Barbarian Princess
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: The Trader
I Freita
II The Shadow with the Knife
III Flavius
IV The Face in the Mirror
V Carn Goch
VI Aftermath
VII Festival at Veii
VIII Aquae Sulis
IX Lies and Bargains
X Ygerna
XI Moonshine
XII Thaw
XIII The Sidhe of Ty Isaf
XIV The Sidhe of Llanmelin
XV Dinas Tomen
XVI Idyll
XVII Bendigeid
XVIII A Kindness Done to Lovers
XIX “…And Roll in Me Arms”
XX Pompeii
XXI A Mountain of Fire
XXII The Samhain
Cast of Characters
Glossary
The Centurions Series
Copyright
Barbarian Princess
Damion Hunter
For Jack and Irene
Prologue: The Trader
“You may be telling Bendigeid your kinsman that he will have our answer by Lughnasadh.” The brawny fair man with the gold torque of a chieftain leaned comfortably in the next to the last gate of the great fortress of Bryn Epona. He had a fall of tawny hair like a lion, and the trader eyed him warily.
“Bendigeid is no kin to me,” the trader said, pulling tight the packsaddle straps. “We’re traders, not tribe folk.” He kneed the pony sharply in the ribs, and it blew out its breath with a surprised look. “I’m away north to Brigante country,” he added, as if to disclaim all connection with the subject of the conversation.
“You’re dark enough for a Silure,” the fair man said, studying the trader’s brown eyes and cropped brown hair. “Or maybe it was a Roman lord who stepped in sideways.” He grinned at the other man.
The trader finished with the pony and grinned back at him, laughing this time, his teeth white against the dark mustache. “Many men would be surprised if their mothers told the truth, Cadal the King. But my father was a dark man before me, and my mother not such a one as men take a risk for. Most likely you’re right, and we were Silures’ kin in the early days.”
“It is only the possibility that you aren’t that made me let you through the gates of Bryn Epona,” Cadal said. It was a joke, but there was a sharp edge to it that was plain enough to the other man.
The trader raised a pair of sharp-angled brows in obvious skepticism. “And you hope to make alliance on a hatred like that?”
“Not alliance, no.” Cadal, king of the Ordovices, looked down at the man with the pack ponies. Even lounging against the gatepost of his fortress, he could look down on him, and the trader was not a short man. “Not alliance, only a war. A good war, to take gold and Roman heads. Afterward, the Silures may look to their own as usual.”
Gold and Roman heads. Enough to bring Cadal and Bendigeid of the Silures together for one bloody season, the trader thought. A hunting party was coming down the chariot track from the top of Bryn Epona – three chariots with warriors and drivers, a pack of great gray hounds loping beside them, and a little dark man who wore an iron slave collar and ran like a hound among the rest. The trader stepped back out of their way and came face to face with the skull, sightless and grinning evilly, that was set into the gatepost. There was a second on the far post above Cadal’s shoulder, and more set in and about every gate and doorway in Bryn Epona. A man’s soul was in his head, and a strong man’s soul made strong magic. No way to end, the trader thought, guarding Cadal’s doorpost.
“Why are you so interested in this matter between me and Bendigeid of the Silures?” Cadal’s voice cut sharply across the drumming hoofbeats as the chariots passed through and careened down the track to the lowest gateway in Bryn Epona’s seven concentric walls. He raised a hand in salute, as one of his warriors turned and made some sign at the gate, and then fixed his eyes hard on the trader. Blue eyes, friendly enough, but with a touch of ice at the base.
“I’m not particularly interested,” the trader said frankly, “but that is not always a wise admission to make to a king about to take a war trail.”
Cadal’s blue eyes looked amused, and he toyed with the heavy gold-and-red enamel bracelet that he wore high up on his arm, turning it round and round with one massive hand. “So it is all one to you, this making of wars?”
