“I knew he would chase us,” Correus said, “but not like this.” He felt like a man pursued by Furies.
“He is losing,” Ygerna said with a shiver. “Everything he has tried to hold is slipping from him, and he is afraid. The Mother pity him; I think it’s the first time.”
“Mithras god, and it’s you he’s afraid of,” Correus said. They had stopped for the night in a hiding place that was no more than a cleft in the ground caused by some old upheaval, but it was overhung with hawthorn scrub and tall grasses; a safe enough place to light a fire.
They dropped in their tracks with the weariness of bodies pushed to the limit, and kindled enough of a blaze to keep the wolves away. The wolves had other things to hunt now that the lean winter was past, Correus thought thankfully; they couldn’t afford much of a fire. They ate the last of the barley bread – Nighthawk or his brothers would bring them more, he assumed; he was too tired to care. They spread Ygerna’s cloak on the ground and lay down together on it, pulling his over them. They had been on the run for a week now and had learned – a memory that would never leave either of them – what it was to be hunted. It was only the presence of the other, he thought, that gave each the strength and comfort to go on. He put his arms around her and she nestled against him, as they had grown accustomed to doing, and slept.
In the morning they were on the run again.
* * *
Two days later they found the pool. They came upon it just after dawn, a small, deep hollow in the rock, fringed by alder trees. The stream that fed it at the top deepened and spread into silent water before falling away over a rocky lip twenty feet beyond.
Ygerna bent down to drink, and the waters of the pool lapped at her hands in the morning stillness, and Correus felt that he hadn’t been clean in a year. On the far side, high rock jutted out of a screen of undergrowth – another hole to hide in if they had to. There was no sound but the water and a low bird song from the alders. Ygerna looked up at him wistfully. To bathe or go on? To run or to be clean again?
The lure of the water was too strong. They ran like goats over the top of the little waterfall to leave their clothes in the scrub under the rocks. Ygerna was barefoot already, leaving her blistered feet to heal, and she stripped off her shirt and breeches with a quick wriggle, like an otter, and looked back at him, laughing.
“Come on!”
Correus pulled his own shirt off over his head. Mithras god, how he wanted to wash. He shucked his boots off and then his breeches. They had lived in each other’s pockets for a week now, and there was no modesty left in them. It was only when Ygerna turned back to face him at the edge of the pool that a shock like a sudden sword thrust went through him. Unclothed, her slim body belonged to no child. Her waist was a thin curve he could have put his hands around, but the line of her hips below it and the smoky triangle of dark hair were a woman’s. Her breasts were small like the rest of her, but large enough in proportion, and tilted upward in the dappled shade of the alder trees in a curve that was made to fit a man’s hand. A shape like flower petals was drawn between them and rubbed in with blue woad in the tribal pattern of a priestess. She had pulled her hair loose from its braid, and it fell in dark waves behind her. Balanced on one foot, she stood on the edge of the pool and waited for him.
Correus wrenched his eyes away. Horribly aware of his own nakedness, he ran for the pool and dived.
When they were clean, they put on their dirty clothes again, afraid to wash them and take too much time to let them dry. Correus, watching the thin form that might have been a boy’s walking ahead of him up the stream bank, tried not to think about the woman’s body that was under it. Ygerna was fifteen now, old enough to marry, by Roman standards and by those of her own kind. She had been telling him indignantly for years that she was not a child, he thought ruefully, but Julius had seen the truth more quickly than he had. Then he shrugged and caught up with her. Her womanhood didn’t matter. The thing that mattered now was to run and keep running.
Nighthawk had told them that the king’s men were still all around them, encircling the fugitives as they began slowly to work their way southwestward. Ygerna was beginning to toughen on the long march, Correus thought proudly. She could probably outwalk him now – she had youth on her side. They pushed on, and if anything could have forged a bond between them that would never break, it was this journey through the Silure hills. Tired, hungry, frightened, and alone, they had no one but each other and the brief glimpse of a small, dark shadow that showed them a new trail or a place in which to hide and then was gone. And all around them were the sounds of the hunt, real or only imagined, clamoring for their blood.
