Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  She felt his hands on her and she shivered as they moved down across her belly and she felt his fingers slip inside her. She could read the want in his eyes so plainly.

  “Ygerna…” He gasped as she touched him.

  And then he was in her, his weight pinning her to the cave floor while the night mist rolled by outside. And the tie that bound them grew one knot stronger.

  “There is only a little way to go now, and I think they have given up.” Nighthawk stood leaning on his spear in the cave mouth. “You could make the fortress at Burrium, most like. Or two more days on this trail will take you into Coed-y-Caerau.”

  “And the king’s men?”

  “They have lost the scent. It was cold by the time they lost the false one. If you are careless, they will find you, but they have no trail to follow, and you could have gone away westward by Carn Goch for all they know. And they have their own hides to look to this close to the Romans.”

  Correus thought. They could drop out of the sky into Burrium, which had mostly an auxiliary garrison, and explain things and explain things and then explain them again. Or they could go by Coed-y-Caerau to Isca where the garrison command would know him. He felt too tired to explain anything to anyone. And it was only a day’s difference. And if they went to Burrium, they would still have to get from there to Isca, but they wouldn’t go without escort.

  “We’ll go by Coed-y-Caerau.” One more day in the otherworld.

  * * *

  And then Llew and a troop of his warriors found them, above the valley of Burrium, found them by accident while they were laying man traps in the long summer dusk for the garrison at Burrium.

  It was only a stirring in the hawthorn scrub, but Correus and Ygerna saw it at the same time and froze, and then suddenly the hawthorn erupted around them as Llew realized what had fallen into his hand out of the dusk.

  They had barely time to pull their weapons when the Britons were on them, and they were fighting two against ten. It wouldn’t take long, Ygerna thought, panicked, as a hand shot out toward her. She stabbed with her knife, and the man yelped and fell back, and she realized then that they wanted her alive. Even now, with the king’s orders to spur them, no one wished to be the man who had killed a Goddess on Earth. They would have no such compunctions about Correus. A brown-haired man with a cloak wrapped around his left arm for a shield feinted at her and then lunged at Correus, and she screamed in terror as the blade came down.

  It was the sound of pure fear, knife-sharp and paralyzing, and the Briton wavered just long enough for Correus to jerk back and block the blow left-handed with his sword, while the knife in his right hand shot out and sank in under the arm. The warrior stumbled back and caught his heel in the edge of a man trap on the trail. The steel jaws snapped, and he went down in a heap, but the rest closed in. Correus was back-to-back with Ygerna now, fighting desperately, but under the desperation was the sheer sick feeling that it had all been for nothing.

  * * *

  “Mother of gods, what was that?” the Gaulish auxiliary on the point of the patrol slued around and stared at his commander. The sound was still dying away over the twilit slopes.

  “An animal maybe,” an auxiliaryman said.

  “Nothin’ makes a noise like that!”

  “Something does, but I’m not sure I want to see it!”

  The decurion looked across the rolling hillside, the eldritch shriek still ringing in his ears. “Well, we’re goin’ to find out.”

  What it proved to be, as they rounded a hawthorn-covered slope in the direction of the sound, was a troop of Britons fighting with itself. At least eight or nine of them were fighting with two others. They seemed to be handicapped by the fact that they were trying to take one of them alive, while their intended captives had no such restrictions. As the auxiliaries came into sight, someone shouted, “Look out, man traps on the trail!”

  Thank you very much, the decurion thought, taking no time from the business at hand to be surprised. Grab them first, and sort them out later. He waded into the fray with his shield up.

  It didn’t take very long. There was half a century of auxiliaries, and the two Britons who had been fighting the rest were plainly on their side. There were only two dead men by the time the auxiliaries had pulled the rest off and had them lined up at pilum point. They glared across the auxiliaries at their quarry.

  The decurion turned to inspect the other two. One of them was a woman, he saw, his mouth dropping open in surprise. He closed it again with a snap. The other had a ragged mustache and dirty hair that fell into one eye. There was a sword of no particular pattern in his left hand and a knife in his right. He dropped them when the auxiliarymen waved theirs at him.

