Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  Correus shook his head. “First, do you agree that you owe me a life?”

  Nighthawk nodded warily.

  “Then the life I want is the royal woman’s, not my own. Will you help me find her before the king can arrange her death and maybe bring a curse on the sidhe-folk with it? Her life for yours, that I saved from Cadal.”

  Nighthawk nodded again. “It is agreed, because I owe you a debt and because the king must not do this thing. But you must tell me why you care. I will not take back my answer.”

  “Because I am a Roman,” Correus said, and waited to see what the sidhe-man would do.

  For a moment he thought Nighthawk would vanish into the forest the way he had come, but the little man didn’t move. “I have never spoken to a Roman before,” he said finally. “Are you human?”

  Correus laughed, but he remained motionless, as a man does when a wild deer out of the forest begins to come near him. “Yes, I am human. And not so very evil either, only different.”

  Different was generally evil, Nighthawk thought, but it was too late to back out now. He had agreed. “I can’t go back on a life-price,” he said. “But I must tell the Old One, to see if she will let my brothers come with me.” He looked dubiously at Correus, as if he didn’t know what to do with him. “You had better come, too.”

  * * *

  “You will have to leave the horse here,” Nighthawk said. They had been moving for several hours, and the little man had finally ceased to look over his shoulder at Correus as if he expected the Roman behind him to have changed to some fearful shape. He kept a wary distance, though, even now.

  Correus tethered the pony to a hawthorn tree and looked around him curiously. He could see nothing but empty hillside covered with a scrubby growth and a few hawthorn thickets. A slight movement caught his eye, and he spotted two thin cows grazing on the hilltop, but no sign of man. Nighthawk beckoned to him. He followed obediently, and then suddenly he saw a thin blue curl of peat smoke drift across the slope. Correus narrowed his eyes. The steading was dug into the hillside itself, with twisted trees growing on the top and a screen of wild briars across the front. The entrance was low, no more than a tunnel through the briars. A Roman patrol could have ridden within twenty feet and never have seen it.

  Beyond the screen of briars, a wooden door frame was set into the hill, also low, so that even Nighthawk bent to pass through. It was dark inside and smelled like a fox’s den.

  Correus hesitated in the doorway and suppressed the urge to bolt. There were numerous tales of the hollow hills and what happened to a man who strayed into one. The skin on the back of his neck prickled, but he fought the feeling back down. If Nighthawk could conquer his fear of him, then Correus could master his own. But the urge to take something of the sunlight with him into this dark place was strong. “Lord of Light go with me,” he whispered and ducked through the doorway.

  Inside, he stood blinking in the dimness until he could make out the figures seated around the fire that was the only illumination at the far end of the cavern. Nighthawk had dropped to one knee before one of them and was speaking in some language Correus had never heard. He looked over his shoulder once at the Roman and then went on talking – explaining him, Correus expected – to the seated figure, which Correus saw was a woman of immense age and thin as a wisp of smoke.

  When Nighthawk had finished, she looked up at Correus and beckoned to him with a gnarled hand. He came forward, trying not to choke on the thick smell in the cavern and the smoke from the peat fire, and knelt as he had seen Nighthawk do. One of the others shifted a little to make room for him, and Correus saw that they were all women of varying ages, dressed like the oldest one in woolen gowns of some dimly patterned material. They were at work – two of them grinding corn and two sewing on some heavy piece of cloth, one from each end. They didn’t cease as the Old One looked at him thoughtfully and then spoke in the same curious accent Nighthawk had.

  “Why does an Eagle man come to the People of the Hills for help?”

  “Because there is no time to wait until our army takes the last of the king’s strongholds,” Correus said. “The royal woman will be dead by then.”

  The old woman nodded and tapped a finger against the bead she wore around her neck. It was the size of an apricot, and Correus thought that it was pure gold. “This was mined from the hills by our folk before the Golden People were ever a nation. What the Eagle men and the Sun’s Children do to each other is all one to us. But the royal woman is the Mother’s, so I must think. You will stay here, and my daughter will bring you food, and then I will tell you what we will do.”

