Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  It was a long ride through the ruined country of the Demetae back to what had once been the sea fort of Dun Mori, and everywhere the hand of Rome lay over the countryside. The hill forts had their walls broken into rubble and their outer ditches filled in – broken and filled by the Demetae themselves while a Roman overseer looked on – and rebuilding was forbidden. The tribal capital at Dun Mori was to be built again in Roman style, and the new chieftain was forbidden to hold council or judge court cases any place but there, under the eyes of the Roman commander.

  When they made the camp the first night, the Roman decurion proved to speak a little British with a heavy accent and to understand her if she spoke slowly to him.

  “All right, pussycat,” he said in Latin, swinging her down from the saddle. “Time for dinner. Here now! Stop that, I’m not going to hurt you, you little demon!” He repeated this last admonition in British as she continued her struggle. “Nobody’s going to hurt you!”

  “Then why did you take me?” Ygerna asked suspiciously, but she stopped fighting. She shook her black hair back from her face with as much dignity as she could muster.

  “For a… a prisoner,” the Roman searched for the right word. “To make Bendigeid talk peace.”

  “Then you are a fool,” Ygerna said flatly. “But I expect you are not the chieftain. Maybe your chieftain will know better.”

  The Roman’s face darkened, and then he laughed and shrugged his shoulders and called to someone to bring the little hellcat her dinner.

  Ygerna watched him thoughtfully. Maybe that was the way to behave then, lordlywise as if the Romans were no matter. At least he hadn’t touched her again. She ate the bread and dried meat they brought her, making a face at the taste, then rolled herself up in her cloak under the tent they had pitched for her. A pair of sentries sat down outside and began playing some game with lines scratched in the dirt.

  In the morning she greeted her escort loftily and with studious politeness, as if the cavalry troop were only the retinue due her rank. The decurion chuckled. He was going to enjoy watching the governor when he handed this one over to him.

  * * *

  “Thank you, Centurion Julianus. Please sit down.”

  Correus cocked a wary eye at the governor. The legion was making ready to pull out for the winter quarters at Isca, and Correus wondered uneasily if the governor had other plans for his own time over the snowbound months.

  “Rest at ease, Centurion,” Frontinus said, apparently reading his mind. “I have no intention of leaving you here to nose ’round Bendigeid’s camps. Besides, you’ve lost your mustache.”

  “I can live without it, sir,” Correus said frankly.

  The governor chuckled. “You can always cultivate a new one if we need it. But I think it will be back to regular duty for you from now on. That will pacify your legate, and we’ve learned what we needed to. But I do have a chore for you at the moment. You collect strays, Julianus, don’t you?”

  “Sir?”

  “That damned dangerous horse of yours – the one you had at Isca – and that insubordinate slave boy with the unsuitable name.”

  “Julius, sir? It is his name.”

  “I daresay,” Frontinus said dryly. “And anyone else would have changed it. But the fact is, wild things come to your hand, Centurion, and I have another one for you: the hostage from the Demetae. She’s not much more than a babe, and she’s scared to death. The decurion that brought her in says she’s got more guts than most of his men, and that’s what worries me. She’s immensely valuable, and I don’t want her frightened into doing something foolish. You speak the language, Centurion, and you’ll know how her mind works better than most. Mithras knows what she’s likely to do, but she’s strung tighter than a catapult, I could see that much. Go and tell her we don’t eat babies for breakfast, will you?”

  * * *

  Nine. No more than nine. That was his first thought when he saw the thin figure hunched on the bed in the red leather officer’s tent the governor had marked for her use. She sat up quickly when he came in and brushed a hand across her eyes, and he saw that he had been wrong. She was on the edge of being a woman, her breasts just beginning to show under her gown. But she was reed thin, with black eyes in a white face under black winging brows and a cloud of dark hair down her back with a gold fillet in it. There was gold and enamel jewelry at her wrist and arms. One hand was clenched about something knotted on a ragged thong around her neck, and she rubbed the other across her eyes again. She moved quickly, lightly, like a small, wild thing out of the woods.

