Julia sent Martia to fetch whatever food the inn could provide at that hour and kept her questions to herself while he ate it.
He had taken a mouthful when there was a murmur of anxious voices at the door, and Martia came in with the fair-haired girl that Correus remembered as Aemelia’s maid. She had a wax tablet in her hand.
Correus took it, peered at it, and said, “Damn!”
Julia squinted over his shoulder. “Is it Flavius?”
“I think so. I can’t tell what she’s talking about. Here you, is the master worse?”
“Yes, sir. My mistress, she—she doesn’t know what to do with him. Please come, sir!”
* * *
The maid had spoken the truth. Flavius was burning hot and raving, and Aemelia was one step shy of a breakdown. Her face was terrified, and she caught at Correus’s cloak as he came through the door. “He’s worse! I—I don’t know what to do. The physician came earlier and bled him again, and when he came back just now he said the hand would have to come off, and Flavius picked up a knife, and… and—” Aemelia put her hands up to her face.
“He tried to stab him, sir. I took it away from him.” Bericus came in from the next room, his face frightened. “But he’s in a bad way, and I’ve got to go for some surgeon!”
“Well, why haven’t you?”
“Who would have stayed with Flavius?” Aemelia said.
“You, I would have thought,” Correus said.
“Alone? I—I couldn’t. Correus, he’s out of his mind. I’m scared!”
“Have you looked at his hands?”
“No! I mean, yes, but they’re – they’re – I couldn’t touch them!”
“Mithras god!” Correus snapped, his temper well off its tether by now. He turned on his heel and stalked into the next room. He took one look at Flavius’s right hand under the half-removed bandages. The smell was overpowering – and unmistakable. “Bericus!”
“Yes, sir.”
“That man is not to come near my brother or I’ll stab him! Go and find a retired army man named Catullus. He has a farm somewhere around Abona. If no one between here and Abona knows him, the innkeeper at the Flower of Abona will. I don’t care if you have to tie him up – get him back here!”
“Yes, sir!”
“That will take hours.” Aemelia leaned in the doorway, her face tear-streaked.
“If the quack that did this is the best man in Aquae, would you trust Flavius to someone worse?”
“But this Catullus may be worse! Flavius said you didn’t know anything about him, that was why you came here.”
“My mistake,” Correus said grimly. “At least an army man will know how to deal with an amputation – they see enough of them. Now come in here, and help me get these bandages off.” The stench was sickening, and there was pus oozing from between the stitches. The skin around them had begun to blacken. Aemelia put her hand to her mouth. “Correus, no – oh, I can’t!”
Flavius turned restlessly on the bed, and Correus saw that he had been pulling at the bandages on his left hand as well. “Then get your maid in here!” he shouted. “And go get some water! Make yourself some use!”
* * *
It was hours before Bericus got back with Catullus, the dark-haired Roman Correus remembered from the Flower of Abona. He proved to be neither the drunk nor the dotard they had envisioned and said tartly that the innkeeper in Abona had his head where most people kept their rear.
“I’d have ridden back the night he did this, and the damned fool ought to have known it. What does he think I am? Here, let me look at him.”
By this time Correus had cleaned Flavius’s hands as well as he could in warm water and then sat holding them so Flavius, in what was now a full-fledged delirium, wouldn’t pick at the bandages. Aemelia had brought the water in, taken one sickened look, and then retreated to the outer room, where she had sat with her arms wrapped around her chest, weeping, until Correus thought he would go mad.
“Someone’s been bleeding him,” Catullus said.
“Yes. Then he wanted to take the hand off.”
“Well, it may come to that,” Catullus said grimly, “thanks to the previous treatment. They ought to stick to potting up skin cream for the magistrates’ wives or go and learn surgery from a surgeon. Someone’s done a decent job on this to start with, though,” he added. “All right, I’m going to have to open this up again, cut away the dead skin, and cauterize it. And you’re going to hold him so he doesn’t try to stick a knife in me. You,” he said over his shoulder to Aemelia, who had crept up to the doorway again, “come and help.”