  A younger woman slid forward and spooned something from a pot which sat on the edge of the peat fire, and the Old One watched Correus with something like amusement. To go into a sidhe was bad enough, thought Correus, but a man who ate of their food would wake in the morning to find a hundred years gone by and all his companions dust in the earth. Or so they said.

  The woman handed him the bowl, and the Old One chuckled. “Are you afraid there is something in the stew, Eagle man?”

  “Yes,” Correus said frankly. “But I will eat it anyway.” He didn’t think he had any choice if he wanted them to help. He lifted the bowl and drank some of the broth. It had an odd taste, but it could have been only the peat fire’s smoke or some unfamiliar game. It wasn’t bad, only odd, and suddenly he was ravenous.

  He finished and sat back on his heels, waiting. The Old One seemed to have gone into some sort of trance, and the other women had stopped their work and were sitting in a circle around her. Nighthawk had moved away to a respectful distance and squatted on his heels, also, waiting. Correus had heard that the People of the Hills were a matriarchy, and apparently it was true. He wondered what the men thought of it, and then decided that they probably had as little choice in the matter as had the women in a male-ruled world.

  He wasn’t sure how long it was, but he was content to sit and wait, and nothing seemed very troubling now – maybe there had been something in the stew after all. The Old One opened her eyes and pushed the gray hair back from her face and removed the two heron’s feathers she had stuck in it. She fixed a bright, dark eye on Correus, and for a moment he thought of a crow with gray feathers.

  “Tell me, Eagle man, why is it that you want the royal woman of the Silures.” She pointed to a place by the hearth in front of her, and the other women scooted back again to make room for him.

  Correus shook that peaceful, lethargic feeling away from him and slid forward. “Because the king of the Silures will kill her otherwise,” he said again.

  “And what is that to the Eagle men?”

  “Because she is useful to us, and we need her,” Correus said. He had the feeling that there was not much use in lying to this creature. “But with us, she will live and be well treated.”

  “She is Goddess on Earth,” the Old One said. “How if the Romans profane her? The Mother will not like that, either.”

  “Would you really mind if the Mother cursed us?” Correus asked.

  “I would not mind if the Mother lifted all your Eagle forts and dropped them in the sea!” the Old One snapped. “But it is not something to take lightly, and a curse has a way of spreading. Still, she will live, and maybe that is the most important. But I do not like it, either way. The Eagle men and the king of the Silures have made a great trouble with this. And you, Eagle man, is that all that is in your mind – the woman’s usefulness?”

  “No. She was given into my care when she first came to us, and I care for her. She is a child, and now she will be frightened.”

  “Not so much a child by now.” She stared at him. “What are you called?”

  “Correus.”

  “That is a Sun Man’s name.”

  “Yes. My mother was a Gaul.”

  “Are you afraid of me, Roman with a Sun Man’s name?”

  “A little.”

  The old woman chuckled. “Good. Maybe there is enough Gaul in you.” />
  “I’m a Roman.”

  “No one is ever only one thing. And the royal woman has been with Romans too long. Maybe she should not have gone back after all.”

  “Then your people may help me?”

  The old woman tightened her lips into a thin line. “The Goddess has spoken to me, and you have given me the right answers, so there is no question of what I allow or not. It is.”

  As she spoke, Nighthawk rose and slipped out of the cavern.

  “Nighthawk and his brothers will go with you,” she said, but her voice seemed to have lost some of its assurance. “This is a new thing, and I do not like it. Many new things have happened since my people were queens here, and very few of them have brought anything but evil. You are a new thing, Eagle man. A harsh wind and a bright light. It may be that you are fated, but I am not required to rejoice in it.”

  “I am sorry, Old Mother. But my thanks for your help.” Correus rose, almost bumping his head on the ceiling, and left. He felt too large, too clumsy, in the sidhe-house. An intruder, a breaker of small objects. He took a deep breath of clean air as he came out of the briars onto the hillside. He saw, without surprise now, that his pony was still tethered to the hawthorn, not a pile of crumbling bones beneath it. It is I who am a danger to them, he thought. I who take away their world.

