The happy people here didn’t know. She was glad she had not shared the problems with them as she had longed to do.
Alaric’s demand for a status report this morning had crystallized the situation. They were doomed and all that was left now was to let their doom run its course. Even if Alaric and his men left tomorrow morning, Diana didn’t have enough food left to last the winter. Not anymore. The soldiers had eaten into their reserves enough to make that impossible. Before Alaric had arrived they stood a fighting chance but that chance was gone now.
“Are your thoughts as bleak as your face, my lady?”
Diana jumped. She had been so occupied with her gloomy analysis that she had failed to see Alaric’s approach. He stood at the foot of her divan, goblet in hand. He was a tall man but his large frame made him seem shorter, yet lanky Griffin, who seemed to scrape the sky with his red hair, stood no taller than Alaric.
“My thoughts are my own,” Diana answered.
Alaric lowered himself and Diana realized he was going to sit on the end of her divan. She jerked her feet up out of his way, even though they were in no danger of being sat upon. The reflex drew her upright and she remained there, her legs curled up against her.
He waved his cup toward the wine pitcher closest to Diana. “May I pour you some wine?”
Diana bit her lip against the laugh that formed at the ridiculous idea of a man serving a woman wine. Keeping her jaw clamped, she shook her head.
He put his cup down. “I want to propose a bargain.”
“Another one?” She was surprised. “Yet you complain that I am not keeping the bargain we have already struck.”
“I am a simple soldier,” Alaric replied, with a shrug. “Barter is not my best skill.”
A simple soldier? Diana knew that “simple” was a lie. No man who chose to trust in his own judgment before a god’s could ever be simple. So she ignored his gambit. “Name your bargain,” she said.
“I have spoken to my men and they agree to provide your household with all the help necessary in exchange for adequate food.”
So he’d told them how she had mismanaged the estate, then. Diana glanced toward the lad and the grizzled old man who served as his lieutenants. Rhys was whispering earnestly to Octavia, making her blush. None of them were taking any notice of the conversation their commander was having with her.
Diana tried to let her stomach muscles unclench enough to allow her to draw a full breath. She looked Alaric in the eye. “Adequate in your terms,” she amended, waving her hand across the table spread with the remains of the costly meal.
“No man expects to eat as richly as this every day,” Alaric replied. “But no man can survive on gruel every day, either.”
“What help are you proposing?”
“Hunting, fishing, trapping…they will keep the household supplied with fresh meat.”
“In winter?”
“We will find enough. Rhys is a superior hunter.”
Diana shook her head. “It won’t be enough,” she said. “Fresh meat, yes. That will help all of us, right now. But the farming cycle spreads over two years, just like the grapes that provide the wine in your cup, soldier. For one year, the fields have not produced enough surplus for seeds to replace those taken by the Saxons. At the end of this year, I judge, it will all come to an end.” Diana smiled bitterly. “The damage has already been done and there is little you can do to reverse it.”
“We can plant the rest of the fields.”
“With what?”
“We can buy seeds. From Eboracum.”
“There is no coin here.”
“Barter, then.”
“Barter what?”
“The wine, perhaps. Or some of the fresh meat we will catch.”
“It might work, if only there is seed to be bought.” Diana grimaced. “The people in this riding have been struggling for many years.”
“Then we move farther afield. Someone will want meat over grain. I have men to spare that you do not, to travel in search of trade.”
Diana shook her head again, slowly. “No, you don’t understand. There is nothing you can do to stop it.”
His hand came down on the tabletop, flat, with a smack that sounded sharp and loud. “No! It is you who does not understand!” he said in a low growl. “There is always a way. You just have to find it.” He reached out abruptly, shockingly. Before Diana could pull herself backward, he grasped her chin and forced her head up so she was looking straight into his dark eyes.
“What you do not understand, my lady, is that Arthur charged me with certain duties and has given me his trust that I will complete those duties without excuses. That is exactly what I will do.”
