“I mean to recommend there’s no harm in drawing good numbers of our men from your people’s frontier,” he said. “Which means matters could get awkward for me if things don’t stay quiet there. Which brings us to your Chattian folk. And your old battle companion, Witgern.”
Some part of her caved in at the sound of the name. Witgern, the one candle left burning. When Auriane was a child in her tribal homeland, Witgern had been the First Companion of her father, Baldemar, the celebrated Chattian chief. Now, Witgern was the sole warrior of her people who still fought for their freedom. He led a rogue Chattian warband called the Wolf Coats, who slept on earth, dressed in wolf skins, and sought vengeance against Rome with small acts of sabotage along the frontier.
“Auriane, have you any influence over him? Could you get him some sort of message to lie quiet, for old time’s sake? This would be a wretched time for one of his pranks. It would go hard for your people.”
“That would be like finding a ghost. And I don’t know if he’d listen—all say the rites have . . . changed him, that he’s more beast than man. But his raids are flea bites—he’d never openly attack a Roman fort.”
“One of my agents has gotten intelligence that he plans just that, but this one’s been wrong before, so—Auriane, what is it?”
The world about her seemed to drift to a soft halt, like an invisible cloak settling into place. Her gaze was caught, then drawn within one of the muted flames of the bronze lamps and she knew that graceful state of fertile emptiness that normally came only after long contemplation of a sacred fire. Exhaustion from the overlong night might have been the cause. The portals normally shut against other worlds blew open—and she was somewhere else. In a cold forest. Where huddled forms draped in skins intoned chants that vibrated the fine bones.
“What is it?” He whispered it this time, drawing her face closer to his, as if to examine what was reflected in her half-shut eyes.
“Marcus, it is already too late.”
“What?”
“You can’t warn anyone in time. Witgern will attack today, at dusk.”
“ Where?” He’d learned, by now, not to doubt.
“The fort due north of the springs of the Mattiaci . . . right on the frontier line, the fort whose praefect is named”—she frowned faintly, struggling for it—“. . . is named hope.”
The last part made no sense to him, but he knew the fort. “By Providence, why? That fort’s better defended than five others to the northeast.”
She shut her eyes completely, striving to see better. “It’s something very dear to him . . . to Witgern, I mean . . . I don’t know. I can’t see more. That is all.”
“All right. I must go,” he said briskly. “I can be at Mogontiacum by noontide. I’ll present this as if it came from regular channels of intelligence so they won’t think I’ve lost one too many spokes in my wheels.” He began swiftly gathering up the wax tablets scattered across the writing table. Among them Auriane saw several that bore the familiar, elaborate salutations of a letter to the Emperor. When he saw her questioning look, he said, “Those wouldn’t interest you, they’re tiresomely dull reading—just copies of letters passed back and forth by the Consilium on that nettlesome matter of the money-for-arms being smuggled over the frontier to your people—”
Her breathing slowed.
“—quite extraordinary that they haven’t found him yet . . . It seems the bounty’s up to three million now for whoever names him, and still we’re no closer to knowing. Our poor Maximus is losing his wits, that’s the other reason I must go.” The Governor at the Fortress of Mogontiacum was a close, fond friend of Julianus’s. “He’s falling under a hail of criticism because he’s failed to ferret out the smuggler, and he fears the Palace will recall him from his governorship a year early because of it. He’s starting to panic and make ridiculous arrests. He’s even begun questioning women—he brought in several prominent women from the Potters’ Guild at Colonia. I’ve got to go and bring him to reason—Auriane? . . . What is wrong?” He pulled her up to face him.
She considered letting the truth spill out right then, like a sack of stones she ached from carrying—but at the last moment, decided against it.
“It’s Victorinus,” she said tautly, looking away. “He’s learned his son’s not getting Arria, and he’s in a vengeful temper over it.”
Marcus laughed softly. “That has you in an anxious state? It was an act of charity even considering him! Surely he never thought—”
“But he did. And he’s dangerously angry.”