Nighthawk appeared again at dusk, his small face worried. “I had thought to go to the new road by the river where the soldiers are cutting turf,” he said, “but the king’s men are there. Laying traps for the Romans maybe, but I think mostly looking for you. They know you will try to get to the Eagle forts as soon as you can.”
“Damn. We may have to go clear to Isca.” Where the Roman zone was the oldest and strongest, Correus knew, it would be easiest to cross the lines.
“It is a long walk, Lady.” Nighthawk looked at Ygerna, but she shook her head.
“It’s a longer walk into Annwn,” she said bluntly, “and my uncle won’t send us there by any easy road.”
The sidhe-man had begun to speak mostly to Ygerna, Correus noted. Even if she belonged to the Goddess, and as such was to be feared, she was of his own world after all, and a person of authority in it. And the more Nighthawk thought of Correus being a Roman, the less he understood him. All in all, it was less unnerving to talk to the Goddess on Earth and let her talk to the Roman. And if what Nighthawk had begun to think about the Roman and the Goddess on Earth were true, the less he had to do with that the better, lest the Goddess Above think to lay it at his door.
“What of the people of Ty Isaf?” Ygerna asked.
“They hide, Lady.” Nighthawk shivered. “The king caught one, and the Old One has cursed him for it, but the king still lives and the man of Ty Isaf does not.”
“Oh,” Ygerna said softly, thinking of a hillside torn open and ruined. The Silures would have been afraid to do it, but Bendigeid would have made them. Something foul would come of it, she thought So much blood and dark magic.
And Correus thought, Whose fault? Bendigeid’s? Rome’s? The governor’s? Mine? At whose door should they lay the destruction of Ty Isaf? “I am sorry,” he said helplessly. “Tell the people of Ty Isaf that Rome will give them what help they can.”
“No, Eagle man. My kind will be here when the Romans have gone again. Especially if we do not have your ‘help,’” Nighthawk added.
Correus nodded. The offer was kindly meant, but Nighthawk was right. The instinct to hide unnoticed was very old and very deep in the Dark Folk, and it was probably the reason why they were still here.
All the same he found his sleep somewhat long in coming, with Ygerna in the crook of his arm and Ty Isaf’s blood on his hands.
There was almost half a moon in the sky now, and the hollow where they slept in tall grass was silvered with it. Correus, sleeping fitfully, woke again when the fire went out.
He started to get up and Ygerna whispered, “No, it’s all right. I’m awake. It won’t be long till light. I’ll watch.”
“Couldn’t you sleep, either?” He could see the moon in her eyes.
“No. It’s restless tonight.”
“I know.” He wrapped her in his arms for comfort, but something in the night began to whisper to him; ghosts or the moon or his own restless spirit. Ygerna looked up at him with those moon-washed eyes, and he knew that she felt it, too.
He was never sure afterward what mad instinct prompted him – maybe the image of Ygerna by the pool was closer under the surface than he thought – but he bent his head down and kissed her. Not a child’s kiss, dropped lightly on the hair or cheek for comfort, but the kiss of man to woman; and she made a low sound in her
throat and put her arms around his neck. After that it was too late.
* * *
Wolves or the Dark Folk or the ghosts of Troy could have come upon him and he would not have known it. Not with Ygerna in his arms. Her face was milky in the moonlight, her body shadowed where he leaned above her on his elbows, trying to catch his breath. Her hair was a pool of dark water around her head. A sidhe-creature of blackness and silver who might love him one minute and vanish the next, leaving him with only empty air in his arms. He was too far gone in the night madness to think clearly. He hadn’t lain with a woman since Freita died, not even with whores. He hadn’t had the heart for it. And Ygerna had taken him wholly, utterly, and left him bemused.
