Their first night together was compounded of small awkwardnesses all the same. They sat late beside the little pool in the atrium, carefully talking of nothing in particular, while the nereids simpered at them from the wall, until Justin, tongue-tied and embarrassed, had finally held out his hand to her and said, ‘Come, then,’ and led her into the bedroom.
Gwytha silently and obediently pulled her tunic over her head, and Justin, seeing the shape of her breasts and the flat curve of her belly in the flickering light, felt the one thing that he had never expected – he wanted her. Wanted her so badly that it almost sent him reeling.
He reached forward and gently pulled the pins from her hair, bathing his hands in it as it came cascading down about her shoulders. She touched his face hesitantly, then moved to curl herself on the rough blankets of the bed, watching him.
Justin, in that strange halfway sensation between embarrassment and desire, dropped his belt on the floor and pulled his own tunic off, tousling his hair and lending a vulnerable quality to an otherwise formidable body. He was lean and tanned and muscled… crisscrossed here and there with scars, but alive and vital, as if distilled in him was the essence of his ancestry – the men who, one after the other, had fought for their place in the Empire. Fought… and loved.
He slipped onto the bed beside her, by now throbbing with desire for her, both surprised and afraid that this woman stirred him as she did. He kissed her lightly and, shaking, slid one hand down to cup her breast. She must feel the desire in his touch, and Justin thought that an answering throb ran through her own body as his hand slipped softly between her thighs. He stroked her gently for a moment, his own desire so tautly controlled that his muscles seemed to be screaming, then softly slid his fingers inside her. She made no protest, and Justin, knowing he could bridle this longing no longer, turned and in one motion thrust deep inside her.
It was awkward all the same. Gwytha, as he had thought, was not inexperienced, but she lay perfectly still beneath him, as if even here her barriers held good, while Justin found himself pulled into a mounting passion that suddenly burst in a series of almost unendurable waves that left him spent and shaken.
When it was over he put his arms around Gwytha and held her close for a moment, and it seemed to him as if his eyes were wet, and he wept. But Gwytha kissed him, turned on her side, and, as far as Justin could tell, dropped into sleep.
Justin lay awake then, propped on one elbow, watching the patterns the moonlight made in her hair. It was not the first time he had fallen asleep with one hand tangled in a girl’s long hair, but it had always been a lighthearted thing, for the pure joy of it. None of them had ever moved him as this unlooked-for wife had done… nor scared him quite as much. If she had been in his bed for sheer pleasure, or from love… but Gwytha had married in sheer desperation, and it stood between them. He wondered if she had ever taken a man from choice and, with this unhappy thought in mind, lay down to sleep.
* * *
When he woke in the morning, she was not there. He wondered if she had packed and run (back to her people, maybe) before he smelled mutton broiling in the kitchen.
Gwytha was turning barley cakes on the stove with one hand and tending the mutton with the other when he came in.
She looked up at him. ‘Did you think I had run off?’
Justin hadn’t known he was that transparent. ‘No, I was only wondering where you came by the mutton. There was nothing here last night but a few sacks of meal. You must have been up early.’
‘Early enough for a trip to the butcher. And see, there is honey for the cakes, too.’
‘Quite a breakfast. You’re certainly an improvement over Pausanius.’ Pausanius was the head cook of the officers’ mess, renowned for his ability to ruin anything.
‘Well,’ Gwytha said, dropping cakes onto a plate, ‘it will have to serve for a wedding feast. You’ll be back to Pausanius soon enough.’ She untied her apron and sat down to eat with him. Her hair, he noticed, was back in its neat braids.
When Justin had swallowed the last mouthful of mutton and barley cake and wiped the honey from his hands and mouth, he stood up reluctantly. He was due back at duty, and no matter what he said, it would be an awkward parting. ‘I must go. I don’t know whether I can get back tonight or not, but I will tomorrow. In the meantime, do whatever you think needs doing to the house. There’s money in the purse by the bed.’ Finn, finishing a bowl of scraps, looked up expectantly and wagged his tail. ‘No, old fellow, you can’t come.’
