Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  Flavius awoke, for the seventh or eighth time – he had lost count – and shifted his weight to ease the screaming pain in his back. His hands were still tied behind him around the post, which seemed to be the central support of a round, mud-walled hut, and he could lie down only by arching his back around the base of the post. It bit into his lower spine until an hour’s sleep in that position was enough to wake him screaming. He was dimly aware of lying in his own filth, but the shame of that had long since passed. He struggled to a sitting position. In another hour or so the pain of that also would become unbearable, and he would lie down again. If the Britons hadn’t come back.

  Flavius forced himself to open his eyes and look round the mud walls, tracing each crack from end to end and counting the stars that could be seen through the half circle that was all his view allowed of the smoke hole in the roof. It was an exercise he had devised to fight down fear and pain and the gnawing hunger in his belly. They had fed him only enough to keep him alive, and he had vomited up most of that when the questioning began. His face was streaked with blood, and there was blood on his undertunic, which was the only garment they had left him. They had not done anything to permanently disable him – perhaps they would trade him back to the governor in the end – but the memory of pain almost beyond bearing rose in his mind, and his stomach heaved. He knew that if he looked at his left hand, he would see only four fingers on it.

  Almost beyond bearing, he thought dully. The Britons had given him that much – the measure of his own courage, and it had proved greater than he had thought. He would have liked to have told his father that… The room began to blur, and Flavius tried to force the mists from his mind. The time for comfort found in oblivion had passed. Almost beyond bearing… the key was in those words. Every man had a brink beyond which he could not go, he thought. His had proved to be a greater distance than he had thought, but he would come to it eventually. Eventually he would go mad, and his mind would no longer control his tongue, and when the Britons came with their knives he would tell them what they asked.

  They would be back soon… He tried to think how long it had been since they had gone but could remember only their faces, dark faces with wild patterns pricked into the skin and rubbed with some blue dye… One with a wolf-skin cloak and a gold torque around his throat had stood silent, unmoving, leaning on a spear, while the others… It had been daylight then, he thought. They had made a fire and held his hand in it to cauterize the wound when they had cut his finger off. They didn’t want him to bleed to death. The fire was still burning.

  He wasn’t even sure what tribe they were. Demetae, perhaps. There had been another man, outside the hut, loudly demanding entrance, and the chieftain had pulled the door flap down in his face. From something he had said, he might have been Silure. Flavius spoke some British, learned as his brother’s had been, from his father’s horse master, but he had never had Correus’s easy tongue with a new language. In any case, it didn’t matter now… not whether the man at the door had been Silure, or why the chieftain had shut it in his face. The enemy now was himself, and time, and there was only one weapon against that. He could stand anything one more time, if he knew it would be the last.

  The door flap was pulled back, and the Britons stepped through, grinning like foxes. Flavius saw them only as dim outlines in the fire and smoke. It was the knife blade that glowed as clear and certain as an open doorway.

  * * *

  The man came out of the shadows almost at the tribesman’s feet, and the Briton swung round with a leveled spear.

  “Friend! Friend!” the other man said hastily. His hooded cloak was drawn around his face, and the man with the spear stepped closer.

  “No one’s allowed out after nightfall. Where did you spring from?”

  “And no one drives a chariot with one damn horse,” the hooded man said irritably. “I thought he’d come in with the rest, but he’s gone missing again somehow.”

  “Then you had best know the watchword,” the spearman said. “Give it quick.”

  “No one gave it to me,” said the man who was looking for his horse. “How was I to know? How many more of you are there out here, anyway? You’re lucky I didn’t knife you, springing up in the dark like that!” Where was Cornelius? The man in the hood forced himself not to look over the spearman’s shoulder.

  “Four,” the spearman said, and then tried to bite back the word. His eyes narrowed. “I don’t know you. Get that hood off quick!”

