In August he landed at Isca, inspected a now pious frontier, and officially exchanged batons with Sextus Julius Frontinus, who left his half-built foundations at Deva with mingled wistfulness and relief and went to build his waterways.
So now he will sail for Rome, and this new man will do as he pleases, Llamrei thought, watching the new governor and the old ride side by side into Venta with an honor guard of the four British legions. She wondered if it would have helped if she had slept with him. Probably not. He had said it wouldn’t.
They watched him, all of them, from Aedden and the king’s captains and the council lords of the Silures down to the peddlers and beggars of Venta. What Julius Agricola saw fit to do was law, and their lives would hang on it.
“He has a nice face,” Ygerna whispered, and Publia Livilla gave a snort as her best opinion of the governor’s nice face.
“Don’t think you’ll wind him around your finger, child, any more than my nephew Frontinus. I must have been mad to let you come here, and the thought of going all the way back to Aquae Sulis in that chaise makes my bones congeal.”
Ygerna chuckled and put an arm around the old lady. “I expect your bones will get a nice rest while we wait for the governor to see me.”
“He may not see you at all,” Publia said repressively. “And pull your scarf around you before your heathen kinfolk see you instead.”
Ygerna obeyed. She could see Aedden in the reviewing stand with the civil officials of Venta, and his captains nearby him in the crowd, but she thought in truth that they wouldn’t notice her unless they were deliberately looking for her. Which was possible, of course, and one of the reasons Aunt Publia hadn’t wanted her to come here. Ygerna had heard from Governor Frontinus, with a shudder of grim admiration, how her uncle had died, but she wasn’t foolish enough to think that a successor of Bendigeid’s choosing would be less ruthless where she was concerned. Still, she didn’t look much like the royal woman who had run away from Dinas Tomen, mostly thanks to Aunt Publia.
Her hair was pinned up on her head now, trimmed in front into a soft fringe of dark curls, and laced through at the back with gold ribbon. She wore a blue silk gown and mantle and blue kid sandals, and Aunt Publia had shown her how to paint her face the way the Roman ladies did. Just enough to be respectably fashionable – Aunt Publia didn’t approve of overdressing.
The governor’s escort swung by – a handful of mounted officers with their men on foot behind them in parade dress. Ygerna caught sight of a blue silk banner with the capricorn badge of the Second Augusta and sighed. She wished Correus could see her, and then wondered if he’d like her this way. Their summer idyll was still bright in her mind, but blurred around the edges, fading, as the faces of her tribe had faded after the Romans had taken her to Isca, until she couldn’t tell if her memories were truth or dreams. She could feel him beside her sometimes in the night, feel the way his hands had been on her skin, but even that might be only wishful longing for pleasures once tasted and now gone. Would he want her if he saw her now? Would he love her? Had he ever loved her? She shook that thought from her mind and watched the new governor’s face, smiling, hand raised to the crowd that jammed both sides of the street behind the soldiers stationed every ten paces along it. What Correus thought wasn’t going to matter if Governor Agricola wouldn’t listen to her.
* * *
“Centurion Julianus. Do come in.” The great man waved a hand at a chair beside his desk in the Isca Principia, and Correus sat.
The new governor had a strong-boned face, wide at the forehead and narrow at the chin, under heavy dark brows and a thick thatch of brown hair. “I haven’t seen you since before you joined,” he said. “At your birthday, I believe it was, yours and your brother’s. I remember drinking far too much wine and listening to that poetic nuisance Martial bore everyone into stupefaction with an endless paean to the family name.”
Correus chuckled. He couldn’t help liking Agricola, but it was a wary liking with a great deal of respect in it. The general was still in his thirties and had risen high and fast, like an arrow shooting off. Few people wanted to get in the way.
“I’m pleased to see you’ve done so well for yourself since,” Agricola said briskly. “And your father sends his love. I saw him before I left Rome. Now tell me, Julianus, just how well do you know that Silure woman and her tribe?”
“Reasonably well, sir,” Correus said. “We were… friends.” As usual he felt as if his sins proclaimed themselves on a banner across his helmet crest.
“She was lying in wait for me at Venta,” Agricola said thoughtfully, “and staged a one-woman delegation outside my chambers until I gave her an audience. She does not wish to go back to her tribe and suggested that I apply to you for confirmation of her reasons.”
“What was your decision, sir?”
“I didn’t give her one.” Agricola gave him a long, thoughtful look that made Correus want to twitch. “I’ve served here before, and I have a fair knowledge of the natives, but I would like your opinion on this, Julianus, if you feel you can make it sufficiently unbiased.”
Correus took a deep breath. Cohort commanders were not generally invited to give advice to governors, and he had not gone entirely unscathed the last time he had done it. He felt he might as well be struck by lightning now as later. “I think it would be a mistake if you make her queen.”