  Ygerna was weaving on her feet, and Correus felt sick. He had come close to trading away both their lives for one more night with Ygerna, and it had brought him back to reality in a hurry. If Ygerna hadn’t alerted the evening patrol from Burrium when she screamed…

  Ygerna sagged against him. She had screamed in fear for him, but there seemed no point in saying so. It was over now, ended as surely by that chance-met patrol as it would have been by Llew’s warriors. And the magic was fading in the twilight…

  “All right now.” The decurion of auxiliaries advanced on them. “Will you please tell me what this is all about?” He spoke carefully in British.

  “He is ours!” one of Llew’s men shouted, and subsided as the decurion swung around and glared at him and an auxiliaryman poked him with his pilum.

  The decurion turned back to the other Briton and the woman. “Can you understand me?”

  The man gave him a weary salute. “Cohort Commander Centurion Julianus of the Second Legion Augusta,” he said in Latin.

  XVII Bendigeid

  At Burrium, Correus emerged sickly from the enchantment of the past weeks, as a man comes from under a drug. Once he had proved his bona tides to the decurion of auxiliaries, the auxiliaries put Correus and Ygerna on Llew’s horses and walked Llew and his men behind under guard.

  With the panic of that brief, desperate fight fading into a bone-deep weariness, Correus began to feel a little sorry for Llew. If no one had seen fit to inform the garrison at Burrium that the governor’s hostage had been stolen, Llew might well have concocted a tale for the decurion’s benefit that would have let him keep his catch. The Romans generally didn’t interfere in the tribes’ internal squabbles. To have the fugitive Rhys turn out to be a Roman himself was almost unfair.

  Correus remembered Llew from two years before – the brown-haired man with the serious face who was blood brother to Owen Harper. He wondered what would happen to Llew now. They would send him to the governor most likely, and the governor would try to convince him to make Bendigeid see the light. When that didn’t work, he would go to the mines, Correus supposed, and Bendigeid would have one less captain and that wouldn’t change his mind, either. It was all such a waste, he thought, and felt even worse when he discovered that he didn’t give a damn.

  The plain fact that he had kept under the surface during their perilous trek back to the Roman zone sat up and looked him in the eye at Burrium: Ygerna was a Silure princess and the governor’s hostage, and no man had any right laying a hand on her. Ygerna was fifteen. Correus could find precious little excuse for himself.

  With Ygerna beside him, they explained themselves to the garrison commander at Burrium, who whistled admiringly and sent a courier off to Isca with a message to send on to the governor and orders to bring Ygerna back some suitable clothes. In the meantime he gave her a military tunic to wear, called her a “brave little thing,” and gave her his own quarters to sleep in. When she asked for a bath, he chased the lounging auxiliarymen out of it and posted a guard around the bathhouse for her privacy. Correus was given a spare tunic and razor, a cot in the patrol decurion’s tent, and a lot of time to think.

  Two days later they were on the road for Isca; Ygerna in her own gown and boots, bright with such of her hoard of jewelry as th
ey hadn’t given Nighthawk to buy them food or pay some farmer to look the other way; Correus, blessing the courier, on Antaeus, in his own uniform again. He looked sideways at Ygerna. She smiled up at him, a little sadly, he thought, and he cursed himself all over again. There was no way to talk to her with the patrol riding ahead and behind them, and there had been no way since before they reached Burrium. She was wearing the arm ring with the flower clasp, and Correus remembered her grim little prophecy when she had given him her own gift a year ago, a little amber drop on a ragged thong: “Its luck comes somewhat sideways, I find, but I think it will keep you alive.” Yes, indeed. Ten miles now to Isca, ten miles to the governor, whom the courier had found in residence there, ten miles back to the army again, to Rome again, and no chance to say “I’m sorry.”

  Ygerna’s hair was loose down her back now, and there was a gold fillet in it again, but she had left the silver moon diadem behind her in Dinas Tomen. That belonged to the Goddess, and she had left it for the next priestess when she had gone back to Rome with Correus.