‘By tomorrow, I’ll have the place so you won’t know it,’ Gwytha said, brisk and apparently cheerful. ‘I wonder when was the last time anyone cleaned the atrium floor.’
He came to kiss her good-bye, but she was scrubbing her pots and pans and spoke to him over her shoulder. He turned away again, feeling foolish, and let himself out into the garden, shutting the door firmly in Finn’s hopeful face.
As he turned into the Principia to report back for duty, the Optio at the door stopped him. ‘The Legate wants to see you, Centurion Corvus,’ he said, with a good deal of sympathy behind this ominous statement.
Well, he had been expecting it. The news must be all over camp by now. Justin braced himself and headed for the Legate’s office.
The Legate was not pleased. He was, he implied, a busy man with better things to do than rescue senior centurions from disastrous marriages. However, as he also strove for a reputation as a good fellow, he began by inquiring jovially if Justin had had to go so far as to marry the girl.
‘Yes, sir. It wasn’t that sort of an affair.’
‘Your family is not going to be pleased, you know. Nor, for that matter, am I.’
‘I was afraid you wouldn’t be, sir.’ Justin held himself stiffly at attention.
‘Not afraid enough to stop you, I notice. You’re a hotheaded young fool, Centurion. Well, a marriage in service is easy enough to get out of, but it doesn’t look well, all the same. Not for a cohort officer.’
‘I assure you, sir, I have no desire to get out of it.’
‘That’s just as bad,’ the Legate snapped. ‘Either way, it’s going to cause a scandal. If you couldn’t just bed the wench, you should have left her alone. A senior centurion has no business flaunting his amours in public.’
‘I wasn’t aware, sir, that marrying a woman constituted flaunting one’s amours,’ Justin said, gritting his teeth. He couldn’t afford open war with the Legate.
‘It does when she’s a slave out of a wineshop. If you’re so infatuated with the girl, why in Hades couldn’t you wait until you were out of service?’
‘I think you forget my wife’s position, sir.’
‘Forget her position?’ The Legate was beginning to splutter. ‘Damn it, how could I?’ He looked grimly at Justin. ‘I’d boot you from here to the most godforsaken outpost in Britain for this, except that I’d have to say why, and I’d prefer not to have it thought that my officers make a habit of marrying slaves. And I can’t dissolve a marriage I can’t even legally recognize. But I think you’ll find, Centurion Corvus, that you’ve done no good to your career. I hope your… wife is worth it, because that transfer you want so much isn’t coming through!’
Justin flinched. He had known that, of course, but he had been keeping it pushed to the back of his mind. ‘I know, sir,’ he said with as much matter-of-factness as he could muster.
‘Well, much joy may you have of it,’ the Legate said. ‘You are dismissed, Centurion. Get back to your duties.’
Justin saluted and left, avoiding the Optio’s heavy, sympathetic face. He had been right in hoping that Metius Lupus’s concern for appearances would keep the Legate from posting him off to the north of nowhere, but it would be a long time, if ever, before he could hope for promotional transfer to another province, or even another Legion. The prospect of his life loomed miserably before him… a shattered career in a green, unfriendly land, with a Legion that was only one step shy of a rabble…
He walked on,
wrapped in unhappiness and paying little attention to where he was going, until a voice shook him out of his lovely misery. It was Favonius.
‘Hai, Justin, the most determined man in the Empire! I never thought I’d live to see our Gwytha say yes to anyone!’
‘Ah, now, he offered more than anyone did before,’ laughed Sylvanus, who was second in command to Favonius and inclined to take his cue from him.
‘Aye, that he did. Tell me, have you broken the news to your mother?’ Martius, who commanded the Sixth Cohort, inquired. They clustered around him, laughing.
Justin was silent and Favonius intervened.
