Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  Ygerna gave her a wary eye. “How do you do?” she said carefully.

  The old lady nodded. “Well, your accent is good.” Her own voice sounded like Correus’s, or the governor’s, Ygerna noted, not like Julius’s, or Correus’s soldiers.

  “I learned it from Centurion Julianus,” she said. She thought maybe it wouldn’t be right to call him Correus to this imposing-looking lady.

  “He seems to have been a good teacher,” Publia Livilla said. She looked at Ygerna thoughtfully, closing her eyes briefly at the red and green checked gown. “Clothes,” she said after a moment. “Clothes and a hairdresser.”

  Ygerna looked rebellious, and the old lady smiled at her, an unexpectedly pleasant smile that softened the wrinkled face. “If you’re going to be a Roman, you might as well dive in with both feet,” she said. “My name is Publia Livilla, and you will call me ‘Aunt Publia,’ and I do not bite.”

  Ygerna nodded. “That is what Correus said. Centurion Julianus,” she amended. “That I should learn to be a Roman.”

  “Yes, I have heard of what happened to you,” Publia Livilla said. “My nephew Frontinus must have rocks where his brains should be to leave you in an army camp with no one but men to look after you.”

  “I had Correus,” Ygerna said. “And it wasn’t his fault what happened.”

  Publia Livilla looked thoughtful again, and an idea that she doubted had crossed her kinsman’s mind worked its way into hers. Someone should be ashamed of himself, and she wasn’t sure whether it was the governor or Centurion Julianus. She laid a soft, manicured hand on Ygerna’s, “I think that it is high time they sent you to me.”

  * * *

  Back to the army again. Back to duty again. Back to the routine of wake up call and march and pilum practice, and the Eighth Cohort to whip into shape and remind them that they had a commander after all. A man could drown a lot of memories in that, Correus thought. He had spent too much time on his own in the last few years – he needed the legion to come home to, for a haven from his own thoughts.

  And if Ygerna’s white legs and dark hair came to him by night, by day they were only the stuff of dreams, the forbidden desires that all men long for in their sleep.

  He rode out of Isca in a dawn mist, with a cavalry patrol and Llew. Llew’s warriors had gone to the mines, but the governor had agreed to send Llew back to the king with one last ultimatum. Ygerna and Owen Harper would have to be content with that. The hovels that were the Isca vicus had grown to a village now, marked by the number of gray tombstones that lifted their heads through the mist along the road. Roman law forbade burial within inhabited land, and every city was ringed by its own graveyards. Correus watched them slide by through the mist. He had gone across Isca Bridge the night before to lay a handful of cornflowers on Freita’s grave and had found a certain sad comfort there. Better not to be able to have Ygerna maybe, than to lose her. Better not to give her what he had given Freita.

  They turned Llew loose outside the new outpost that the Second Legion was beginning to dig into the turf at Pen-y-Gaer. It was no more than five miles from Dinas Tomen, for a curlew. For a man on two feet, of course, it would take longer, but he would get there eventually. Especially if he went behind a shield and pilum with five thousand of his messmates.

  * * *

  “They will come,” Llew said. He sat leaning on Owen’s shoulder against the main beam of the warriors’ house at Dinas Tomen. There was a peat fire burning in the hearth, and Llamrei sat cross-legged in front of it, polishing a dagger, her dark face expressionless. The first snow of winter was coming down lightly outside; still fair enough weather to go raiding in, for a man who knew the country, but there was no place left to raid. “They will come,” Llew said again. “It will be famine winter this year, and then they will come with their siege machines and open Dinas Tomen like an egg.”

  “Shut up,” Owen said.

  “That is what the governor told me,” Llew went on, ignoring him, staring at the fire. “And what Rhys, or whoever he really is, said to me when they let me go at Pen-y-Gaer. It was meant to frighten, but I believe it now. Now I have seen the Roman zone from the inside, and it was like looking into Annwn.”