  Behind her, Llew and his seven warriors now rode with their feet lashed together under their ponies’ bellies.

  * * *

  Correus stood at parade attention in front of the commander’s desk at Isca and listened to the governor dock him three weeks’ pay for three weeks’ Unlawful Absence.

  “I warned you, you know,” Julius Frontinus said, glaring at Centurion Julianus’s impassive military stare. There was a scar just over the centurion’s lip, which someone said the fool had given himself. “I generally find it a mistake to go back on a warning.”

  “Yes, sir.” Correus was wearing full dress kit to receive the governor’s dressing down, and his helmet with its transverse parade crest was tucked under one arm at the regulation angle. He didn’t look particularly humble, merely expressionless.

  “It may interest you to know,” Julius Frontinus went on, “that you have been proved right. Right enough to be an embarrassment to me, Julianus.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “I’ve read the scouts’ reports of the hunt the Silures got up for you and that child,” Frontinus said, “and they make the situation crystal clear, even to a man as aged and stubborn as myself. I can’t think of any use the king would have for his niece alive that would warrant his pulling his fighting men off our trails to get her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were right, Centurion,” Frontinus said again. “He would have killed her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The governor slammed a hand down on the desk, making his ink pot bounce. “Aren’t you going to ask why I’m having your pay docked, then?”

  “I assume, sir, because you said you would,” Correus said.

  Frontinus laughed. “Did I tell you, Centurion, that I served under your father once, when I was young? You put me forcibly in mind of him.”

  Something of the governor’s amusement broke through Correus’s unhappiness, and his mouth twitched into a half smile. “I’m not sure that’s a compliment, sir.”

  “It isn’t.”

  Correus was beginning to feel slightly foolish. He had discovered that Julius Frontinus could generally have that effect on him when he chose. “I apologize for being an ass, sir. I didn’t kick about having my pay docked because…” Because he didn’t care, but that wasn’t the right thing to say. He tried to think of the right thing, but his imagination seemed to have deserted him. He ended up looking unhappily at the governor with the feeling that all his sins were written plainly on his face. Even Julius had given him an odd, thoughtful look when they had ridden in from Burrium, and Correus had swung around and glared at him, daring him to say one word.

  Frontinus narrowed his eyes. “Sit down, Centurion, and suppose you tell me what’s on your mind that’s more important than money.”

  Correus sat. “Ygerna, sir. We’ve made her into something that’s not Roman nor Briton, and now she doesn’t belong anywhere, and I feel responsible.” And I made it worse; but he couldn’t say that, either.

  “Ygerna must make herself useful, as we all must,” Frontinus said. “It is the scheme of things.” He sighed. “And like you, Centurion, there are times when I would like to go build a nice bridge somewhere and let the scheme go fall in the Styx, but there are difficulties with that, beginning with the Senate and ending with the emperor and my pension. But you are right about one thing – Ygerna needs to learn to be a Roman, with everything that involves that can’t be learned in an army camp. And I want her where her uncle can’t try again, now that he has made his intentions so clear. So. It may relieve your mind to know that I am going to send her into the civil zone where she can’t be got at by her tribe and where she can learn what she’ll need of our laws and history if she’s going to govern her people someday.”

  “Where will you send her?”

  “To Aquae, I think. It is very Roman at Aquae. And I have a female relative living there – one of those aunts in the third degree who always has more gentility than money. She will be very fond of Ygerna and spoil her dreadfully and make her thoroughly Roman in no time at all.”

  And the next time he saw her she would be queen of the Silures, Correus thought dismally. And then they would marry her to some man who had the right ties to Rome, and who wouldn’t give a damn about her. And just how did that make himself any better, a voice at the back of Correus’s mind asked acidly.

  “May I be the one to tell her, sir?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Thank you.”

  “By the way, Centurion, it seems that you have done Rome a service. So you may hang these on your harness” – Frontinus hefted a red leather bag – “with Rome’s compliments.”

