Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  The king of the Silures walked from the King’s Hall to the pony shed in the lower court knowing that every eye he passed was fixed on him expectantly, dependently. He shook his head at the inquiring face of his driver, lounging by the shed door, and closed it behind him. Inside, he leaned his face against the cool upright stone that formed the door post and fought down desperation. Do not think how, just do it. A Druid had told him that once, when he was a child, a child’s bow in his hand, looking in despair at a prey impossibly far away. Teyrnon, it had been, he thought, his beard darker then, only beginning to be speckled with white, and the gold sun disc on his breast catching the afternoon light that flowed along the upland moor. Don’t think how. If you think “how,” the answer will be “you can’t.” Just shoot. He had shot, and the hare had crumpled into the ground.

  Bendigeid took the pony bridles of antler and russet leather from the wall, where they hung with the rest of the chariot gear, and whistled softly between his teeth. The black ponies in the far stall flung their heads up and whickered at him. The bridles were studded with silver bosses along the leather straps, and the antler cheek pieces were carved with the likeness of Epona among the horses. He bridled the ponies and led them outside. His driver had brought the king’s chariot out, just in case, and Bendigeid stood waiting while he hitched the frisking blacks to it.

  “Don’t you want me to drive you, lord?”

  Bendigeid shook his head again. “No. Go and pull the gate open for me.”

  The ponies danced through the gate. The way was slippery with half-melted snow, and he pulled them into a walk as the chariot track switchbacked downward to the long bulk of Ty Isaf at the hill’s foot. Ty Isaf, the Lower House – the ancient grave mound that had been old when the Dark People were kings in the world. It was a holy place still, although no one could say what long-dead god lay sleeping there, and it was Ty Isaf which had given Dinas Tomen its name – the Fort Above the Mound. It was a bleak place, screened by stunted trees that grew up onto the top of the mound. The men of Dinas Tomen gave it a wide berth – the Dark Folk made their mysteries under the sod of Ty Isaf.

  Bendigeid told the ponies to stand, then he knelt before the carved curbstone of the southern slope. There were two blocked entrances on either side and a false one in the north face, but it was the southern way, he knew, that led to the chambers within. The opening was narrow and no more than half a man’s height. Even the Dark Folk would have to wriggle to get through. Bendigeid kept his distance from the darkness of that cleft in the ground and scratched with a stick in the dirt before the curbstone. When he finished, he stood and tossed the stick away with a jerk of his hand. He didn’t like Ty Isaf. There was a feeling of old magic about the mound.

  * * *

  The glade was clammy with winter, but the ice was gone from the stream, and near the bank where the sun came through the screen of bare trees, the first green shoots were pushing up through the slush and wet ground. The king of the Silures sat on a flat rock by the stream and waited.

  They would come, he thought idly. If they didn’t, he could find them, but he didn’t want to. Even with half-blood to the sidhe folk he didn’t like going into one. Or maybe that was why he didn’t like it – the fear that blood might call to blood, and he would never go out into the sun again. No, they would come to him. He had given them two days to find what was written by the curbstone of Ty Isaf and meet him there. They would come. Anything written in the Ogham script was magic and had to be obeyed.

  “And a king’s magic is greater than most,” a voice said. The little man was standing ten feet away, just inside the trees.

  “Do you read my mind so easily?” Bendigeid said.

  “Maybe,” the little man said noncommittally. “What does the king of the Silures want with the sidhe of Ty Isaf?”

  “What are you called?” Bendigeid said. “I think I have seen you.”

  “Maybe. My mother was sister’s daughter to your mother’s mother. I am Fox,” he added while Bendigeid worked the relationship out in his head.

  “We used to play,” Bendigeid said slowly. “My mother once took me back to her people for a summer. You have a scar on your foot where my puppy bit you.”

  “That was before you were Sun Lord to the Silures,” Fox said. “Before you were a man, wearing iron.”