  Correus put a hand to his forehead and said in the Silures’ dialect, “The lady is welcome, and the Mother is welcome at the hearth of Rome.” It was the formal greeting to a priestess, and the child sat up straight in surprise, her dark eyes suspicious. Mostly, even her own folk didn’t accord her that much.

  “Who are you?” He wasn’t a Silure. He was Roman to his fingertips, lordly and superior, as they all were, and iron-plated like a shellfish, which was a cowardly way to fight. But she had seen his face before somewhere. It might be better not to tell him that.

  “May I sit down?”

  Ygerna nodded warily. “Can I stop you?”

  “No,” Correus admitted, “since they sent me here to talk to you. My name is – Correus.” He started to say “Centurion Julianus,” but this was a baby after all. Surely his precious dignity could stand that she call him Correus.

  “That’s a British name.”

  “You’re too smart for your own good, aren’t you? It’s a Gaulish name, but I expect it might be the same here at that. My mother was a Gaul of the Belgae.”

  “She is dead now?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. Only that she isn’t a Gaul anymore, not really. She’s been a Roman in everything but blood since she was, oh, not much older than you.”

  “I am thirteen,” Ygerna said with dignity. “I am a woman.”

  “I suppose you are,” Correus said gravely. The tribes counted womanhood from the first flow of blood. But she was pathetically young. At one-and-twenty, Correus, with three years in the army behind him, felt immensely old by comparison.

  Ygerna watched him thoughtfully. He looked like all the rest of them, strong-featured, with a face like one of their eagle gods, but he spoke like a Silure, a familiar, comforting sound among the voices of the rest that grated like the harsh, unintelligible cries of hawks in her ears. Her fear began to ebb just a little. And he didn’t seem to be angry – or laughing at her as the cavalrymen had been, or terrifying as was the big granite-faced man with the eagle feathers on his head who was the chieftain of this place. He just sat quietly with his hands in his lap, fidgeting with the red leather strips that hung down below his breastplate. His hands – Ygerna put her own hands to her mouth, as it came back suddenly to her mind, what Tegid had told her on Lughnasadh night before they left Carn Goch, standing in the glare of the Lughnasadh Fires while the Druids chanted out their prayers: “They cut off his fingers, and he screamed and screamed but he never told. He must have been a great warrior, that one.” That was where she had seen his face – tied to a pony after the fight for Dun Mori!

  “Your hands…” she whispered.

  He looked down at them, puzzled. He wondered if she had the Sight, enough to see old blood on them. “My hands?”

  “Not even the Druids can grow fingers back. What are you?”

  Correus stood up, and she shrank back from him. “Not a demon, I promise you!” he said. “Do I look like one?”

  “I don’t know.” Maybe the Romans were all demons. But this one was half a Gaul, or claimed to be.

  “My brother,” Correus said gently when he understood her terror. “You saw my brother. Here, look.” He held out his hands. “Touch them. See – quite real.”

  She laid a small pale hand carefully on his. Her fingers were cool to the touch, clean, with neatly cut nails. “Is that why you are here? Because of what Gruffyd did to your brother?”

>   “To take vengeance on a little girl because Gruffyd had my brother tortured?” Correus was indignant. “What do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know!” Ygerna said. She looked ready to cry again. “I don’t know what you are! I never saw a Roman. And you don’t talk like one.”

  “If you never saw a Roman, how do you know what we talk like?” Correus said. “I’m here because the governor – that’s the… the chief warrior of our army here – thought that you were afraid, and it would help to talk to someone in your own tongue.”

  “Why does he care?”

  “Because, whatever you may think, we are not monsters. And because you are valuable to him. Too valuable to let you work yourself into a terror and try to run away.” Or kill herself, but he wasn’t going to put that idea in her mind if it wasn’t there already.

  Ygerna lifted up her chin. “I am not afraid. If you kill me the Goddess will curse you.”