  Nighthawk was standing by the pony, and five other sidhe-men had materialized from somewhere. They were barefoot and tattooed as Nighthawk was, with wolf or cat skins wrapped around their waists. They looked curiously at Correus, wary as wild deer but not afraid.

  “I have told them that you are an Eagle man, but that the Old One has said it is all right,” Nighthawk informed him. Correus had the impression that Nighthawk had gained some in reputation from having talked with the Eagle man before he had been judged “all right.”

  “Then you are not afraid of me anymore?” he said.

  “I have thought about it,” Nighthawk said. “I do not like Romans. I am afraid of Romans, and I do not understand them. And if you save a royal woman from a wrongful death, then my people will owe the Romans a debt, and I do not like that. But you do not look like a Roman or act like one, so maybe you aren’t one.”

  “I assure you, I am.” Correus was beginning to wish he could have said otherwise.

  “Sometimes people don’t know what they are,” Nighthawk said. “And the Old One has said that this is your Fate, so it must be mine also, and if that is the case, I am not meant to understand.”

  He turned away down the trail they had come on, with his brothers behind him, and Correus swung up on the pony and followed. He felt like a giant that walks across some very small land, leaving destruction behind it, because it cannot see what it tramples.

  XV Dinas Tomen

  “There it is, as the Sidhe of Ty Isaf has said,” Nighthawk said in a low voice. Correus tilted his head to look upward at the walls of Dinas Tomen cresting a long spur that jutted from the central mass of the Black Mountains. The trail they were on joined a banked chariot track that switchbacked up the steep hillside to a gate in the southwest wall. The governor would have his work cut out for him when it came to taking Dinas Tomen at the last, Correus thought.

  Below, where their trail joined the chariot way, was the long green mound of Ty Isaf, forbidding even in the sunlight. Someone had left a handful of pale flowers on the curbstone. The local sidhe-folk, he had gathered from Nighthawk, didn’t actually live in the ancient long barrow, but took their name from it as being the place of most significance within their territory. The sidhe-houses seemed to have no place names of their own. Or perhaps they were secret ones and unspoken.

  “The king’s court has wintered in Dinas Tomen,” Nighthawk said. “And it is still there, although the war band is likely fighting Romans elsewhere. It may be the king is with them,” he added.

  “That would be pleasant,” Correus said. And too much good luck to hope for, he thought. They kept their voices low. Correus trailed two pack ponies behind his mount and would no doubt be recognized by some from his time in the Silure hills two summers ago. But it was a certainty that they had been watched since before they had crossed out of the Roman zone.

  “Will you come with me?”

  Nighthawk shook his head. “No, I will go to my own kind. If I sleep in a Sun Man’s dun, I will be unclean again, and I didn’t like the cure for that the last time.”

  “How will you know when I need you?” Correus looked up at Dinas Tomen again. He could think of no way to communicate with the sidhe-folk from inside it. Or from outside it, for that matter. As a rule, one didn’t go to the People of the Hills. They would come to him. If they felt like it.

  “My brothers will be watching,” Nighthawk said. “They’ll know.” They had decided that Nighthawk’s kinfolk should keep low out of sight, leaving only Nighthawk to travel openly with the trader. He was the only one for whose presence there was a plausible explanation.

  Correus looked dubious, but he had little choice in the matter. If Nighthawk’s five brothers, or whatever relationship they really were (he had discovered that “brother” might mean merely “man of my generation” or even “man of the same sidhe”) could get to Dinas Tomen unseen by the Silures, he expected they could spy on them with equal ease. Certainly they seemed to know everything that went on. If Correus had wished to wait, they could have told him whether the king was indeed in Dinas Tomen with his court. But it didn’t matter – Correus had to go in anyway. And if the king was gone, he thought – and felt cold – it probably meant that he had managed some death for Ygerna already.