“‘Dangerous’ and ‘Victorinus’ do not belong in the same sentence! He’s a small, albeit noisy, man, whom we considered only out of politeness. This is a new and uncharacteristic occupation for you,” he said teasingly, “to worry over the bite of a fly. One flick of the tail—and it’s off!”
I heard once of a horse that died of the bite of an insect. The wound festered. The small can bring down the large.
“There’s more to this,” he pressed gently. “What haunts you so?”
If her eyes had been a well many fathoms deep, his gaze might have filtered straight through to the bottom. That he did so with kindliness made her feel all the more the cornered beast. You must tell him, she prodded herself.
The smuggler you seek? You take her to your bed every night.
No. It would force him into a cruel and impossible corner; he’d be compelled to choose between duty and love. It might well end our life here.
And is there not some chance the whole matter will never come to light?
So she said only, “Perhaps we took a wrong path seven years ago, and living on the borderland is not possible, wasn’t meant to be possible . . .”
“Nonsense. I would have no other life but this one here with you.” Then he shrugged amiably. “There are no matters before us that can’t be attended to, with patience and time.”
With arms laced together most naturally, they left the library, talking softly of house matters as they moved toward the waiting carriages.
When he had departed, Auriane slept but a single restless hour, then summoned one of her confidential servants, the Greek secretary who corresponded with the estate by Lugdunum in Gaul, which she held in her name. She dispatched him to the docks of Confluentes, with instructions to engage the services of a townsman called Aprossius who owned a riverside warehouse that stored cattle hides for the legions. This Aprossius had a secret, second occupation: He was skilled at finding people, and he asked no questions when he took his fee. She would hire him to hunt down Lurio. She would silence the fugitive sailor with a rich bribe, greater than the reward for naming her. It seemed a desperate strategy, but she must try it.
Then she walked to the river, carrying with her a wheel-form brooch of silver that had lain on her mother’s breast. This she buried in the earth beneath a wood image of her goddess Fria she’d set up alongside the Mosella’s dark, marbled waters; by this, she committed her mother to the embrace of the Mother of all kindred. Mother, do you know why I do not come myself, to give you protection? It would be a one-way journey that would sever me forever from Marcus and my children. Surely you know I’m prohibited from returning—the Consilium thinks my presence among our people would rouse them to insurrection. No. I must do battle here, in this foreign place that counts my children half-breeds, and myself a kind of elevated slave.
On returning to the house, Auriane cast an anxious glance into Avenahar’s chamber. How peacefully she sleeps, Auriane thought—with a child’s trust in the benignity of the world. How different from when she’s awake! What will I do with her? She is a fire out of control. She cannot live and marry in this province; she would become like the wild horse that kicks apart its stall. In her, Chattian blood runs stronger. She must one day go home.
From outside, Auriane could hear gleeful cries; her younger daughter, Arria Juliana, was getting a lesson from the riding master.
That one, I need not worry over; she’s a thoroughly R
oman child, with no pull toward my people.
But all at once Auriane saw, in that still place that did not know time or distance, a mind-picture deep and sure as that vision of Witgern readied for the attack. But this time it was her quick and audacious Arria she saw, immured within the moldering household of the magistrate, Volusius Victorinus.
Slaves regularly fled off from that estate. No one knew exactly why.
Auriane leaned against the frescoed wall and shut her eyes in revulsion.
This is well—it proves these cursed visions are not true. Because there is no way beneath sun and moon that the vile Lucius will ever have our Arria as bride.
Chapter 3
Marcus Firmius Speratus, centurion of the Eighth Legion Augusta, looked with growing unease into the thrashing sea of wind-whipped firs below. He stood on the sentry walk of a frontier fort constructed of turf ramparts stiffened by timbers; the thatched roofs of its corner towers jutted up bravely against the somber sky. His fort was manned by a single century of the Eighth Legion, strengthened by one hundred native auxiliaries. This tiny outpost of Empire was perched at the world’s rim; just two hundred paces beyond in the haunted gloom, the Roman world came to an end, and the lands of the savage Chattians began. There, a military trackway, ditch, and wickerwork fence marked the Limes, the three-hundred-mile-long frontier line whose humble appearance belied its grand purpose—dividing the known world from the unknown wastes, separating historic time from mythic time.