He put a hand gently on her breast, and she moved beneath him and pulled him down to her. He had tried to go carefully with her, but a body long denied forgets its good intentions, and he thought he had hurt her anyway. She hadn’t seemed to care. The hands that fluttered along his back were urgent, questioning, and he felt her spread her thighs apart again and pull him down between them. He began to make love to her again, slowly this time, with hands and mouth, making himself wait.
She sighed and pressed her face against his chest. She had driven the German woman from his mind at last, or the night had done it for her. And the thing that had been impossible was hers now in this strange otherworld that was neither his land nor her own. Hers to hold onto while she could. She hadn’t even minded that it had hurt at first. For tonight, for until Isca, he was hers.
* * *
Until Isca. For Correus also their flight became an enchantment now, a sidhe-dream from which he would wake at Isca. By day on the trail, with Ygerna in boy’s clothes trotting beside him, Correus cursed himself for a fool. By night, with the heady smell of meadow grass around them, he lay with her in his arms and grew drunk.
Until Isca. They said it once aloud and then put the words away from them. Isca was another country, and they would cross into it when they crossed into the Roman zone.
Correus, with one last grasp at sanity, pushed Ygerna away from him and held her by the shoulders, his hands tangling in her hair. “It’s not right,” he whispered. “It isn’t fair. Not to you.”
Ygerna shook her head. “No. We have until Isca. Someone has given us that. It wouldn’t be fair not to use it.” The blue flower petals between her breasts swayed as she moved forward. Her slim feet twined themselves about his own. She put her hands on him, and he was lost.
I will be grateful, she thought as she felt him enter her, not painfully now, but welcome and familiar. I will be grateful, and I will not ask for more. Neither the governor nor Rome nor her own people would ever let her keep him, but until Isca, none of them mattered. She didn’t even ask that he say he loved her. It would make no difference in the end.
The next night the Dark Folk woke them at midnight, their faces pinched and frightened, their small hands shaking them into consciousness.
The king was riding by night, they said, and he was on the right trail. Their voices were urgent as Correus and Ygerna scrambled into their boots and let themselves be pushed onto some path they couldn’t see.
“Run!” Nighthawk said, and the fear in his voice put a cold hand to Correus’s neck. If Nighthawk was afraid…
They ran, stumbling blindly over tree roots, the low-growing vines and briars scratching at their faces, and in the distance Correus thought he could hear… something, something that was not quite the baying of hounds, but an indistinguishable sound that might have been the voice of fear itself. The forest seemed to close around him, and he felt his breath come painfully as if something were clamped around his chest. Ygerna, in front of him, made no sound but her own labored breathing, but he knew that she felt it, too. Whatever was loose in the forest was death.
And then suddenly it was gone – the terrible hand that had gripped his lungs and the almost-sound that had pursued them. Nighthawk dropped to a walk. “They have turned them,” he said, and Correus saw that the sidhe-man’s brothers were no longer with them. And that it was daylight.
They trudged on, panic gone and bone-weariness in its place, until Ygerna began to stagger on the trail, and Correus thought that neither of them could go farther. Nighthawk stopped suddenly ahead of them, where the ground rose up sharply in a tumble of rock and wild berries. Correus gave him a puzzled look and then narrowed his eyes where the little man was pointing.
It was a sidhe-dwelling, differing from the Sidhe of Llanmelin in that it was adapted to a different terrain, but alike in its concealment, its blending into the earth around it.
“This is the first place the king will hunt,” Ygerna said wearily. “You told us that.”
Nighthawk shook his head. “This is the Sidhe of the Dancers, and it has been empty since before the Golden People came. No one knows why. Maybe they died. Or maybe it was only that the well went bad, and they moved on. The Old One of Ty Isaf didn’t say. But unless the king comes this way by chance, you’ll be safe enough here.”
“Won’t he track us?”
“My brothers have turned him onto their own trail,” Nighthawk said. “Or he would have been here by now. Wait two days and if I am not here, go southeast.”
