“And will he keep her here until she dies?”
“No. But she’s to be taken far from your people. Her influence is too great. She will suffer the same fate as that Veleda who served before her, in the reign of Vespasian—she’ll be sent to Rome to live out her span on a modest pension, far from any mischief she might work among your people.”
“Sent to Rome. What madness. She is a woman of the forest.” She tensely met his gaze. “He did release Ramis’s women?”
“Yes, all but two maidens, to attend her.”
“My message got out, then.”
“The message you gave Brico? Yes. But Auriane, know this, mad as it must seem—just now, Avenahar is probably safer where she is.”
“She’s in a war camp!”
“She has a chance of life. You’re battling in a sine missio.” He referred to the form of gladiatorial combat in which no combatant was allowed to survive. “Auriane, we must speak, now, of what’s to be done for you.”
Together, they sat on the straw-stuffed mattress; the supporting wooden frame gave a forlorn creak. “Listen with care. When I’m gone, they will try you, and they will, no doubt, condemn you.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. I will be executed on the block. Like the ten hostages after Witgern’s attack. It happens commonly. I will be one more. A quick, clean death. There was no sword stroke I could not defend against. Except this one.
He pulled a rolled papyrus document from a bronze canister. “This is your grant of citizenship from the Emperor Nerva. It’s but an exemplum, a certified copy of an original document. It’s inscribed with a lettermark, here, that indicates the location of the master copy in my archives, back at the villa. Demaratos knows how to retrieve the original. Remember this, should this be stolen or destroyed. Maximus will know what this is. You are going to appeal, which is your right—I’ve explained that already. This alone won’t save you, of course, but it will gain you some time, until I can do so. Do not tell anyone you have this—wait for the trial.”
Gravely, she nodded.
“Appeal will mean to the Emperor, of course, who—bad chance for the Palace’s court, better chance for us—will still be in Dacia. It will greatly annoy everyone concerned, but they’ll have no choice but to follow the letter of the law and send you there—the case is too famous. Do not lose heart.”
“Marcus, Arria must know nothing of any of this. If the Emperor does now count you an enemy, her groom’s family won’t want her anymore. They’ll break off the betrothal. It will destroy her one place of refuge.”
“Cease tormenting yourself. Arria will be married at the proper age, with due ceremony and ample dowry even if neither of us survives. If I can see to nothing else, I’ll see to that.”
They rose together, and he readied himself to depart. “Auriane,” he asked suddenly. “Do you know how Ramis was schooled?”
“She interests you?” She realized this gladdened her.
“She is a surpassing mystery.”
“Did I not always tell you?”
“It’s one thing to hear of it and entirely another thing to witness, for it engages every sense, not just the mind.”
“She herself had a teacher, another great seeress who died before Nero ruled.”
“That hardly explains it. She has the speech of philosophers. When they took her off I followed to make certain they didn’t misuse her, and I put questions to her. Her every reply raised up more mysteries. She is a Pythagorean. She describes the deathless spirit just as they do, and its passing on from one life to the next. She spoke even of the Age of Gold and the Age of Iron. She knows their disciplines—she once kept silence for five years. How can this be? This woman has never seen these texts—indeed, she cannot read, and has lived all her life far from any academy, where only the peace of the forest could have taught her.”
“Is it so unthinkable? Our seeresses have always taught of the hidden soul-truths. And in ages past they were far-journeyers, more than today—though they seem to have been forgotten by your people’s tale-keepers. Have you ever thought, Marcus, that you may have it all turned about? That when human creatures left their earth dwellings and moved into stone houses, they may have brought this knowledge with them? That perhaps your Pitta . . . Pitha—”
“Pythagoras.”
“—may have taken his knowledge from her?—her sister seeresses, I mean, of aeons past?”
“You turn civilization on its head but at this dismal hour it looks better that way. Her jailers think her some sort of high magician who could walk through walls. But for me it’s something else: She does not just speak these things. This woman truly lives in another world. She seems present among us but she’s not. And, by all the gods, Auriane, every sense tells me it’s a better world.”
