Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  Aeshma bucked in protest as a street vendor with a tray of clay horses dodged under his nose.

  “Get your Veii race horse here! Bring you good luck all year!”

  Aeshma tried to bite him, and Julius hauled the gray’s head around and found himself looking up at a banner stretched over the street that proclaimed: VEII MIDSUMMER OPEN RACE, with the name of the sponsor prominently displayed. A troop of street dancers was performing in front of a wine stall a little farther along, and Julius regarded them wistfully. The centurion had given him some money to spend, and it began to burn a hole in his pouch while he eyed the festivities. It was intended to be spent in Rome on the return trip, but the centurion hadn’t really said not to stop any place else. And there was going to be a race. Julius had never been able to resist a horse race in the same way that some men cannot pass a dice game. He kicked Aeshma into a trot, nearly bowling over a pair of farm wives, each with a brace of chickens slung by the feet around her neck. They shouted and waved their chickens at him indignantly as he turned Aeshma down a side street. There must be a stable in Veii somewhere.

  * * *

  The Veii Midsummer Festival was in full swing when the servants of Appius Julianus made their appearance, dressed in their festival best, and with their own largesse to spend. Appius preferred that his slaves find their amusement in the bucolic celebrations of Veii and the smaller towns outside of Rome than in the City itself, where the opportunities for getting in trouble and being fleeced of their money were infinitely greater, and he decreed his holidays accordingly.

  The German underhorseman Forst regarded the crowd with satisfaction and looked down with a gleam in his eye at the red-haired woman beside him. Festivals had a way of becoming even gayer as the day wore on, and one never knew quite what might happen during the celebration or after it, in the torchlit amusements of the evening.

  “I will buy you a present,” he declared. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Emer said. She glanced at a stall of cheap red pottery ware with a likeness of the Veii Basilica stamped across it and shook her head. “I will tell you when I see it.”

  “If it’s not too expensive,” Forst said, and she grinned up at him. She had on a russet dress that blazed in the sunlight like her fox-colored hair and a straw hat to shade her face.

  “I will be careful,” she said, and he ducked his head under the hat and kissed her when none of the other servants was looking.

  “Today would be a fine day to ask the master,” he said experimentally, and Emer shook her head again and pushed him away.

  “Don’t, Forst. Don’t spoil the day. I’m too happy to fight with you.”

  “One of these days you will have to think about it,” he said.

  His skin had tanned to a deep bronze in the Italian sun in the years since he had left Germany, but his blond hair was still long, worn twisted into an outlandish knot at the side of his head, and Emer thought for the thousandth time how wild he looked, how out of place in this crowd, in the household tunic and armband of a Roman house. Emer came of British stock, but she was native-born to Italy, slave-born. Forst’s slavery was all on the surface, like the tunic and the armband. That difference had something to do with the argument that always came between them when Forst grew serious.

  “Don’t,” she said again, and he shrugged, careful of the mood. He put his arm around her and talked of something else, and she leaned against him happily again.

  * * *

  The Perseus and Andromeda was a wine stall with a little open court cluttered with stone benches in front of the counter. Julius bought a cup of cheap, watered wine and settled down in front of the whitewashed wall, squeezing himself onto the end of a bench beside a fat farmer with straw on his boots and a hulking fair-haired youth who appeared to be his son. The talk was all on the horse race, the sort of free-for-all, open-to-anything-on-four-legs competition that often meant an open field where betting was concerned. Julius cocked his ears forward and settled in to listen.

  “Hey, Polydorus!” the farmer shouted jovially at another man slouching gloomily on a bench opposite. “You comin’ to the race?”

  Polydorus did not appear enthusiastic. “Paid my entrance. I suppose I might as well. Too late to get it refunded now.” He glared at the fat farmer. “You talked us into that rule, Marius.”

  Marius chuckled. “We all voted for it. Can’t have entries comin’ and goin’ at the last minute – much too confusin’. Sorry to hear old Hector went lame, though.”

  Julius didn’t think he sounded sorry at all. Neither did Polydorus, apparently. He had a round, red face under a fringe of dark curly hair, and it grew a little redder as he glowered at Marius.

  “Open entry,” Marius said happily. “Put in another horse.”

  Polydorus snorted, and Julius slipped off his bench and went back to the wine counter for another cup. “Why is the dark-haired man so angry at the fat one?” he asked the shopkeeper, putting his coin down on the counter.

  “You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?” the shopkeeper said. A foreigner in Veii was anyone from outside the city limits, even one from Rome thirteen miles away. “Otherwise you’d be knowing. Marius got all the race committee to vote this spring that all entries were final a week before the race, and now Polydorus’s beast has gone lame the day before, and he can’t get his entry fee back.”

  “And Marius’s horse will win?”

  “I expect so. Unless somebody’s got something I haven’t heard of. Polydorus’s Hector might have beat him – Polydorus thought so. That’s the other reason he’s looking so sour. He bet heavy, and now Marius won’t give him that money back, either.”

  “But he could put another horse in for his entry?” Julius had begun to look thoughtful.

  “Sure, if he could find anything in this town that could outrun my old granny that’s not entered already.”

