“Of course he loves you, but in his own selfish, oldman’s way. The next time you are sent for, I will go.”
“He will lose patience with you. He imagines slights and insults where there are none, and he has slain because of a glance his way.”
“Then for once I will give him a real fear.”
“Father!”
He rounded on her savagely. “Would you rather I cowered at home until your body is found floating on the Tiber? Honor demands . . .”
“Judgment,” she choked, her mouth quivering. “And sacrifices, and retribution. I know. All useless, father! Sometimes I think that we are all marked for a violent death. Before long, someone will put a knife in Llyn when he is drunk, because he will not curb his tongue. Nero or Agrippina or even Claudius himself will shorten my years. Eurgain must eventually be arrested because of those mad followers of The Way, and she will die in some monstrous fashion. You believe that it was hard to be ricon of Camulodunon, and harder still to put on the yoke of arviragus, but, oh Camulos! It is a daily torment for us to be your children here in Rome!” She made as if to run from the room but his arm shot out and pulled her back. He thrust his ravaged face close to her own, restraining her gently but firmly.
“Tell me this, Gladys, and tell me in truth,” he whispered. “Has the time to choose death already come? Shall I take a knife to you all and then to myself? Would that be enough to retrieve your honor, and mine, Llyn’s and Eurgain’s and your mother’s?”
“No!” she spat back at him. “That moment passed forever when Claudius pardoned you! Now there is a new battle. We fight to live, we fight with everything we have for as long as we can, for this city is still the enemy, and we are still the warriors of the mountains.” She tore away from him and walked quickly away, calling for Caelte, and he stood shaken, unable any longer to recognize himself, or her.
Rufus Pudens called the next afternoon. He was shown into Caradoc’s reception room, and together they sat facing the atrium, watching sunlight glint on the water of the pool and lie somnolent upon the red tiling. They talked easily, but Pudens sensed that behind Caradoc’s polite comments the mind was far away, pursuing some other train of thought. The house was quiet. The slaves could be heard upstairs, their soft voices echoing faintly down the central hall, and birds perched on the guttering above the pool and fluttered and chirped, watching the fish below, but the pillared rooms sat silent and empty. Conversation began to lapse, and then Pudens said bluntly, “Lord, I am not certain of the customs of your people and so I may offend you. If I do so, forgive me. I would like to address myself to your daughter Gladys.”
Caradoc dragged his gaze away from the water and looked at him blankly. “I do not understand. You are quite free to address yourself to any of us when it pleases you.”
“I did not mean like that.” Pudens searched the other’s face, feeling as he did so the weight of dignity and alien experience that separated them. The man sitting loosely beside him, dark hair resting on scarlet shoulders, an elbow on the arm of his chair and fingers curling around the cleft chin, was no more than four years older than he was himself, yet Pudens knew he could never approach Caradoc as an equal. He was rich, influential, well-educated, but could not match the agelessness of the eyes that suddenly became alert and probed him. Caradoc smiled.
“Ah. I think I understand you now. Do you have a wife, Pudens?”
“No.”
“Then the matter is none of my business. I ask only that you treat with her in honesty, and that you do not forget a young girl’s freshness and innocence may seem charming to an older man, but only for a while.”
“I believe that your women fought and died before they reached Gladys’s age,” Pudens rejoined gently. “How old is she?”
“You must discover that for yourself.” Caradoc stirred. The fingers moved to run over his face in a gesture of weariness. “Sometimes I think she is older than I.”
“May I visit her often?”
“As often as you like, but I ought to warn you that before long you may not want to be seen in this house.” The smile came and went but it was not warm. It held only grimness, and Pudens raised his eyebrows. “I think I am about to make the emperor very angry,” Caradoc explained. “If you are concerned with the imperial favor, leave us alone. Gladys will have finished her studies by now. Go and look for her in the garden.”
