The fuzzy light continued its evocative dance, edging closer. It blinked as it moved through the orchard and was rhythmically blotted out by trees. Suddenly she realized it was someone with a lamp. Whoever it was approached by the one path that ensured his scent would not rouse the dogs or the horses. Evidently he, she . . . it knew the plan of the farm.
I should awaken the grooms, she thought. It’s foolish to meet an intruder alone.
Once, she glanced toward the stables and saw that one of the grooms was there, watching her near the blacker-than-night entrance to the barn.
Good. Let him. He can rouse the others if trouble arises.
Then she realized the light was moving in a pattern familiar as a nod of a head. Could it be? It was.That signal was used by the warrior companions of her father, Baldemar, to sign a night approach to comrades. The old sign, once discerned, seemed clear as her feet before her; she couldn’t understand why she didn’t know it at once. Gods below, it’s someone known to my father.
Pity, remorse, and amazement jostled within her in a potent mixture. Feed him. That was her first thought. She doubled back to the storehouse attached to the villa’s kitchens and began stuffing a hemp sack with millet bread, a wheel of hard cheese, sausages from the smokehouse, a glass jar of pickled peas, a jug of good wine—as tears flooded her eyes.
While busy in the storehouse, she never saw the groom as the man darted forward in the dark and began threading his way through rows of concealing box-hedges as he, too, made his way toward the visitor with the lamp.
Returning with her food-offering Auriane felt a yawning dread coiled about a core of relief, as she imagined one might feel when facing death after long illness.
The old world comes for me at last.
News from home could bring no good.
The light had reached the garden; she saw it was a horn lamp, such as are affixed to carriages. It illumined a hooded figure, and the flare of a man’s heavy travelling cloak.
“Who’s there? Show yourself!” Auriane shouted into the wind. “Have you need of help?”
“A friend! I mean no harm.”
That voice shot into forgotten realms in her, infusing breath into withered places. No. It couldn’t be.
“Are you Auriane?”
That voice!
“Auriane? It’s you, isn’t it? It’s Witgern.”
She hesitated, doubtful again. Where was his old valley-filling roar?
“What’s the name of the hound my father kept,” Auriane said, “his favorite?”
“Shadow,” came the ready reply. “Auriane, it’s—”
“What is my dead brother’s name, and how was he slain?”
“Arnwulf,” came an unhesitating reply, “and he was slain in a Roman raid on your father’s hall. Why do you doubt me? Auriane, it truly is me, I swear it on your father’s sword.”
She began running then, losing sausages from the sack as she half stumbled once. She stopped when she was arm’s length from him, dropped the food sack, and grasped him by the shoulders.
“Witgern, what in the name of the gods are you doing?” A sudden burst of laughter made her anger less convincing. “You’re mad to be on this side of the river!”
“I am, perhaps,” came a good-natured reply, “but so, too, is the world.”
Beneath a woolen hood she saw the warmth of welcome in his single eye, though it burned a little too brightly, like a creature become feral. Ash-colored hair fell across his forehead. The ruined eye was covered with a black silken eyepatch; it lent him the look of a wizard living half in darkness, possessing knowledge of Hel’s realms ahead of his time. That angular face hinted of its old refinement though its landscape had become stark, and the corrosion of winds and rain had roughened his flesh to the texture of cowhide. He was shorter than she remembered, but there lingered about him still the spirit of a bemused young poet; had he been born in a Roman town, he would be throwing out lyric lines to a rapt audience, not spears at a relentless enemy. He smelled of the bear’s grease he’d rubbed on himself against the damp and cold.
“They’ll make a spectacle of your death if they catch you! Do you want to die miserably in some small-town beast show? Have you lost all sense?”
“Can we seek a warmer place before you shout yourself hoarse?” He said it grinning.
She retrieved the food sack and pulled him toward the main house, where they found a place beneath the cover of the eaves; there, they sat, with their backs against the wall.
He jumped forward, alarmed.
“There is a fire in the walls.”
