“Not in the water, mind.”
There was no answer and he was just beginning to wonder if she was fool enough to run, when she came around the patch of scrub, straightening her belt and gown. “I know that.” She gave him a look. “But I thought about it.”
“Well, you’ll have to use the water, too,” Correus pointed out. “Why are you so mad at us, truly?”
Ygerna sighed and sat down on a rock. “I don’t know. I tried to remember things, my people’s faces, and I couldn’t. They are my kinfolk and they may all be dead now, and I couldn’t see their faces. And it is your Eagle men who have done it. I hate you.”
Correus crouched down beside her. “Truly?”
“No. But I don’t know why not, either. Or why I can’t remember my own folk, or why I was afraid you would be killed. It is wrong not to hate you.”
“You didn’t feel that way a month ago. Is it because of the battle? You knew that was coming.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know I wouldn’t be able to remember them!” Ygerna said.
“Move over.” Correus squeezed onto the rock beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. “You are young. Memory fades very fast when you’re young. It’s not your fault.” It was his fault. He’d done everything he could to blur those memories. He pulled her closer. “It’s not your fault.”
She was oddly aware of him, even under the armor, and something she couldn’t explain gave a little lurch inside of her and her face felt hot. “That hurts.” She put the flat of her hand against the iron plates of his lorica and pushed him away a little. “Like a lobster. Why do you wear it? It is a cowardly way to fight.”
“It’s a highly intelligent way to fight,” Correus said indignantly. “Killing is a great waste. The most successful battle is one in which the enemy surrenders with the fewest men lost on both sides.”
“What is the point of fighting an enemy if you don’t kill them?”
“We want to pacify West Britain, remove a threat to the rest of the province – not destroy it.”
“What you want will destroy it anyway, I think,” Ygerna said solemnly. “And if there is no blood, the Morrigan may look elsewhere to feed, and you will be sorry.”
“I can easily believe your grandfather took his wife out of a sidhe,” Correus said. “You sound like a witch. I thought the Goddess had left you.”
“Maybe I will make a magic and find out,” Ygerna said darkly.
“And shrivel me up like a winter apple?”
“Maybe.”
Correus stood up. “In the meantime would Your Grace allow me to escort you back to camp? It is getting dark, and I want my dinner.”
Ygerna picked a trail of bramble from the laces of one shoe. When she straightened up he thought she looked a little embarrassed. “I was afraid you were going to be killed. I am sorry I said I hated you.”
“I know.”
She pulled something over her head and handed it to him. It was a drop of amber on a ragged thong. “Here. It is supposed to be lucky. Its luck comes somewhat sideways, I find, but I think it will keep you alive.”
He put the amber around his neck, tucking the disreputable thong into his tunic front where the legate wouldn’t see it. “Thank you, Princess.”
He held out his hand, and she took it and let him lead her back to the camp.
* * *
“They have begun another fortress, at Pen-y-Darren. We caught one of their patrols and left the heads in the water upstream.”
“Good.” Bendigeid nodded. He was rewrapping a sword hilt with fine bronze wire, a delicate task more often left to the goldsmiths. “Send me Owen and Llew when they come in.”
The Druid across from him looked up. He sat on piled deer hides on the floor, with a bowl between his knees, watching the patterns the torches made in the dark water. He was Teyrnon the Chief Druid, and most men had the sense to be afraid of him. Bendigeid’s captain saw his look and backed out again.
“And how long will the king of the Silures trade no more than a few heads for another fort raised among us?”
“Until the Chief Druid can devise a better plan,” Bendigeid said. “We have killed many of them by raiding in the past month. You saw what happened when we met in open battle.”
“The Druids do not make war,” Teyrnon said. “We deal with the gods only. It is for the king to hold the sword against the enemy.”
“It would be more to the point if the Chief Druid would deal with his underlings in Cadal’s hall!” Bendigeid snapped. “He has refused the alliance altogether now that we have lost men to the Romans. I do not think he is as afraid of the Romans in his own hills as he claims. If the Druids ordered it, he would come.”