The cave smelled old and, Ygerna thought, of some dark magic that hung about it still. She was almost too tired to be afraid, but there was the feeling of a presence that she couldn’t shake, and she kindled a small fire and made a torch of a branch of dry leaves in it. As she lifted it, figures leapt up in the light, and she gasped.
Correus jerked his head up, his hand on his knife, and it was only after a moment that they realized what they had seen. Across the back wall of the cave they leapt and curvetted, antlered heads swaying to their step, bare arms and legs seeming to move in the flickering light – six antlered human forms painted in red ochre on the stone.
“What are they?” Correus whispered.
“The dancers of the Horned One,” Ygerna said. “They are older than – anything. I wish now I hadn’t seen them.”
“They are only paintings.”
“That’s the Roman in you,” Ygerna said. “They are old magic. Your mother’s folk would know them.” She put the light out. “I don’t think we should look at them.”
“They are only paintings,” he said again, and pulled her onto his cloak beside him. “Sleep, and don’t think of them.”
“Do I have a choice?” Ygerna said wryly. “I can sleep here with the Horned One or outside with the king, my uncle.”
“Of the two,” Correus said firmly, “I will take the Horned One.” But his back itched as if he could feel them, too, behind him, and when he slept there was something that came and danced at the edge of his dreams – not menacing as the king’s presence had been, but old and full of power… and not to be denied.
When they woke, it was dark; even the faint glow that had come from the cave mouth was gone. They found each other and their food by touch, and when they had eaten, they lay down again and told stories to chase away the dark, tales of the high and far-off days when the kings and gods of the Dark Folk had warred with those of the Golden People, and their heroes had had the height of mountains. And stories of the gods who lived on Olympus, and the Fall of Troy, and the Twelve Labors of Hercules.
And then slowly as the heroes of flesh and legend faded into the dark, they sat up and stripped their clothes off and put out their hands to each other. And in the cave of the Horned One, she was not fifteen and he was not a Roman; they were woman and man, and their coupling was a magic and a dance in itself.
On the second day, Nighthawk was waiting for them as they came blinking out into the light, and they realized that in that ancient magic, they had not even feared the king. The fear came back on the trail, but the magic lingered somehow, deep in the bone, where it would stay.
Correus lost track of time now, feeling more and more like a man who has slept in the otherworld. They worked their way slowly south, parallel to the line of the Wye Valle
y forts, but always with the king’s men between them and safety. Nighthawk and his brothers brought them food and pointed to a landmark or a star and were gone again, to keep their watch on Bendigeid’s movements. The Dark Folk could move across the hills unseen in ways that not even such a trailwise spy as Centurion Julianus could go. Nighthawk kept his distance now when he could, his old wariness of the Roman seeming to have tripled. Nighthawk knew what had happened. Correus was almost sure of that. The sidhe-man’s small face registered such open horror that he apparently expected the Roman to turn to stone or the offending member to drop off at any moment. Finally Ygerna said something furiously to him that Correus couldn’t hear, and he backed away with his hand to his forehead.
“What did you tell him?”
Ygerna looked slightly amused. “I threatened him. He thinks I make a sacrilege with you because I am the Goddess on Earth and you are a Roman. I told him that the things between a man and woman are the Goddess’s business, and he is not meant to understand. And that if he said one more word, I would send something to him that would give him other worries.”
Correus wondered if Ygerna could really curse the little man. He expected she could, especially since Nighthawk was so plainly receptive. The curse that Correus was worried about was a more tangible sort, and he kept enough grip on reality that night to talk about it.
“I would know if I were with child,” Ygerna said. “I am not a priestess for nothing.” She did not tell him that she would not know this early. If it happened later, then she would decide what to do. This would be all she would ever have of Correus for years, maybe forever. She would be sad for that later. Be sad for the child she couldn’t have later. Tonight she would take what was given her.
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