  “I doubt that that would weigh with the governor,” Correus said frankly. “But there’s no point in running, because you wouldn’t get past the tent door. Now listen, what do I have to do to convince you that if we weren’t planning to take good care of your valuable hide, you’d be manacled to a post in the stockade, not lolling about here in a damned tribune’s tent that’s better than mine!”

  Ygerna seemed to consider this. “Then if I am so valuable, let your soldiers go back to Craig Gwrtheym and make Gruffyd’s women give back the rest of my clothes and the gold torque that Bendigeid sent to Gruffyd for part of my dowry. Also, I will need a woman to wait on me.”

  Correus threw his head back, thumbs hooked in his sword belt and his face split wide in laughter. “That’s better! The only other female in Moridunum at the moment is the cook’s cow, but I promise you when we get to Isca, you shall have a dozen women if you like!”

  * * *

  “Here.” Correus dumped an armload of clothes on her bed, brightly colored and sewn with gold thread and pearls and bits of amber. A princess’s clothes plainly, with shoes of soft, dyed deerskin and a parcel wrapped in sheep’s wool that spilled open in a little river of gold jewelry.

  “You did get them!” Ygerna ran her hands through the pile of clothes – safe, familiar things with which to wrap herself in this alien place. “This isn’t mine!” She held up an arm ring of red gold braided into an intricate pattern and clasped with an enameled flower.

  “You made a conquest of that decurion of cavalry,” Correus said. “I think he figured the Demetae ladies were holding back on him, and he, uh, picked up anything he thought you’d like, by way of evening the score, while he was in Craig Gwrtheyrn.”

  He could pronounce it, Ygerna noted. The cavalry man had just said “that place we took you from” when he talked of Gruffyd’s holding. Gronwy’s holding now, what the Romans had left to him. “There was a lot of score to even,” she said, and smiled at him suddenly. “Thank him for me. And thank you.”

  The smile was gone as quickly as it had come, like a flash of light. But she had smiled at him, Correus thought proudly. She had never done that before. And it lit up the pale oval of her face like a torch.

  “And now will you go outside, please. I want to dress.”

  “Certainly, Princess.” Correus bowed solemnly and strolled outside the tent. Behind him he thought he heard Ygerna laugh. I like that child, he thought. The trouble he had taken to get a cavalry troop detached from duty to get her clothes back had been worth it. Robbed of his own child, he seemed to have adopted Bendigeid’s, he thought ruefully. But she needed someone to pay some attention to her. Even with her worst fears allayed, she must be ready to die of sheer loneliness and boredom.

  “Come back in and look at me!”

  He poked his head through the tent flap. Ygerna spun around to show off the full effect. She had taken off the blue-and-scarlet gown that had grown trailworn even before she reached Moridunum, and was dressed now in a gown of white-and-green squares stitched over with russet embroidery and little bronze bells like tiny apples. It was an outlandish costume by Roman standards, but it suited her small, exotic face. Her black hair was tucked back from her face by a gold comb like a crescent moon, and she was wearing the stolen golden arm ring, much too big and pushed high up on her sleeve.

  “You look as fine as Cleopatra,” Correus said admiringly.

  Ygerna whirled around once more and sat down cross-legged on the bed. She wiggled her toes inside a pair of russet shoes. “I feel clean again. Who was Cleopatra?”

  “A queen of Egypt and a very dangerous lady. She took two Roman generals for her lovers and caused a very great war.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “In the end she killed herself,” Correus said. “But she’s a legend now.”

  “Do your bards make songs about her? I should like to hear one.”

  “We don’t have bards, not the kind the Gauls and Britons do. But she’s in the history books, only you would have to be able to read Latin or Greek.”

  “I know a little Latin.” Ygerna made a face. “More than your Eagle soldiers think.”

  “You must be learning very unsuitable words,” Correus said. “Would you like to learn proper Latin? If you could read, it would give you something to do.”