“Nooo – I can’t…”
“Forget it,” Correus said under his breath. “Her maid’s here, and the slave that brought you. Rusonia! Bericus!”
“Hmmm!” Catullus dismissed Aemelia and began working while Rusonia lit a fire and handed him what he asked for, and Correus and Bericus held Flavius’s writhing body down on the bed. The surgeon cut away the blackened parts with a knife and laid a red hot iron along the live, bleeding flesh.
* * *
Correus remembered the next two days as if he had lived them through the dim curtain of some drug. He had been given opium a few times before to dull the pain of a wound that had to be probed or stitched, and it was that menacing but dreamlike quality that seemed to hang about him now.
Catullus came again the next day, and the next, to clean Flavius’s hands, but they needed to be cleaned every two hours in between, and it was Correus who did it, carefully, as Catullus had taught him, washing the seared wounds and daubing them with copper salts and resin and then packing them over with a poultice of lint and honey, while Bericus stood endlessly waving the flies away.
Julia came the first night after Catullus had gone, took one look, and decided with her usual practicality that the most useful thing she could do for either of her brothers was to remove Aemelia. She took her off to another bedchamber, bullied the landlord out of a hot brick to put in the bed, and tucked Aemelia up in it with a cup of warmed wine.
Aemelia drank it obediently, hiccuping, and wiped her tear-stained face on the bedclothes. “I should never have come out here, should I?” she whispered.
“No, I expect not,” Julia said. “Why did you? Aemelia, was it to see Correus?”
“No! Well, I did think… maybe we might see each other. But I wasn’t… I was trying to be a good wife. Lady Antonia said I shouldn’t follow the army,” she sniffled. “But I thought she was wrong, I really did.”
“She was right,” Julia said, more gently now. She had heard enough frontier stories by this time to be sure of that. And she had seen where Freita had lived. “Aemelia, there’s no point in trying to be something you aren’t. Go back, and make a… a haven for Flavius to come back to. Don’t try to stick it out here. It could get worse than this, you know.”
“You came out here,” Aemelia said.
“Lucius isn’t in the army. And I think I’m more… adaptable than you are.”
“That… that German woman came out here,” Aemelia said.
“And look what happened to her,” Julia said ruthlessly. “She was stabbed to death by a renegade tribesman who took her for someone else. They cut that baby from her dead body.”
Aemelia made a choking noise and put her hand up. “No, don’t—”
“Do you want Flavius to go in fear of that for you? It almost destroyed Correus.”
“Correus,” Aemelia whispered. “Julia, I don’t know him anymore. It’s like a… a different person with his face. I’m afraid of him.”
“No, you just don’t understand him.” Julia stood up and smoothed Aemelia’s hair back from her face. “Now sleep. I’ll call you if there’s any change in Flavius.”
* * *
For three days they wrestled with the infection in Flavius’s hands and the fever that left his whole body burning hot to the touch, but in the end they saved the hand. On the third day he woke rational and sweating as the fever left him
and with his right hand beginning to heal. The left had been out of danger since the day before.
Catullus gave a grunt of satisfaction and wiped the back of his own hand across his forehead. “Well, son, you beat the odds,” he said to Flavius. “Which of you here was the last to get any sleep?”
“I was, sir,” Bericus said.
“Good. You’re in charge. I’ll look in every day for a while. I don’t think there’s anything more to worry about, but I don’t want him to set foot outside these rooms until those hands are properly healed over. You—” He looked at Correus. “Go back where you belong, and go to sleep.”
Correus went back to Julia at the Girl with the Jug, slept for another full day, ate, and slept again.
When he woke the second time, Julia thought he still looked like a fresh corpse and said so, but she didn’t quarrel when he insisted on going to see Flavius. Correus still hadn’t told her the details of what had happened to Flavius – or him, she thought – but there was no point in asking while he was in this restive mood.