The man bowed and left, and Caradoc watched him cross the atrium, a tall, black-haired soldier with an easy stride, his toga billowing white from his straight back. When he was out of sight Caradoc rose and went to the foot of the stairs, raising his eyes to the landing, squinting in the sun. “Eurgain,” he called. “Come down.” Presently she appeared and glided to him, and he beckoned and led her around the pool and through the cloister. Before them the terrace opened out, and then the steps and the long green sweep of the lawns. Together they stood watching as Pudens went in under the shade of a tree whose branches overhung the wall and sheltered Gladys. They saw him greet her where she sat, with her embroidery frame before her. Eurgain looked at Caradoc enquiringly.
“I am not sure,” he said slowly, “but I think that you are looking at the man who will deliver Gladys from the empress’s spite.”
She understood at once and he studied her face as she scanned the bright garden, then she turned to him abruptly. “Only if she loved him, and it is too much to hope that her affections may go to a man over twice her age.”
“Then you would hope for this?”
“She will never see Albion again,” Eurgain answered bitterly. “None of us will. There are no young chiefs to court her. I can only hope that he will love her as Aulus has loved your sister.”
“Do you still love me, Eurgain?”
She stepped back startled. “That question comes from you as though we were already looking back upon a lifetime gone,” she said, wondering why his self-sufficiency was suddenly shaken. “Why do you need my reassurances? Have I not always been beside you when you needed me?”
“I feel old!” he burst out angrily. “There is not a man in Rome who could best me, my body is strong and healthy, but I feel as though I should squat in a corner on a pile of blankets and relinquish my life as my father did. I should have died beside Cin, in the mud, with an arrow between my shoulder blades.”
“Perhaps you did,” she said softly, and the purposeless rage in him brimmed over.
“Did you?” he snarled, then his arms went around her and he kissed her. “Forgive me,” he said huskily. “I have wasted your life, Eurgain.”
“No. There is only waste when love dies, and I love you.”
Gladys heard him approach and looked up from her work.
“So it is you,” she said. “If you are looking for my father, he is somewhere in the house.”
Pudens greeted her. “I have already spoken to him,” he replied, and she glanced at him quickly before dropping her gaze. “I did not know that Albion’s warrior women were interested in embroidery. What are you making?”
She sighed. “It is supposed to be a hanging for my emperor, but I don’t know now whether he will want it. I have been learning to embroider but I must confess that I find it very difficult and I think that when I have finished this I will not attempt it again.” She waved at the frame, tucking her needle into the cloth and rising, and he came closer, bending over it, acutely aware of her brown face frown ing inches from his own.
“You have almost completed it.” As he looked at it his interest was aroused. There was an ocean of peacock blue, flanked on one side by a scarlet eagle, beak open and talons hooked, and on the other by a bird without plumage, black as night. The eagle’s claws were tipped in red but the black bird stood on silver—graceful, aloof, somehow above the eagle’s blatant predatory stance. He was about to stand straight when something else caught his attention and he peered again, hearing her laugh quietly beside him. The black bird’s eye was not an eye. There was a woman’s face, contorted into anguish, and her hair flowed out of t
he socket to mingle with the bird’s shining feathers. “I understand the eagle,” he said at last, “but what is this bird?”
“She is the Raven of Nightmares.” With a slap of her hand, Gladys spun the frame so that the picture was hidden. “She cannot be the Raven of Battle, for all battles are over, nor is she the Raven of Panic, for those days are also gone. Only the nightmares remain.”
He did not know what to say. He went and sat on the wall, looking away from her and out over the haze of the river and the city, and after a moment she folded her arms and spoke calmly. “Britannicus wants to climb onto my back and ride into his father’s affections,” she said, “and Nero wants me on my back for other reasons. What do you want of me, patrician?”
His head came round, and he found himself looking into eyes as full of dark experience and inexplicable knowledge as her father’s. Nothing, he should have said. I want to pass the time of day, that is all. But instead he said quietly, “I think I am in love with you, Gladys. I want nothing from you that might hurt you.”
She expressed no surprise, nor did she simper or laugh. “You can say this after having met me such a short time ago?” she asked him, and he left the wall.