“I know it. My people call it the place-of-no-sorrowing.”
“I would study her if I didn’t have to depart. A pity to come upon such a wonder when we’re both so close to being damned.”
The darkening chamber was melancholy as an abandoned house when ghosts start to stir. There came a dry flutter of wings, an owl’s cheerless call.
“Auriane . . . matters are grave . . . for you, I mean, graver than I have said.”
“I’m ready for what comes,” she whispered. “We had our feast of days.” A lightflash of a smile crossed her face. “I’ll be a ghost over Avenahar’s shoulder, over Arria’s—over yours. You’ll have a guardian spirit.” She crushed her face against his rough cheek. Her kiss was fervid, sad, a protest against the brutal finality of his going, but he met it in a way that was rich with consolation, and for long they drank of each other in deep final drafts, enough to last out the somber, uncertain months. They drifted on sorrow, emptied of words and hope, and she didn’t know she was mumbling, “. . . We are closer than kin, closer even than mother and babe . . .”
“There is no other creature like you on this earth,” he said hoarsely into her hair.
As she held to him she saw that the pooled blackness over his shoulder wasn’t so empty as it seemed. There was a quickening at its core. She stiffened, and drew in a breath. Though fainter than starlight, images boiled out of the void, swarming, coalescing, forming. She heard a rush of air and a slashing of boughs, men’s shouts. She saw a king—the Dacian king?—fresh from murder, a bloody falx in his hand, and behind him, an empty horizon broken only by the movements of tribes who lived their lives on horses.
“What is it?” he whispered darkly, not wanting to know.
“Marcus. You go into another world.”
“You could call Dacia that,” he said uneasily.
And I don’t know if it’s of the living or of the dead. “There’s . . . a good chance I’ll not see you again in this life.”
“Nonsense. Do as we’ve planned and I will see you in Dacia. I promise it before every god, Auriane, that however far I go, even into other worlds, I will find you.”
Chapter 20
As Avenahar gained the high point of the summit she felt joyous enough to fly, and intimate with the loneliness all about. The sky was a field of cold blue traversed by puffs of rushing clouds. The hills fell off in ever-paler hues of gray-green, to become ghost hills at the horizon’s edge. Ground mist shrouded the valleys’ somber recesses, alive with the furtive dartings of the unseen world—always there, just out of sight. A wind affectionately ruffled the grasses and set into undulating motion the golden carpets of aromatic flowers. Here Fria was a close, kind sister.
After one and a half cycles of the moon with Witgern’s band, Avenahar was lean as a wild mare. Her face and arms were tanned nut-brown from long days spent beneath the northern sun. Her hair, when they’d found her, had been so matted with burdock burrs there was no help for the mess but to crop it; the remains were torn dark silk, hanging short and blunt as a boy’s. She wore a waist-length deerskin cape over a baggy tunic woven of nettle fibers, belted with rope; Witgern’s provisions women had tossed into a cess trench the muddy remains of
her womanhood cloak, and the fine, tablet-woven tunica she’d worn from the villa. But for the wilted wreath of blue verbena flowers caught in her hair, she might have been a gangling youth as she stood on the hilltop, surveying the land as though she’d conquered it.
A woman with sagging jowls climbed up beside Avenahar and surveyed her kingdom. This was Ragnhild, the herb woman who travelled with Witgern’s band. She had the indrawn shoulders of a woman shy of her fellow creatures, and could be stubbornly mute in most company. But her small eyes were sharp as pins—she knew what she knew, and when she spoke of those things, all shyness vanished. Wind whipped her cloak back magisterially and tugged at her dove-gray hair, pulling it free from a snail-coil at the nape of her neck, blowing it across her durable face. She scented the wind like a horse.
“I smell burning,” Ragnhild said. Avenahar sniffed. She smelled nothing.
“Ragnhild,” Avenahar asked then, “these plants . . . wolfsbane, golden woundwort, Bride of the Sun . . . they’re what we gather before battle.” Ever since word had filtered to them of the Governor’s treacherous seizure of Ramis, Avenahar knew Witgern had been laying plans for some mysterious, reputedly dangerous expedition that would cost Rome much in men and supplies.