“Unless I happen to be caught in the middle when it starts,” the trader said. “Whoever wins, they will still need to buy, and I will still have goods to sell. I told you, we are not tribe folk, my family. I would not like Rome to win, though,” he added thoughtfully. “They buy readily enough but are less inclined toward the paying for it.”
Cadal gave a sharp bark of amusement. “Then look you that you do not be selling the Roman kind anything you should not.” The word “information” was unspoken but hung plainly in the air. The trader gave a visible shudder and a rueful smile to Cadal as he swung into the saddle of the lead pony. “Cadal the King may be assured that the arm of Cadal the King is far too long for anyone but a fool to do that. I am no fool. The god’s greeting to you, Cadal of the Ordovices. May the sun and the moon shine always on your path, and the winds of change blow softly about your doors.”
Cadal brushed a hand across his tawny mustache, hiding a smile. “Somehow I never thought you were a fool, Rhys. But if I were you, and not going back to Bendigeid, I should ride hard for Brigante country and stay there the season.”
The trader nodded and lifted a hand in farewell. He brought it down hard on the pony’s rump behind the bedding that was lashed to the saddle back, and the three animals moved out at a steady trot down the banked chariot track to the foot of Bryn Epona. At the gate he drew rein and looked back to see Cadal still leaning in the next to the last gateway, his red and blue woolen cloak making a bright splotch of color against the mud and timber wall, while the gate’s guardian grinned bonily down from beside Cadal’s left ear.
The trader passed out through the last gate, trailing the two pack ponies, and swung northeastward on the old trackway that led to the lowlands of the Seteia Estuary and then, up across the heights of the spine of Britain, the Brigantian Hills. He would double back later, when he had put enough distance between himself and Bryn Epona.
The morning was getting warm, and the red and white pack pony behind him shook its head to drive away a cloud of midges. The trader loosed the pin that held his cloak of heavy, brown-and-black checkered woolen and turned in the saddle to tie it on the bedding behind him. It smelled warmly and steamily of horse, and he wrinkled his nose as he pushed its folds into a manageable roll. He had just pulled the last knot tight when his eye caught a flicker of movement – just the faintest shape, like a shadow – in the trees behind him, where the little river valley that the track’s path followed sloped upward to a small wood that was strung along a rolling hillcrest. A hawk’s wings flickered across his peripheral vision, and he turned his head to follow its lazy swoops above the hillside, but it had not been a hawk he had seen. He swung his eyes back and it came again, the faintest hint of movement under the trees. He caught a flash of pale skin and a glint of light from something at chest height.
He narrowed his eyes, and the shape in the trees froze.
There was a rattle of pebbles and a furious voice, and a chariot came careening down the slope on the other side of the little stream-bed.
“Rhys!”
The trader swung around in the saddle and looked across the stream. Three of Cadal’s warriors and their chariot drivers were splashing across the ford with their hound
s beside them. He recognized the hunting party that had passed him in the gateway of Bryn Epona and slipped his left hand quietly onto the knife hilt that was stuck through his belt.
The lead man, a red-haired warrior with a gold torque and arm rings and the look of a man in a rising fury, scanned the valley and the dark-wooded hills that circled it, as his driver reined in the horses beside the trader’s pack train.
“Good hunting to you, lord,” the trader said politely.
“We’re hunting that damned slinking ferret of a tracker, that’s what we’re hunting!” the red-haired man said angrily, and the trader realized that the little dark man with the iron collar was no longer among the hounds. The hounds themselves sat back on their haunches, tongues lolling, while the red-haired man cursed them.
“He shouldn’t be hard to run down, not with dogs,” the trader said, thinking with a certain amount of sympathy of the frozen shadow in the woods behind him.
“They won’t take the scent,” another warrior said.
“He’s magicked them,” said his driver, a blond boy of somewhere near fifteen. “Sidhe magic,” he added, and made the Sign of Horns nervously. The gesture was repeated by the others.
“What’s he done?” the trader asked. It must have been something grave to make a slave risk running.