  The other man raised his hands slowly to his face. The sentry would give the alarm in a moment, and his knife was still in his belt. “And why should you know me?” he inquired sarcastically. “Are you knowing every face in the—”

  A shadow moved behind the sentry, and the man’s eyes flew open wide. He sank to the grass with a moan, and the hooded man dived and drew his knife across his throat.

  “Drag him under a bush.” Correus let out a long breath and wiped his knife in the wet grass. “Where in Typhon were you? He was ready to yell and raise the whole hive of them.”

  Cornelius knelt and cleaned his own knife. “I met another of them.”

  “Mithras. Did you—”

  “Yes, but he almost had me. He knew I was a wrong ’un right off. I told you I couldn’t talk the language.”

  “I didn’t expect you to have to,” Correus said, getting his breath back. “It’s your knife I need.” There were rumors about Cornelius, including the unlikely one that held that he had been a professional assassin before he had signed on with the legion one jump ahead of a death sentence. But he was undeniably good with a knife.

  “This ’un said four more, the poor fool.” Cornelius gave a glance of vague pity at the body that he had rolled into the shadow of a hawthorn bush. “D’you suppose it was truth, sir?”

  “I think so,” Correus said. “We’ve been the whole length this side. Two for the main gate, and one each at the posterns. Plenty to raise the alarm if they spot a force moving in. They won’t be expecting us, not this way.” He gave Cornelius a twisted smile. “It isn’t Roman.”

  “Fools, then,” Cornelius said again. “Anything’s Roman that wins a war.”

  “All right then. Bring them up.” He squatted in the hawthorn’s shadow until he heard a whisper of sound go by and saw moving shadows fan themselves out and drop down just below the ridge crest. Where the dry stone wall crossed flat ground at the top it was greatly thickened, and a strong timber gate was set between the stones. It would have to be unbarred somehow. He looked up to find Cornelius standing beside him again. Three legionaries in dulled armor with blackened legs and faces waited behind him. Two carried unlit torches in their hands, and the third, a shielded pot of coals.

  Correus nodded, and they followed him wordlessly up the last sloping ground to the wall. The scrub here had been cleared, and they paused at its edge for a moment, then took the distance at a run, flinging themselves flat against the rough stone. They ought to have ditched it, he found himself thinking. A single wall’s no defense. The gods be thanked they hadn’t.

  He stuck the torches through his belt and began to feel for a toehold in the stone as Cornelius tied the pot into a sling with his cloak and hung it across his chest. The wall was high but not as smooth-faced as it should have been, and Correus clung to the outer face at the top long enough to put his head up with caution. He had been right. One of the two rectangular buildings that Carn Goch enclosed was below him, with a few feet of empty space behind it. He pulled himself to the top and rolled quickly to the wall’s edge and dropped. A moment later Cornelius came down beside him. He took the pot from his cloak and set it on the ground with relief.

  “Bastard’s hot.”

  Correus jerked with his hand for silence and stood with his ear to the timber wall beside him. The faint sound of shifting hooves and the snort of a pony came through it. The door would be on the other side. Beyond this building was a second, but judging by the number of open fires they had seen from the wall
, most of the men in Carn Goch were sleeping in the open. It was not a settlement meant to live in, but a holding pen for cattle, women and children, and household goods, while their warriors met the enemy in the open. Between times, only a handful would live here, most likely in the third building that Carn Goch afforded – a circular hut, which was the usual form of dwelling in these hills. For now it would house the chieftain perhaps, or… There had been no sign of movement to be seen from the walls among the fires of Cara Goch, but Correus had seen the door flap of the hut swing open. He slipped to the end of the ponies’ shed, with Cornelius padding silently behind him.

  “How’re you gonna find him in all o’ this?” Cornelius Whispered.

  “I think I know,” Correus said. “Sit tight, and keep that light under your cloak.” He stepped from the shadow of the shed and strolled as if on some errand in the direction of the hut, while Cornelius watched him admiringly. He could generally tell a man who’d been drilled – it got into his walk and his backbone and stuck there like a signboard, but the commander seemed to be able to slip it off with his uniform. A talent, that.

