips. When he felt her falling into his rhythm he dropped his head to her shoulder and kissed the side of her neck.

  “That’s the way,” he whispered, his mouth hot and wet against her skin. He kissed her again. “Come with me.”

  And she did.

  Bronwen thought that Claudius was sleeping, but when she looked down at his face she saw that his heavy lidded eyes were open.

  “I didn’t know,” she said softly.

  He raised his head from the curve of her arm and looked at her, kissing her cheek.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know what it would be like. I shouldn’t have kept us waiting so long.”

  Claudius ran a strand of her shining hair through his fingers. He didn’t contradict her.

  “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “From the first moment I saw you.”

  “I’ve been such a fool.” She looked down at her hands self-consciously. “Was it like this with your wife?”

  “How could it be? She was very different from you...”

  “Yes, I know. She was good.”

  He chuckled. “And you’re not?”

  Bronwen didn’t answer, thinking of her secret life as an Iceni spy. “I guess this marriage didn’t work out exactly as planned, did it?” she asked him.

  “As planned by Scipio and your father? No.”

  “I was astonished on the day of our wedding when I saw that I was marrying you,” she said, remembering.

  “So was I. I had looked for you and dreamed of you, but thought never to see you again.”

  “Dreamed of me? How?”

  “I dreamed of doing what we just did,” he said, and smiled.

  “So did I,” Bronwen said quietly.

  “That first night I asked you if you remembered me and you said that one Roman was the same as another to you,” he reminded her in a teasing tone.

  “I lied. I didn’t want to love you, Claudius. I resisted with all my might.”

  “Yes, I know. And your might is considerable.” He threw off the sheet and strode naked to the fireplace, adding several logs to the dying fire. She watched his swift, economical movements, admiring the lithe body that had recently been joined with hers. When he returned to the bed he said, “Do you want me to bring you some water to wash?”

  “I don’t think so. There isn’t much blood, but I’ll ask Maeve to change the sheets in the morning. I don’t want the other servants to wonder what’s going on.”

  “If they’re not wondering already they’re deaf and blind,” Claudius said dryly.

  “Maeve is the only one I trust. She’ll be happy that we made the marriage real, she’s predicted it from the first.”

  “Alone among your people, she never hated me.”

  “She listens only to the voice of the goddess.”

  “The goddess was right this time.” He stretched out next to Bronwen, propping his chin in his hand and looking at her. “Where does Maeve get her powers?”

  “Her first master was a Druid from Caledonia in the far north. She learned much of the lore and medicine from him, since he had no son to pass it on to, but I’ve heard that she was born with the caul and had the sight from childhood. She predicted Caesar’s coming.”

  Claudius raised his brows.

  “Yes, she did. Long before you Romans arrived she said that foreign invaders from a sunny climate across the sea would hold sway in Britain for five hundred years.”

  “Five hundred years! Your father and his confederates would not like to hear that.”

  “Do you think it’s true?” Bronwen asked. “Do you think you are the invaders she predicted, or will others come?”

  He sighed and rolled onto his back. “I think the Empire will pass, as they all do, and others will certainly touch upon these shores after us. But five centuries ago Rome was a tiny monarchy under Tarquin, so I suppose anything is possible.”

  “It frightens me to think that I didn’t want you to come here,” she said softly, studying his arched profile, so Roman, so unlike hers and yet so beautiful. “I might never have known this night.”

  “I didn’t want to come here either. I had no idea that a girl with cat’s eyes and hair the color of polished bronze was waiting in Brittania to steal my heart.”

  She moved next to him and he curled one arm around her shoulders, drawing her in against his body.

  “Will you still go to Londinium?” she asked him.

  He looked down at her. “Do you want me to go?”

  She threw her arms around his neck passionately. “I want you to take me with you.”

  “That wasn’t the plan. I’m posted to the barracks there, there is no housing assigned to me for a wife.”

  “Can’t that be changed?”

  He smiled. “You’d like Scipio to alter my orders? Again?”

  “I thought he wanted to help you.”

  The smile widened to a grin. “Bronwen, I’m in the army! I do what I am ordered to do. The general shuffled papers to get me sent south in the first place and now he’s going to tell Londinium that I’m bringing my wife along, a wife who needs a house and a staff?”

  “But I don’t need those things!”

  “You want to live in the barracks with the centurions striding around stark naked, urinating into the cisterns and spitting on the floor?” he inquired, his eyes wide.

  “Claudius, I’m serious. What about both of us staying here, can’t we do that?”

  “Everything has already been arranged for me to go, Bronwen. There’s another man coming here to take my place, I can’t just send him back to Magiolagos because I’ve changed my mind.” He stroked her arm. “It would probably be much easier to find a place for both of us in the garrison at Londinium.”