“Nothing!” the red-haired man exploded. His name was Amren, the trader remembered. “Nothing to be beaten for, unless we haven’t found it out yet. He just dived into a patch of scrub on a trail and never came out, and he’ll be lucky to live through the beating I’m going to give him now!”
“Let him go, Amren,” the warrior in the third chariot said lazily, “before you choke on your own bile. He’ll be back when he’s hungry, or else the wolves’ll get him. What difference does it make, one more or less of the little dark ones?”
“He’ll go to ground in some sidhe with his own kind,” Amren spat, “and they’ll begin to think they’re lords in the land again, and we’ll be too busy chasing runaway slaves to turn around twice. Besides, I want to beat some obedience into him. Rhys, have you seen that ferret?”
The trader shrugged. “If you cannot track him with dogs, lord, is it likely he’d let me catch wind of him?”
“I suppose not,” Amren growled. His red hair was tied back with thongs for hunting, and a pair of light throwing spears and a heavy boar spear were lashed to the side of the wicker chariot. He was plainly a man who had been balked of both his property and his intended day’s sport. He muttered something to the young driver beside him, a younger brother by the looks of him, and the three chariots swung around and fanned out down the riverbank in the direction of Bryn Epona, the hounds coursing back and forth along the reeds and gravel at the water’s edge, their faces puzzled and unsure.
The dark-haired trader watched them go with a shiver of sympathy for the hunted thing in the woods behind him. If he wanted to stir up an unhealthy interest in himself among Cadal’s warriors, he couldn’t think of a better way than to hide one of Cadal’s runaway slaves; but that iron collar hit closer to home than he liked to admit. He shrugged and put his heel to the pony’s flank. The dark man would make his own way now – or not. But Rhys the trader would have no slave’s death on his conscience to wake him in the night.
He moved on, leading the two pack ponies, still northeastward. Cadal’s land was wild and ragged, a swift up-rush of cliff or a sharp fall of rocky stream bed hurling itself away downhill to join yet another stream and then another larger one until, in the end, it emptied into the Deva or the Seteia, or the Sabrina far to the north. A land of rivers, this, and wild peaks, where a tribal lord could dig in and spit in Rome’s eye. For a while, at least.
The dun pony he was riding threw up its head with a snort and stopped so suddenly that the trader nearly banged his jaw on the pony’s head. He swore and looked to see what had startled it.
“Here now, where did you spring from?”
The little dark man regarded him solemnly. He had, so far as the trader could tell, come up from the ground like a mushroom. Certainly he had been all but invisible until he had popped up under the pony’s nose.
“I came to tell the trader lord that I am grateful he did not speak of me to the red-haired one.” The little man’s voice was curiously accented and almost singsong, as if this might not be his native speech. “There is a life between me and the trader lord now.”
“Yes, well, you’d better lie low or you won’t live to enjoy it,” the trader said. “I wasn’t sure you knew I’d spotted you.”
“Oh, yes, I knew. I have been too long among the Golden People. Otherwise you would not have found me. Unless you have the Sight. They did not see me,” he added proudly.
The trader studied the little man’s face. He was small, no more than up to the trader’s chest, and naked except for a kilt of wolf skin and the heavy iron collar that ringed his throat. His eyes also were dark, and he had pulled his dark hair loose from its braids to hang down his back. He was marked on his arms and forehead with faint blue patterns, loops and spirals tattooed into the skin and faded to a soft color, wild and strangely beautiful. An odd, but not unpleasant, odor clung about him, and the trader suspected that it was the substance used to mask his scent.
“Where will you go now?”
“Back to my own kind,” the little man said.
“Your own kind?”
There was the flash of a smile, like the flicker of a bird’s wing. “We were here before the Golden People. We will be here when they and the Roman kind together have gone West-Over-Seas. I will find my folk easily enough.”
“Find them – how long has it been?”
“Ten winters,” the dark man said. “Maybe one more or less.”
