Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  “Don’t worry,” Julius said. His voice sounded tight.

  “See here.” Correus swung around and looked at him. “Were you just trying to catch a kiss, or is there more to it than that?”

  “I wouldn’t touch that little she-cat again if she was made out o’ gold,” Julius said. He smacked the mallet down on his thumb and swore.

  Correus stood up. “Good. Then go and make friends with her. And try to remember she’s a princess, and cut your manners accordingly.”

  “Yes, sir.” Julius gave the girl in the wagon a wistful, unnoticed look. “I won’t be forgettin’ again.”

  * * *

  Correus made his rounds carefully, lantern in hand, past the neat, straight rows of the Eighth Cohort’s tents with the baggage mules in carefully pegged-out corrals between and the wagons lined up alongside. The governor could have taken a surveyor’s kit and found not one corral or tent row an inch out of true. There was only the thin shred of a waning moon in the sky, and lantern and firelight blossomed about the camp, leaving the rest in blind darkness beyond the light’s circle. In the shadows, the flags that marked the guy wires on the tent rows fluttered like pale birds.

  A baggage mule snorted at him as he went by, and Antaeus, catching a familiar scent, stuck his gold head over the ropes and whickered.

  “Here, you.” Correus fished in a fold of his cloak where he had tucked a piece of barley cake, and held out his hand. Antaeus took it, leaving Correus’s hand wet and sticky, and he wiped it on the horse’s mane. A few of the mules ambled up expectantly, and Antaeus swung around and bared his teeth at them.

  “Inelegant company you keep,” Correus told him. He rubbed the horse’s nose and went on. The lantern swung from side to side, sending shadows leaping across his path.

  The Eighth Cohort’s picket saluted. “Quiet tonight, sir.”

  “Yes, remarkably peaceful,” Correus said. “Not even a dead horse in the water.”

  “I expect they’ll be about it soon enough, sir,” the picket said.

  Correus nodded. He returned the salute and moved on, lantern swinging. He was ten paces away when a shout from the picket turned him back.

  “What—”

  “Dunno, sir, but there’s a grandfather of a row going on over there!” The picket pointed toward the west gate.

  Correus closed his lantern and tried to see. The camp was full of running feet, and figures silhouetted blackly against the dying campfires. His optio appeared at his elbow.

  “Night raid, most likely,” Correus said. “Put the men on alert,” he told the optio, “but don’t send them out unless you get the word. Remember last season.” The whole camp had poured out the gates after the Britons then, while the ten men who had somehow slipped in through the darkness beforehand had set fire to the tents. No one had been killed, but the flames and stampeding livestock had wreaked havoc, and half the baggage and food stores had been ruined.

  The optio nodded, and Correus set off at a trot for the commotion, opening his lantern as he ran.

  The sounds of shouting came dimly across the camp, followed by nearby voices and confusion as the senior officers stumbled sleepily from their tents. Ygerna, in a tent pitched near the tribunes’, rolled over on her camp bed at the noise and pinched the Dobunni slave awake.

  “Go and find out what’s happening.”

  “I can tell you what is happening. They are fighting again,” the Dobunni woman said sleepily. “If I go out there, likely they will fight me in the dark.”

  “Go, I tell you!”

  Feet ran past the tent, toward the noise. The Dobunni woman sat up, grumbling, and pulled her shoes on. “Someone will put a knife in me.”

  “I doubt it.” The woman wore a white night shift and pale braids hung down past her enormous bosom. She stuck her head cautiously through the tent flap, then slipped out. Ygerna sat up and pulled the light covers around her.

  There was a sudden scuffle outside the tent, and the Dobunni woman’s voice was cut off short. Ygerna threw the bedclothes aside and reached for the leather case that held her jewelry. There was a cloak pin in it with a bronze point as long as her forefinger. The Romans wouldn’t let her have a knife. Shadowy figures stumbled through the tent flap, and Ygerna turned to face them, the pin in the palm of her hand.

  “Princess—” A man stepped forward, and Ygerna sank the pin into his shoulder.