“Druids do not make war,” Teyrnon said again, flatly. “It is not our place in the way of things. The king of the Silures would do well to remember his own place!”
Bendigeid stood up. “Teyrnon Chief-Druid may find his place somewhat uncomfortable if the Romans win!” He sheathed the half-wrapped sword, holding the roll of wire carefully. “I am going where the gods are less thick about my ears. I have need to talk to someone who has not put his head under his cloak!”
The Druid spread his long fingers out across the surface of the water. “There will be a burning. I can see no more than that. But it may be that the king of the Silures began it when he threw Gruffyd of the Demetae to the Roman kind and taught the king of the Ordovices the trick of it!”
Bendigeid went outside, where a clear, cold sky left the holding walls sharply etched in the moonlight. There was a fair amount of noise coming from a building across the courtyard where such of his captains and household warriors as were not raiding the Romans were getting noisily drunk in the respite. A woman’s high-pitched laugh carried through the cold air, and someone shouted something and she shrieked again. The door slammed open, and Rhodri, the captain who had reported the new fort at Pen-y-Darren, stumbled out. He stuck his head in a rain vat to clear it, shook the water off him like a hound, and went back inside. The voices came closer and then dimmed again as the door swung closed.
The king leaned his back against the mud and withy wall of the house and thought about going inside. He recognized another woman’s voice as Llamrei’s, a woman almost as old as he and still unwed. He had lain with her sometimes; it might even be for him that she had stayed unwed. She would be glad to see him. So would his captains and spear brothers. It had been a long time since he had sprawled in the rushes on the floor and gotten drunk on mead and harpsong, with a woman in the crook of his arm. He put his hand on the door and then drew it away again. How long had it been, he wondered, since he had taken his pleasure without finding it barred with shadows like the ground under trees. How long since he had been the king?
XI Moonshine
“My dear boy!” Appius Julianus held out both hands as Flavius swung down from the saddle in the outer court of his father’s house.
The greeting was effusive, but Flavius thought his father looked slightly embarrassed. Didn’t think I had it in me, did you? He put both arms around his father, kissed his mother on the cheek, and caught Aemelia up in a hug that lifted her off her feet.
He is changed, Antonia thought, watching him. Changed enough so that even his father sees it. Flavius stood in the full sun, and there was the first hint of lines in his face that hadn’t been there before. He was tanned from the journey, and his dark curls hung over his forehead and needed cutting. He grinned at them all and heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief when Philippos, his father’s steward, bustled out with a small slave in tow carrying a silver cup of wine to welcome the young master back.
A groom came up to take the horses, Bericus began to sort out the baggage, and more slaves appeared from the house to bear it off to the private apartments in the east wing.
His mother tucked her arm through his. “We’ve put you in the Egyptian room,” she said, referring to an apartment with a pleasant green and gold design of lotus flowers on its walls.
/> Flavius grinned to himself. The Egyptian room was actually a suite of rooms normally reserved for guests, with a skylight and a little open courtyard on the upper level, where visiting senators could sun themselves and think important thoughts in privacy. A far cry from the Spartan quarters considered suitable for his boyhood, but fitting enough for the newly appointed staff aide to the Praetorian-Prefect Titus, son and presumed heir of the emperor.
The family passed through the atrium, the central room of the house, built around a skylight of its own and a small tiled pool, then drifted through the far doors into the rose garden, Lady Antonia chatting placidly of domestic arrangements and Aemelia just holding shyly to his other arm. Appius walked behind them, his eyes on his son’s straight back in the purple of an imperial staff officer and on the curiously elongated shape of the hand that he put around his wife’s shoulders.