Correus found Flavius still lucid and healing and, himself now greatly relieved, set out to make amends to Aemelia. The effort was more wearisome than otherwise, and when he returned to the Girl with the Jug to find Julia organizing a family outing to Aquae Sulis’s famous baths, his sister’s uncomplicated company was an agreeable relief.
The medicinal baths at Aquae were famous, but they also boasted a swimming bath and the usual cold, tepid, and hot rooms as well as a recently constructed steam bath. Tullius hung up his clothes in the changing room and went to work out in the courtyard with likeminded stalwart souls, while Martia, with Coventina and the babies in tow, enjoyed a sedate rubdown and a plunge for health’s sake in the women’s cold pool. Correus did a brisk three laps in the swimming bath and then went to soak in the superheated waters of the steam bath. Mixed bathing was less strictly regarded in the provinces, and Julia followed him. She poked a toe in gingerly and made a face but finally slithered down beside him. Her dark curls were carefully pulled into a knot on the top of her head, and she had tied a ribbon around her forehead. She eyed her brother’s scarred, muscled body – as much of it as could be seen through the steam – with a thoughtful face. The marks of old campaigns… He’s beginning to look like Papa, she thought. He’s too young to look like that.
They were the only occupants at the moment. It was growing close to the dinner hour. Correus leaned back against the wall of the bath and let the steam soak loose the kinks in his neck and the groggy feeling of having slept too long.
Julia stood it as long as she could and then prodded him gently with a toe. “I’m melting like lamp fat. If I’m going to keep you company, this would be a good time to tell me what happened to you and Flavius out there.”
So he told her, plainly and with no skirting around the horrors, and she listened solemnly until he was done. When he had finished, Julia leaned her own head back against the stones and closed her eyes, trying not to picture too vividly the things Correus had said. Mutilation. It was a horrible word. But it could have been worse, so much worse. Was that the way to put it to Aemelia? Probably not.
“How is Aemelia?” she asked him, hoping she wasn’t pressing on a sore spot.
“Less hysterical,” Correus said. He didn’t seem to care, and Julia was beginning to have her suspicions about the depth of the tragic romance her friend had cherished so carefully.
“Were you ever really in love with her?” It was an offhand question, almost a murmur. The steam was making them both sleepy, and in this mood he seemed likely to answer.
“She was a… a picture.” Correus waved a hand vaguely in the steam. “Everything people kept telling me I couldn’t have, mustn’t ask for. And she wanted me. That’s a… strong attraction.”
“That’s lust,” Julia said drowsily.
Correus opened one eye. “You’ve grown up,” he murmured.
“Enough to know that, anyway,” Julia said. “She’s a kitten. With a bow on its neck. Pretty. Not like Freita. Freita was a mountain cat, Lucius said. I wish I’d known her better.”
“Freita was me,” Correus said.
Julia slid over on the bench beside him and slipped a hand through his arm.
IX Lies and Bargains
The courts of Bryn Epona were full to overflowing with the entourage necessary to support the dignity of two kings. Inside the King’s Hall, where the council table had been set up, there was much politeness, while outside in the second level where the guest chambers were, the dark Silure warriors sulked in the sweltering September heat. Cadal’s fair-haired men glowered at them as they passed from the lower courts to the upper where the King’s Hall was, sometimes on legitimate business, but as often as not merely from suspicion – the master’s hound pack seeing that the interloper’s dogs kept to their place.
“Agreement must be made by the winter,” Bendigeid said. “We will have that much time, but the Romans will be out and hunting with the first thaw.” His voice was level, and he sat back in his chair, his hands flat on the tabletop, the look of a man with much patience.
Across the table, Cadal, with his tawny hair loose down his back under a twisted gold circlet, also lounged in his seat, lids drooping with the air of one who has, little need to hurry. But the air between them snapped like the sultry hours before a storm, and their household warriors, ranged behind their lords’ chairs, shuffled their feet and looked warily at the others.