  Another one caught her as she turned to ran and pried the pin out of her fingers. The first man was swearing and trying to see his shoulder in the darkness.

  “It was a cloak pin,” the second voice, a woman’s, said. She threw it into the corner of the tent. “Don’t fight us, you fool, we’ve come to take you back.”

  “No!” Ygerna began to straggle in the woman’s grasp, and a third figure and a fourth came up to hold her. The cat jumped off the bed and crouched, spitting, beneath it.

  “We are friends, Princess!”

  “No!” She fought on, panicked, biting and kicking. “Correus!”

  “We will have to put a knife in her,” someone said.

  “No, we take her home alive,” the first man said. “She’s no more than a child, and she’s afraid! Now see here, Lady” – he gave her the grown-up title – “be still, and no one will hurt you. We have come to take you home.”

  Ygerna fought down her panic. She was beginning to recognize voices from over the years. The first man was Rhodri. And Owen the Harper. Her uncle’s captains. They would kill her if she fought them. She made herself be still. Maybe – just maybe – they weren’t going to kill her otherwise.

  * * *

  “I can’t tell what it is, sir,” the sentry at the west gate said. “The legate sent Centurion Carus out with two cohorts, but they don’t seem to be trying to get in. Maybe they’re just makin’ a noise, like, to keep things lively.”

  Correus sighed. That was likely enough. Heads on poles and fouled water, and an enemy that howled around the camp’s walls and then melted into the night when they chased it – they were all common tactics to make the Romans jumpy.

  An arrow sailed over the gate and hit the ground at their feet, and they jumped. “Ahriman take ’em!” The sentry bent to pick it up. “Must be a wild shot – it doesn’t seem to be on fire.” Fire arrows sent over the walls were another annoyance the Britons had adopted lately. “’S a bit different from most.” He held it out.

  “Let me look.” There were torches set in the gate on either side, and Correus held the arrow under one of them. “Here, hold this.” He gave the lantern to the sentry, who held it up to add more light.

  The arrow was small, shorter than a normal man’s reach when he drew his bow back, and it had a bronze tip.

  “Never saw one like that, sir,” the sentry said. “Looks like a kid’s.”

  “No,” Correus said slowly. “I don’t think so.” But why? The little dark people kept out of the tribes’ fights with each other or with Rome. It was all one to them, as Nighthawk had said. Most Romans didn’t even believe there were enough of the Dark Folk left to have any power of their own – including the governor of the Province. Then why attack a Roman camp? They must have been given a very good reason.

  There was a shout from somewhere behind them in the distance, and he spun around, a cold fear beginning to make a ball under his breastbone. He left the lantern and the arrow with the sentry and ran.

  There was a fight of some kind going on and more running figures joined him as he sprinted for the eastern end of the camp. Someone stood in the roadway before the tribunes’ tents, shouting and pointing. Correus recognized one of the tribunes’ slaves. Outside Ygerna’s tent he almost tripped over the Dobunni woman, cowering under the guy wires, her mouth bleeding and her eyes squinted almost closed in fear. One arm was thrown up over her head as if she thought he was going to hit her. He almost did. The tent was empty and a wreck inside, and it was plain what the Dark People’s good reason had been.

  He ran on toward the east gate, which
stood open with more soldiers pouring through it. A pen full of baggage mules had been set free and were galloping about in the night, braying and falling over tent wires while the soldiers cursed and jostled past them. Under the torches by the gate was a sentry with his throat cut.

  A rain of arrows came down around Correus, one bouncing off his lorica, and he was grateful not to have shed his armor before the uproar began. Ahead a group of mounted warriors made a block in their path, fighting with the still disorganized legionaries. And from the side, another flight of bronze-tipped arrows skimmed over their heads out of the dark.

  The new grass was wet, but it felt sticky under his feet. The warriors began to pull back, and an arrow with a flaming tip came down in the front ranks of the legionaries. A sudden flame shot up from the ground, and Correus realized that the grass had pitch in it. Another arrow came in, and another. The burned men backed coughing out of the fire. Over the flames, Correus saw Ygerna’s white face turned back toward the camp as someone brought the flat of his sword blade down on her horse’s rump.

