The Warrior's Princess

by Barbara Erskine

  ‘But not that she could follow me to Rome?’

  Steph shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about the way ghosts work, Jess. Isn’t there a legend that they can’t cross water or something?’

  ‘Isn’t that witches? Besides, I suppose technically she didn’t follow me, I followed her.’

  ‘Then I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t want you to get frightened. And I don’t want to start wondering if you’ve become obsessed.’ Steph hesitated. ‘Dan talked about some Roman soldier who you believed was stalking you.’

  ‘That’s rubbish.’ Jess slid off the bed impatiently and went back to the window. ‘If anyone is stalking me it is Dan himself. I saw him in the garden down there just now before it got dark.’ She spun round to face Steph. ‘I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t believe me! Do you think I am hallucinating? Who knows, perhaps I am.’ She pushed her hair back off her face.

  ‘You are obviously very scared of him.’

  ‘And that of course makes me paranoid. So, I go round and round in circles. I can’t win.’

  ‘Daylight and sunshine will help, Jess. And tomorrow why don’t we all go out together. As long as you aren’t alone, if Dan is following you then there is nothing he can do, is there.’ Steph slid off the bed and stood up. ‘Let’s forget all this and go out on an excursion to the Villa Borghese or somewhere like that. Forget Dan.’

  Forget Eigon.

  Jess smiled wanly. ‘OK. I’d like that.’

  When Steph had gone she stood for a moment without moving, then she tiptoed towards the door and turned the lock. Seconds later she had closed the windows too and latched them securely. She drew the curtains across and went back towards the bed. It didn’t matter how hot it was, she wasn’t going to leave the windows open.

  Hours later she was still awake. At two thirty exactly someone had tapped on the window. When she climbed out of bed and went to peer between the shutters there was nothing there but her own reflection.

  14

  They spent the day at the villa touring the Galleria Borghese and strolling in the gardens and parks around it, picnicking on the dusty grass under a huge old evergreen oak and then lying back in the shade as the heat of the day overwhelmed them. Later they wandered back, Jess trailing further and further behind the others. It was here. She was sure it was somewhere here, the villa that had been home to Eigon. There was nothing to recognise. No landmarks that she could make out, nothing but an increasingly strong feeling that this area was where she had lived. She paused and gazed round yet again, feeling the warm breeze stirring her hair. It was uncomfortably humid, almost hard to breathe.

  ‘Eigon?’

  Was she here, among the trees? She turned round, pushing wisps of hair out of her eyes, scanning the parkland for signs of life. There was no one there. There had been a party of children behind them, winding their way noisily through the trees. They had gone. All she could hear was the soughing of the wind in the great pines nearby. Then even that had died away and she was surrounded by a suffocating silence.

  Julia!

  The voice came from faraway.

  Julia, where are you? Don’t hide!

  Jess stood still, trying to see where the voice had come from.

  Please don’t hide. I hate this game. Please, where are you!

  ‘Eigon?’ Jess called the name out loud.

  ‘Jess! Jess, what is it! What’s wrong?’ Suddenly Steph was beside her. She caught hold of Jess’s arm. ‘Jess, for goodness’ sake! Wake up!’ The voice in her ear was sharp.

  Jess stared at her sister for a moment, then she shook her head. ‘I’m not asleep,’ she said indignantly. ‘I thought I heard someone calling. Sorry. The heat is getting to me.’

  ‘Kim says there is somewhere nearby where we can get some gelati.’ Steph scanned Jess’s face. ‘You were calling Eigon.’

  Jess shook her head wearily. ‘I thought she was here. I thought maybe this is where the villa was. There is something about this place. It has an atmosphere.’

  Will and Kim had come to a standstill about fifty yards further on, in the shade of an old plane tree. They were looking back towards them, waiting.

  ‘Don’t tell them,’ Jess said. She glanced at Steph pleadingly. ‘They already think I’m mad.’