  “You wouldn’t go without me, would you?” she asked fearfully, clutching him.

  “No, no,” he said reassuringly, stroking her hair. “I’ll never leave you now.”

  “But if the general was reluctant to let you go in the first place, the request to take me along could be another reason for him to object to the transfer, couldn’t it?”

  “He authorized my orders without any problem. He was somewhat reluctant initially, only because I’m one of the few officers posted here who can add a column of figures,” Claudius said dryly.

  Bronwen
looked at him skeptically.

  “It’s true. Most of the others are like Ardus and came up through the ranks, some from the colonies. But unlike him they have little education and can’t keep the books. They’re trained to be warriors, not clerks. With the tribes at bay, at least for the most part, I’ve been spending my time recalling my boyhood mathematics, tabulating shipments from Rome and doing grain allotments.”

  “It sounds fascinating,” she said, laughing.

  “It makes me almost wish for Gaul again,” he said, smiling, and

  wrestled her under him. “Almost,” he added, and kissed her.

  “You will ask to take me with you?” Bronwen insisted, kissing him back.

  “You’ll be with me, wherever I am,” he replied.

  Bronwen wound her arms around his neck, locking her legs into place behind his and moving against him sinuously.

  “You learn fast,” he murmured against her mouth.

  “Teach me more,” she whispered, and he did.

  Bronwen rose from the bed, wrapping the sheet around her. The fire was almost dead and she stirred it, dropping thin sticks onto it until it blazed and then adding several logs. She walked back to the bed and looked down at Claudius sleeping there, his arm thrown across the space where she had been, the sheet caught below his waist. She trailed her hand lightly across the broad shoulders, the muscular back and arms, the lean, tapering waist.

  He stirred and she stepped back.

  If she went with Claudius to Londinium and made sure he stayed there, she could give the Roman troop departure date to Brettix. Her brother would use it to plan an attack on Camulodonum, where they now were, and by the time that happened she and her husband would be safely out of the fort, relocated many miles to the south.

  It was the only way to help her people and still keep Claudius out of danger.

  She looked at the window, where the sun was rising, and realized that the servants would be up already. She had lost track of time during the sleepless night. She dropped the sheet and retrieved her nightgown from the floor, slipping it over her head and draping her shawl over her shoulders. She glanced into the mercury silvered standing mirror as she passed it, then stopped short, looking into it more carefully.

  Her hair was wild, reminding her of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom pictured on the stamps on Claudius’ scrolls. It streamed back from her face and over her shoulders like a lion’s mane. Her left cheek was raw with beard burn, her mouth red and swollen; there was a purple suck mark at the base of her throat. She looked like what she was, a woman who had recently tumbled out of a hectic bed. Anyone seeing her would know exactly how she had spent the night.

  She sighed with resignation. She had few secrets from Maeve anyway. She opened the bedroom door and waited for the crone to pass on her rounds, then beckoned her into the doorway.

  Maeve angled her head to look at Bronwen with her good eye, then smiled knowingly.

  “What’s this?” she said, touching the younger woman’s reddened lower lip. “Your mouth looks well used.”

  “It was.”

  She took Bronwen’s chin in her hand and turned her head toward the light from the low burning torch in the hall.

  “And this?” she said, fingering the bruise on Bronwen’s neck. “A love bite?”

  “Mind your own business, old woman,” Bronwen said, but she was smiling.

  “At last,” Maeve said with satisfaction. “The prophecy is completely fulfilled.”

  “Yes, yes. I know. You were right all along. I would congratulate you on your keen perception if you weren’t already so busy congratulating yourself.”

  “I was certain it would happen. How could you keep your hands off him?”

  “I managed it for some time,” Bronwen said dryly.

  “The more fool you. If I were a few years younger...”

  “If you were fifty years younger...”

  Maeve shrugged. “Young people waste time because they think they have so much of it.”

  “I’m not wasting time any more. Right now I have two tasks for you,” Bronwen told her.

  “Only two?”

  “Yes. The first is to strip my bed and wash the sheets separately from the rest of the household laundry today. Then dry them before the storehouse fire and return them to the chest.”

  Maeve grinned. “Should I let the master sleep as long as he wants before taking them? I’m sure he’s tired.”

  Bronwen ignored that and added, “Then get word to Brettix that I have something for him.”

  “Can’t you just give me the message?”

  “No. He has to hear it from me. Say that he must come as soon as he can, tonight if possible.”

  “How shall I reach him?”

  “Find Cartia, the sister of that friend of his. You know, the girl who comes in to market,” Bronwen said. “I’ve gotten messages to him through her before.”