  Correus moved quickly with the hood across his face, all too aware that by torchlight he would be marked for a spy. The Demetae warriors would be tattooed as the assassin at Isca had been. Rhys the trader of course belonged to no tribe, and his bare face had not been questioned, but Rhys had no more business in Cara Goch by night than Centurion Julianus.

  Most of the men were asleep by their fires, rolled in cloaks, but a few sat wakefully talking, and one was throwing knucklebones with himself, left hand against the right, by a fire that burned directly in Correus’s path. Somewhere across the open ground another man was singing, and Correus shifted his path out of the way of the fire, as if making for that camp. There were always wakeful souls to gather when a harper began to sing, and the man with the knucklebones didn’t bother to look up as he passed. There were no fires near the hut, and Correus was grateful for the darkness. There were clouds in the night sky, and if one would obligingly run itself across the moon, he could get closer.

  And then, across the harper’s lifted voice and the growing murmur of talk inside the hut, there was a scream: a harsh, tearing sound like an animal in a trap that went on and on. And no one moved. The man with the knucklebones looked up briefly and shrugged his shoulders, and even the harper didn’t pause in his music. Only in the second building, beyond the pony shed, did someone flinch and try to shut out the sound, but she was a child and her terrors unimportant.

  In the darkness outside the hut Correus, sick to his stomach, turned and moved blindly back the way he had come. At the pony shed he found Cornelius waiting for him, his face green in the moonlight.

  “Was that—?”

  Correus nodded. He picked up a torch and jammed it into the coals. It flared into sudden light, and he threw it viciously onto the thatched roof of the pony shed. “Come on!”

  * * *

  The hall beyond the pony shed was of the same open rectangular construction, meant to pen cattle or store goods or give temporary shelter in foul weather. Now it housed the chieftain of the Demetae and his three sons and the scarred, gray-haired man who was envoy from the Silures. The chieftain had gone to put the Roman to the question again, and his sons, finding the envoy in foul temper, had prudently withdrawn as well.

  At one end the chieftain’s ponies were penned, with his silver-mounted chariot and a haphazard stock of grain sacks and such goods as Llywarch had had time to snatch up from the guest hall at Dun Mori when the Romans came. Now he sat glaring at his surroundings at the other end, while the girl lay huddled in a cloak on a bed of straw beside him. She had begun to whimper in terror when the screams began again, but she was of little matter to anyone, save for her actual physical presence, and neither the chieftain’s sons nor her kinsman had seen fit to offer comfort. Now she lay still, her mouth compressed tightly, and her cloak pulled about her ears.

  The horrible screams went on and on, and Ygerna wriggled deeper into the cloak. It was no good asking Llywarch what it was; she knew that well enough: They were torturing the Roman they had caught, whom Gruffyd of the Demetae thought knew something important, and Llywarch was in a temper already because they wouldn’t allow him entrance. Maybe he would be angry enough to take her away again. Ygerna had been promised to so many men before, beginning when she was not yet old enough to marry, that she was almost used to it. This time it was Gruffyd’s eldest son, a boy some three years older than she was who accorded her less interest than he would a hound puppy. But this time she was thirteen, and it might actually happen.

  The screaming stopped, and she raised her head a little. She was hungry, but no one had thought to bring her any food since that morning, with the confusion of trying to house a whole war band in a holding meant only to pen cattle, and Llywarch either quarreling with Gruffyd or prowling about Carn Goch on some quest of his own when Gruffyd’s back was turned. The screams did not start again, and she sat up and brushed the straw from her hair. There was a low rumble of voices from outside. Maybe Gruffyd was coming back and would bring food. The rumble turned to shouts, and then a more terrifying sound – the faint crackle of fire.

  “Llywarch!” She grabbed his arm and screamed. Above them the roof thatch was in flames.

  * * *

  The pony shed was blazing like a beacon, and the second building was halfway alight.