“It’s hot air, not fire. That’s just the hypocausts, which give us heat.”
Warily, he eased back again, and then he turned to Auriane, cupping a hand beneath her chin. “You’re hale and handsome as a swan-maid! So this is where you dwell! A kingly place, worthy of you. I always thought you should be living in a palace. Evidently the gods think so, too.”
She started to object that this was no palace, aware suddenly of how much of the world she had seen, how little of it he’d seen, but kept silent. “And you’re powerful as a bear!” She said it to salve her sadness at his frailty.
“The sight of you is like spring after a snow-time that froze all the cattle! You’re just as I last saw you, and yet forty winters have gone since that spring morning when Ramis caught you, a yowling babe.”
“Stop flattering me and eat,” she said, spilling the food from the sack before him. From the size of his bites she guessed he hadn’t eaten in several days.
“I’ll not be driven off?” he asked between attacks on the bread, looking anxiously toward the main house.
“If you mean by Julianus,” Auriane replied, “he isn’t here. Anyway, he’d never treat as an enemy any man I counted a friend. Let’s not put the household’s discretion to the test if we don’t have to, though. How did you get here?”
“Friends of mine who were forced into one of those new cavalry cohorts, you know, made up of our people and men of our brother-tribes—they dressed me as one of their own and I rode right over the Mogon bridge, at night.”
“You didn’t! The prize rebel, riding right past the bridge sentries!”
“By Wodan’s help I found this place. I was given wrong directions twice. I’ll not be long. A few words with you, and the wolf melts back into the forest.”
“We are sister and brother through all time!” Brother and sister in battle, she meant, for in youth they’d raided together along the frontier, and starved together during Domitian’s war. At its end, he’d meant to die alongside her when the legions drove them from their final fort of refuge, and had his horse not found a rabbit hole and thrown him to the ground as they made their death-charge into the lines of a legion held in reserve, they would have been captured together. Instead, their lives had parted there, and she lived as an expatriate on the comfortable side of the Rhenus.
“I’ll get to my purpose,” he said, his voice grimmer now. “At the last full moon, the Great Assembly met in secret. They elected me to fetch you—they think I’m the only one smooth-tongued enough to convince you to return. Know this, Auriane: We need you now as at no other time.”
She felt her body tautening, as if her flesh had become a shield.
“The Cheruscans have seized seventeen villages,” he spoke on. “They’ve settled in to stay. Your home village lies like easy prey before them.”
“And my mother?” she whispered.
“Athelinda’s fine. I think the Cheruscan dogs fear her, just a little. They won’t overrun the Boar Village until next year. But Auriane, we must go to war.” He leaned closer and said in a covered voice, “Thanks to you, we can—your generosity has filled a cave with weapons of iron.”
She broke her gaze from his, tense and desolate, beginning to feel herself a beast herded into a narrower and narrower pen.
“We must drive the Cheruscans off now or fall to them evermore,” he went on. “The chiefs of our strongest war bands are
warring with each other—they won’t unite behind one man. I had hopes for that bright-shining son of your father’s good companion—Sigibert—but of late there’s an ugly tale going round that he plans to marry the invading chief ’s daughter. The sad truth of it is, we can’t raise a force large enough without you. You are the only one every faction will follow.”
The words shot through her like a javelin, swift, clean, complete—and merciless. She felt she’d been staked to a tree, and left there to writhe. For a time, she could not speak; she could only shake her head, no.
“You must know why I attacked that fort.”
“That was singularly stupid, Witgern. Do you know that if Marcus Julianus hadn’t—”
“I rescued Baldemar’s sword from it, Auriane. I saved it from a pitiable life as a Roman war trophy.”
“That can’t be, no one knew what became of it.”
“We watched, we listened, we found it. My band has it safe in their keeping.”
“I never expected to hear of it again in this life,” she said, with the hush of one who enters a death chamber. “I thought it cast off into a ditch somewhere, or rotting in the earth, or stowed unknown, in some foreign armory . . .”
“I did it so you could return—and take it up.”