  Bendigeid nodded. The Dark Folk were forbidden to touch iron. Iron was the Sun Lord’s creation, a conqueror’s weapon. His father’s kind had brought it to Britain and taken the land with it. To the Mother’s children it was an unclean thing. The iron sword blade at his belt and the dagger in his boot were the mark of the gulf between himself and Fox.

  Fox shrugged his shoulders. That was the way of things. “What does the king of the Silures want with the sidhe of Ty Isaf?” he asked again.

  “There is a woman of my house in the Roman fort by Llanmelin.” Bendigeid chose his words carefully.

  “And the king wishes to get her back?” Fox looked dubious. “We cannot fight the Eagle men.”

  “Not in open warfare, no. But where the People of the Hills go, they go unseen.” He used the old, polite name for them. “We cannot take the open ways without crossing the Romans’ patrols.”

  “Why is it so important that the king find this woman?”

  “The woman is royal woman of the Silures,” Bendigeid said. “The Romans will profane her. And if they can, they will make her queen over the Silures. That will be an evil to the People of the Hills as well as to the Sun Lord’s folk.”

  Fox squatted down on his heels and thought. What the Romans did made little difference in the lives of the sidhe folk. Most Romans never even saw one. But the Romans were a Wrong Thing, and it was wrong that they should have a royal woman, who was Goddess on Earth and belonged to the Mother. But the king of the Silures had never paid much homage to the Mother, for all that he was half-blood to her first children. “And what if we cannot get her back?”

  “Then we will have to kill her,” Bendigeid said steadily. “While the Romans keep her, she is death to my people. And maybe to yours also, if the Romans decide to go looking in the hollow hills for their sport.”

  “We were here before the Sun People,” Fox said. “If you cannot find us, the Eagle men will not.” Men who tried to reach a sidhe, one of the Dark Folk’s secret steadings in the hills, often found that they had walked full circle back to where they started.

  “I can find you,” Bendigeid said levelly.

  “You are half-blood,” Fox said. “And even you are afraid.”

  “But I know how to find a sidhe – son of my mother’s kinswoman.”

  It was a plain threat. Fox looked at him thoughtfully. The People of the Hills would have their revenge in the end – there were many ways, beginning with the milk sickness in cattle and ending with stillborn children and the black madness that grows hidden in grain. But none of that would bring back the dead of a burned sidhe. “The Silures have always been brothers to the People of the Hills,” he said cautiously.

  Bendigeid nodded.

  “We would keep it that way, King of the Silures. But to kill a royal woman is a great evil.”

  “Not if it is her Call. Better she should go back to the Goddess with our help than be taught to betray her people.”

  “The Call is a matter of choice among the Sun People,” Fox said. “Is it not?”

  “There are times when the choice must be made by the people. Is that not the Goddess’s way?”

  Fox thought. “It is our way, and she is ours because she is the Goddess’s. But I don’t know. I think it may be a Wrong Thing anyway. I will have to ask.”

  He stood up and turned toward the trees, and in two steps he had faded between them into nothingness. Bendigeid sat on his rock and waited. He had never seen a sidhe man come or go, except once with the corner of his eye. They were simply there, and then they were not. If they didn’t want to be seen, they weren’t. This one would be back, when he had gone to his sidhe and spoken with w
hatever Old One ruled there now. It would be a woman, often immensely aged, but sometimes young enough to be fertile still. She was the Old One, whatever her age, and had no name but that from the time that the last Old One died, and she drank the holy drink and saw the visions. All the women drank it, but only one, the chosen one, would see the visions. Now Fox would tell her what the king of the Sun Men said, and she would make a magic in the fire, drink some of the holy drink, and decide.

  Bendigeid got a crust of barley bread and some fresh cooked meat from this morning’s breakfast from the pack in his chariot. They had slaughtered the last of the stock they could spare that morning. Any further reduction in the herds, and they could not be built back up again without the inbreeding that made weak bones and a too-small size. He sat back down on his rock to wait.

