Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  He passed Emer the wineskin, and she put the hat on the ground and tilted her head back and drank, laughing as some of the wine missed her mouth and ran down her chin. He wiped it with the back of his hand and kissed her, and her lips were warm as the night and tasted of wine.

  After a moment he stood up and put his hand out, and they walked deeper into the orchard, into the dusk and shadows. The pipe music seemed to linger in the air, old and insistent, an older song than other gods’. He thought Emer felt its magic, too, and they started to run, laughing, caught in the music. They halted at the far edge of the orchard, where it spilled into open pasture, and there was a single tree, branches low-growing, that made a green cave beneath it. Forst dived into the cave and pulled Emer in with him, and she turned her face up to his under a tangle of fox-colored hair washed pale in the moonlight. She had lost her hat, and she smelled of the wild rosemary-that grew by the roadside.

  Forst put his hands in her hair and kissed her, and she sank into the grass under him. He put his hands on something hard in the grass and lifted up a reed pipe, delicate as a bird’s bones.

  “The Horned One’s pipe,” Emer whispered, her eyes glowing.

  Forst tossed the pipe away. “No, only some shepherd boy’s, I’m thinking.” But there was something in the air, some wild music of their own or of the procession on the road.

  “I won’t change my mind,” she whispered.

  “You don’t have to,” he whispered back. The night and the music were enough. He pulled at the russet gown, and she gave a quick wriggle like a fish, and then she was naked in his arms, her skin pale as marble, but hot, not cold to the touch. He buried his face in the shadows of her throat, and she sighed and pulled him down to her under the cavern of the tree, while outside the old song ran goat-footed through the grass.

  * * *

  No such pleasures attended Julius. He had washed and stabled Aeshma, delivered that sad, accursed letter to the centurion’s father, and been cornered and expertly questioned by the beautiful gold witch who was the centurion’s mother. Julius didn’t trust her at all, even without the centurion’s telling him not to, which of course he couldn’t do because the gold witch was his mother, and it wouldn’t be respectful. But Julius distrusted Helva instinctively and gave her a wide berth when possible. Tonight it hadn’t been possible.

  She had fluttered out in a gold gown that made his head spin, put one scented white arm around his shoulders, and called him “dear boy.” As always, Julius felt uncomfortably aware of his own body, and of being strung together all wrong, all legs and arms that knocked things over. And there had been no way for him to avoid telling the centurion’s mother what would be common knowledge in the household tomorrow anyway, so he had. The centurion’s mother hadn’t liked the centurion’s lady one bit, and now the whole time she was saying “how dreadful,” Julius thought she was counting over senators’ daughters in her head. As soon as she had let go of him, he had run as if the Sirens were after him, down the hill to the barn, and hidden among the horses.

  It was just as well. Aeshma had kicked his stall down and was out looking for a fight, and Julius caught up with him just before he found one with the big bay who was the current lord of Appius’s horse herd. He dragged Aeshma back, put him in another stall, and sat down gloomily outside it on a bucket, until Forst should come home and figure out what else to do. And Forst had had red-haired Emer on his arm and probably wouldn’t be back till dawn, Julius thought disgustedly.

  Julius had had his first tumble here on the old general’s estate, with a field girl no older than he was, and it had eased a need, but it hadn’t impressed him much. Now it was beginning to seem greatly overrated and more likely than not to just bring trouble, as he sat glaring at Aeshma and thinking about the centurion’s lady and the centurion’s mother and Forst, whose fault it was that he, Julius, was here sitting on a bucket all night. And if the centurion didn’t watch it, that mother of his would have him hooked up again, to some “respectable” girl this time, with a good position, who wouldn’t understand him and wouldn’t like the army and like as not would make all his slaves wear fancy tunics and give them silly names. The centurion had better be careful.