‘Be quiet, you two. This is a serious matter. You’ve got to get yourself out of this, Justin. The news is all over camp. If you need money – I’m sure the girl would be glad of it – I could—’
Justin turned on him. ‘I have just finished telling the Legate that I have no wish to “get out of this” and I will tell you the same thing and it will be the last time!’
Favonius blinked at him. ‘You can’t be serious. A slave out of a wineshop? Just as well marry one of Venus Julia’s girls.’
‘One more word out of you about my wife, Favonius, and I’ll knock all your teeth down your throat and spoil your pretty voice.’
Justin drew back a fist as if to get a head start on this plan.
‘You can’t do it, Corvus,’ Martius said. ‘You’ll disgrace the whole Legion. We won’t stand for it.’
‘And you—!’ Justin turned to face him.
‘Justin!’
He swung around to confront this new voice, intent on murdering someone, and stopped. It was Hilarion, carrying a large bundle under one arm.
‘From what I heard, the Legion seems to be disgracing itself, Martius,’ Hilarion said mildly. ‘If I were you, I’d tuck my tongue back in my mouth before I tripped on it.’ He handed the bundle to Justin. It was a blanket of gleaming grey wolfskin lined with bright bright red and blue checkered wool. ‘It’s a wedding present,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you yesterday, but you didn’t give us much notice.’
It was an open declaration of the side he stood on, and Justin was grateful. ‘Thank you. Gwytha will like it.’
Favonius opened his mouth to speak and Hilarion decided that things had gone far enough. He didn’t want Justin hauled up for beating a fellow officer to a bloody pulp. ‘I really came to find you, Favonius,’ he said. ‘One of your centurions has gone and stuck his finger in a catapult and they want you to send someone out to replace him. I think he’s broken it. Come on, Justin, we’re both on wall-building duty today. We can leave this off in your quarters on the way.’
He steered Justin firmly past the other three and off toward the officers’ block. ‘Whatever you do, try not to push Favonius’s face in,’ he said when they were out of earshot. ‘Granted it’s a face that could use it, but you’ll just make matters worse.’
‘I know,’ Justin said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve made yourself three enemies, though.’
‘Oh, well, I never did have much use for Favonius and company. They are to gentlemen as a cart horse is to the Emperor. Still, you’ll have a lot of that to put up with.’
‘And I’ve got to put a stop to it now, if I’m ever going to.’
‘Well, just try to do your fighting verbally,’ Hilarion said. ‘And let your friends help you where they can. I think you’ve got more friends than you know.’
* * *
When Justin marched into the mess hall that night, his hair still clinging damply around his ears after a solitary splash in the bathhouse, it appeared that Hilarion was right.
He had considered going back to Gwytha and the house in town, but had changed his mind. Facing the other officers at mess was something that had to be done sooner or later, and better sooner. He was going to give no one any cause to say that Centurion Corvus was ashamed of his wife, although his self-confidence was not bolstered by the knowledge that his marriage was one which he himself would have condemned strongly had it been made by a centurion of his own cohort. And he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to face Gwytha tonight either.
He entered the mess hall in an antagonistic mood, determined to keep the peace if he could and to break someone’s head if he couldn’t. As he came in the door, a group who had only too obviously been waiting for him swept him off to sit with them.
Licinius was there, and Hilarion, whom he had expected, and Lepidus, of whom he had not been quite sure. Justin, always ruthlessly veracious, had been inclined to put Lepidus’s liking for him down to a sense of duty and a bit of hero worship for a commanding officer, and he was faintly surprised to find that it ran deeper than that. Even more unsettling was the discovery of Geta at his elbow. Separated from the other senior officers by the unbridgeable gulf of class and from the common soldiers by his rank, Geta had, so far as Justin knew, no real friends in the Legion. To Justin he had never shown anything more than a passing respect. Certainly he had never given any indication of a willingness to declare war on the rest of the Centuriate for his sake.
But there he was, cracking a friendly joke, and next to him was young Flavius, Licinius’s junior surgeon. That Licinius might have ordered him there crossed Justin’s mind, but Licinius didn’t work that way. And if Flavius’s presence had been Licinius’s idea, Octavian, the surgeon’s apprentice, would have been there as well. He was not.