“Arthur,” Diana said with a tired sigh. Again, Arthur.
His fingers against the corners of her lower jaw shifted a little in reaction. “Yes, Arthur,” he said levelly. “He has shown me and every man, woman and child who serves under him that there is always another way of doing things.” His eyes were blazing. How could she have thought them dark? Black, yes but alight with an energy, fire, something that glowed there and seemed to call out to her with a song that was almost familiar.
Verus! He had looked like this. But no, it was not the same. It did not have the same power. Verus had not touched her the way the blaze in Alaric’s eyes did.
“Do you understand?” Alaric repeated and Diana blinked. She felt as though she had returned to herself from some distant way. She began to notice the noise in the room again. The laughter. The touch of Alaric’s will had changed her perceptions. Suddenly she saw things that until she had looked into Alaric’s eyes had been invisible to her. She recognized that even among strangers, the old mating patterns were at work—in the women’s coy giggles, the grandiose gestures of the men, the collision of gazes…and the subtle formation of couples.
Diana found she was trembling.
Alaric let her chin go. His fingers left a burning imprint on her skin. “There is always a way and we will find it.”
“Yes,” Diana agreed almost soundlessly, her lips barely moving. But her agreement was complete. She now understood what Alaric meant—the will to keep moving, to keep fighting. To never give up—which she had almost allowed herself to do.
Alaric straightened and reached for his cup and the moment was gone. “Tomorrow we will hunt for meat and start on repairs to the villa gates.”
He was taking over! Diana sat bolt upright. No! She couldn’t allow this! Scrambling for a way of turning back the decision, she said haltingly. “Not the gates. The barns must be tended to. The animals. And nuts. We need more. And the bee hives. We want honey.”
He studied her for a moment, one brow lifted. Then finally he nodded. “All right. Barns, honey, nuts.” He smiled. “Anything else?”
She shook her head. She felt like she had just barely managed to avert disaster.
He stood, stretched and picked up his cup. “Then I will wish you a good night.”
“Good night,” Diana murmured, barely able to formulate her words for the shaking in her body.
He turned and walked away and only then did Diana feel it was safe to reach out for her cup. She grasped it tightly and sipped her wine. None of the facts had changed yet somehow, incredibly, he had given her hope. The estate was still hers, her life was still her own. It was a gift. A solstice blessing.
Diana watched Alaric, enjoying her small private pleasure, as he leaned down low to whisper in Evadne’s ear. The woman nodded. He picked up her hand and she rose and followed him from the room with an anticipatory smile.
Suddenly, all Diana’s warmth and pleasure congealed and turned to ice. She pushed her cup away. The wine suddenly tasted sour, despite the spices.
The natural processes of pairing and mating that she had only just perceived had abruptly taken on more ominous overtones. Alaric and his men had taken a foothold on her people and her estate. In agreeing to Alaric’s new bargain, she had just pushed the door open wide for them.
Chapter Six
Diana spent the next six days trying to reverse the encroachment of Alaric’s men into her household. Every morning she would give Alaric tasks that kept his men outside, away from the estate if possible, or confined to one small area. She organized the rest of the household so that there was little contact between the two and she extended no further invitations for the men to join them at the nightly dinner table.
If she caught any of the women chatting with soldiers, Diana would send her back to her duties with a sharp word and forbid her further contact with them. She would work into the night, planning how best to keep the men at a distance on the morrow, trying to outguess human nature.
Every day Alaric suggested that even a handful of men start repairing the gates. Every day Diana curtly refused, citing a dozen other more urgent tasks. It gave Alaric no say in the running of the estate. It kept him out.
Even if she had been able to see ahead to the Day of the Dead and the forest clearing, it would not have deterred her from scheming. It would have made her double her efforts to keep Alaric and his men as strangers. On the death of the old year, however, the fact of their presence became inescapable.