  * * *

  Helva sat brushing out her gold hair by the light of a little silver lamp shaped like three-headed Cerberus. On the opposite side of her dressing table was Charon in his boat, and he was a lamp, too, and the combined glow gave a softness to the image in the mirror that smoothed out the few lines that marked her face by daylight. I should try to stay in lamplight, she thought. I’ll last better that way. She laid the brush down and stared at it moodily. It had a gold back, set with coral, and Appius had given it to her years ago, when Correus was born. She wished she could have given him another child, the way his wife had done, but perhaps it was just as well. It would have ruined her figure, most likely, and at least she still had that, although Appius was growing less susceptible to it than he used to be.

  In the end it would have to be Correus who would keep her from the one thing she dreaded – the lonesomeness of a life without the pleasures to which she was accustomed. Not as someone else’s slave, and not in poverty – she knew Appius would never do that to her – but alone, no one’s pampered darling, with only enough money to be comfortable. Helva didn’t want to be comfortable. She had been more than that for too long. And the business of a great household – the great men who visited and the important affairs they dealt in – she didn’t think she could do without those either, now.

  She called to her maid to come and tie her hair up in rag curls for the night. Tomorrow would be time enough to talk to Appius. Tomorrow, when all the things she would have to say about a suitable marriage for Correus would have already occurred to him. You always got further, Helva had discovered, when a man thought something was his own idea.

  * * *

  In his study, Appius Julianus sat looking at his son’s letter. So the woman they had fought so hard over was dead. And he had a grandson, his first. A half-German grandson, but Correus’s blood nonetheless, and Correus was Roman to his fingertips. And the mother wouldn’t be alive to hold him back. Appius sighed. He was sorry for that poor girl and sorry for Correus, but she had made her babe’s future infinitely brighter with her dying. Appius pulled a sheet of papyrus from his desk and began to compose a letter to his son; a letter of comfort that would contain none of those harsh and practical thoughts. There were times when a lie could heal more wounds.

  VIII Aquae Sulis

  It was dusk when the Capricorn reached Abona, on the eastern side of Sabrina Mouth, a primarily British settlement with, so the captain told Correus and Flavius, a passable inn. They were still fifteen miles by road from Aquae Sulis, so they hunted up the inn and bedded the horses in its stables for the night – Antaeus and the troop horse allotted to Flavius, which had taken exception even to the relatively calm voyage from Moridunum up the Sabrina Channel and was now wild-eyed with nerves and shying at the shore birds that swooped past to hunt in the ebbing tide.

  “Bide still, you ass,” Flavius said as the snorting horse executed a swivel and turn and fetched up legs braced wide apart as a curlew’s shadow flitted by.

  “Do you want to trade?” Correus asked.

  Flavius shook his head. “He was well enough till we put him on the Capricorn. Funny, some horses just won’t take a sea crossing no matter what. He just needs a night in stables. I could do with one myself. I felt like invulnerable Achilles this morning, but it seems to have worn off.”

  “It’s as well to stop, then,” Correus said. “And you need those dressings changed.”

  They found the inn and shouted up a stableboy, who appeared suitably awestruck by the appearance of two Roman officers and promised faithfully to see that the horses were fed and watered. Correus slung both their kits over his shoulder, and they headed gratefully for the large tile-roofed building of the inn, optimistically titled the Flower of Abona.

  Yellow lamp
light spilled through the windows onto the stone-paved courtyard, and three Britons in shirts and breeches were dicing in the lingering twilight with a middle-aged Roman who looked as if he might be a retired army man. It was pleasant country and good farmland this side of Sabrina Mouth, and already the time-expired soldiers of Rome’s legions were beginning to take up their grants of land here where they had served, encouraged by a government eager to consolidate its hold by breeding a civilian population with strong ties to Rome.

  The inn was used to travelers, the waters at Aquae Sulis having been famous for their curative properties long before the Romans came, and it boasted a pleasant whitewashed dining room where bread and cheese and good stew could be washed down with native beer or a fair Gaulish wine. On the second floor were three bedchambers built to house some six or seven travelers each, with as many more on the floor as could be fitted in during the busy season. Correus and Flavius said firmly that they would take the smallest of them, to themselves, please, and the innkeeper, having seen the color of their money, was pleased enough to comply. Who had been turned out to make shift in one of the other chambers they didn’t ask, and Flavius, sinking gratefully onto a bed, said firmly that he didn’t care, either.

