Susana, Lucilla’s personal maid, came bustling along the porch just then. She was a slender, dark-haired woman. She dressed in the black clothing common among older Italian women. Regeane at first had wondered why she was so retiring, seldom showing her face outside of Lucilla’s extensive apartments, until she saw Susana had a harelip. There was a surgery for this defect, but it left its possessor only passably attractive. Susana had been rejected on her wedding day by a suitor whose family thought it would be sufficient to offer their son a wealthy marriage and didn’t take into account his reaction when he saw the girl. “ ‘I wouldn’t breed from the bitch,’ is what he said,” Lucilla had told Regeane. “Her father drew his sword and struck him dead on the spot. Then all parties fell to . . . and during the confrontation Susana’s father was killed.
“Hadrian was present. He had to call out the guard to settle the brawl, and all parties blamed the poor girl, as if any of it were her fault. The smart-mouth young whelp should have been taught better manners, and he shouldn’t have been deceived in the first place. Susana’s family were not much better. They should have realized her little problem would need to be openly discussed before the wedding day. But at any rate, she came here, and I’m the better for it. She manages all my money and estates and has doubled my capital over the years.”
Regeane knew the two women were friends and Lucilla reposed great trust in her, but Susana still covered the lower part of her face with her veil even when she spoke to Lucilla’s intimates. “Ladies, you had best come now. Simona is here with someone you need to meet, and you, my lord Ludolf, please accompany me also.”
They rose and followed her to Lucilla’s tablinium just off the atrium fountain. Simona was standing there with the girl Lavinia. When Lavinia saw a handsome young warrior and three beautifully dressed women approaching, she began backing away. Regeane saw the same mad terror in her face that she’d seen in some animals confronted, not necessarily with a deadly threat, but by the truly unknown. Fortunately there was a thick marble column behind Lavinia. She backed into it and froze.
“Go slowly,” Regeane told the rest. They were hurrying along. “She is frightened and ready to bolt.”
Simply looking at the girl, the wolf sensed pain and fear: fear for a long time, pain for a long time, so much that they had destroyed her ability to eat and even sleep quietly. This girl was so frightened and so weary she was almost ready to give up on life, to lie down somewhere and die. The rest, sensing the otherness of the child, slowed down, confused and not wanting to frighten her further.
Regeane hailed Simona. “How are you?”
“Very well, my lady.” She came forward and kissed Regeane’s cheek. “You look to be blooming. Tell me, has he gotten you with child yet?”
Regeane grinned. “No, but we’re trying as hard as we can.”
“Humph. You mean he’s trying as hard as he can.”
Both laughed. “And Posthumus?” asked Regeane.
“He and that hoyden Elfgita are at the English king’s court. Can you believe it? My son at a king’s court. I’m happy for him, yet I do miss him so. But that wench Silvie is breeding, so I imagine I’ll have another one to rear soon. She won’t be what I would call a devoted mother. Too busy counting the hands up her skirt, so she can charge them later.”
“Something besides a hand must have gotten up Silvie’s skirt. I never heard of a hand making a baby,” Regeane shot back.
Simona laughed again, then reached back and took Lavinia’s hand. “Come here. Talk to the lady Regeane. She won’t bite. Not right now at any rate.” Simona chuckled. “Under all those fancy clothes, she’s just a woman like all the rest of us.”
Regeane stretched out her hand and Lavinia hesitantly took it. Simona’s broad talk somehow seemed to have reassured the girl. Regeane inclined her head to Lavinia.
“My lady,” Lavinia said.
Regeane could feel tension in Lavinia. The hand alone told her she was trembling like a captured bird. Regeane led her carefully over to a marble bench by the atrium pool. She asked Susana for some bread and wine.
“Now, girl,” Simona said, “tell her what you told me.”
Lavinia nodded. Her speech sounded rehearsed, and Regeane thought she must have spoken it over and over again in her mind as she lay in ditches, deserted forest clearings among ruins, or hurrying furtively down a hundred paths and byways as she tried to hide from her pursuers.