  “Shut up!” Owen hissed again violently. “You sound like a Druid seeing visions in his soup! You are a fighting man!” He stood up and looked coldly at Llew. “Or is that gone, too?”

  Llew shifted his shoulder against the beam, now that Owen had moved. “That’s all that’s left,” he said thoughtfully. “If there’d been anything else to run to, I’d have gone the other way at Pen-y-Gaer.”

  “Damn you!” Owen turned on his heel and walked out, and after a minute Llamrei followed him.

  Owen was standing by the well, watching the snow fall into it.

  “Don’t fight with him, Owen. There’re not enough of us left to fight.”

  “He’s not the same,” Owen said. “He said she’d made the Romans send him back. She’s a witch, maybe.”

  “And stolen his soul?” Llamrei looked disgusted. “Llew has always seen things a little clearer than most and made everyone uncomfortable by saying them. He’s only seen something worse this time.”

  “Well, he needn’t be talking of it. It’s like listening to the Morrigan’s ravens.”

  “Llew can’t help talking,” Llamrei said. “It takes some of the fear out of it, I think.”

  “Llew has never been afraid!” Owen said indignantly.

  “Not of a spear point, no. But he sees too much. Sometimes I think he has the Sight. Hywel always said he did.”

  “Hywel gave up. And Hywel had his own reasons.” Hywel hadn’t come back from the last raid, and his men said he had ridden onto a Roman pilum. “He’s been asking the ravens to come back for him since they took his wife and boys.”

  Llamrei sighed. “Another of us gone.” The captains’ ranks were growing thin.

  “Rhodri was looking for you earlier,” Owen said. “I think he’s gone to the ponies.” It was only a change of subject. Llamrei knew that Rhodri had been hunting her; she would have gone by now if she’d a mind to. “You should have married him,” Owen said.

  Llamrei shook her head. “I don’t love him enough.” She looked at Owen. “That’s another reason for you not to quarrel with Llew. He came back for you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “He came back so you wouldn’t have to fight without him. He meant it when he said he could have gone the other way at Pen-y-Gaer.”

  Owen made a strangled noise in his throat and stumbled back into the house, leaving Llamrei to watch the snow fall into the well. One more winter, she thought. That’s all we’re going to have. No one should be alone this winter. Through the inner gate she could see the roof of the pony shed in the lower court, and she went to find Rhodri.

  * * *

  “Why did you come?” Rhodri said. “You never came if I asked you before.”

  “I was never this lonely before.”

  They were lying together on their cloaks in an empty pony stall. Rhodri shifted his weight to take the strain off an old wound that ached when it was cold, and he grinned at her. “It is a bad winter that doesn’t bring someone some good. I should count it lucky, maybe.”

  “Maybe you should.” Llamrei had never gone to any man for the asking, save one, and he would never ask her again, she thought, not now, and no one should be that alone. She reached out and ran her hands down Rhodri’s back and pressed her face against his throat, to blot the king out of her mind.

  * * *

  “And what will the king of the Silures do now?” Teyrnon Chief-Druid looked at him across the snow-covered lintel of Ty Isaf. They had come here to talk because it was a holy place and no one would disturb them in its shadow. Also, neither of them would lie.

  “I came here to think about that,” Bendigeid snapped. “And to ask the Chief Druid in his wisdom.” He looked across the white bulk of the mound. The snow had begun to bank up among the trees that cov
ered it, obscuring its shape. “They will make her queen,” he said finally.

  “Yes.”

  “And outlaw you. And what will the Chief Druid do then?” He mocked Teyrnon’s tone.

  “I will go,” Teyrnon said.

  “So simple as that?”

  The old man nodded. “My life is not bound to one tribe.” He gave Bendigeid a long look. “And no tribe’s life is bound to mine.”