  ‘No, they don’t. We’ve all walked a bit too far, that’s all. We’ll get a taxi back once we’ve had a drink or an ice cream or something. Don’t worry, Jess.’ With a reassuring smile Steph turned and walked on towards the others. Jess glanced back over her shoulder. She could see the party of kids again now, hear them! They weren’t faraway at all. How could she have missed them?

  Pomponia Graecina’s niece, the lively, pretty, Pomponia Julia, had been one of Eigon’s first true companions and now she had come to live with them permanently. Her mother had died the previous winter and her other brothers and sisters being much older, Julia was bereft in her father’s austere household. The chance to come and live with her friend Eigon had filled her with joy. Cerys was not so pleased. Julia was a bad influence. A bright, beautiful, intelligent girl, she was also a natural rebel, the perfect foil to the serious, intense atmosphere in which Eigon lived as the only child of her parents and the only pupil of Melinus.

  He had established a strict routine, giving Eigon lessons every day, patiently repeating the information until she could say it back to him word perfect, never letting her write it down, training her memory ever more carefully and she absorbed every drop of wisdom he could impart. Her only other regular occupation was to play her lyre and to sing. She had a pure clear voice which soothed and delighted her father, and anyone else who happened to hear her, and she sang often, even when she walked alone in the gardens.

  It was there sometimes she heard her sister calling. The voice came from so faraway it was hardly audible. Glads was still playing on the mountain, still looking for her lost family, still waiting for them to return. Eigon tried so hard to reach her with her thoughts, to reassure her that she was not forgotten, but Glads never seemed to hear and Eigon grew more and more lonely for her. It was a loneliness she couldn’t share with her parents.

  Eigon’s father was increasingly ill. He had another violent recurrent fever that autumn which drained all his life force. Her mother stayed close to him and she and Melinus conferred with the Roman doctors to try and make him well so that he could go out and visit the Emperor who was asking for his attendance and growing impatient for a reward for the grand gesture of allowing them to live. From time to time Caradoc summoned the strength to come and sit in the gardens by the fountain. Sometimes he sat and listened to the water and the birds, and sometimes he called for music and Eigon would bring her lyre. Her mother had ensured that she had two or three friends and she would play and talk with Portia and Julia and Octavia, but most of all Eigon liked to give them the slip and wander alone around the formal square beds of the herb gardens with their carefully tended symmetry. They were like nothing she had ever seen at home; nature tamed and forced into straight lines. She would touch the little clipped plants and talk to them and commiserate at their imprisonment which she recognised perhaps at some level to be a reflection of her own. She grew to love those peaceful, healing beds of lavender and rosemary, but she was frustrated that she was never allowed out into the city. When the wind was in the right direction she could hear its howling and its rumbling from faraway, she could smell its stench and look down upon it from the cliffs beyond the walls at the end of the gardens, and she had to admit, it seemed a frightening place, but she was curious, oh so curious, about the outside world. She wanted to see what it was like.

  The lady Pomponia Graecina had asked if the girls could visit her there. Eigon’s mother refused. The others could go, but not her daughter. And Eigon knew why. The man who had raped them was out there in the city streets and the only way he could feel safe was to ensure that Eigon would never identify him. To do that he would have to kill her.

  It was
boring and Julia had a plan. ‘We’re going out! I’ve arranged it all. Flavius will meet us outside the gate with horses and he will come with us. Then we are going into the city!’

  Eigon shook her head. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ Julia seized her arm. ‘I don’t understand why you won’t go. I know your mother forbids it, but it is not the order of the Emperor. You are not a prisoner. You can go where you like! Come on, Eigon! There is so much to see down there. Your mother won’t know. We’ll be back before she misses you.’ That was a cruel jibe. Eigon knew her mother wouldn’t notice if she was out all day and probably all night too. Cerys had less and less time for her daughter, spending every minute with her ailing husband or with her dreams and memories of the distant past when she had three young children who scrambled and laughed and played among her skirts. Julia caught Eigon’s hand. ‘If you won’t come, I shall go without you!’