  “Which friend? Parex?”

  “Yes, Parex. Today is market day, Cartia will be in the fort to set her wares out in the cattle barns they use during the winter. You’ll be shopping for the house anyway, take her aside and tell her.”

  Maeve nodded.

  Bronwen bent and embraced the old lady, realizing suddenly how small and frail she was.

  “Thank you for everything you have done for me. I know I haven’t always been as patient as I should be...”

  Maeve held up her hand. “You’ve been placed in terrible circumstances. What I remember is how you cared for me when I had no one else. If I have returned the favor then I am content.”

  Bronwen kissed her cheek.

  “Go now,” she said to the old woman, as another servant came down the hall. “Do as I’ve told you.”

  Maeve walked away and Bronwen went back into the bedroom to wake her husband.

  CHAPTER nine

  Lucia vomited violently into the basin her mother held and then fell back against the bed. Drucilla dabbed at her daughter’s forehead worriedly, then wiped Lucia’s lips with the same cloth.

  “When did this start?” Drucilla asked.

  “During the night,” Lucia whispered, trying to look as ill as possible. She didn’t add that she had carefully mixed salt and water and wood ash into a potion and swallowed the noxious brew before her mysterious ailment began.

  “You look green,” Drucilla said. “I’m going to tell your father to send that Greek here, I’ve heard he’s still at the fort tending Dolabella’s pregnant wife.”

  Lucia sat up. “No mother, please. I don’t want him poking me, I dislike that man. His accent makes me nervous.”

  “He has a Greek accent, which is very pleasant to the ear. You would do well to cultivate some Greek friends, they have made advancements in philosophy and medicine and mathematics which put the rest of the world to shame.”

  “That didn’t prevent us from conquering them,” Lucia said darkly, stifling a yawn.

  “So they are not soldiers,” Drucilla said, shrugging as she filled a bedside carafe with water from a jug.

  Lucia stared. “You should study history, mother. The great Alexander was a Greek and he conquered the known world.”

  “He was a Macedonian, which is an entirely different thing,” Drucilla said irritably. “His father was a barbarian and his mother was a crazy woman who cast spells with snakes and told him he was really the son of their god Hercules.”

  “I guess it didn’t hurt him,” Lucia said dryly.

  “Don’t argue with me, Lucia. I was speaking of the civilized present day Greeks, not the ancient warriors, and you know it. I don’t know why you have to debate every point with me like Cicero holding forth in the forum...” She stopped talking as Lucia was sick once more, grabbing the basin from the stand and holding it under her nose.

  “I’m sending for Pallas,” Drucilla said.

  Lucia grabbed her wrist as she moved away. “I will not see him, Mother.”

  “Lucia, be sensible. Who knows what kind of fevers these Cel
ts are passing around?”

  “I don’t have a fever. I am merely sick at my stomach and it will pass,” Lucia replied weakly, wishing that she had consumed just a little less wood ash.

  There was a knock at her door and her father entered, wearing his loose

  sleeping robe.

  “Ariovistus tells me that you are ill,” Scipio said to his daughter, eyeing her narrowly.

  “She’s been vomiting since well before dawn,” Drucilla said. “I want Pallas to take a look at her.”

  Scipio studied the slight figure in the bed.

  “Leave me alone with her,” he said to his wife.

  Drucilla looked at him in surprise.

  “I want to have a few words with my daughter in privacy,” Scipio said to Drucilla, widening his eyes.

  Drucilla shook her head, muttering to herself, and swept out of the room.

  Lucia watched her father approach her bed and then sit down in the chair next to it.

  “This came upon you rather suddenly, didn’t it?” Scipio asked her archly.

  “Yes.”

  “Fortuitous timing, wouldn’t you say?”

  Lucia didn’t reply.

  He looked around the room. “I noticed that you haven’t done any packing.”

  “I was waiting for you to tell my mother that I was leaving,” Lucia shot back at him evenly. “Apparently she doesn’t know anything about my imminent departure.”

  Scipio folded his arms and sat back in his chair. “I didn’t tell her because I just learned that the major pass leading south to Londinium is blocked with snow. There will be no traveling through it until the weather improves.”

  His daughter’s expression changed as she reacted to that piece of information.

  “That’s right,” her father said, nodding. “You staged this little demonstration for nothing. I hope that whatever emetic you used will not do any permanent damage.”

  Lucia folded her hands on the sheet, not looking at him.

  “And now it seems your horse trainer has disappeared,” Scipio added in a wondering tone.

  Lucia met his eyes reluctantly.

  “I don’t suppose you have any knowledge of that,” her father said sarcastically.