“I met a lady at the villa Jovis. She was named Lucilla. I told her I was unhappy there but had nowhere to go. She told me that if I delivered a message to Rome for her, her friends in Rome—Simona and Dulcinia and Susana—would help me find work and a place to live.”
“We will,” Regeane said. “She is Susana, that is Dulcinia—and her intended, Ludolf—and this is, as you know, Simona.”
“I was to give you this.” Lavinia handed Regeane the ring.
She showed it to Susana.
“It’s hers. Hadrian gave it to her.”
Lavinia shook her head. “The message she gave me, I don’t understand it. But . . .” She looked at Simona. “Maybe they won’t believe me—”
“We will believe you,” Regeane said. “We know you couldn’t carry a long or complicated message. Tell us what it is and see if we can’t make sense of it.”
Lavinia looked reassured. “All she said was just one word: Verona.”
“So,” Dulcinia said, and hissed. She and Ludolf’s eyes locked.
“Yes,” he said, and dropped his hand to his sword hilt.
“Hadrian must be told as quickly as possible,” Susana said.
“The pope!” Lavinia exclaimed. She looked ready to die of fear on the spot.
“Shush,” Simona said. “That won’t be your responsibility.”
“It will be mine, and right now.” Ludolf kissed Dulcinia’s hand again and strode away.
“Lucilla succeeded in her endeavor,” Dulcinia said.
“What about the place to stay and work? Work that doesn’t involve spreading my legs,” Lavinia said harshly.
Regeane said, “We are all grateful to you, little one. You cannot imagine how grateful.”
“Yes,” Susana said. She drew a necklace of gold links from around her neck and dropped it over Lavinia’s head. “This is for you right now. And there will be much more later when you have bathed and eaten. As for a place to stay, remain here. Lucilla would not want me to do less.”
“But it might take me some time to find work.”
“You are my guest and Lucilla’s for as long as you like,” Susana said. “Now come. Did they have baths at the villa Jovis?”
“Not for us.”
“Well, we do here—for everyone.”
Simona shook her head as Susana led the girl away. “Verona. I suppose you know what that means?”
“We do,” Dulcinia said.
Regeane was moving out of the atrium, down the pillared walkway at top speed.
“Stop,” Dulcinia said.
Regeane paid no attention.
Both Simona and Dulcinia pursued her.
Then she was in the garden. It was siesta time. No one was about. The dress she had been wearing floated away. Simona and Dulcinia found it tangled in a bush covered with white roses. No one saw the wolf leap the villa wall and vanish into the tranquil afternoon countryside.
Lucilla was struggling to survive in the hole where she’d been abandoned. After studying the grate over the cell, she found it could be pushed up enough for her to get a hand out, but it would open no wider, being secured at both ends by chains and padlocks. The hinges on the other side were new and tight.
She could pick locks, but whoever had placed her here had foreseen that possibility. The keyholes of both locks had been jammed shut with wood. Probably a stick or twig pushed into the hole, pounded down, and broken off.
She then crawled around the walls, examining them. The only weakness she could find was that on one end, the cell was dug into the hillside. On the fa
r end she could see enough to know the ground sloped down and there might not be more than three or four feet of dirt between that end of the cell and the hillside. She considered all the possibilities and then methodically began to dig.
A discouraging task. The ground here was baked dry and almost stone hard. Moreover it was filled with debris of all kinds: wood, pot shards, pieces of brick. Her knife began to wear out quickly. She was dismayed when the tip broke off as she struck a piece of marble.
She was already tired and her head still ached. She sat down on the broken column and wept. She dried her eyes when the thought occurred to her that tears were draining a small supply of water from her body. She knew by bitter experience that one could survive a rather long time without food, but only a very short time without water. If she had no luck with her excavation, she would have only about three days to live. She was tormented by thirst already. She took a sip of the opium-laced wine, forcing herself to make it a small one. Then she sat quietly on the column drum with her back to the wall and closed her eyes.