“But Witgern, a hundred ropes bind me here.”
“I have the sword to cut a thousand ropes. Do you want your own Boar Village to be a Cheruscan town? When these Cheruscan lice are in need of money they drag our girl children off from the villages and the maids aren’t seen again until they’re put on the auction block at Mogontiacum. Can you sit idle while we stock the Cheruscans’ slave trade? We’re assembling an army in secret. When we take the holy images from the groves and go to war, you must be with us. All say it: The right weapon in the right hand will restore the world to what it was.”
“Well, this is the wrong hand. I left Avenahar once to go to war and it brought a bitter melancholy to her that’s never gone away . . . I think part of her distrusts me for it to this day. Now you want me to do it again, and this time, leave two babes behind. No. Never again.”
But her haunted look told him how divided in mind she was; it encouraged him to press harder.
“Why do you spar every day with a wooden sword? Because you know your true fate. As for Avenahar and your little Arria Juliana . . . children must live their parents’ fate. It has always been so. You could send for them in time. As for Marcus Julianus—he’s not of our people, Auriane. I ask you to put the blood of kin before the blood of a foreigner.”
“You’re angering me, Witgern. You drop a babe into my hands and say, ‘Raise it.’ You look at this villa that teems with what I love and say, ‘Leave it.’ You’re thin-witted to think such a thing can be decided in a moment.”
“I see things more simply than that. Here is the most potent sword. And here is Baldemar’s daughter. When you want to make a big fire, you bring pitch to the flames. This I do. I leave you to settle accounts with the spirits.”
When she did not answer, his expression hardened. “Well, I see this place has made you a different creature. You’re not one of us anymore.”
“That’s cruel, Witgern. You ask me to agree, in a night, to unravel my life.”
“Ah, I’m doing this badly—I must not be the clever envoy they think I am. But believe me, Auriane, I do know the magnitude of what I ask.”
“Why are they so intent upon me? Haven’t I trampled on enough sacred laws to be counted a curse in the flesh? My children have two fathers, and they’re both men of the enemy. I even took Roman citizenship. I’ve let years pass without carrying out the rites at the ancestors’ graves.”
“Make no mistake about it, you do have a crop of enemies. There’s a seeress who condemns you for those very things—a powerful one, close to Ramis. But among the warriors, it is different. Some still offer a sacrifice for your return, every spring, on the spot where you were captured. To the common lot of them you’re their victory bearer. Some don’t know you from a swan-maid. And a swan-maid can bed any man she pleases if it suits her purpose or bargain with the enemy if she sees fit, or for that matter, die and come back to life—”
“But Witgern—”
“Hear me out. To the warriors, it’s as though you’re one of the Ancestresses already—a fighting Ancestress who will set them free. You’ve never known your power to give succor. They love you as they love their hearths. They don’t think of all this”—he waved a hand to indicate the sumptuous estate—“they remember only that after Domitian’s war, you won vengeance for all of us when you slew the great traitor who led an army against our back. No one living has matched your deeds, or carried such light. Come with me, Auriane.”
Her throat was clenched from grief. Uttering the words felt as painful as being dragged over gravel.
“My answer still must be no.”
“You’ve more wisdom in you than anyone I’ve known, woman or man, Auriane. But sometimes I think it slows you. You walk through a denser forest than the rest of us, and it conceals what we easily see. Your home is besieged. Our fields are overrun with Cheruscan vermin. How can you turn your back on us?”
“How can I turn my back on my children? And on Marcus, who I do count as kin.” Miserably, she looked down. “It’s a fork in the path, Witgern. Taking either route brings shame on me, for the one abandoned.”
But the land is my child, too, some part of her protested. And I did a shameful thing in leaving it.
“Don’t think on it overmuch, Auriane. Just come with me.” He waited through silence. “You still refuse, then?”
“I am sorry, Witgern.”
“I go, then.” He climbed to his feet.
“Stay a little longer!”
“I’ve no other purpose here. I failed. Farewell.”
“How will you get back across the river?”