  “We ought to eat,” he said sleepily, unbuckling his greaves and kicking them onto the floor where his lorica and helmet were piled. “But I don’t know that I wouldn’t rather just sleep. What are you doing?” He propped himself up on one elbow to watch his brother.

  “Shaving,” Correus said, peering into a bronze hand mirror, which he had propped on a table against the wall. “I can’t go about Aquae Sulis like this. I’ll look a fool.”

  “I was beginning to wonder if you were permanently attached to that thing,” Flavius said.

  “I was beginning to be afraid I was.” Correus’s voice was slightly muffled as he carefully clipped the luxuriant growth to a quarter-inch length. “Julius thinks it’s beneath my dignity, and one of my men chalked up a picture of a catfish with long curling whiskers and my face on the latrine wall. It was so good, I didn’t have the heart to give him more than three days’ punishment, but I understand my second upped it to five after I’d gone.” He put the scissors down and gingerly picked up a razor. “All the same, I’m thoroughly sick of it, and I think my usefulness in that department is pretty much at an end anyway. Ow! Typhon! It itched like Hades growing in, but it’s worse coming off.”

  “I could get you some fat from the kitchen,” Flavius suggested helpfully, and Correus glared at him over the razor.

  “I put a cream on it, you fool, but it’s only meant for one day’s growth.”

  “I know,” Flavius said, “I’ve got a linimint in my kit. It’s for sore muscles, actually, but it’s the greasiest stuff I’ve ever encountered. I’m serious,” he added hastily as Correus gave him a black look. “It ought to work.” He rummaged in his kit and made an irritated sound. “No, I remember, I rolled it up in my cloak – I was afraid it would leak on the governor’s scroll. It’s still on the saddle. I’ll fetch it.”

  “Don’t bother,” Correus mumbled, carefully scraping another half inch clean with the razor.

  “I ought to get up anyway and eat something,” Flavius said cheerfully. “And I can’t bear to watch you wrestling with that thing. You’ll cut your throat in a minute. Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

  He departed with a clatter of hobnailed sandals on the stairway, and Correus resumed his shaving with relief. He had little faith in Flavius’s linimint, but at least he could finish the job in peace and quiet while Flavius went to hunt for it.

  He scraped the rest of the left side clean and stopped to sharpen the razor again before tackling the right side, the more difficult angle. There was undoubtedly a barber somewhere in Abona, but not at this hour, and no doubt the fewer explanations he had to make as to why a Roman cohort centurion was sporting a drooping mustache that would have done credit to a statue of Vercingetorix, the better.

  He had just finished the right side and was trying to see in the inadequate mirror and failing light if it had left a pale streak across his upper lip, when it occurred to him that Flavius ought to be back by now. He wondered if he had forgotten the linimint entirely and had fallen into the dice game outside (in the carefree, almost lightheaded mood Flavius seemed to have developed lately, Correus wasn’t sure what his brother was likely to do next) and opened the window to see. The dice players appeared to have gone, however, making for home, no doubt, before the late hour earned them some woman’s scolding, and Correus paused in the window to try to catch the last twilight in the mirror. The oil lamp on the table had reflected in the bronze so brightly that it was worse than nothing.

  The stable door was open, and the inn’s boy was pushing a desultory broom across the flagstones. Correus leaned out to call to him. “Here, you, have a look in the stables, and see what’s keeping my brother! Tell him I want my dinner, and I don’t need his silly linimint.”

  The stableboy nodded and put his broom down with no reluctance. But in a moment he popped out from the stable again, his eyes wide and frightened.

  “Here, sir, you’d better come down! He’s had an accident!”

  Correus dropped the mirror and took the stairs two at a time, wondering what could have happened. He couldn’t have been kicked by a horse; horses didn’t kick Flavius. He had what Freita had used to call the horse magic, the same understanding of the beasts that was Correus’s, too. Robbers? Surely not, in the inn courtyard. But Flavius would be an easy target with his wounded hands.