  He rode slowly up the chariot way, feeling watched, with the pack ponies trailing behind him. Halfway past the third turn he was stopped and challenged by two men who appeared to be sentries. One of them knew him and gave him a friendly grin.

  “We heard you were coming. You’ll get a feasting welcome, I expect. We’ve seen little enough of the fancy things this season. The women will be glad to see your face again.” Another grin, and a leer. “They’ll be thinking how to lower prices a little, so look you that you don’t wear it out.”

  “I never lower prices,” Correus assured him solemnly, “no matter what else gets raised. This is a business, mind you.”

  The sentry chuckled. “Well, you’ll be welcome. And the Shining One knows there’s gold enough to pay you. What we’ve been needing can’t be bought with it. I wish you could have put the corn harvest on those ponies.” Correus shook his head. “And if I could have, the Romans would only take it off again.”

  “They let you through their lines?”

  “Oh, aye, watched all the time, and knowing just what we carried. They don’t mind if the king of the Silures buys himself a new arm ring, but no corn, mind, and no knives or spearheads, either, I’m afraid.”

  The sentry shrugged. That was logical, and the Romans were always logical, at least by their own lights. “Where’s your little shadow?” He made the Sign of Horns as he said it. Sidhe-men made him nervous.

  “Gone to roost with his kin somewhere,” Correus said. The sentry gave him a curious look. “Where’d you pick him up? They don’t generally pop out in daylight like that.”

  Correus chuckled. “He was running like a hare with a pair of King Cadal’s warriors baying on his trail. Dived behind a tree practically under my nose. I don’t like Cadal’s folk much anyway, so I looked blank and said ‘What sidhe-man?’ and they went off cursing. He owes me a life now, or so he says. I expect he’ll stick with me till he thinks he’s paid it back.”

  “Well, don’t bring him in here if you can help it,” the sentry said. “We’ve all got a touch of the sidhe in us, a ways back, but the pure-bloods make for trouble, and we don’t need things stirred up any more than they already are.” He was deliberately cheerful, but behind the smile Correus could see the strain of a man in a losing war.

  “He wouldn’t come anyway,” he said. “It’s been a long trail, and I’m hungry. So if you aren’t wanting to look in
my packs for Romans or more sidhe-men, I’ll be taking them up yonder to see who’ll buy.”

  The sentry waved him on with a friendly hand, then called out after, “What’d you do to your face?”

  “Hit a Roman in the fist with it,” Correus said over his shoulder. “He had a ring on. A slight difference of opinion over prices,” he added. He clucked to the ponies, and they trotted up the chariot way, eager for the trail’s end. They could smell their own kind, and a barn meant food.

  The next set of guards passed him through with less chat, and he came at last into the outer courtyard of Dinas Tomen where the sheep and cattle pens were. By the time he reached the main level, a crowd had begun to gather around him, some recognizing him from two years since, others merely welcoming the trader as a diversion. Any break in the bitter confinement of Dinas Tomen was a diversion. It was no easy thing to feed several children on one person’s barley ration, while the men fought a losing war and the fields went to ruin out of reach. Now there would be a feast, in spirit if not in food, and dancing and music, and new things to look at. The women clustered around him, their babies on their hips or clinging like limpets to their skirts, staring from behind the folds at the stranger and his packs. They were mostly women, Correus saw, with a handful of warriors, no more than enough to hold the gates of Dinas Tomen if they had to – it wouldn’t take many to hold Dinas Tomen against anything less than siege engines. The warriors were boys or graying men. The few in between had healing wounds. The talkative sentry had walked with a limp, he remembered now.

  Correus spread his packs out in a stone courtyard on the next to the highest level, and warriors and women both crowded around as he unrolled them. He had jewelry to sell, and glass pitchers and cups of Roman make, copper cooking pots, gold and antler and enameled pony trappings, charms to bring love or long life or merely good teeth, combs and polished metal mirrors, flasks of scent and eye ointment, and powdered, hardened sticks of medicine, also Roman made, and lengths of cloth, many of them silk – the Silures were a wealthy folk and had bought lavishly of such trade goods in better days.