“You’ve been listening better than I thought. We’ll know what that’s about when we’re meant to. Move along, sluggard, we’re nearly there.”
Avenahar romped down the hill, sinking into soil like cake. Ragnhild scuttled briskly after. “Slow down, Peregrina,” the old woman called out. “Town life’s dashed your patience.” Avenahar had plucked the name “Peregrina” from a tale she’d read in a book of fables, about a brave girl who’d saved a town from pirates. Avenahar had let the Wolf Coats believe she was a fugitive slave, a wardrobe maid from a villa on the Great River, who’d fled a nervous mistress lethally fast with an iron hairpin. Witgern alone knew the truth, and Avenahar prayed no one else would deduce it—she wasn’t eager to put the war band’s tolerance to the test. In the last month, she hadn’t wanted to be known as either parent’s child: As Auriane’s daughter, no mettle she displayed would ever be counted her own. As Decius’s child—that was too fearful to imagine.
They might well decide to sacrifice her to the gods.
“I found it—wolfsbane,” Avenahar called out with extravagant pride. She charged into a field of flame-colored flowers and began happily tearing at flower heads.
“Stop that! Be gentle, just take the petals—like this.” Ragnhild began stripping petals with precision, delicacy, and formidable efficiency. “Don’t injure my pretties. Do you know why she’s the best balm for sword wounds? Because she’s got a bit of sun captured inside her. What heals better than the sun? It means she’s got the Lady herself inside her. Look how fine and bright her heads are.” Ragnhild had nothing but gentle thoughts for plants. Avenahar was amused to see how plants excited her and people didn’t—though their ailments sometimes did. Her neck projected from her shoulders at an equine angle, from a lifetime spent examining the ground, where her sly children, the roots, fungi, and flowers, hid from her. Ragnhild filled her wicker hamper long before Avenahar did. The herb woman’s hands were hard, smooth, and curled like claws; she could pull up an angelica root without a spade. She claimed it was because she first won the trust of the plant. Ragnhild answered to no one but the land spirits. If Witgern ever offended her, she would be off, and Witgern knew it.
“Does wolfsbane grow here without help?” Avenahar asked.
“No. This is one of my gardens. Other women use it, too, though, so we’ll just take what we need, no more.” Ragnhild frowned. “Peregrina? What are you looking at?”
“There—on that hill.”
Near the peak of a neighboring hill was a point of fire that steadily grew, until it seemed to open like the baleful eye of an awakening giant dwelling in the hill. Then it was a fiery blade thrust up against stark blue.
“A need-fire’s been lit,” Ragnhild said. “That’s close by the Boar Village. They always seem to get foul news first.”
“The Boar Village?” Avenahar whispered. “We’re that near?” She felt an unpleasant tug, as if she’d dropped an anchor in deep water and couldn’t happily sail on any more. Her throat tightened. There, Baldemar’s hall stood; there, Auriane was born. And there, Auriane’s aged mother, Athelinda, lived on still. She wanted to go there and draw in the spirits of the wells, the old hall, to drink in whatever elixir had given her mother such uncommon battle luck, and set her on a course of deeds that left a star-path still reflected in the eyes of the people of this country. Perhaps there, Avenahar thought, she would belong, as the mountain ash belonged—and could forget she was a woman of split soul, that the blood of a foreign murderer polluted her heart. A tangle of needs jostled within Avenahar—to best her mother, to hurt her, to have her adoration. All had Auriane at their center, however, like some maypole Avenahar was bound to circle round, first in one direction, then the other. And Avenahar knew, then, that running off was doing little to heal her hurt—she’d just been living off the succor of inflicting an equal wound on her mother.
On the hill behind them, a second fire found feeble life, and grew steadily stronger.
“Another one,” Avenahar said wonderingly. “Something dreadful’s happened.”
“Let’s get to the stores, and back to camp.”
More excited by all this than frightened, Avenahar followed Ragnhild down the path to the cave where the old woman stored her medicines.