“It’s of little importance now. I go back without you.”
“Witgern!”
“Oh, I’ll give a gift to the river so it won’t suck me down, and swim it at night. I’m quite good at eluding frontier patrols. A wolf knows his way.”
She embraced him then. “I’m glad at the sight of you, Witgern, dear old friend. But you’ve slashed open every wound. You leave me desolate. Go in safety. The grace of Fria go with you.”
She pressed the remainder of the food on him. He’d gone but a few paces when she ran to catch up with him. “Witgern! A last matter . . . have you heard any news of . . . of Decius?”
“I fear I have, Auriane.” For the first time, she saw something hard and merciless flash in his eye. “I’ll say only this—his heart is Cheruscan, and he’s eagerly bloodied himself.” Witgern hesitated, looking somewhat uncomfortable. “Does Avenahar know . . . has she any suspicion that . . .” That this bloodstained rogue you briefly bedded in bygone days is her father? she heard in his silence.
“No,” Auriane said quickly, looking away. “Her mother is a coward.”
THE HORSE GUARDSMAN’S groom lay flat on his stomach beneath a box hedge and didn’t move for long moments after the Matrona and the notorious rebel had gone their own ways. He’d briefly considered a headlong gallop into Confluentes to roust the magistrate’s men from sleep, but good sense told him it was no use. Witgern was adept at moving invisibly through the countryside; the Wolf Coat chief would be well off by the time a search party could be gathered together. The groom had not followed most of what was said—Auriane’s native tongue was similar but not identical to the tongue of the Batavian tribe of his birth. But Witgern was here! That was damning enough. This estate was a festering sink of conspiracy. His master had been wise to leave him behind to have a look about. When he receives this amazing report his gratitude will be so great he’ll grant me my freedom.
ON THE FOLLOWING morn, as Auriane and Avenahar walked swiftly through ground mist, following a path to the practice arena, Avenahar was troubled by the haunted look she saw in her mother’s face.
“It’s
nothing at all,” was Auriane’s curt reply to a tentative query. Avenahar, you must never know Witgern was here. I can’t have both of you aligned against me. The pull would be too mighty. Witgern would win.
The crying of my people. The crying of a child. Which is more urgent? Which is my true charge?
Auriane stopped then and removed the amulet of sacred earth from about her neck—certain that it, too, was aligned against her. It’s relentlessly dragging me back to my country. I must get rid of it.
“You can’t take that off; Ramis gave that to you.” Avenahar’s eyes were black pearls, dissolving in the warmth of her concern.
“I can. You must wear it now.” It will give you protection, when I no longer can. The certainty that Avenahar would soon need such protection was daily gathering strength within her. “Take it.”
“To wear all the time? This is not a jest?”
“I’d hardly jest about such a thing.”
“Something did happen.”
“Never mind. Put it on.”
Avenahar stood with arms pinned at her sides, constricted as if bound by invisible cord. She couldn’t rob her mother of her most sacred possession. It felt too much like besting her mother—something the part of her that was boisterous, raw, and young ardently wanted. But a deeper, steadier part of her thought acquiring such a prize this way a horrible and thankless thing.
“Avenahar, I’ll never live in my country again. And home’s your direction—that’s plain to see. It’s right that you wear it. So be it. Don’t argue.”
Auriane’s stern look did not allow disobedience, so Avenahar took it, pulling the thong a little awkwardly over her smooth black hair, feeling she sported with a holy thing—like sneaking on a queen’s headdress just to try it, or clambering, just for adventure, onto a temple roof. But as the leather of the amulet touched her skin, Avenahar was certain she felt a small tug, as if the potent thing had already begun pulling her toward a larger fate. In her mind she fled home, to Chattian lands, and took her place among the shadowed heroes and heroines her mother had walked with—a woman revered, not ridiculed, as she doled out counsel in war and peace, who lived as a pivot-point in the life of the villages, not as a shameful oddity, as she would always be in this Roman province. I’ll live even more gloriously the life my mother lived. . . .
Lady of the Light Page 10