  XIV The Sidhe of Llanmelin

  They stumbled back into the camp at daybreak, singed, muddy, and snapping like a hound pack that has lost the scent.

  Carus’s two cohorts had come round from the western gate as soon as it became clear what was happening, and the legate had ordered out three troops of cavalry as well. But the Silure raiders vanished in the blackness as if a pool of ink had been poured across the valley. All sign of them stopped at the Isca River, close by the camp. Beyond that, the pursuers found no trace along any of the known trails, and two troop horses broke their legs on treacherous ground. Ygerna and her kinfolk might simply have sunk into the earth.

  Correus trudged wearily back beside the primus pilus, Centurion Carus. The pair of them went reluctantly to report to their legate and the governor.

  They found the latter disinclined to waste more time on the hunt when he had heard their tale. He nodded thoughtfully, eyeing their bramble-scratched legs and faces and the hem of Correus’s tunic, singed from the pitch flame. “‘Never pursue a small force of the enemy on ground of his choosing.’ A sensible enough maxim, so I think we won’t go further. Nine-tenths of Silure land is under our jurisdiction now. In another two months it will all be. They’ll have to surface somewhere then.”

  “And the child, sir?” the primus pilus asked.

  “She’s had nearly two years with us,” Governor Frontinus said. “Two months of life on the run may well work in our favor. From what she’s told Centurion Julianus here, there’s little enough love between Ygerna and her uncle.”

  The primus pilus looked dubious, but he kept his peace. It wouldn’t be easy to get her back before they forced Bendigeid to surrender. And weighing the chance against more men lost… Carus was second-in-command of the legion; they were his men, all of them, and he wasn’t willing to throw them away. But it was a pity, because Centurion Julianus was right – the girl wasn’t going to live to see the king surrender, in all probability. Not after Carus had seen those little bronze-tipped arrows. The primus pilus’s mother was an Iceni woman, and he was more inclined than the governor to put some importance on the Dark People’s hand in the matter.

  Correus thought he knew what the primus pilus was thinking, and he didn’t blame him. But the primus pilus had not spent the last two years learning to love Ygerna, either. He had brought one of the bronze-tipped arrows with him. He set it on the edge of the governor’s camp desk and braced himself. Cohort commanders did not argue with military governors if they wished to see another promotion in their lifetime.

  “Yes, Centurion Julianus?” Governor Frontinus plainly knew he was about to be disputed with, but he seemed more amused than otherwise.

  “That is one of the Dark People’s arrows,” Correus said.

  “So Centurion Carus has just told us,” Frontinus said dryly. “I will admit that there may be more to your talk of hill men than I had thought, but since this is the first we have seen of them, I can’t think them much of a danger. Especially if, as you say, they don’t use iron.” He rested his hand comfortably on his sword hilt. “Iron has conquered bronze since man learned to forge it.”

  “I don’t think the Dark People are a threat to us,” Correus said. “Or even to Ygerna. But the fact that they helped Bendigeid at all – that’s what worries me. They wouldn’t have liked getting this close to us. They wouldn’t have done it if Bendigeid hadn’t forced them somehow. And that’s not an overly safe step for him to take, so he must have had a strong reason.”

  “Is this all speculation, Julianus?” Domitius Longinus asked. He was perched on a camp stool on the other side of the governor’s desk. His dark face was weary, and Correus thought that both commanders, like their men, had been up all night.

  “Yes, sir. But I am sure of one thing – Bendigeid will kill her. He knows he’s losing, and he knows what we want with her—” He looked from Longinus to the governor, but no denial to this theory was forthcoming from either. “That’s why she’s important to him now. If he’d won, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “There’s a curse on the man who kills her – or so the Silures think. The little witch told me in graphic detail what would happen if I killed her,” Frontinus said. “Bendigeid won’t do it.”

  “I’ve met Bendigeid,” Correus said. “He’ll do it.”