  “Then go away,” Bendigeid said. He watched the old man trudge away through the snow, then sat down on the curbstone of Ty Isaf. It didn’t feel threatening anymore, only dark and somehow safe, and certain things were very clear, sitting there.

  I am the threat, he thought now. I am the spear at their throats. It was such a simple thought, to come so sharply into his mind. Maybe it had always been that simple – there was a price on life, a price on power, and always a price on kingship.

  Bendigeid of the Silures had been a thorn in the Roman hide for more than ten years. While he ruled, Rome would make the harshest possible settlement of his people that she could. He would be taken hostage and used against them. Or Rome would exterminate the tribe in trying to take him. But if his successor were made king now – a man the tribe and Rome could both accept – it might be that Rome would let well enough alone if the Silures offered peace. And the tribe would live.

  He could hear his own words in his head, spoken arrogantly enough one season ago, one short spring ago: I will sell away any one man or woman of my tribe if it buys life for the rest. And the Old One’s answer came back to him, night-haunted even in the fierce sunlight that was reflected from the snow-covered shape of Ty Isaf: Let the king of the Silures be remembering he said that.

  Bendigeid leaned his head back and watched a curlew sailing on the updraft above him. The sky was clear now, dazzling above the snow, and all his thoughts came clear as well, sharply defined as a sword blade against that brightness. Had he known what the Old One meant, with some unknown part of his mind, even last spring?

  The old king who had ruled before his father would have known. He had died in a famine year, when all the fields were parched dry, and on Midsummer Day he had gone out to hunt, or so he said.

  They had brought him back on a shield, with a hole in his heart where a cornered stag had turned on him. The homed beasts were all the gods’ creatures, and king and stag had gone to the gods together.

  Bendigeid had been no more than three, but he could still remember how the old man had ridden out through the parched land, bright with his best jewelry and his gray hair freshly washed and shining in the sunlight. They had buried him with his weapons in a barrow beside the cornfields, and that night and through the next days it had rained and rained. There were some things that could only be bought with one price. And it was the life and the blood of the kingship that when it was asked, it was to be paid.

  He watched the curlew swooping above him for another minute, memorizing that joyous shape against the dazzle of the sun.

  * * *

  “I cannot.” Aedden stood like a man with his back to the last wall. “I thought I could, but I cannot.”

  “Then you are no king,” Rhodri said, “and he will do it for nothing.”

  “This has not been done since we became the Sun’s people,” Aedden said. His face was painted in red and ochre, and above his brows Teyrnon Chief-Druid had made the King’s Mark with blue woad. Underneath it his skin was white, and the dark circles under his eyes were from nightmares, not paint.

  “It is the king’s choice,” Rhodri said. “Without it, it would not be certain.”

  “It is the king’s right!” Teyrnon said. “If you can’t look that in the face, Aedden, then Rhodri is right, and you are not a king!”

  Aedden shuddered, closed his eyes, and then opened them again slowly. “I can look,” he said. “Give me my cloak.”

  * * *

  It had snowed in the morning, and the upper court of Dinas Tomen was powdered with it, but the sky was clear and cold now, black against the stars. A circle near the inner wall had been swept clean of snow and a dais raised above it. On it, cross-legged like a statue, sat Teyrnon Chief-Druid, looking very old and fragile in the torchlight, bundled against the cold in a bearskin mantle. There was a staff with the golden circle of the sun laid across his knees, and his hands rested lightly on it.

  All around the circle the fires burned, the Nine Fires of a King-making, as brilliant orange as the sun against the blackness. Outside the ring of fires, the people of the tribe waited, their faces tiger-striped with torchlight and shadow, their bodies never quite still, moving uneasily to the sound of chanting and of pipes that began to drift upward from the lower courts, as if some old magic, half-remembered, came upwards on the sound.