  * * *

  It was nearly nightfall before Fox came back. He looked almost misty in the twilight, but this time Bendigeid had been watching. He saw him when he was no more than two paces out of the trees.

  “The Old One wishes to talk to the Sun Man,” Fox said, and Bendigeid jumped. Beside the sidhe man another figure had walked unseen.

  Bendigeid put his right hand to his forehead and bowed respectfully to the old woman. Her hair was a pale smoke color that melted into the twilight, but her face was oddly unlined, like a girl’s. It was impossible to judge her age. Like Fox, her skin was marked with the blue woad patterns that had been old before the king’s father’s people had begun to use them. She was small, the top of her head level with the king’s shoulder. The Silures were smaller than most of the Celtic tribes of Britain due to the mixture of the Dark People’s blood in them, but Fox and the Old One were full-blooded sidhe folk, no bigger than an adolescent, even among the Silures. She wore a gown of rough woolen, checkered gray and green, and a belt of wildcat tails around her waist. Her boots were cat skin as well, and she wore a necklace of gold and coral that looked to be very old. Her eyes were dark. She stood looking unblinkingly at the king. He looked back, fixing his mind on a new set of horse trappings, gold and carnelian with enameled plates between the eyes. Let her read through that if she could.

  The sidhe woman gave a snort of something that might have been amusement and squatted down in the grass, motioning to the king to do the same. “And why does the son of my mother’s sister mask his thoughts so carefully?”

  Bendigeid wondered if she really were kin to him, or if she merely spoke figuratively of a woman of her mother’s generation. The sidhe folk counted their descent in the female line, but considered any child born in their own generation as a sibling. “My thoughts are my own. I am king of the Silures. Does the Old One tell to me things that are for the sidhe only?”

  She made a motion with her hand, dismissing that. It was thin and long-fingered, with delicate bones like a bird’s, and a bracelet of plover’s feathers. “It is all the same to us, what the Sun Men do. But you have asked our help and have said to Fox that there may be a killing in it. That matters.”

  “There will be no killing unless there is no other way. I have also said this to Fox.”

  “But a killing all the same.”

  “A necessity,” Bendigeid said, keeping his voice slow, patient.

  “And for this ‘necessity,’ the king of the Silures comes in his fine chariot to beg our help.”

  She flicked her eyes at the beautifully painted chariot the king drove. He had left it tethered at a distance because of the iron wheel rims, knowing the sidhe folk would come no closer. It was indeed fine, a king’s chariot, ornamented with gold and silver and enameled bosses on the sides. It was the mark of a man’s station that he could make his possessions beautiful, and a man’s horses often wore more jewelry than the man himself. But there was wealth enough in the sidhes, carefully hidden; old gold, fashioned into pots and jugs and necklaces made before the start of time. There would be very little use in offering gold as the payment for their help.

  “I ask because we need you in this. And because the Goddess on Earth belongs to you as well as to us.”

  “Very well,” the Old One said. She sat back on her heels and looked him in the eye. “We will take your people by our own trails as close to the Romans’ camp as may be. We will make some happening for you outside the camp, if you wish it. And we will cast a shadow on the Romans’ path if they follow you. We will do so much, and no more. We will not go inside the Eagle fort, and we will not put our hand to a knife in the dark. It may be necessary, but we will not do it. It is the Sun Lord who sold the royal woman away at the start.” She stood up, plainly indicating that the interview was at an end.

  The king of the Silures rarely felt the need to justify his actions to anyone, but the flat dismissal in the Old One’s obsidian eyes provoked him. “The Iceni and the Trinovantes and the others – they were a great people once, kings in their own land, and you know the road they have taken! If my people do not end like those, it will be because of me!”

  “It is all one to us, what the Sun Men do,” the woman said, “but I am thinking you are right at that.” She turned away to the trees, the cat skins swinging from her waist, and Fox trotting at her heel.