“Now look here, this is ridiculous. You would have been a child ten winters ago. You won’t even know where to look.”
There was that flickering smile again, a little shiver of amusement. “I don’t know where to look, but I know how to look; they’ll find me. I will have to wait while they take this collar off anyway,” he added. “Iron is a Wrong Thing. I couldn’t go in a sidhe-house with it.” He sighed resignedly. “I expect it will take a long magic to get clean.”
“Are your own folk from these hills?” The trader seemed to be worried, despite the little man’s assurances.
“Oh, no, mine are away to the south above Coed-y-Caerau, where the Romans are building their fort. But there are a sidhe-people in Cadal’s hills, although they keep out of sight of Cadal’s men.”
“Why did you run, after all these years?”
“Why does the gray goose go south? I don’t know why I ran, lord. Only that I woke this morning and this collar weighed more than yesterday, and I knew that tomorrow its weight would be greater still. It was time.” He went down on one knee and put both palms to his forehead. “There is the price of a life between us.” He looked up. “If you have need of me, any of my folk will find me for you. My name is Nighthawk in my own tongue. If Rhys the trader will ask for me by that, he will find me. Can you whistle?”
“Can I what?”
“Can you whistle?”
The trader looked amused. “Yes, I can whistle.”
The little man made a short trilling sound that was almost a bird but not quite. He repeated it over several times and looked at the trader expectantly.
The trader mimicked him, and the dark man nodded. “Whistle that call near an oak grove, and one of my folk will come for you.”
The trader crossed his arms on the saddle horns and leaned down. “Are you so numerous in the land then? Or will I be waiting for a week or so until one passes by?”
“It may be that you will wait a while,” Nighthawk said. “But they will come.” He looked up at the trader. “Remember the call, lord. We are very few compared to the lords of the Golden People, but we are the adder in the grass, my people and I. You may want one by and by.” He ducked under the pony’s nose and trotted across the clearing, his bare feet soundless
in the grass, and vanished entirely into the shadowed edge of the trees. Not even the iron collar winked back from the stillness.
In the morning the trader turned south, down the winding valley of the Sabrina to the fortress the Roman legions were raising on their hard-won toehold at the foot of Bendigeid’s hills.
I Freita
The bugler outside the leather walls of the tent was putting his all into “Wake Up,” and the man inside on the camp bed groaned and pulled the blankets over his ears. He had come back to camp only four hours before, and four hours is just long enough for the drugged sleep of exhaustion to make waking almost impossible.
As the last strident note died away in the cold air, he drifted up reluctantly from the depths of sleep to shrug back the covers and to feel on the foot of the bed for the tunic that should be there. His hand came up instead with a filthy shirt and breeches, and he sighed and put them down again, rising to rummage in the clothes chest for his tunic. As he pulled it over his head, he caught his reflection in the mirror propped against the tent wall on top of a second, higher, chest.
He stared balefully at the face in the mirror, leaning his hands on the chest, which rocked on the uneven dirt floor. When it rained, as it did at every opportunity in Britain, even in summer, little rivulets formed and flowed through the tent, bearing twigs and drowning insects on the tide. Isca Silurum was a half-built fort, and the half yet to come included the barracks rows.
A dark-eyed Briton with a sharp-angled face peered back at him from the mirror, behind the luxuriant growth of a brown mustache that got in his food and made him feel as if something had landed on his face. His brown hair was too long and had last been cut with a dagger blade. Somewhere in this Briton was Correus Appius Julianus, cohort centurion of the Ninth Cohort of the Second Legion Augusta, currently on the emperor’s service in Britain, but he was hard to find. Hard enough that the gate sentries the night before had wanted to toss him into the guardhouse until the legionary legate should rise and deal with him in the morning. Only a grasp of Latin profanity that no Briton could have matched and the recognition of Centurion Vindex, whose cohort had sentry watch that night, had saved him from the fate.
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