  Flavius was curled almost into a ball on the stable floor, in the straw of the loose box that housed the troop horse, and the horse was nuzzling him curiously. His face was drained nearly white, and he was plainly unconscious.

  Correus dropped down on his knees beside him. “Help me get him out of here!”

  The stableboy edged fearfully to the door. “Will he kick again, sir?”

  “The horse didn’t do it. I think he’s just fainted. He – Oh my god!” Flavius’s left hand was curled around his right one as if for protection, and the right was bleeding freely, the bandages torn and mired with dirt and manure. The mark of the horse’s shoe could be seen across the knuckles and the flask of linimint was smashed in the straw beside it. “Get in here and hold the horse! He’s put his hoof down on his hand and opened up an old wound!”

  The stableboy edged around Flavius and took the troop horse gingerly by the bridle while Correus put his hands under his brother’s arms and dragged him free.

  “Now go fetch someone to help me carry him!”

  The boy slammed the loose box door shut and scampered across the courtyard, returning in a moment with the innkeeper and a burly youth who might have been his son.

  “Here, sir, what happened?” The innkeeper peered at Flavius as the younger man picked him up and started for the house with him, apparently requiring no help. “Not robbers, not in my own stables! Go on, you lazy bitch, and see where they’ve gone!” He aimed the toe of His boot at one of the hounds who had come trotting at his heel, and the dog gave him a puzzled look and sniffed at the stable door with disinterest.

  “No, it was an accident,” Correus said. “My brother has had a finger… amputated, from both hands.” He ignored the innkeeper’s curious look. “He came out to fetch some linimint. He must have dropped it, and the horse put a hoof down on him when he tried to pick it up. The beast’s been skittish since we took him off the ship.”

  The innkeeper held the door open, and they carried Flavius in through the main dining chamber, past a curious crowd of travelers and late drinkers. They put him on the bed upstairs, and the innkeeper bustled back in with another pair of lamps while Correus unraveled the bandages from Flavius’s right hand with a sharp, indrawn breath.

  “He needs a physician. Is there—”

  “Not in Abona,” the innkeeper said. “The closest one is Catullus – he used to be a surgeon with the legions. He comes in now and again for a drink
and the news and a game with the local lads, but he’s gone away up the valley home a half hour ago, with a fair amount of drink in him. You won’t get him back here tonight. You’d do best to take the centurion on to Aquae Sulis in the morning, I’m thinking.”

  “After his hands have a chance to rot with stable dung in them all night,” Correus said grimly, Silanus’s lecture on cleanliness and infection still fresh in his mind. “It’s got to be done now. Get me two bowls of warm water, and a—and a bowl of vinegar.” Wine would hurt less, he thought, shuddering, but vinegar was stronger. Correus had seen enough gangrenous wounds to have the soldier’s terror of infection well instilled in him. It began with a reddening of the skin around the wound, then spread and blackened and the whole limb began to die. The presence of horse dung made lockjaw another terrifying possibility. One of their father’s slaves had died in convulsions of that after cutting his hands on a hoof pick.

  Flavius’s eyes were still closed, but he began moving restlessly as Correus stripped off the last of the bandages.

  He must have passed out from sheer pain, Correus thought, looking at the mangled and bleeding hand.

  The innkeeper and his son came back with the bowls, the innkeeper’s plump wife hurrying behind them, her motherly face worried and her arms full of towels. They put the bowls of water by the bed and Correus, who had no idea in the world how to clean a wound, plunged Flavius’s hand into one of them and moved it about under the surface as the bits of dung and dirt came loose and floated to the top.

  Flavius’s eyes came open, and he gritted his teeth. “Bastard stepped on me,” he muttered. “Broke your liniment… sorry…”

  “Hold on,” Correus said. “We’ve got to get it clean.” He pushed the bowl away and pulled the other one up, washing the hand again for good measure. “Hang on, this is going to hurt. It’s vinegar.”