“You said the Varini are a warlike tribe?” I murmured, nodding at the sword in her hand. “I hope they taught you how to fight with something more than your knuckles before they bartered you away.”
She spat a quiet curse as the taller of the two gestured in our direction. They knew we were there. They were coming for us. And they were not alone. Other shadows detached themselves from the darkness, and suddenly another pair of men was moving across the town square toward us too. I hissed at Elka and nodded in the direction of the new threat, and I could almost hear her pulse start to race. With nowhere to run, Elka and I stepped into the middle of a wide, clear space where we had unobstructed views on all sides.
“Back to back,” I said tensely.
She shifted her body so that her shoulder blades jammed up against mine.
The slave chain hissed along the ground as the men closed in around us. I kicked at it to keep it out from underneath my slippers, and one of the men—the taller of the first pair—swung a short-hafted pike at Elka’s head in an artless, horizontal slash. She ducked without blocking and shifted to the side, bending around my left flank so that I could move with her. I saw what she was doing and dropped into a crouch as she twisted. The man reared back again, and while his attention was focused on Elka, I sprang forward with a low, darting thrust that tagged him solidly on the upper thigh. He howled in pain, flinching as the point of my sword pierced his worn breeches and sank into the muscle there. I pulled my sword out and blood spilled down the front of his leg. It was the first time I’d ever wounded a man, and I felt a savage rush of excitement.
“Not such easy meat as he thought.” Elka’s voice was in my ear, panting with fear or exertion—I couldn’t tell which. “That was nice, little fox.”
“Thanks,” I said. “For all the good it—”
“Hai!” Elka exclaimed and threw herself against my spine, hard enough to knock me forward. Blades clashed beside my ear as Elka fended off her attacker, but I was too occupied in that moment to help. The partner of the man I had wounded had learned from his companion’s misfortune and came at me with a feinting attack instead of a direct swing. I saw beneath the matted tangle of his overgrown beard that he wore an iron collar. Just like me.
Only not like me at all. Because if the slaves of the Gaulish tribes were anything like the ones owned by my own tribe in Prydain, they weren’t allowed to be schooled in the arts of war. And I, most certainly, was.
“They’re slaves!” I shouted at Elka. “They’re not trained!”
“Tell them that!” Elka shouted back as she dropped to one knee and threw herself to the side to evade another clumsy blow that—training or no—would have broken her head open.
As she dodged, I covered her, scything through the air with my sword and screaming curses that startled the man so much he actually backed off a few paces. Elka scrambled to her feet, and together we faced them, shoulder to shoulder.
“They’re just girls!” the brigand with the leg wound shouted. “Cut them down!”
In all my life, I’d never actually been in a real fight. Never gone on a raid, or warred over territory, and—in spite of all my declarations of warrior prowess—I think I’d always secretly wondered if I’d be able to handle myself in an actual battle when the time came. Now, one look at the men backing off, one of them clutching a wound made by my blade, told me that I would. I had. The first taste of real battle was sweet on my tongue, and I felt a surge of hope. We could do this. We could win this fight.
Maybe.
“Just girls my ragged arse!” one of the other brigands spat. “Demons is more like!”
They were afraid of us. A spark somewhere deep inside of me flared to life. The tiniest blue flame, with nothing of tinder to catch onto except the delusional hope that I could somehow fight my way back to freedom. The spark snuffed out the moment the brigand attacked again . . . and the rusted blade in my hand shattered into shards.
I gripped the hilt of the broken old weapon and desperately wished it were my own gleaming sword, the one Charon had taken from me.
The brigand in front of me lifted his weapon high. And then—
“Enough!” Charon’s distinctive accent roared through the ruins, echoing off broken stone walls. As if my very thoughts had conjured him out of the thin night air—summoned his shade like an Otherworld demon—the slave master stepped out of the darkness and into the moonlight. And suddenly, there was nothing but empty space in front of me.
The brigand was just . . . gone.