The air was warm and full of bees. They settled themselves around the pool in the rose garden. It had an edge of rose-colored tiles and delicately floating water lilies, counterpoint to the squat shape of a carp the cook was keeping in it until dinner. Flavius pulled off his cloak and spread it on the stone bench for the ladies to sit on. Under it, he wore a light cuirass and a purple sash similar to a tribune’s uniform. He had left off being self-conscious about his hands a year ago, but his mother drew in her breath in a sharp gasp when she saw them.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I forgot you hadn’t seen me since—”
“I have,” Aemelia said, “and it still makes me wince. It must have hurt so.”
“So do a lot of other things,” Flavius said cheerfully. “It doesn’t hurt now.”
“Neither does your promotion, I expect,” Appius said. “I’m impressed myself.” He was impressed with Flavius, too, but there didn’t seem any way to say it without being pompous. “It is no bad thing to be serving the next man to wear the purple.”
“I’m a good staff officer and an uninspired field commander,” Flavius said frankly. “It’s a relief to be put where I feel useful.”
“You were useful enough on Gratus’s staff,” Appius said. “He’ll be chewing on his helmet feathers without you, but I heard he was the one who recommended the appointment, with a second from the governor. Now he’ll be running through staff aides at three a month again. He must love you like a brother.”
“Rather more at some points, I should think,” Flavius said. “Poor Correus fished me out of a British camp and then nursed me through the worst of this.” He held up his. “It got him a corona civica, but I imagine it was a relief finally to see the back of me.” Flavius gave his father a somewhat pointed look. He thought that Appius acknowledged it.
“How is your brother?” Antonia asked.
Flavius flicked an eye at Aemelia, but her rose-petal face registered only polite interest, and the hand which she had laid on his shoulder didn’t move. Her hair smelled of oil of jasmine.
“He’s all right now, I think, but he was close to the edge a year ago. That woman’s death nearly killed him.”
Appius studied him. “I suppose you are thinking I should have let him marry her.”
“No, sir. Julia said that, but I think she’s swayed by hindsight. I don’t think you should have, not unless some oracle promised you ahead of time the woman would get killed.”
“Flavius!” Antonia looked shocked.
“I think that’s a fair statement,” Flavius said mildly. “An adopted child is one thing now that the poor woman’s dead. A live wife would have been quite another.”
“Indelicately stated, but accurate,” Appius said. “His letters sound better now, but still… sad. I wish I’d had an oracle.”
* * *
“Awful, it was. Really.” Tirza pummeled the dough with plump hands, lifted it, and smacked it down the other way ’round on the marble board. “He came into the kitchen to see Cook, and I don’t know when I’ve had such a shock – he hadn’t got any fingers!”
“He’s got eight fingers, you fool,” Emer said. She was stirring cheese into a sauce with a whisk, and it was stifling standing so close to the stove. She brushed a stray tangle of red hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Did you see ’im?” The wine steward’s boy was pouring an amphora of white cooking wine out into a bowl. “Was it awful?” He balanced the amphora on the floor, point down, and leaned on it, awaiting details.
“Dreadful,” Tirza said, ghoulishly important. She slapped her hand into the dough for emphasis, and it came away with a horrid sucking sound. “It must have hurt something dreadful! How anyone could bear it!”
“Not as much as your backside will if you ruin that pastry,” Emer said as the cook glared across the kitchen at them over the bird which he was carefully stuffing. “And I don’t suppose he had much choice.” She sprinkled a pinch of herbs into the sauce and tasted it gingerly.
Tirza shuddered but turned her attention back to the dough. The life of a slave in Appius’s household was not particularly exciting. The return of the young master with a promotion and a tale of torture and mutilation on the frontier was more drama than had come their way all summer.