  The chanting swelled, and from somewhere in the distance there was a low throb of drums that kept pace with it. Owen Harper, standing just outside the fires with the other captains, felt the sound twist around him like a woman and tried to shut it out. He was of the family, and it was to his blood that wailing chant called out. And if he would never have to pay the price for it that Bendigeid and Aedden would, it was still too near to be comfortable. He looked at Llamrei standing next to him, but her face was immobile, head thrown back, and her dark eyes never leaving the space at the center of the fires. Rhodri was on her other side, and he put a hand on her shoulder, kindly, but she seemed not to feel it.

  The music came closer, higher, wilder than before, until they could feel it on their skin, and then the crowd rolled apart to make two gates between the first fire and the second, and the first fire and the ninth, on either side of Teyrnon’s dais. Through the first gate, five women came, white-robed, singing, with mistletoe in their hands, and behind them four warriors, weaponless as were all the tribesfolk, their faces hooded under their cloaks. In their midst walked Aedden, naked except for the paint and something which shone white in his right hand. He stood in the circle of the fires, his eyes glittering in their light, with his warriors behind him, while the women wove their singing dance among the flames. In the old days, the young king had gone to his King-making this way. But in the old days it had been the pattern for them all, the death and the rebirth of the land through its king every seventh year, and the old king had gone into the fires with a drug in him as often as not. Tonight Owen thought they might have given it to Aedden.

  The pipe music whirled and shuddered, an unearthly sound, and the crowd drew in its breath in a gasp that was almost fear as Bendigeid stepped out between the other fires. He, too, was naked, but his face was bare of paint. But even in the firelight, the blue tattooed lines of the King’s Mark on his forehead blazed out like a brand, and even Teyrnon looked on him with awe.

  The black hair was loose down his back, and it caught the fire and flared around him as if it burned. Above it was a cap made from a red horse’s crest, with the gold diadem of the sun between its pricked ears, and there were heavy bands of gold about his forearms. His feet were painted with red clay.

  Except that it was Teyrnon and not the Goddess on Earth who sat on the piled deer hides on the dais, it might have been a King-making from the dim and half-forgotten times that were only racial memory now, when Earth Mother was the force that ruled them all, before Lugh Long-Spear had mated with her and mastered her and brought the power of the sun with him. That is, until Owen looked into the king’s eyes. They blazed like the sun, and the bronze knife was in his hand and the red clay on his feet because it was his choice and his right. He would burn your hand if you touched him, Owen thought.

  The women finished their circle of the fires, and at the last, before Teyrnon’s dais, they threw their mistletoe, and it cracked and blackened in the flames, and Teyrnon raised his hand.

  The women and the hooded warriors drew back, one in each gap between the Nine Fires, and the crowd shivered and strained forward, like something on a leash. They will tell their children, Owen thought, that once they watched a King-slaying.

  Teyrno
n raised his hand again, this time with the sun staff in it. His eyes were ancient and veiled, and the expression on his mouth was hidden under his beard. There had been no love between the king of the Silures and the chief of the Druids, but that did not matter now. He let the staff fall silently in his lap and the music stopped, suddenly, like something severed with a knife.

  They faced each other within the fires, the old king and the young one, naked in the biting cold. Neither seemed to feel it now, as they came together to fight for the kingship of the tribe – and the terrible power that went with it.

  Llamrei watched, nails biting into the palms of her hands at her side, knowing that Rhodri was watching her. Her dark eyes were bright, with a glitter like the fires.

  It was only a moment; a brief circling like a dance, a parry and the white flash of a knife. Then Bendigeid seemed to speak to Aedden, and Aedden’s knife came up again into the king’s breast, just beneath the bone that hides the heart.

  The king’s knife slipped from his hand. He stood for just a moment, a burning figure outlined against the fire, before he fell.

  He could still see the fires and they blended into golden mist and he thought he could see the curlew again, black against them, and behind that, fiercer, brighter than the fires, the face of the sun. He tried to lift a hand to it, but the strength was gone, and he threw back his head and fell and let the brightness come to him.