In that moment, I completely understood why, young as he was, Charon’s men respected—or, perhaps, feared—him. With one swift motion, Charon had grabbed the brigand by the shoulder and yanked him around. Two more moves and the man lost first his sword hand . . . and then his head.
His blade, hilt still clasped in dead fingers, spun through the air. The man’s head toppled from his neck and bounced away into the undergrowth, the whites of his eyes glinting in the moonlight. The headless torso slumped to the ground, and Charon wiped his blade on the dead man’s sleeve. The relief I felt was followed swiftly by a stab of fear. Elka and I had been rescued only to find ourselves once more in the hands of our captor.
And he wasn’t very happy with us.
Charon stepped over the corpse at his feet and grabbed me by the slave collar, hauling me close so that I was almost nose to nose with him. I could smell wine on his breath. He’d probably been traveling in ease, riding in his private covered wagon, when the cage cart had overturned. Although my pulse thrummed in my throat, beating wildly against the knuckles of Charon’s fist, I forced my eyes to meet his. If I was going to die, I was going to stare into the face of my death when it happened.
I held my breath. But after another long moment, I saw the white fury fade from behind the slave master’s eyes.
“You cost me a man, and you cost me a wagon, and yet here I am, rescuing you from the ravages of your own stupidity,” he hissed. “I must be mad.”
“Leave me here among these ruins, then,” I said, half-defiant, half-afraid he would do just that, “and I’ll trouble you no more.”
“Don’t tempt me,” he said. “Listen to me. You’re a fool, and you know nothing. You don’t even know what you’re worth. But I do.”
My eyes snapped back up to his face.
“And that’s the only reason you’re still alive,” he said. “But understand this: If you try and pull a stunt like this again, if you even so much as think about running, I swear by all the gods, I will stake you to the ground myself and leave you for the wolves.”
He let go of my slave collar, and I stumbled back a step, knocking into Elka. She put out a hand to steady me. Charon jabbed a finger at the tall Varini girl. “And you,” he said. “You’ve already cost me blood money. I should kill you right now just for the trouble you’ve caused.”
I felt Elka’s fingers close tightly on my arm, but she said nothing.
“I can’t sell you dead,” he growled. “But if you don’t fetch a price that’ll make it worth my trouble, I’ll sell you instead to some fat Roman bastard senator who’ll make you wish you were dead.”
He turned and gestured to his men to collect us and our surviving attackers, who now knelt in the dust at the feet of the slavers. “Get them back down to the road. And get a chain on these other animals. Might as well glean all the profit we can from this misbegotten night.”
“What of Clodhar?” Hafgan asked, nodding toward the road.
“What of him?” Charon said. “He’s dead. His incompetence cost me a cart and a night’s rest. He can lie in that ditch till the scavengers scatter his bones.”
He turned and stalked off into the night, leaving his men to deal with us. I turned to Elka, who kicked at the iron links that bound us together.
“I guess we’re stuck with each other then,” she said. “For the time being.”
“There are worse fates,” I said.
She rolled an eye at me.
“Not many, but some.”
A grin flickered across Elka’s face as Charon’s men barked at us to get moving. The slave chain hissed sullenly along the ground, but I realized that I really was grateful that the tall, fierce Varini girl was tethered to the other end.
IX
FROM THAT POINT ON, the journey south became a drudgery of crushing sameness. The days crawled past the bars of my cage, the landscape veiled in a pall of dull yellow road dust: hills, then forests, then fields rolled by; waving golden crops ripe for harvest replaced by fields of stubbly, shorn stalks; pale blue skies and high pink clouds giving way to the vaulting darkness above me as I lay sleepless, shivering and aching.
And then, one day, our caravan crested a high hill, and there, laid out like a dream before us, was a place I never, in my wildest flights of fancy, could have imagined: the port of Massilia, sprawled on the coast of a vast sea the Romans called Mare Nostrum. From the time when I was barely old enough to run like a wild creature out beyond the walls of Durovernum, Sorcha and I would go down to the market stalls to barter with the traders for bolts of fine, bright cloth and pink salt and spices from lands where the sun was so hot, they said, you could die of its kiss.