Light drained rapidly from the sky, and night already had a secure hold on the forest floor. At the tenth hour of this day, his exploratores, men of the legionary intelligence system, returned to report they had seen smoke drifting from a sector of land where no Chattian settlements existed. Closer examination proved the smoke issued from a marsh. When Speratus ordered the fort’s sheep driven from their forest meadow and confined within the walls for safety, they showed signs of agitation, and they numbered three fewer than they had the day before. The praefect relayed an urgent request for reinforcements, through torch signals passed along a string of signal towers communicating with Mogontiacum, the nearest permanent stone fortress on the river Rhenus. But he could not expect fresh troops to arrive before the tenth hour of the morrow. He’d then sent out a party of volunteers for the dangerous work of digging an additional defensive ditch fitted with sharp stakes, positioned just within javelin range of the fort’s north gate. But their work would not be complete before darkness fell on them like a predator.
Surely, he thought, even an Alexandrian Greek, famous as they were for scorning belief in the unseen powers, wouldn’t linger in this god-cursed country at night. Out there a man wanted only to hug close to the light of his cookfire until he was rescued by dawn. Too many tales abounded of pale lights moving through the forest accompanied by unearthly singing, of sightings of odd beasts that defied the catalogues of the naturalists, of soldiers who strayed no more than twenty paces from their column, never to be seen again until their polished bones were found in one of the natives’ ghastly sacrificial groves. A succession of grim wars beyond the Rhenus had taken Rome this far. The most recent, the Chattian War, had, in his opinion, stretched Roman forces too thinly into this unholy unknown. He knew that in the event of a massive attack, this fort was expected to fall. The long frontier line was thinly patrolled, guarded by thatched watchtowers spaced half a day’s march apart. Their best hope would be to hamper the barbarians’ progress long enough to allow the legions housed in the great river fortresses time to come to full alert. As Rome was always reluctant to risk Roman lives, many of these small frontier forts were manned by native auxiliaries. Only a quarter of the men under Speratus’s command could claim citizen birth. Most were fresh recruits drawn from a local Germanic tribe, the Ubians—hastily trained men who had not yet seen battle.
Just as the softly glowing lamp of a near-full moon eased above the far hills, Speratus began to hear the howls of wolves.
The praefect knew at once these were not the sort that loped about on four legs. New recruits could be fooled. Long service on the frontier taught Speratus to distinguish the cry of the true wolf from that of the man-wolf. With an effort of will he kept his face implacable as a casting in bronze, for the men below were watching him by the light of the windswept torches along the walk.
A sentry stationed by the west tower moved to his side. In the semi-dark, Speratus saw the smooth silhouette of a helmet, a dominant nose jutting like a bent finger pointing downward, eyes that were horizontal arrow slits. This was the soldier most in the praefect’s confidence, a veteran of thirty years named Vettius Gratus.
“Curse those clever beasts to the Cimmerian depths,” Gratus said. “From the sound, how many would you say?”
The wolfsong grew more poignant. It was a hymn to the great spirits of the forest, a solemn rite in the mystery religion of wolves. It was as though the hills with their ancient hurts found a voice. The cry crossed worlds, charging the dark, illumining the moss with ghostlight, starting a quickening in the earth, prompting the dead to walk. The Chattian warriors were astonishingly skilled in imitating the wolf ’s rich, emotion-laden wails. With vocal arrangements elaborate as any Greek master of composition’s they wove a tapestry of sound, timing their cries so that as one bleak plaint crested and billowed out, a fresh cluster would smoothly ascend, while the oldest drained off in sequence, clinging tenaciously on the night, never fully absorbed into silence. Sometimes the Chattians’ howls convinced even the wolves, who would break out in answering cries. Speratus would have found it difficult to explain how he knew these wails issued from men. Some distinctions defy words, yet distinct they are; he knew only that there was a certain sly human-ness in the sound.
“No less than three hundred,” Speratus said. The turf-and-timber fort suddenly seemed small against the vastness of the forest.