“I am no longer a boy, falling in and out of love for fun, nor do I want to grab at love for the pleasure I can wring from it,” he replied. “I am thirty-four years old, I am set in my habits, and I have a family that will be horror-stricken when I tell them I want to marry a young barbarian. But I can handle these things if you will tell me that I may again sit with you in your garden and make a fool of myself.”
She studied the face, seeing there the pleasant arrogance of his blood, the marks made upon it by his soldiering life—the face of a man used to having his orders obeyed, who knew his own direction. “Roman men marry money, property, a vehicle to carry their children,” she said softly. “I must be more than those things to the man I marry, Rufus. I have been reared very differently from your sisters.”
“I know. You forget that I have had a taste of Albion’s gently reared sword-women! How old are you, Gladys?”
She answered him with a straight face, but humor lurked in her eyes. “I am thirty-four.” He began to smile and she came up to him, “And you are sixteen. Am I right?”
“I think you are indeed.”
“Then let us walk by the fountains, and you can tell me about this snobbish family of yours.”
For an hour they strolled Caradoc’s paved paths and lush, carefully groomed lawns, standing to watch the fountains spew rainbow-colored water that arched and glittered in the late summer sunlight; then Pudens took his leave. “I was actually on my way to the baths,” he said. “Martial will be wondering where I am, for I promised to meet him there.”
“Martial? The poet Martial? He is your friend?”
Pudens smiled at her obvious delight. “Yes. Would you like to meet him?”
“Very much, and I am sure Caelte would as well. Bring him to dinner soon. I will ask Father for a time. Do you live far from here?”
He drew her back to the wall and pointed down and to the south. “I rent three rooms in a house on the Clivus Victoriae,” he said. “You cannot see it for the trees, but it is almost directly below here. I am seldom in Rome, and when I am it is usually for business, so three rooms are sufficient.”
“The gray stone house that fronts the street directly? I know it. Tell me, Rufus, do you have many friends at court?”
He was pierced by the hint of pathos in her tone. “I have a few,” he said simply, and took her hand. “Now I must go. I am afraid I have become thirty-four again. Forgive my stupidity, Gladys, and let me come to see you again.”
“Tomorrow!” she shouted as he walked toward the gate, and he turned and waved before disappearing among the trees.
He spent three hours at the baths, but it was only when he and Martial lay side by side on the boards in order to be oiled that he unburdened himself. Martial grinned across at him. “Your dear mother will die of shock,” he said. “And truthfully, Rufus, I myself think you are touched. You will end up blowing her nose for her when she cries, and singing to her when she has nightmares.”
“She wants to meet you. Her bard will enjoy you as well.”
The black, heavy eyebrows went up. “Oh. Then she must be reasonably civilized if she appreciates my work. But I don’t know about the bard. All love and flowers, I suppose.”
Pudens saw himself back in the garden on Plautius’s estate, in the night, and Caelte’s head was bent over his magic. “Not exactly. Why don’t you reserve judgment until you meet them?”
Martial groaned as the slave’s hands dug into his spine. “Don’t rub so hard! Well, what do we do? Sit cross-legged in a circle and tear at beef with our hands?”
“They will end up tearing at you with their hands if you behave like this and believe me, Martial, I would sooner face a lion’s claws than the anger of that family. When were you last at court?”
“Three weeks ago, when the emperor returned. He did not approve of my verses and told me so, which of course ensures that they will be repeated all over the city. I had commented on the empress’s crow’s-feet.”
“Then I am surprised that you did not see my Gladys. She is the emperor’s darling.”
Martial whistled and sat up, waving the slave away. “So it is that barbarian! And already she is ‘my Gladys.’ It looks as though I am going to be the only eligible bachelor left in Rome. Whatever will Lucia say?”
“It is none of her business.”
“True. Pass her on to me, Rufus, if under your indulgent hand she has not become too unruly.”
“Perfume, sir?” the slave enquired, and Martial spread his arms wide.