  Polydorus put his wine cup down and trudged gloomily down the street to the ironmonger’s stall to see about the new kettle his wife had been pestering him for. Kettles! He should have been counting Marius’s money in advance and planning his new barn; instead he was taking home a kettle to soften her up while he explained how he had happened to bet their barn savings on a horse that had just gone lame in its stall, and they weren’t going to see one thin sesterce of it back again. Maybe he ought to take her something lighter, he thought. She’d probably hit him with the kettle.

  “Master!”

  Polydorus jumped as a barefoot boy appeared beside him out of nowhere, like a genie from a bottle.

  “You are looking for a horse?” the boy said, like the voice of the genie.

  * * *

  “If you don’t like horses,” Forst said, “go and watch the pantomime. I will come and find you afterward.” He waved a hand at the oddly assorted collection of entrants that made up the Veii Midsummer Open Race.

  “Mostly those are not horses,” Emer said, looking at the motley array of starters. “And I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I only said that if you are thinking to find any stock worth showing the master in this race, you are a bigger fool than the poor fools who own them now.” There was one stand-out, a big black with a heavy head and long, powerful-looking legs, but the rest were an unprepossessing bunch, pulled from their daily work at cart and plow. It was one of the features of the Veii race that no professionals, equine or human, were allowed. It was the only rule.

  “Maybe,” Forst said. “You never know.” He bought them a sack of plums and some hot pastries from the vendors who threaded their ways through the throng while crying their wares, and they leaned on the track railing, munching them companionably.

  A trumpet, badly played, screeched into the chatter of the crowd, and one of the horses reared and started to buck. Someone ran out and dragged it to the starting line by main force, and the trumpet screeched again. The man on foot dived for the side of the track, and the race was on.

  At first it looked more like a dog fight t
han a race as the entrants sorted themselves out in the first turn, the riders fighting each other for position, aided by rocks, riding crops, and anything else they had thought to keep handy. The big black careened into a muddy gray animal and cut across him to the inside, the rider turning in the saddle to smack his crop down across the gray’s nose.

  That, as Forst said afterward, was when the race really got going.

  The gray screamed and sank its teeth into the black’s rump, and then into the black’s rider’s thigh. Forst narrowed his eyes. There was something familiar about the way the gray’s head shot out, teeth bared, and also about the thin figure of the gray’s rider, who seized the opportunity to pelt the black horse and its rider with rotten pears that he pulled from a sack in his tunic. The black reared as a pear smacked into his head just behind the eye, and the gray shot past him, its rider kicking the gray flanks valiantly as the gray seemed inclined to turn around and fight instead of run. The rider aimed the gray at another horse in the pack ahead, and the gray shot after that quarry instead.

  “That’s Correus’s gray!” Forst said suddenly.

  Emer leaned forward intently. “Are you sure?”

  “Watch him run. That isn’t Correus on him,” he added gently.

  Emer glared at him. Anything that had been between her and the master’s son had ended when he had brought his German woman home with him, and if Emer had lain with Forst once or twice since, she had given him no right to make Correus his business. She started to say so, but Forst’s attention was glued to the track again.

  The gray squealed and bit at a sorrel ahead of him, and as the sorrel’s rider turned a terrified face over his shoulder, the gray plunged past with no more than an inch to spare between the sorrel and a piebald mare on the other side. There was only one other horse ahead of them now, and its rider gave the gray a respectful distance as the gray went past. There was another commotion in its wake, and the black burst out of the pack, its rider waving his crop furiously at anyone foolish enough to get in the way. The gray’s rider looked over his shoulder and took another pear from his tunic.

  The black’s rider responded with rocks, and the gray’s rider gave a howl of rage as one thudded into his shoulder blade. He yanked on the gray’s reins, and as the black came up beside him, he swung the gray’s nose sideways so that the black’s rider’s other leg, the right one this time, presented itself. The gray obligingly sank his teeth into it, and the black swerved hysterically as another pear hit him in the nose.

  “Now run, damn it!” the gray’s rider yelled, and the gray abandoned its victim and streaked for the finish post.

  The crowd spilled out onto the track, gathering around the winners, and Forst took Emer by the hand. “Come on!”

  “Where?”

  “To get the horse, of course, and save that fool’s neck before someone kills him!” He craned his neck above the crowd, toward the finish post. “Damn, I’ve lost him! Maybe he’s had enough brains to hide.”

  * * *

  Marius sat moodily under a fig tree doling out money to the grinning cronies who had bet on Polydorus’s Hector and never thought to see their silver again. Polydorus himself sat to one side counting a stack of coins into a big iron kettle. “You sure you don’t want to sell that beast, young ’un?” he inquired of the dusty youth who stood waiting his turn to settle up with Marius.

  “I couldn’t, sir. He’s a pet, like.” There seemed to be no point in mentioning that the horse wasn’t his, especially not in Marius’s hearing. There might be some rule about that.

  “A pet!” one of the bettors snorted and started to laugh, and another one said, “Sure, he keeps him for a watchdog! To bite the tax man!”

  Marius swung around and saw Julius, and his face went purple. “You! You’re the little bastard who came and wanted to bet on Polydorus’s Hector!”