Sosia kept a sharp eye on the level of current supplies, leaving Diana free to worry about finding more. On the last day of the year Sosia brought Diana’s morning bowl of gruel, carrying the bowl in one hand and holding her new babe on her other hip. She also bought news that the supply of wood for the furnaces had nearly all gone. The furnaces provided hot water and generated the heated air that circulated through the hypocaust to keep the villa warm.
“All of it? But there was so much.” Diana recalled the tall stacks of wood they had carefully stored undercover before winter. “How could we have gone through so much, even with the furnaces running night and day?”
Diana had insisted upon that luxury and had seen to it that adequate supplies of wood were always to hand. The breath-robbing cold of a winter morning when the furnaces had been allowed to dwindle during the night was too closely related to that other cold—the chill that came with the red cloud. So Diana kept the furnaces always burning, often stoking them herself in the still hours before dawn when the household slept.
Sosia shifted the blond-haired babe on her hip to a more comfortable position. “Since the soldiers built their hearth, it has melted away like ice in the sun.”
Irritation touched Diana at the reminder of the hearth in the slaves’ quarters. She couldn’t fault the soldiers for wanting to stay warm and the quarters had been unused for years because they were not served by the hypocaust. It was the high-handed way they had gone about fixing the quarters to suit their needs that made Diana clench her teeth together. They had not seen fit to ask her if they could punch a hole in the roof! Yet she had remained silent on the matter.
But to use all her wood to the point where the furnaces were in danger of dying out…
Diana stood and reached for her cloak. “We’ll just have to go wood gathering today, Sosia, and so help me, they will too! Even if I have to drive them into the woods at the point of their own swords.”
Sosia’s head moved silently from side to side.
“What?” Diana asked, fastening her cloak with swift, angry movements.
“It’s not a day for wood gathering, my lady.”
“I don’t care. We’re gathering wood and his men are going to gather wood with us. If they’re going to use so much, they can replace it. I want at least two wagonloads.” She skirted Sosia, already preparing the words she would use to inform Alaric of the day’s agenda. She pushed the door open, stepped onto the verandah and gasped.
It was cold. Colder than Diana could ever remember. She pulled her short cloak around her tightly as the raw air touched her face. A breeze eddied around the semi-enclosed courtyard and her skin tightened. It had been snowing during the night. Fresh, powdery mounds piled up against the columns and spilled onto the verandah. The courtyard lay beneath the cold blanket, marked by the trails of early risers.
“Heaven save us!” Diana murmured. “Winter is taking its vengeance upon us this year. It’s too soon for snow like this!”
“Yet we have it.”
Sosia’s stoic acceptance steadied her. Diana shrugged. “A little snow won’t stop the wagon. We are going wood gathering.” She looked back at Sosia, standing in the open doorway of the library. “Gather everyone who can be spared.”
Sosia inclined her head and walked toward the kitchen.
Diana stepped over a tendril of snow, walked down the west wing and rapped sharply on Alaric’s door.
“Come!” The reply was barked.
Diana opened the door and stepped in.
Alaric was standing in front of his chair, foot on the seat, strapping the lower leg of his pants. He looked up as Diana entered and frowned.
“You’re about early today.”
Diana didn’t have time for pleasantries. The fuel supply was far more urgent. “I’ve just learned that your men have used all the wood supplies meant for the furnaces to keep their own fires.”
The furrow between his brows deepened. He lowered his foot to the floor. “You would prefer they use none?”
He was attempting to trap her into admitting she’d rather they froze and dismissed the attempt with a wave of her hand, too impatient to deal with it verbally. “I want you and your men to replace what you have used. Today. Now. The wagon is being hitched as we speak.”
He was still for a long moment, considering her. “Agreed,” he said unexpectedly. “Who replaces what you have used?”
“We do, naturally,” Diana said.
From outside came the low murmur of voices. The household was gathering in the courtyard. Good.