“Of course. Let me know when I am to appear on the hill, Rufus. I really am delighted to be of such interest to foreigners.”
Pudens smiled at him. “I will see you in a day or two, Martial, and I will ask Lucia whether she wants to join your household.”
The poet cocked an eye at him. “You’d better wait a while. Your little barbarian might disappoint you.”
“Never.” Pudens picked up his towel and went out.
For two days he visited Gladys, walking with her in the garden, sitting with her in the shelter of the cloister while a swift squall of rain combed the roses free of their wilting petals. On the second night, Martial came to dinner and charmed them all with his scathing wit. “I am a satirist,” he told Caelte after hearing him sing. “You are the true poet,” but Caelte disagreed.
“We are brothers and besides, sir, I am more musician than poet. Melody comes to me more easily than words.”
The third day was cold, for summer was almost over, and Pudens had to spend it sitting in the senate chamber. Gladys wandered through the house touching this and that, looking out at the windy garden, caught in the seemingly timeless lull between the seasons. The slaves had stoked the hypocaust, and warm air followed her in and out of the halls, up and down the stairs. Eurgain kept to her room and talked quietly with Chloe, her body servant. Llyn had disappeared soon after daylight, and Caradoc and his wife sat in the triclinium with Caelte. As Gladys drifted past the archway she heard her mother say, “But there must be news. Someone is keeping it from us, that is all,” and Gladys’s steps slowed until she halted, reaching out to lean against a pillar with her eyes closed. News. Day follows day. We eat, sleep, and laugh, we dress and go about the city, while in Albion’s forests children die, and the struggle for survival goes on. Beneath the masks that we prepare for each passing hour are gargoyle faces of longing and despair, and my emperor knows this and holds all news close to himself, to punish us. Shall I take you at your word, Rufus Pudens, and marry you, and cast another warm cloak around my own small unhappiness? What agonies of love and regret must have torn you, my aunt, as you fought to decide whether to give your freedom for Plautius or sink it deep back into Albion’s soil. I do not believe I could make that decision. She walked on, melancholy and slow-thinking, out un
der the windy sky.
The evening meal was eaten in near silence, and Llyn had still not appeared when the family finally left the triclinium to the slaves and scattered. Gladys, passing through the deep shadows that always lurked in the corners of the atrium, on her way to her rooms, caught the movement of a darker shade beyond the lamps’ glow, and paused, stiffening. The shade moved again and a hand came out of the gloom, beckoning to her. With her fingers on her little knife she turned toward it. A man waited in the covering shadow behind the pillars—short, bulky, dressed in a ragged tunic. His feet were shod in dirty sandals, and his face was covered by a black, greasy beard. As she approached him he reached out and pulled her deeper into the dimness. “Who are you?” she said loudly. “How did you get into the house?”
He put a finger to his lips. “Quiet, Lady. I come from Linus. He is in trouble. He is gambling tonight with strangers. He has lost all his money, and the men he is with will not take a promise of payment tomorrow. They are holding him until you bring it.”
She peered at him warily. “Then go to my father.”
“Linus does not want your father to know. He said that your father’s anger would be great if he knew.”
Gladys stared at him, suspicious and alert. It was no use asking for a note from Llyn, some written confirmation of the man’s gruff words. Llyn had never bothered to learn to write, though he now spoke Latin with great fluency, and she knew that she could not put money into these grimy hands and send the man away. She had never plunged into the maelstrom of humanity that lined the banks of the river as Eurgain had, and she thought of asking her to go, but then dismissed the idea. Eurgain would argue as the man waited, his glance probing the huge, deserted hall. “Very well,” she said, uneasiness filling her. “Wait here. Can you guide me to him?” The man nodded and she left him, climbing the stairs, walking the landing, turning in at her own door with a feeling of danger churning around her.
She went to her box, lifted the lid, and her body servant came to her. “Do you want to play a game, Lady?” she enquired, as Gladys drew out her leather money purse and strapped it to her waist.
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