  “No, I didn’t,” Julius said. “I just said Polydorus’s entry. You never said Hector was scratched,” he added, aggrieved. “Tried to cheat me.”

  “That’s right!” someone shouted. “Serves you right, Marius!”

  He probably would have got out of Veii with a whole hide if Polydorus hadn’t called out to him as Julius departed jingling his winnings, “Mind, lad, if you ever want to sell that horse, you see me first! Him or his colts!”

  “You swindling bastard,” Marius growled as Polydorus’s nonownership of the horse finally registered, “That’s a professional horse! He’s not even yours!”

  “He was mine this afternoon,” Polydorus said complacently, waving a bill of sale under Marius’s nose. “I bought him before the race and sold him back afterward. All legal.” He nodded proudly. “All the little lad’s idea. He’s a bright one, that young ’un.”

  * * *

  Julius knotted the girths of Aeshma’s saddle and brushed some of the mud from his hide. He’d have to bathe him before the old general saw him, but they’d decided, he and Polydorus, that a little mud would keep Aeshma from attracting too much attention in Veii before the race. Julius scratched at the mud and thought about the return trip. The centurion had given him some money to spend in the City, but now he had enough to make his holiday really interesting. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and he whirled around to find himself confronting Marius, with the tall bulk of the farmer’s son looming behind him. Marius’s thoughts were all too plain, and Julius made a dive for Aeshma’s reins.

  “Not so fast!” Marius made a grab for Julius and hauled him out of Aeshma’s reach as the stallion lunged at him. Julius kicked frantically at his captors’ shins, but there were two of them. They were going, they informed him, to sift him out until they found their money.

  “It’s not your money!” Julius said indignantly, and then suddenly a fist came out of nowhere and connected with Marius’s ear. Marius dropped Julius, and Julius yelled and then a man he had never seen before hit Marius’s son on the head with a board.

  In coming to Julius’s rescue, Forst hadn’t allowed for the festival mood in Veii. Passersby, with a wine jar full of trouble under their skins already, joined in on both sides. One man was hitting everyone in reach with an old boot, and another punched first Forst and then Marius. Inevitably, it was only a minute before someone was yelling for help. As the heavy sound of mailed sandals approached, three figures heaved themselves up out of the fray. Forst pushed Julius and Emer up on Aeshma’s back, grabbed the reins, and ran.

  “You damned little fool!” Forst took Julius by the scruff of the neck and shook him like a terrier with a rat when they were well outside the city limits of Veii. “What in Wuotan’s name were you doing?”

  “Polydorus needed a horse,” Julius protested. “I just sort of lent him Aeshma. The centurion didn’t say not to,” he added.

  “The centurion also no doubt didn’t say not to ride the horse off a cliff or swim him across the Tiber,” Forst said. “What in the hell are you and the horse doing here anyway?”

  ‘Taking him to the general,” Julius said. His face sobered, and he reached a hand into Aeshma’s saddlebag. “I—I have a letter for him, too.”

  * * *

  Forst and Emer sat with their backs against a peach tree on the edge of an orchard by the dusty road that ran into Veii, and passed a wineskin back and forth. It was dusk, and the glow of torches shone in the distance. A faint wailing chant and the sound of pipes could be heard as a procession wound its way up the road.

  “Whose worship?” Forst asked.

  “The Horned One, I think,” Emer said. “Whose else at Midsummer Eve?” The high, thin music of the pipes came closer, and they made the Sign of Horns because it wasn’t healthy to speak without due respect of Pan on the edge of a wood at dusk.

  They sat and watched as the procession wound past – a litter carried shoulder high, laden with grapes and summer fruit, with a kid bleating angrily in the middle of it. A half-dozen girls in gauzy dresses with flowers in their hair danced at the head of the line, while the boys capered behind them with go
atskins tied around their shoulders, their torches whirling above their heads.

  Forst had sent Julius straight home, Emer thought with relief, under threat of dreadful consequences if he so much as looked over his shoulder. There was no telling what trouble the little demon would get into if left to run loose on Midsummer Eve. She watched the procession disappear down the road with the wild music shining in the air around them.

  The last time Correus had brought Julius home with him, his sins had been without number. “Cook will catch him stealing honeycakes again and have a temper,” Emer said. Cook’s tempers generally worked themselves out on his staff.

  “Probably,” Forst agreed. “Someone will always be in a temper with that one. I would beat him if he were mine.”

  “Well, Correus won’t,” Emer said. “I don’t know why.”

  “Yes, you do,” Forst said. “That one can’t shake off his own birth any more than you can forget yours.”

  “Forst, don’t.”

  “No,” Forst agreed. “It’s too fine a night.” He took a deep breath. The air was warm and heavy-scented, and he thought he would as soon be himself as his master tonight, reading that letter alone in his study. Julius had told them what had happened when he had remembered the letter, but Forst didn’t want to discuss Correus tonight, especially not with Emer, who had been Correus’s lover before Correus brought the German woman home with him. And now she was dead, poor thing, and nothing was going to come of it but misery for both of them if Emer started looking in that direction again. Best not to talk of it, even, but to take the night and what was given them in it, if he could.