  ‘You can’t. It wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘Of course it would be safe. I go to the market all the time. As long as there are slaves with us we’ll be all right. Don’t tell Melinus. He makes you so dull. You work too much with him.’ Julia’s own studies had been sketchy. She had a good memory and loved stories and poems, often attending Eigon’s lessons, but when the subjects became hard and serious she would creep away. She did not enjoy talking about astronomy and history and law and the proper rituals for the worship of the gods. She did not want to learn basic medicinal techniques and the properties of herbs. Flowers were for smelling; the stars were for gazing at and one day soon, she hoped, for kissing under. She was young and she was healthy. And she had found someone to flirt with, Flavius, the son of the house steward, Aelius. Besides, she was a little afraid of Melinus. He might dress no differently from the house servants, but he exuded a sense of power and authority which intimidated her; she sensed his disapproval of her frivolity and was in no doubt as to what he would think about their excursion. ‘Come on! Just for a few hours. We’ll be perfectly all right. I promise.’

  Eigon shook her head. ‘I’ve told you. I can’t.’

  ‘Can’t, or won’t.’ Julia narrowed her cornflower-blue eyes sharply. ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ It was more than three years since they had arrived in Rome. It might as well have been thirty. The events which had led to her mother’s warnings had happened long ago and they were buried so deep they never emerged now even in her nightmares. Eigon gave in.

  The next day, swathed in cloaks they crept towards the villa gate as soon as Eigon’s lessons for the day were finished. The guards had been bribed to keep silent. With a wink they stood back from the gates and turned to study the skies with interest while the two girls ran, smothering their giggles, to where the handsome young Flavius and two slaves were waiting with horses in the thick shelter of a clump of evergreen oaks.

  It was a long time since Eigon had sat on a horse, but riding was not something one forgot. She settled into the Roman saddle with ease and almost at once her sense of guilt and terror at defying her mother was replaced by exhilaration and excitement. If she felt excluded almost at once by the attention that Flavius and Julia paid each other she didn’t notice. There was too much to see. The track through the woods gave way almost at once to a paved road which ran downhill straight as a die through the gates of the city. The road was busy, with wagons and riders, carts full of produce from market gardens, travellers on foot and once or twice a litter carried by slaves, its windows curtained against the dust. They left their horses at an inn a short way inside the city gates and ventured towards the market on foot.

  Julia clutched Eigon’s hand with a giggle. ‘See! Isn’t it exciting. Did you bring money?’

  Eigon shook her head. She had no money.

  ‘Never mind. I shall lend you some. Come and see. There is a goldsmith near here where my aunt goes. He makes the most beautiful things.’

  The streets were narrow and between the high buildings, deafening. They echoed with the shouts of vendors, the echoes of a thousand conversations all carried out at full volume accompanied by laughter, barking dogs, the rattle of wheeled barrows pushed over the cobbles. Eigon clutched Julia’s hand more tightly. It was overwhelming. As were the smells. Some good. Some bad. Their arrival at the small doorway which led into a narrow inner courtyard in a street of jewellery makers and goldsmiths was a huge relief. The slaves, Dimitrius and Volpius, sat down on a bench there as Flavius led the two girls in through the door to the house at the back where the goldsmith plied his trade. He glanced up as they entered and obviously recognised Julia at once. ‘So, is the lady Pomponia Graecina with you, child?’

  Julia shook her head. The hood of her cloak fell back, exposing her black curls tied with a scarlet ribbon. ‘I have brought my friend, Eigon. I want her to choose something pretty. Then we will put it on my aunt’s account.’

  The goldsmith studied her face. He was a short stout man of middle years with deeply wrinkled skin and merry brown eyes which read the girl’s innocent expression with ease. ‘So, does the lady Pomponia Graecina know she is going to present this young lady with a gift?’

  Julia tried to look worldly and failed miserably. ‘No. Not really. But she won’t mind.’

  ‘How can I be sure she won’t mind?’

  ‘Oh please,’ Eigon interrupted, embarrassed. ‘I don’t want anything. I should just like to look.’ Her eyes had already strayed to the tray of brooches and rings on a table nearby. Behind the counter which divided the room the goldsmith’s assistant was working with a range of hammers, punches and chisels, concentrating on his work without looking up. Small crucibles, tweezers, snippets of silver wire lay around him on the bench.