Alaric was reaching for his cloak, apparently ready to leave at once. Diana watched him, stunned. She had been prepared to fight to get her way. Alaric’s ready agreement left her floundering. She grasped for a familiar theme. “You surprise me.” She made her tone dry.
“That is a likely possibility.”
“You’ve failed to suggest we repair the gates, instead.”
Alaric smiled. It was a full, unrestrained expression and Diana knew he was laughing at her. “That would explain your sour expression.”
Her chilled cheeks were starting to warm in the heated room. The reminder of the cold outside gave her a moment of pleasure, as she ran her gaze over Alaric’s single layer of tunic and trews. “We will await you and your men in the courtyard,” she said and left to add a few extra layers to her own clothes.
Let him freeze. It would teach him the price of warmth engineered by the Romans he disdained.
* * * * *
A wind blew across the fields, whistling between the wheels of the empty wagon as it creaked along the track. Diana followed the wagon. The snow compacted under her feet. With each step a fine puff of snow kicked up and was whisked away by the wind.
Around her walked almost every adult on the estate and all the children. They were hunched into their cloaks, hoods pulled far forward, faces muffled to the eyes. They braced themselves against the wind, withdrawn and silent. Diana was alone with her thoughts. Her mood was as bleak as the iron-gray sky.
The wind sang around them in stinging arias. Diana’s ears were already without feeling and her cheekbones ached with the chill that had crept into them. She had changed her short cloak for her best cloak—once kept only for the most special of occasions. It was long and made of thick, warm wool, sturdily woven. Underneath she wore several layers of tunics. Despite them the cold was starting to bite into her body.
If not for the threat of the furnaces dying out she would have abandoned the expedition as soon as they had passed beyond the gates of the estate, but the thought of suffering this coldness inside the house was enough to drive her onward. She did not look up to see how far away the edge of the forest was. She didn’t want to see the brooding black carpet of endless treetops that lay over the land for as far as the eye could see.
&
nbsp; She did not allow her thoughts to linger on the fact that it was the Day of the Dead and she was sending everyone into the shadowed world among the trees where spirits of the dead were said to roam. She was not superstitious, she told herself firmly, and never, even if she were put to branding irons, would she admit she was glad of the company of Alaric’s capable men.
* * * * *
The absence of the wind made it seem warmer amongst the trees—warmer than she had felt since stepping outside the house this morning. Diana threw her hood back.
Everyone was stretching and straightening up. They began to talk, but in whispers, for the silence of the forest demanded it. It was dark under the ancient trees. They grew tall and thick and the ground was nearly bare of snow. The leaf litter was thick and warm to the foot.
They split up into foraging parties. Alaric’s men went in search of the larger deadfalls, taking axes with them. The task of the women and children was to load the wagon with what the men cut and to salvage any deadwood. These were familiar tasks to all. They moved deep into the trees before searching. The edges of the forest would be stripped bare of deadwood by the poorer farmers in the area, who lived from hand to mouth and would not dare disturb the spirits that lived deeper inside.
There was a trace of a path for the wagon to follow and they spread out on either side of it, moving out through the trees, looking for fallen branches. Diana forged well ahead, occasionally pushing off the path to collect a branch, which she dropped at the edges of the trail for others to lift into the wagon as it passed by. Gradually the sounds of people pushing through the trees to either side of her fell away and silence closed in.
It was very far from the estate and the problems that plagued her there. The forest was like the Otherworld that it was rumored the pagan moon priestesses came from. Diana’s problems evaporated, here. There was only the sound of her breathing, slow and steady, and the almost silent fall of her feet.
It was very easy to recall her life before the Saxon raid, here among the trees—easy to pretend that her mother and father were at home and Verus too. Lucilla, caring for her boys. It was almost possible to pretend she was the woman—no, the girl—who had believed that life could not change for her, that it was cast in bronze. That girl had been cradled in perfect security, ignorant of how the world could touch her.
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