The kitchen was crowded, its usual staff augmented by labor recruited from the gardens and the other house slaves, in preparation for the young master’s homecoming feast. A pair of field slaves stood uncertainly in the doorway, blocking what little breeze there was, until Emer told them crossly to put their cursed lettuces there on the table and get out. The cook’s small daughters were peeling onions and sniffling in the corner, and Niarchos, the majordomo, stuck his head in at the inner door at intervals to argue with the cook. Thais, the elderly slave who had been nurse to Flavius and Correus both, was at a table ignoring the cook’s baleful stare and brewing a concoction to which she claimed Flavius was partial. Emer privately decided that Flavius would pour it out the window, but Thais loved both her former charges with a lifelong devotion, and Emer certainly wasn’t going to interfere.
“He has come through it all wonderfully,” Thais said now, with a quelling look at Tirza. “And with a corona aurea. Both my boys are a credit to the house.”
“Master Correus helped me climb the apple tree when he was here,” Cook’s smallest daughter volunteered. “Is he coming home, too?”
“Undoubtedly,” her father said, beginning to baste his bird with a dish of thinned jelly, “and then I will be forced to construct yet another dinner with the assistance of field hands! No, you fool! Put the asparagus there, in the snow box. And close the lid! Do you know what snow costs at this time of year?”
The slave gave him a petrified look and obeyed, carrying the asparagus as if it might bite him. It was late in the season for asparagus, he had been given to understand by the merchant who had delivered it, and worth its weight in pearls.
“I expect he will soon,” Thais told the cook’s daughter. “He’ll want to see his child if Mistress Julia will just light long enough to catch them in one place for a week at a time. And he ought to be with his family. It might be a comfort, now that his poor lady’s dead.” Thais thought of Correus’s German girl and sighed. Poor boy, he had loved her so, and it was all so impossible.
“Pooh,” the little girl said. “She was just a slave.”
“So are you,” Thais said gently. “Does that make you so unimportant?”
“She’s not bedding the master’s son,” Tirza said. “Some people who do that get to thinking they’re more important than they are.” She shot Emer a look across the lump of dough.
“You’re not to speak that way in front of the children, Tirza,” Thais said.
“Oh, I know all about that,” the older girl said.
“Well, you shouldn’t,” Thais said repressively. That was what came of having no mother. “You should marry again,” she told the cook.
“You should get out of my kitchen,” he said. “Get the oven open for me, and get out of my way.”
Emer grabbed a potholder and pulled the clay door of the roas
ting oven open. She put a lid on her sauce and set it on the rack over the stove to keep warm. “What next? Oh, heavens, the dormice! Do you really think Master Correus will come home soon?” she asked Thais as she shifted the tray of dormice onto the table next to her and began to mix cream and honey into a sauce.
“You show too much interest,” a deep voice behind her said. “You will make yourself a spectacle.”
“Mind your own business,” Emer said. She poured some sauce into a pan and began to arrange the dormice in neat rows.
Forst lounged on the table beside her. “That is disgusting.” He poked a finger at the pan of dormice. They were immensely fat, fed on nuts until they could barely move and then skinned and cooked whole. Others, awaiting a similar fate, climbed obesely over each other in a perforated clay jar by the wall.
“You are not invited to eat them,” Emer said. She sprinkled the dormice with ground nuts and poured the rest of the sauce over them.
Forst leaned on the table, and she reached around him for the pepper grinder. He was barefoot and dressed in the plain brown tunic that all of Appius’s slaves wore, but he looked as wildly out of place in the kitchen as a thistle in a bed of lettuces.
“What are you doing here?” Emer said. “Go back to your horses before Cook has a temperament and the dinner is spoiled.”
“Tirza is right,” Forst said, prodding her.
“Tirza has a face that would dry up a water clock!” Emer snapped.
“You look some better than she does,” Forst admitted judicially. “And a roll in the hayfield with the master is your own business, but you’ll break your heart if you look for more than that.”
“Get out!” Emer hissed.
“You aren’t getting younger, either,” Forst said. Emer was six-and-twenty, which was not young anymore.
“Get out!” The other slaves were watching them with interest, ears pricked.
“I’ll come walk with you tonight,” Forst said, “if I haven’t found a woman with a better temper by then.”
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