  “The gate!” Correus shouted, and Cornelius threw down his torch and ran. Correus wrenched at the doors of the pony shed as the screams of horses rose from inside. The burning thatch was beginning to drop down onto the straw on the floor, and Correus pulled his knife and began to cut the ropes that penned the ponies in at one end. There were men beside him now, doing the same, and he hastily wiped a sooty hand across his face. How long, he wondered, until they realized the fire was torch-set?

  A pony screamed and reared, and Correus brought his hand down hard on its rump so that it plunged past him into the men coming in behind. He flattened himself against the wall as more animals went by him, kicking and biting each other in their fear. A piece of burning thatch dropped down and set one pony’s tail alight, and it reared in terror and trampled a man beneath it.

  At the opposite end of the shed they were trying to drag the chariots free. Correus caught up a piece of blazing board and waved it above his head. The ponies poured through the doorway into the open, and Correus flung the board among the chariot wheels. Their wicker cars would burn like tinder once they caught.

  Outside he could hear the sounds of chaos – the screams of men and horses and a sharp cry of warning as the roof began to come down. And beyond that the clear note of a bugle call.

  The chariots were ablaze now, and the men in the pony shed began to fight their way through the smoke as the building went up around them. It burned like a bonfire, and the nightmare smell of singed flesh hung in the air. Correus flung another brand among the chariots for good measure, and someone caught him by the shoulder and spun him around. Correus drew his knife as he turned and drove it into the man’s breast. He fell forward into the chariots, and the roofbeam came down on top of him. Correus dived through the inferno that masked the door and rolled as he hit the ground outside, smothering the flames in the dirt. To his left the second shed was going up.

  “Romans!” someone shouted, and he pulled himself up and ran.

  The main gates of Carn Goch stood open, and half the Roman soldiers were stampeding ponies through the gap, while the rest fought their way forward toward the fires. Cattle had broken loose from somewhere. They ran lowing and wild-eyed through the camps, and the soldiers began stampeding them, too. The Britons were trying to fight back, but most of them had been asleep when the fires broke out and didn’t know who or what they were fighting.

  Correus saw Aquila at the head of his men, looking like something out of the fire himself with his blackened face and armor, and plunged toward him screaming “Roma!” as he went.

 
Aquila saw him and a bugle call sang out, and the third century came up around him. He saw that Cornelius was with them, his cloak pulled well back from his face so he wouldn’t get killed by his own side.

  “The hut!” Correus screamed, and they turned and ran for it. The sky was aglow, and the Britons had given up trying to put out the fires in the sheds. There was no water source in Carn Goch, and what they stored in barrels wouldn’t have bought so much as a break in the flames. They left it to burn itself out and turned on the invaders.

  Aquila’s men ringed the hut, and Correus dived through the door flap with Aquila behind him. Gruffyd and his warriors were gone, out somewhere fighting the Romans or the fire, and Flavius was alone, a contorted figure chained at the waist to the central post of the hut. There was a lit fire in the hearth, and by its light and the orange glow from the doorway Correus could see why they had not bothered to tie his hands again. The fourth finger was missing from each.

  “…oh gods,” Aquila said sickly and made a retching sound.

  Correus knelt beside Flavius and felt frantically for a heartbeat. His face was almost unrecognizable with blood and bruises, and his lips were cracked and bleeding. Above the stench in the hut Correus caught the faint smell of burned flesh again and then saw why; they had put the amputated stumps into the fire to seal it.

  Flavius’s eyes came halfway open as Correus touched him. “Knife…” he whispered. “Leave me… the knife.” There was a warning shout outside, and Aquila spun toward the open doorway.

  “Hurry, sir,” Aquila said over his shoulder. The sounds of fighting outside had intensified as Gruffyd’s warriors realized what was happening.

  Correus wrenched at the chain that bound the prisoner to the post and saw that it was fastened with an iron lock. He took his knife and tried to pry the links apart, but the blade bent in his hand. He drew his sword and began to hack at them desperately.