One of the traders, a thick-bodied man with skin like boiled leather, would dock his ship at Durovernum twice a year and spin tales of the cities he’d seen and the people he’d traded with. I would perch on the bales of merchandise stacked on the docks and listen to his stories of far-off lands. That was where I had first heard of the great middle sea, whose waves washed the shores of many different lands, lands like Greece and Rome and Aegypt. The trader had told me that Mare Nostrum meant “Our Sea” in Latin, and I had marveled at the arrogance of Rome, which would dare to lay claim to the very elements of the earth. The goddess must have laughed at them, I’d thought. I certainly had.
But I wasn’t laughing now as I finally saw with my own eyes the things the trader had spoken of. The stone walls of Massilia gleamed so brightly in the sun that I had to squint to look at them, rising up against the backdrop of a sea the color of the deepest sapphires and nestled among green and brown hills cloaked with olive trees. The road we were on had widened steadily over the last day’s traveling until it was broad enough to let four ox carts go side by side down toward the great north gate. Our own caravan joined the multitude of foot and cart traffic that streamed toward the bustling city that, as far as I could tell, held more people within its walls than I had thought were alive in the whole world.
My mouth kept dropping open, and I would choke on road dust as the city loomed ever closer. When I glanced over at Elka, she was in the same state—wide-eyed and torn between fear and wonderment. Everything seemed like something out of legend. In the shadow of the soaring walls, the city became less of an imposing majestic place and more a heaped, jumbled gathering of wealth and squalor existing side by side. Heady perfumes and the stink of offal wrapped around each other, woven into an overwhelming tapestry by the ocean breeze. Wicker cages full of fowl and small game swung from carts, squawking and chittering excitedly, filling the air with a haze of fur and feathers. Tens and tens of incomprehensible languages rang in my ears. Houses and temples and other buildings made of stone—structures that made my father’s great hall seem like a sheepherder’s hut—rose above the street, level upon level.
All of it—the sights and sounds and smells—tangled together into an assault on my senses that made me want to clap my hands over my ears and hide my head. But there was no escaping the chaos as our cart plunged on, heading right toward the very heart of Massilia. With only the bars of my cage between me and the pushing, shoving, singing, shouting crowd, I’d never felt so vulnerable.
But the people on the road paid us little heed—we were, after all, just one more load of trade goods to be sold in the marketplace in Rome—and by the time we’d passed beneath the massive arch of the city gate, my panic had mostly given way to curiosity as Charon’s drivers shouted and cursed, bullying their way toward Massilia’s famed docks. Eventually, we came to a stop beside a ship with the same maroon-and-blue-striped sail as the slave galley that had taken me away from my home.
Charon appeared, swinging himself down from the back of his covered wagon, and hailed the ship’s master. I watched the two men clasp wrists in greeting, and I could tell that the ship captain was agitated. He gestured with impatient swipes back toward the ship. I glanced over and saw that the ship’s rails were lined with Roman legionnaires. Dozens of them. They bristled with weapons and armor, and beneath the brims of their helmets, their faces looked like statues carved by the same sculptor, equally stern, hard, uncaring.
The sight of them made my blood run cold.
These men, I thought, are not warriors. They are soldiers.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the tribes of Prydain—for the men and women of the Cantii and the Catuvellauni—to face those soldiers. How had it been for Virico or Sorcha? How had it been for Arviragus and his doomed coalition of tribes in Alesia? These were stone-cold men trained to kill—not with heart and fire and fury, not with the joy of glorious battle, but as a single, unthinking whole, like drones in a beehive.
Eventually, one of the soldiers—one of some sort of rank, I guessed, judging from the helmet plume and his immaculate cloak—strode forward to speak to Charon, and the slave master waved away the captain.