  The goldsmith smiled at his customers, raising an eyebrow at Flavius who was hanging back in the doorway. ‘And this young man once again comes as your escort. So, young sir, have you saved enough to buy your young lady a gift?’

  Flavius blushed scarlet. ‘Not yet, sir,’ he mumbled. He turned his back on them uncomfortably, staring out into the courtyard. Dimitrius and Volpius had settled at a table where a duodecim scripta board with its counters and dice had been left out for the amusement of people waiting; engrossed in the game, husbands and lovers would be less likely to try and hurry their ladies away from the choice of luxuries inside the workshop. Flavius sat down with them and in a few moments had forgotten the girls completely.

  Eigon glanced at Julia who seemed unconcerned at Flavius’s discomfort. ‘It’s not fair to tease him like that,’ she whispered. ‘You shouldn’t bring him here.’ She could feel the boy’s embarrassment as a physical pain. She smiled ruefully at the goldsmith. ‘I am sorry we have come without intending to buy anything,’ she said gently. ‘Julia was so keen to show me the beauty of your pieces she didn’t realise that it’s important for you to sell them. We’re wasting your time.’

  The goldsmith frowned. He studied her face closely. His customers were not normally the least bit interested in whether or not his time was being wasted or indeed whether or not they could afford his wares. He smiled at her encouragingly. ‘I should enjoy showing you some of the things if you would like to see them, young lady,’ he said gallantly. ‘Sometimes it is enough to have one’s handiwork admired by someone with a good eye and I sense you have an eye for beauty.’ He called into the back of the house and a slave brought them a tray with a jug of pomegranate juice. ‘I have here a selection of designs borrowed from the tradition of the Gauls.’ He had spotted her Celtic cloak pin and noted the red glints in her dark hair, her fair colouring. Pomponia Graecina was noted for her love of the jewellery she had collected when her husband was governor of the distant province of Britannia; perhaps this child or her parents were also part of the lady Pomponia’s collection of foreign memorabilia. ‘See.’ He turned into the body of the workshop and selected a few items from a row of caskets on one of the shelves. ‘The craftsmen of the Celtic peoples are better than anything we can do here, but I have offered them homag
e with my attempts to reproduce their style.’ There were rings and brooches on the small wooden tray. Swirling, glorious shapes incorporating here and there the animal heads and whirling wings and elegant limbs that characterised the style. Eigon gave a small smile. ‘They are lovely.’ She picked up a small silver ring and held it up.

  ‘Put it on.’ Julia watched her with a grin. Then she snatched something else out of the tray. ‘No, try this, it’s gold and much prettier.’

  Eigon glanced at their host and saw he was still watching. He smiled understandingly as she shook her head. ‘It is beautiful.’ She couldn’t keep the longing out of her voice. ‘But too rich an ornament for me.’

  Julia exclaimed crossly. ‘Eigon! You are a king’s daughter! What could be too rich for you?’

  ‘Ah, I think I have guessed who you are, young lady. The daughter of the famous Caratacus!’ The goldsmith nodded. ‘I was there, in the crowd, the day the Emperor gave your father his freedom.’

  Eigon put down the ring. ‘We are still prisoners in all but name.’ She gave the man a thin smile. He had reminded her of a day she would rather forget. ‘My father is too sick to leave the house. My mother cannot leave his side. And I am being reared as a daughter of Rome. That is not freedom.’ She turned towards the door. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, but we have to go back before I am missed.’

  ‘Eigon!’ Julia stared after her crossly as she went out into the courtyard. The three men scrambled to their feet as she stepped out into the sunlight. ‘Eigon, wait! There is no hurry! Your mother won’t know you have gone even if we stay out all afternoon.’ But it was too late. Eigon was already heading through the gateway and out into the street.

  Julia glanced back at the goldsmith. ‘I am sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.’

  He laughed. ‘She has pride, Pomponia Julia. That is what is wrong. And maybe it is not so wrong at all.’ With a sigh he turned back into his workshop. An idea had just occurred to him.