  He pushed the bag across the desk, and Correus untied the thong at the neck. But he knew what was in it before he spilled them out across the commander’s desk – eight silver gilt medals with the likenesses of the emperor and the principal gods of Rome. Military phalerae, for services rendered to Rome.

  * * *

  “You look like a chariot pony.” Ygerna poked at the phalerae, hung on a leather harness across his parade lorica. They had been presented again, publicly, on the parade ground that morning.

  “I feel like one, but it’s an honor all the same.” He was trying to speak lightly, to recapture their old mood of friend to friend. The Dobunni woman was in the next room, and in any case, they had said “until Isca” and had known that they had to mean it. Neither one would go back on that now, but just for a moment, when Ygerna turned her face up to his, he could see through her gown to the flower petals on her breasts and the whiteness of her skin, and remembrance came back like a wave.

  “So I am to go to Aquae Sulis and be a lady,” Ygerna said. She sounded stoic about it, but she turned her face away from him. After a minute she said, “Don’t be sorry for me, Correus. I had what I wanted, and I knew it wasn’t going to be forever. But see if you can make your governor let Llew go, for Owen Harper’s sake. I used to love his music so. It won’t make any difference in the end, you know. Tell the governor that’s the price for my queenship.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Thank you.” She turned and looked at him across the room. “The Shining One and the Mother go with you.”

  * * *

  “You must be mad.” Publia Livilla sat in the atrium of her small house in Aquae Sulis and gave Julius Frontinus a look of bemusement. The atrium was shabby but immaculately swept, and as she spoke, a serving girl came in with a silver tray. “Do have some wine,” Publia Livilla added.

  “Thank you.” Governor Frontinus regarded the wine dubiously and drank. “I fail to see the difficulty. You’ve undertaken this sort of task before, and you could plainly use the income.”

  Publia Livilla didn’t bother to take offense. There wasn’t much point. “Country fanners’ daughters needing a little town polish, yes. But a native priestess who’s been raised in the back hills all her life?… Julius, I do no
t think it’s possible.”

  “She’s lived at Isca—”

  Publia Livilla raised her eyebrows in expressive comment on Isca.

  “She’s lived at Isca, or in my camp, for two years,” Frontinus went on. “She speaks Latin reasonably well and has very little love left for her own kind. She is extremely intelligent. And I am willing to provide a suitable house and see that it is properly staffed.” He sat back in his chair and looked expressively around the room. “When Ygerna has left, you may keep the house,” he added.

  Publia Livilla sighed. The discomforts of genteel poverty were an accustomed nuisance, but not one to which she had ever grown resigned. But if the child were bright and adaptable, something might be done with her. “Very well, Julius, I will take your little princess. But I don’t promise you anything more than passable results.”

  “I’m not trying to turn her into a social belle,” Governor Frontinus said. “I merely want her to think like a Roman.”

  Publia Livilla snorted. “That may be harder than anything.”

  * * *

  Ygerna looked up dubiously at the blind outer face of the house in the Street of Lilies and turned to the cavalry decurion beside her. “What would happen if I just ran?” she whispered.

  “You’d get hungry,” the cavalryman said. “If I was you, I’d see what I got here before I turned tail. All right, here we are.”

  The door swung open, and a slave in a blue tunic bowed respectfully. “You’re expected, miss.” Another slave bustled past to collect her baggage.

  “Well, I’ll push off then,” the cavalryman said cheerfully. He patted Ygerna on the shoulder. “You’ll do all right.” He inspected the house through the open doorway. “Better than an army camp. Wouldn’t mind it myself.”

  The slave gave him a look of disapproval down his nose and bowed Ygerna in, closing the door firmly behind him. She followed him through a wide room with a little pool at the center, down a corridor to another, smaller room comfortably furnished with couches and cushioned wicker chairs. There was a picture on the floor of a man rolling a rock uphill, and an old lady with a tower of gray curls and paint on her face sat on one of the elaborate couches. The walls were painted to look like windows or archways opening onto strange landscapes or rooms full of statuary. Ygerna looked around her with mouth open, and the gray-haired lady held out a hand and said in Latin, “Welcome, child. Come and let me have a look at you.”