  “Do you mean it is all written down? All your tribe’s history? Among my people, writing is only for making magics. The bards memorize all the great stories and the generations of their chieftains’ families back to the first gods. Can’t yours?”

  “No, but we have some great stories all the same.”

  “Why do you say ‘we’ when you’re half a Gaul?”

  Correus shook his head. “I’m not. I’m a Roman, Ygerna. Many of us are half-blood, generally with a Roman father and a mother from one of Rome’s provinces. There are Roman citizens who have never seen Rome, but we all think of ourselves as Romans. Rome is the heart of things.”

  “Have you been to Rome?”

  “Oh, yes, I was born there.”

  “It must be a very great holding for your king to send his war band across the ocean. Or were your clans driven out?”

  “No. No, you don’t understand. We don’t have tribes and clans, not the way you do. I don’t think I could help you understand yet.”

  Ygerna thought that over. “Maybe not.” She plainly had other questions to put in its place. “Why do your men marry foreign women? Are Roman women barren? I have heard that happens sometimes to a tribe.”

  “Our soldiers marry where they serve, a lot of them. To a soldier on the frontier, no woman looks foreign for very long.”

  The Romans would look foreign enough to the women, Ygerna thought, but she didn’t say it because this one had been kind to her. “Is that what your father did?”

  “Not exactly. My father is… higher up than a plain soldier. He was a great general, like Domitius Longinus who commands this legion. He married a Roman lady of the same kind of family – that’s my brother’s mother. My mother is a, well, like a concubine. When I was grown my father adopted me so the army would take me – there are standards for the Centuriate… I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he added lamely.

  “I’ll tell you about me if you like,” Ygerna said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, it won’t take very long. My mother was a king’s daughter. In the old days, when our people made their first prayers to Earth Mother, she would have been queen, not Bendigeid.”

  “And your father?”

  “He was of the royal house, too, in another line. I don’t remember him very well. He was killed on a cattle raid, and Bendigeid never could make my mother marry again. She went to live with the holy women on Mona last year.”

  “The Goddess’s women?” Correus had heard that there was some sort of sanctuary on Mona. Rome had burned it once, but holy places had a way of enduring.

  “Yes. She is very strong in us, even though the kingship comes from the Sun Lord now. But we married with the little dark ones in the
old days, and they are the children of the Goddess. Even now sometimes there are intermarriages – my grandmother was a sidhe woman. That’s why the Ordovices hate us. They are sun people almost entirely and leave the Mother’s worship to their women. But they are afraid of the old magic. Maybe they think it will come back for them one day.”

  “Come back for them?” He looked at her carefully. It was the sidhe-blood, maybe, that gave Ygerna that small-wild-animal grace.

  “The Mother is in everything,” Ygerna said. “When the barley ripens in the summer or a woman suckles a babe at her breast, she is in that. And when a wolf catches a hare and kills it, or when it is war time and there is blood on the ground, she is in that, too.”

  “Yes, I know that much,” Correus said, “though the Gauls are less the Mother’s people than they used to be.”

  “Lugh Long-Spear has grown stronger,” Ygerna said, “and the people count their kings in the male line now, but the Goddess is still there. She is everywhere. I am afraid of her, too, but she is part of me. Maybe she will go away from me now,” she added sadly, “for coming into an unholy place.” She looked suddenly older.

  “Would that be such a tragedy?” he asked gently. “If she makes you afraid?”

  “You don’t understand,” Ygerna said. “That I am afraid of her doesn’t matter. Everyone is afraid of her. But I am her body on earth. It is through me that she shows herself. If she goes away from me, then what am I?”

  “I don’t know,” Correus said. But he thought, You will never be what you were before you came to us, no matter what. He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling the brittle bones under the green-and-white gown. “You are still as thin as a bird. You had better eat your supper. We’ll be gone at first light tomorrow, and it’s a long way to Isca.”

  She was enough of a child still to be distracted. “Will we go in one of the Eagle ships that came to Dun Mori? Will you be there?” Somehow, beside the other Eagle men, this one had come to seem less terrifying.