“Caius Antonius Varro!” Charon held out his hand and greeted the legionnaire with cheer. “Well met, Decurion.”
The two men clasped wrists in greeting.
“What are you doing in Massilia?” Charon continued. “Official business?”
“The port authorites made a request of Caesar to lend the services of my detachment,” the legionnaire replied. “So that we may escort cargo ships safely to Rome. I’ll be traveling with you on the last leg of your journey.”
Charon raised an eyebrow. “This would be in regards to the ‘pirates’ my captain tells me of? He thinks the authorities are imagining things, Decurion. Or exaggerating.”
The Decurion shrugged. “They can think whatever they like. My father’s trading partners lost three ships to bandits in the last month alone,” he said.
“Three?” Charon frowned. “Senator Varro must be beside himself.”
“The merchants’ guild has been trying to keep the matter quiet in order to avoid a panic, but you can be assured that what I tell you is truth,” the Decurion said. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to jeopardize the safety of your current inventory. I can tell you that, with Caesar’s Triumphs looming near, there is fierce competition in the capital right now for the kind of slaves you always seem to have on offer.”
Charon grinned, leading the Decurion back up onto the deck. “Come see for yourself,” he said.
As the slave master and the Decurion talked, Hafgan and his men had unlocked our chains, herding us from the caravan cages toward the galley. A miserable clot of human livestock, we shuffled up the sea-slick gangplank to huddle on the deck of the ship. The Decurion began pacing through our ranks, and I secretly examined him as he examined us. Even though most of his face was obscured by the cheek-plates of his helmet, I’d already got the impression—by the timbre of his speech and the way he carried himself—that he was fairly young.
Probably the brat son of some minor official given a plush ceremonial appointment in the legions as an officer, I thought. What a charming escort.
“I must lack a discerning eye,” he said eventually. “I see nothing at all remarkable here.”
Charon didn’t rise to the slight. He just leaned against a stack of barrels, arms crossed. “Travel takes its toll,” he said. “They’ll clean up all right, this lot. Trust me.”
The young Decurion’s gaze landed on me, and I could see that in his estimati
on, I was less than a filthy runt in a kennel. I swallowed the biting words that only would have earned me a slap as he swept past, heading toward the captain’s tent near the stern of the ship, where there would no doubt be wine and refreshments laid out for him.
As Hafgan appeared to herd us all down into the darkness of the ship’s hold, the smoldering disdain I had carried most of my life for the legionnaire’s kind—for the soldiers that had killed my sister and dishonored my father—flared to a bright-burning flame of hatred. And my soul fanned that fire wholly in the direction of the young decurion named Caius Antonius Varro.
X
IN THE HOLD OF THE SHIP, the darkness was absolute, the air close and damp, overwhelming with the reek of seawater. We’d been sailing for hours, and it must have been close to midnight. Most of the slave captives dozed, lulled by the groan of wood and creak of rope and the rhythmic slap of the waves on the hull. I sat huddled with my knees drawn up, staring wide-eyed into the gloom, when suddenly the galley heaved over, shuddering terribly, as something slammed into her broadside.
At first I thought it must have been wild waves born of the storm. I could hear the crack and rumble of close, heavy thunder. But then the hull planks next to my head groaned and splintered inward. We’d been hit by something far more solid than seawater.
A flash of lightning—sliced into squares by the iron grate covering the hold hatch above—illuminated a chaos of gushing sea and screaming slaves plunged into nightmarish terror.
I clambered to my feet, screaming for Elka.
“Here, Fallon! By the hatch!” she shouted and I saw her wave her arms over her head in the aftergleam of the lightning before everything faded back to black. “Ten paces to your left!”
“Where’s the ladder?” I called, reaching blindly out in front of me and staggering through knee-deep foaming water. I felt Elka’s strong fingers grasping at my wrists, and I clutched at her, stepping over the flailing bodies that tumbled through the water toward the hole in the ship’s hull.
The Valiant Page 7