“They’re close, sir,” responded Gratus, “they’ve crossed the Limes—the brutes are half-distance between it and us. Something’s not right about this. I’ve not seen a Chattian band this brazen since before the war.” The sentry’s hand tightened round his javelin and a taut rope of muscle asserted itself in a thick forearm—javelin practice was the chief leisure activity in this lonely outpost of civilization. “The size of that band . . . it can only be our one-eyed friend—”
“—Witgern.”
“Let us give him the heartfelt welcome he deserves.”
The Chattian chieftain Witgern was said to be mad, and, according to the credulous on both banks of the Rhenus, had mastered the art of shape-shifting and could assume the form of a wolf. Before his Wolf Coats struck, they performed elaborate rites that freed them from all knowledge of death and infused them with bestial courage.
“Come, Witgern—you pay now for the hart!” the sentry said, speaking loudly enough that two men in the yard below overheard. They turned from the tripod and cauldron from which they were ladling spelt porridge, and raised a shout, “Revenge for the hart!”—which was quickly taken up by the whole of the encampment. Last year, Witgern had netted a female red deer in her time of heat and fastened her to a bough near a cave in which he and a number of his Wolf companions lay concealed. Next, they released a fine, strong hart in the path of one of the legionary hunting parties. When the hart scented and sought its mate, the beast brought Speratus’s men straight into Witgern’s ambush. Two out of twenty had returned to tell the tale.
“Silence! Douse the torches,” Firmius Speratus ordered. Through a signal flag borne by a signifer stationed on the sentry walk, the praefect ordered every man to ascend to the graveled rampart top, which served as a fighting platform as well as a patrol track. Since the fort was so lightly garrisoned, he knew their best hope was to make a show of numbers on the wall. The legionaries assigned to the six small catapults called scorpiones drew back the windlasses of their engines, awaiting the praefect’s signal. In a desperate ploy, Speratus ordered a Chattian warrior’s cloak hung from the rampart. This signaled that they
held a hostage within, and would execute him if attacked. In fact, they had no hostage.
“Permission to speak?” The whisper belonged to a nervous nineteen-year-old Ubian auxiliary.
Speratus nodded brusquely.
“Roughly half the watch ago, when you were below, I’m certain I saw the glint of steel down there.”
“Magissus, I’ll sever that tongue from your head if you’re flapping it without warrant,” Firmius Speratus retorted. Since Rome had systematically divested the Chattian tribe of weapons of iron, Witgern fought with fire-hardened spears, clubs, and occasionally, stones. His strength was in his intimate knowledge of the terrain, not his weaponry.
But after a moment of examining the somber deeps, Speratus saw it himself—a beam of cold moonlight moving down a column of iron. There was no denying what he had seen. He’d long known of the coin-for-arms being smuggled into the hands of Chattian chiefs. But most reports claimed the prohibited swords were being hoarded in a cave; for reasons no one fully understood, the natives, to date, had not seemed inclined to take them up. Curiosity rose, along with primitive fright. Why here? Why now?
Moving briskly, neglecting nothing, the praefect inspected the men, who were formed up in two ranks on the rampart. Then he ascended the gate tower so all his men could see him.
He dropped his hand, and six catapult bolts flashed off into the night. There was a tearing of leaves, followed by silence. They had missed their mark.
IN THE ABYSSAL darkness of the forest floor, three hundred Chattian warriors crouched close to the moist, mossy earth. They’d allowed their wails to fade off into darkness. Now they watched the fort with the eyes of wolves, eyes that reflected moon and stars, not human thought. They yearned to spring on prey, to taste its sweet blood in their mouths, but they waited, alert to the signal of Witgern, the Old Wolf. For nine nights they had slept on wolf skins under the growing new moon. For nine days they had shared “raven’s bread,” the beautiful red mushroom with white warts that ushers in the wolf-spirit. They had chanted the wolf chants, passing leftward around the fire while a tribal seeress sang them into other worlds. Each had fasted until this day’s dawn, when they broke it with a meal of wolves’ hearts. They knew only their loyalty to brother and sister wolf, and their own boiling fury.
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