The opium dissolved her headache and calmed her. She found herself studying the trash she’d already freed from the wall. The piece of marble looked like part of a mortar and pestle. The pestle.
She crawled over and examined it. It was lying next to a piece of wood and assorted pottery fragments. She knocked the dirt off the wood against the column drum; the dirt fell away and she saw the object was cup shaped. Probably it once held a table leg but it made a passable container. She put it aside carefully. It was spring and heavy rains were common in the region. It might be that none would come in time, but they might, and a cup would be a help. Now, as to that lump of marble . . . Lucilla frowned and her eyes narrowed. A half hour later she had several shards of marble from the column drum. One made an excellent digging piece; several had edges sharp as any she could desire in a knife. With them she was able to cut the hard bread into scraps small enough for her to chew.
That evening at dusk she made a meal of small pieces of the hard bread and a few sips of wine. She managed to compose herself to sleep on the bed of dried grass.
The next day was like the first except that she was weaker and more thirsty. All but the dregs of the opium-laced wine were gone. In the late afternoon she found she could dig no more. She lay down on the grass bed and wondered if all that her efforts had accomplished was to condemn her to die an agonizing death by thirst.
Early on the second day she’d begun a tally stick. She looked at the notches and counted: five. Five days she’d been here. She tried to remember if she’d counted the first day or began the count on the second, but then couldn’t remember and was annoyed with herself for her lack of mental acuity. Then she laughed silently at herself for being so foolish as to think it mattered. She couldn’t laugh out loud because her lips were cracking and her tongue was beginning to swell.
That evening, using a pebble, she was able to coax sufficient saliva from her dried-out body to spit in the jug and loosen the last dregs. They put her to sleep because there was enough concentrated opium in the bottom to knock out a horse, and so she slept, but when she woke in the morning, thirst was a raging agony and her tongue was so swollen it was beginning to protrude from her mouth.
She was able to open a vein in the back of her hand with one of her improvised knives and drink her blood. Not much use, she thought, but it did relieve some of the pain in her mouth and throat.
She went on digging for a while out of sheer stubbornness and to keep herself from thinking about the inevitable end of her struggles. But, again, by afternoon she was too weak to continue. There was one last way to get out a little of the opium caked in the bottom of the jar, and despising herself for needing the drug to erase her sufferings, she went ahead and used her own urine.
The horrible mixture burned her mouth, but she was able to get to sleep. When she woke it was dark. She felt around in the dark for the knife but couldn’t find it. She no longer had the strength to search. It was absolutely black in her hole and she wondered if she’d gone blind, but then she was able to see a few stars.
She closed her eyes again and thought about death. She didn’t pray. She would not beg and plead with the bishop for her life, and she would do no such thing with God either. She’d come here for a fell purpose. She’d known that when she started out. And if God had judged her unworthy of assistance, he could tell her about it soon enough. If there were no God . . . She remembered what Socrates said about death before he took the hemlock. Perhaps it was only an eternal sleep? If so, he judged it no bad thing, since he had never heard anyone, not even the great king of Persia, criticize the experience of a long, restful sleep. So why should he fear an eternal afternoon nap?
No reason. The man had been right. She had thought so when she first read the Dialogues and still agreed. In the morning, come daylight, she would find her knife. She knew where the pulse runs closest to the skin at the elbow and near the thumb. A resolute cut would open a blood vessel there, and she was nothing if not resolute. And it would all be ended. Then she stretched out and relaxed and drifted off to sleep again.
That night it rained.
Even the skies seemed to weep for the Lombard king. Charles pursued Desiderius across a rainy country as the spring downpours broke over the lands below the Alps. Charles kept his army in good order. He rode ahead with a tight guard of his finest mounted men. The bulk of the famous scarae followed, protecting the foot columns, and another contingent labored along with the supply wagons at the rear.
Maeniel and a select few of his warriors had a place of honor with Charles’s uncle Bernard in the vanguard. The fact that two of the warriors were women was disturbing to a few of Charles’s courtiers, but no one really wanted to challenge Silvia or Matrona.