They flow away from each other like oil and water, Llywarch thought, sitting between the two kings, with certain other of the council lords of both tribes. Dark men and fair, older enemies than were the Roman kind, what common ancestry they had was now buried so deep as to make no bond. We will be lucky if we can keep them together for one battle.
Cadal tugged thoughtfully at the end of his mustache and appeared to consider. “You are so sure that the Romans aren’t hunting your hills already that you can sit in Bryn Epona until winter?”
“The Romans are biting the Demetae at the moment,” Bendigeid said with that half smile that showed the points of his teeth, like a wolf.
“Bendigeid, you broke faith with Gruffyd of the Demetae,” a red-haired man snapped. “Why should we be trusting you to keep it with us then?”
The Silure men bristled, and Cadal chuckled. “A fair enough question, though not overtactfully put.”
“Gruffyd broke faith with me,” Bendigeid said. “He called the Romans onto his own trail when he tried to kill the commander of their Eagle Army with a Silure knife.” Cadal knew that well enough, but he was best pleased to put Bendigeid on the defensive. They had each employed that tactic all morning, setting out demands and concessions like pieces on a Wisdom board. Cadal nodded. He pushed back the sleeves of his red, gold-embroidered shirt and looked thoughtful. “And Gruffyd’s horseflesh? I will count Gruffyd’s men well enough used in taking the edge off the Romans’ swords – and maybe holding them till winter – but two thousand of his ponies, chariot broken, for the common herd – that was the number promised, was it not?” He turned with a questioning look to the red-haired man, Amren.
Amren nodded.
Bendigeid looked at Amren, his blue-patterned face pale and dangerous under the fall of dark hair and the red-gold circlet that crowned it. Amren shifted in his chair in spite of himself. The king of the Silures had the Old Blood in him, and Amren didn’t like the dark folk – particularly not when they could make him feel a cold hand on his neck by looking at him.
“The ponies are in Silure horse runs, well guarded,” Bendigeid said. He dismissed Amren and turned his face to Cadal, pleasantly enough. “Gruffyd sent them before he realized I wasn’t going to save his treacherous hide for him.” He smiled, less pleasantly. “He had no particular use for them, since the Romans burned his chariots.”
“Then they won’t be taking long to burn his holdings as well,” Cadal said. He had no particular sympathy for Gruffyd. The Demetae were too small and unimportant to play t
hat game with Bendigeid. Gruffyd should have known better. “When the Roman Eagle Army has put Gruffyd’s head on a pole,” Cadal said, “they will be looking to the Silures next. Is the king of the Silures sure that he can wait till winter?”
“Surer than the king of the Ordovices should be,” Bendigeid said, and his voice had grown a touch of menace to it. “I know the Roman kind. They will make sure of their hold in Demetae lands, and then they will go back to the fort they have built in the lowlands until the spring. They have tried to take Silure lands before, and always it has been harder than they bargained for. This commander is no fool. He won’t take the war trail with only a month’s good weather left.”
“And why should that be a concern to me?” Cadal said.
“Because if the Romans strike and Cadal of the Ordovices has not made treaty, his tribe will stand alone when the Romans look to Ordovician lands. You were not thinking, were you, that the Romans will go no farther than my hills? If we go down, they will hunt you next. And if we win, they will pull back from us and hunt you instead.”
Cadal took a deep breath and stretched his hands out in front of him. He turned to Amren. “It grows stifling in here, and it frays tempers. Send someone to fetch us beer. And open the doors.”
Bendigeid stretched also and eyed Cadal with a certain respect. Theirs was an old hatred that went bone-deep, but Cadal was a master at this game.
Llywarch, watching them, dark head facing tawny one down the length of the table, thought how different they were. Not in body or in birth, but in the soul. Cadal was a dangerous man and a fine enough king, but he didn’t possess the power that was in Bendigeid. Cadal had other men who were dear to him – companions among his warriors, lovers among the women. Bendigeid had only that dark power and the tribe. Not as individuals, but as a living thing itself. Cadal was a warrior. Bendigeid was a king in the old way. It would consume him, Llywarch thought. The god’s gifts always did.
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