  “I will sell away any one man or woman of my tribe if it buys life for the rest!” Bendigeid said.

  The Old One turned her head back to him a little, the curtain of her gray hair blending with the deepening twilight. “Let the king of the Silures be remembering he said that.”

  * * *

  The last of the snow vanished from the ground, and the smell of new grass was heady and almost cloying. Sextus Julius Frontinus began his season with an inspection of last summer’s work, the warp and woof of the net he was pulling tight around the troublesome Silures. The Twentieth Legion went northward up Sabrina Mouth and then inland along the broad Wye Valley, while the Second Adiutrix finished the westward line that ended on the coast at Moridunum. The governor, with the Second Augusta in tow, took the southern section, pushed as far as Gobannium in the autumn, which would link with the Wye Valley forts at Cicutio. The meadows were yellow with flowers, and the high, thin call of the plover seemed to have left its winter loneliness behind. For a whole week it didn’t rain, and the soldiers discarded their winter gear and pranced on the march like spring lambs.

  Ygerna sat on the tailgate of her wagon, swinging her feet in the trampled grass while the Dobunni woman and Julius put up her tent. It was warm, even in the dusk, and she had pulled her dark hair back from her face with a bone comb. The cat was beside her, washing its toes. A hundred yards away a pair of legionaries was digging a latrine trench and loudly singing a rude song about a general and his horse.

  She smiled as Correus came up, helmet under his arm and fresh grass caught in his lorica where he had wriggled along on his stomach with his second-in-command to sight the line of the north ditch.

  “Hello, Princess. Standing the trip all right?” He kissed the top of her head.

  “Mmmm. No one will tell me where we’re going, as usual. And I don’t like fish sauce on my dinner. And I am too hot.” She lifted the heavy dark hair off her neck to let the light breeze blow against her skin.

  “You’re complaining,” Correus said. “So you’re fine. You only get sweet-tempered when you’re sick.”

  Ygerna giggled.

  There was a muffled oath, and Julius emerged, disheveled, from the folds of her tent. “Bastard’s missing a peg,” he announced.

  “Then go and steal one from the quartermaster,” Correus said.

  “Yes, sir.” Julius gave Ygerna a wary look and backed away.

  “What have you been doing to him?” Correus asked. “I won’t have you quarreling with Julius.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Ygerna said indignantly. “Besides,” she added, “you won’t let me carry a knife.”

  “Just as well if you plan on using it on Julius. What happened?”

  “He tried to kiss me. I hit him.”

  “Oh, lord!” Correus started to laugh. “What d
id you hit him with?”

  “With my fist, of course. In the nose. I expect it hurt.”

  “I expect it did. Poor Julius. I should have thought of that. You’re growing up to be awfully pretty, and Julius isn’t much older than you are. I’ll give him a talking-to, but you be nice to him. I won’t have you two quarreling.”

  Ygerna gave him a thoughtful look. “You talk as if we were babies. How old are you?”

  “Older than Julius,” Correus said. Older than the hills, he thought, looking at her. “Julius is lucky. Did I ever tell you, my wife tried to stick a knife in me, the first day I met her?”

  “Did you try to kiss her?”

  “No. No, not then.” Later, when I was mad. I still don’t know why she forgave that.

  “Maybe she had the right idea,” Ygerna said darkly.

  Correus pushed the thought of Freita away from him, as he had learned to do. Julius came back with a new tent peg and a spare for emergencies. “I’m going to help get your tent up,” Correus said. “And then I’ll see if I can find Your Grace something to eat with no fish sauce.”

  He caught hold of one of the outer guy wires and slipped a peg through it. “So you got punched in the nose.” He squatted down beside Julius, who was pounding the next peg into the dirt.

  Julius maintained a dignified silence.

  Correus pulled the cord taut and picked up a mallet. “Don’t do it again. She’s a princess. Even if she didn’t hit you in the nose, you could easily get hung up on a cross by the governor.”