So Flavius, too, was there from friendship and it made Justin feel a little guilty. Always slow to make friends, he had left no one behind him on the Rhine or in Africa that he much missed, and in the Hispana it was only to Licinius and Hilarion that he would speak freely on some matters. He had tried to be a compassionate commander to Lepidus, and to Flavius and Geta he had given friendliness but never friendship. Now he found that in the Legion he hated so much there were five men willing to risk their standing with the rest for his sake, three of them without even any idea of why he had gotten himself in this mess in the first place.
He was still mulling this over as they hauled him off and sat him down near the end of the table, one on either side of him, two across from him, and Licinius like a watchdog at the end.
Justin looked around him and grinned. ‘So, you look out for my welfare.’
Across the table Lepidus grinned back at him. ‘No, sir. We merely show where we stand.’
‘Hmmm.’ Justin cracked open an egg. ‘I see. I’m quite capable of defending myself against the likes of Martius, you know.’
‘We know,’ Licinus said drily. ‘That’s precisely what we’re worried about, you idiot.’
‘I take it your aim is not so much to protect me from outraged public opinion in the person of Martius, as to save me from myself?’
‘Precisely. Public opinion will die down in time, but if you punch it in the nose in the meantime, it’ll take a lot longer. And make things uncomfortable for Gwytha as well.’
Justin was silent. He hadn’t thought of that. ‘Very well, I’ll endeavor to, uh, restrain myself. But there are some things I can’t let go by.’
‘No. Can’t.’ Geta spoke for the first time. ‘Just don’t go lookin’ for ’em, that’s all.’
‘I’ll be good,’ he promised solemnly. ‘And… my thanks to the five of you. I know what you’re doing and I appreciate it.’
‘Nothing of the sort, sir,’ Flavius said. ‘Can’t let those idiots set themselves up as the custodians of everybody else’s behavior. If they were as grand as they think they are, I don’t imagine they’d be centurions in Britain,’ he added.
The Legate, hearing the laughter from Justin’s table, glanced in their direction and was glad he had decided not to take further measures in the matter. Corvus had more friends than he thought, and it would have been sure to cause a great deal of undesirable talk. Unlike Justin, he did not acquit Licinius of having ordered Flavius’s attendance but that did nothing to lessen its importance in his eyes. Although he did not like to admit it, the senior surgeon made him nerv
ous.
* * *
His friends’ good intentions managed to keep Justin out of trouble for three days. He occupied them with combing a few more kinks out of his cohort – in case anyone should feel himself privileged to comment on his commander’s marriage – and with finding a serving woman for Gwytha.
After talking to several prospects, he settled on Januaria, a round amiable woman with glass drops in her ears, who had been nurse to a family who had moved to a drier climate for the sake of the father’s health. As the last child had recently married, they had decided against taking Januaria with them. Bereft without something to mother, she took to Gwytha on sight and treated her with the same high-handed affection she had had for her former charges.
Gwytha balked at first, but succumbed rapidly to Januaria’s mother hen instincts. When she had pointed out testily that she had gotten along without a nursemaid since the slavers had come when she was ten, Januaria’s dark eyes had brimmed with tears and she had said, poor lamb, then it was high time she had someone to look after her. Gwytha gave up.
Finn’s affection had been instantly won by a largesse of bones, and his respect by a firm refusal to let him sleep on the furniture.
Januaria allowed Gwytha to do such housework as she considered proper for a lady, and the rest she did herself. When Gwytha went marketing, Januaria accompanied her, basket in hand, and using her wide person to clear a passage through the street.
Not for nothing had Januaria been nurse to a gentleman’s children, and anyone thinking to make remarks to Gwytha on the subject of her recent marriage would, upon taking one look at that imposing figure, have changed his mind. All in all, Justin thought that he was leaving his new household in good hands.
The Legions of the Mist Page 13