“Is it Chariomer’s army, do you think?” Avenahar asked. The two women were uncomfortably far from Witgern’s encampment, and they had no weapons.
“No, we’d hear horns. Anyway, it’s too late in the raiding season.” Ragnhild’s face contracted as if she’d put something bitter into her mouth. “We can expect that scourge to reach these hills by next spring, though.”
In the past month, Avenahar had begun to see the Chattian tribe’s plight with merciless clarity. Once, while ranging far for herbs, she and Ragnhild had come upon a village in the Cheruscans’ wake; the precincts before the temple were heaped with unburned dead. Black blood on skin turned to hide; a babe that had starved beside its slain mother—she couldn’t banish these horrors from memory. Chariomer’s army had massacred them just after harvest time; this was how his war band supplied itself with fruits and grains for the winter, for the Cheruscan chief’s own provisions women had abandoned him over some dispute. Chariomer, with Decius at his side. The swords Auriane courted ruin to send, said to be hidden in a cave in Witgern’s keeping, were the Chattians’ single frail hope that Chariomer might one day be driven off. But Avenahar drove off, soon as they came, all thoughts that might enhance her mother’s glory—for these days, despising her mother was the fuel that kept her warm.
As Avenahar and Ragnhild spilled down the hill, they saw more fires’ unsteady blooms, manifesting near, then far, shimmering awake like the first stars of evening. The whole of the land was ablaze with protest.
Avenahar was seized with an unaccountable certainty she did not want to know what was wrong, that it would strike her to her knees.
“Ragnhild . . . you are not at all frightened?”
“I was at the Ram’s Eye when Chariomer butchered even the she-goats. I climbed down a well. The dead were thrown in on top of me. After such a thing, all else is but the prick of a bone pin.”
This suppressed Avenahar to quiet. “I am sorry, Ragnhild. That’s the village where Ramis was born, is it not?”
“It was. My, you know much about us, Peregrina.” Ragnhild slowed, and slyly slid her gaze toward Avenahar.
Avenahar drew in a breath. Had the old woman deduced who she was?
“They’ve taken from us everything, every place that is holy,” Ragnhild went on. “It could never have happened in Baldemar’s day. The folk here about don’t understand why Auriane never came home. Maybe that’s why all this has happened, maybe her desertion cursed us.”
Is she laying out bait?
Does she know I’m not of a nature to let a dart thrown at my mother go unmet? “Perhaps she had . . . a good reason. Perhaps she was trapped where she was, by her honor. Perhaps she does plan to return.”
“Is that it. You’re full of answers today, villa-child. I tell you though, when a babe cries out for its mother, it doesn’t reason why.” Ragnhild shrugged, and began nimbly striding on again, following a deer track that led to her root cave. Stinging smoke bit the backs of their throats; both women held a corner of their cloaks over their noses.
Then Avenahar burst out with the question that had been swelling within her ever since the Wolf Coats had found her. “Ragnhild . . . what do people here say of the fact that . . . that Auriane lay with the Roman thrall Decius?”
Ragnhild stopped so abruptly that Avenahar collided with her.
“I should take a willow switch to you.”
But Ragnhild softened her gaze when she saw Avenahar’s distress. She made a dismissive gesture. “I know some folk say that, Peregrina, but you must understand, these are liars who hate us. Auriane’s child was fathered by Wodan.”
Avenahar fought to convey nothing with her face. Living as long as she had in territories held by Rome, where even rough countrymen drank in with mother’s milk a small dose of cynicism about the gods, she’d half forgotten there were sober men and women in this world who thought a child could be fathered by a god.
“Ragnhild, do most people here believe . . . I mean, know what you know, concerning this matter?”
“Most do, but there’s a sorry lot that don’t. There are even some who’d slay her for it. But the true people, the good and pious folk, know Auriane incapable of doing such a thing.”
Avenahar bit back a response. She knew this assessment couldn’t be all that accurate—at her womanhood ceremony, it had seemed everyone knew the truth. But it would be unmannerly to speak against the words of an elderwoman and host.
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