Gavin had spent his time in camp wallowing among the comfort wagons, and his exploits—sexual, gustatory, and alcoholic—were already legendary among certain sections of the court. But he had to do a lot of washing, fumigating, switching from wolf to human and back again to get rid of assorted fleas, lice—seven different varieties—and uncomfortable social diseases he’d contracted during his peregrinations among the ladies and gentlemen of the demimonde.
Matrona currently wasn’t speaking to him. Neither was Silvia.
Travel wasn’t comfortable and it had been raining off and on all morning. The wind was in their faces. Almost everyone was wearing mail. It had to be padded, and the padding was getting really soggy.
Maeniel twitched his skin in a decidedly nonhuman way to shake off the water on his arms.
Gavin took a long pull on a jug and offered it to Maeniel. “You really should try this, my lord. It’s wonderful. I’ve been sipping it since last night, and I can’t feel a thing.”
Maeniel sniffed and decided Gavin might be dead. Drinking that might soon kill anyone.
“We bought it from some old man on a farm in the mountains. First he makes turnip wine. Then he freezes it, pours off what doesn’t freeze, adds a few herbs and—”
“Pisses in it,” Maeniel said.
“Oh, that’s just to get the mushrooms in,” Gavin told him. “If you steep them, it gets too strong.”
Maeniel could believe this, as simply sniffing Gavin’s breath made his eyes water. The alcohol content was simply unbelievable and the odor of valerian, mistletoe, henbane, and a dash or two of opium was rank.
“I have to remember that man’s name, so I can go back and get some more,” Gavin commented. “It’s nice for a rainy day.”
Just then Arbeo came riding up hell-for-leather. He reined in next to Audovald and shouted, “The baggage train is being attacked.”
Charles didn’t seem terribly disturbed. “They will want to slow us down. Can you deal with this, my lord Maeniel?”
Maeniel jerked his head. “Yes.”
Silvia and Matrona followed him to the baggage train. They arrived to find it in disarray. One man had been wounded, and two bullocks pulling an oxcart of supplies had been
killed.
Silvia jumped off her horse and joined in, helping the servants cut the dead oxen from their traces and dragging the cart aside to keep it from blocking the narrow road. One muscular fellow looked as if he might resent taking orders from Silvia, but when she picked up the heels of one of the dead oxen and dragged the massive carcass over to a tree—her intent being to skin and gut the beast so that the meat might be salvaged, but she was going to hang it up first and going to accomplish this single-handed—everyone decided discretion was better than valor in dealing with Silvia. Maeniel didn’t think they would give her any trouble. So he and Matrona rode off in pursuit of the attackers.
Even though they were out of the mountains, the countryside was still very rugged, with lots of rocky outcrops, high hills, deep ravines, and small river valleys. They crossed a narrow valley with a brook running through it and paused on the slope of a still-higher hill.
“Robert,” Maeniel said. “And I think Desiderius’s captain: Antonius gave me his name . . . Nivardd. They know what I can do.”
“Ummmm,” Matrona said. “Ride to the top of the hill.”
Maeniel did so.
The brook they’d just crossed fed into a tributary of the mighty Po. It ran through a thickly wooded valley below the hill. Deep in the forest near the water, Robert and Nivardd watched him.
“My lord,” Robert said.
“You know what he can do?” Nivardd asked.
“Oh, yes, he and his wife. But he is too far for a bow shot and, in any case, I wouldn’t—”
“No, no, no,” Nivardd said. “I wasn’t thinking about that. I just don’t want him on our back trail.”
“Oh, lord, no!” Robert said. “We will take to the river. Even scent hounds can’t . . . He’s leaving.”
At a signal from Matrona, inaudible to humans, Maeniel turned his horse and rode back the way he came. He might as well help Silvia with those bullocks.
Nivardd and Robert rode on and never saw the black wolf watching them from the shadows.
The Wolf King Page 41