  Frontinus sighed. He was tired. They were all tired. He and Longinus had been up all night, chewing the problem over already, and the two centurions in front of him were practically weaving on their feet. He weighed the deterrent of the Goddess’s curse against Julianus’s assessment of Bendigeid. And for the hundredth time he weighed his later need of Ygerna against delay and lost men now. He turned to the legate. “Your opinion, Longinus?”

  Domitius Longinus shifted on the camp stool and put his hands on his knees. His back ached. Frontinus had ordered Julianus to attach himself to the Silure child at a time when Julianus was bereft of his wife and vulnerable. Longinus didn’t suppose that Frontinus was overly surprised that Julianus would fight for her now. But the practical worth of Ygerna against a break in the campaign now, against lost men – that was what counted, and, regrettably, there was only one answer to that. “I do think the attempt would cost us. I agree that we wait and hope that Bendigeid will be satisfied with taking the child out of our hands. And that if she isn’t happy over that, she will have the wisdom not to say so.”

  “Centurion Carus?”

  Carus flicked a glance at Correus, his face unhappy. But he said, “I’m afraid I agree with the commander, sir. And if they are going to kill her, they’d do it for sure if we even got close.”

  Correus tried to think of the words that would sway the governor, but there weren’t any. No one had actually disagreed with him, they had merely weighed one value against the other, and Ygerna had lost. And they were right. As an officer of the legion, Correus could not make the balance come out otherwise. But he had held the child in his arms and said, “No one will hurt you,” and she had believed him. The interview was beginning to take on an odd, dreamlike quality, like trying to run in water, and desperation was pushing at him. Did Ygerna know what Bendigeid wanted? If she didn’t, it would be so easy…

  “Centurion Julianus!”

  Correus jerked himself to attention.

  “I am afraid that that settles it,” Frontinus said, “I am not without sympathy, and I am aware of your feelings for the girl. Also that the responsibility for that rests with me,” he added. “But I think that you are wrong in your suspicions. And even if you are not, I’m afraid the decision goes against you,” he said, not unkindly. “And now I think we had all best get some sleep. We will break camp as soon as your men have rested. Dismissed, gentlemen.”

  Centurion Carus saluted, and Longinus rose from his stool tiredly.

  “Wait, sir! Please.” Correus pulled himself together and arranged his words in his mind.

  Frontinus gave him an irritated look. He
had been far gentler with Julianus than was his usual wont, and his patience was beginning to get holes in it.

  “Sir, I have a long leave due,” Correus said to Longinus. He hadn’t taken any leave at all for nearly two years, since Aquae Sulis. There hadn’t seemed much reason to. Or rather, a lot of reasons not to, and too many memories lying in wait. “Overdue, in fact, sir,” he added, watching the governor warily out of the corner of his eye. “Permission to apply for it now, sir!”

  Longinus gave him an exasperated look. It was his business and not the governor’s, of course, to grant the damned fool his leave. But under the circumstances the governor was likely going to want his own wishes considered, and Longinus was not inclined to defer to the governor on a purely internal matter in front of his subordinates. He wouldn’t put it past Julianus to be betting on that, either. The legate mulled it over. In truth, he thought Julianus had a right to go chasing off after the girl if he wanted to. It was his leave and his neck, and as for what he owed the army – not to get himself killed, for instance – well, the army had brought that on itself. The army had ordered Julianus to make friends with the little Silure girl. It could hardly complain because he had done so. Now he, Longinus, was probably going to lose a good cohort commander, and the governor could damned well write to his father when it happened. He gave a dark look to the governor and Correus both, then nodded. “Permission granted.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Governor Frontinus said something in a low voice to the legate. Correus saluted and headed for the door before the governor could decide to countermand the order.

  “A word in your ear, Julianus.”

  Correus halted.

  Frontinus was regarding him grimly. “Your commander has seen fit to allow you to spend your leave chasing wild geese, and I can’t say that I blame him. The fact that you asked in the first place inclines me to think that you are unfit for other duties at the moment.”