“Your reasons, please.”
“She’s grown up with us. She’s too Roman now, and they won’t ever accept her. I don’t think she will live a month, curse or no curse, if you depose Aedden. And then I think we will have a war again. Either they will start it with what fighting men they have left, or you will have to start it when they kill her.”
Agricola raised an eyebrow. “Practical, Centurion, and possibly correct. And your personal concern?”
“My personal concern is that we have diverted the normal course of her life,” Correus said stiffly. “We have made her something that is neither a Roman nor a Briton. No one has ever had the slightest concern for Ygerna except for what use she could be to them, and we have been as bad as her uncle. Now she has no place in life except with a tribe she’s afraid of or with an old lady in Aquae Sulis who’s not even kin to her. I think we have been wrong.”
Agricola watched him. More there than meets the eye, and trying to stuff it away somewhere. Poor Ygerna – neither fish nor fowl, but a good deal like Centurion Julianus, poor man. An ill-matched pair, one would have thought, but something was there.
“Very well,” the general said aloud. “You are dismissed, Centurion. I will take your concerns under consideration.”
Correus fled and went into Isca Town to get drunk, for some reasons of which he wasn’t entirely sure, and Agricola put his feet up on his desk and thought about Ygerna.
A black-haired Silure witch with a grandmother out of a sidhe. Or a Roman lady with her lips tinted coral and her hair curled into a fringe with hot tongs.
“I don’t know which I am, either, Governor,” Ygerna had said, draping her mantle over a chair with the carelessly fashionable gesture Aunt Publia had taught her and helping herself to a seat. “But I do know that I’m going to be more trouble than I’m worth to you if you send me back there.”
Agricola raised an eyebrow. “Are you threatening an imperial governor?”
“I don’t have to,” Ygerna said. “I won’t need to make trouble. The tribe will do it. I was not overly fond of my uncle, Governor. But he was the king, and what he did was a great enough magic that even the Dark Goddess will pay heed to it. There is no place for me among the Silures. Not while Aedden wears the King’s Mark. They will kill me. I have thought about it, and I do not think she will curse them for it.”
“Then may I inquire,” Agricola asked politely, “what the princess thinks I should do with her?”
“I don’t know,” Ygerna said frankly, “but if the governor wants the leisure to attend to Cadal of the Ordovices, he had best not send me to take Aedden�
��s place.”
He had ended by sending her back to Aquae and assuring her courtesy-aunt that his predecessor’s stipend to their household would be continued for the time being. But what in Hades was he going to do with her? He couldn’t leave her to kick her heels in Aquae indefinitely. The thought slid unbidden into his mind that her dark hair would look like a pool of ink spread out over a pillow. Unlike Correus, Governor Agricola had no blind spot about Ygerna’s age. But like his predecessor, Governor Frontinus, the general had a reasonably proud wife in Rome. He wanted no mistress he would mind forgetting when he sailed. And he had the feeling that any man who had once had Ygerna in his bed would not forget.
A small grin crossed the governor’s face. He would bet young Julianus was getting drunk right now.
Agricola swung his feet down from his desk and called to a slave for papyrus. Why not? He felt pleased with himself. He didn’t get many chances to be kind; there was generally a military consideration in the way. But at the moment he had on his hands one extra woman, whose usefulness to the state was nil, and one cohort commander who was the son of an old friend and who had already, he had heard, lost one woman under tragic circumstances.
Item, he thought cheerfully, beginning to write: one pension as a ward of Rome. Item: one Roman citizenship, subject to confirmation by the emperor. And item: one suitable dowry upon the marriage of said woman to a Roman citizen. And that ought to sweeten old Appius.
He sealed the papyrus sheet and whistled up an optio. A kindness done to lovers was good luck, or so they said, and Julius Agricola wanted luck. This was his season, these next few years – his chance to prove himself the greatest general ever to come to Britain, or only another in a list of governors who had pushed the frontier ahead a few more miles only to have it come sliding back down on them. He would deal with the Ordovices first, and the druidical troublemakers who had flocked back to Mona – and then he would take the frontier of Britain to the edge of the world. And when, as inevitably happened, the necessity of it all was questioned back in Rome, the voice of Appius Julianus would be heard on the side of Julius Agricola.
* * *
Correus stood outside the house in the Street of Lilies in Aquae Sulis and braced himself to put hand to the door. Like most houses in the Roman style, it turned a blind face to the street. All its windows would open inward onto the garden, a private world secluded from the one outside. He wasn’t sure what he was going to find in it.
The door was opened finally by an elderly slave in a blue tunic who presented him to another, more important, slave, who presented him to the household steward who led him finally to a lady with a patrician nose and an imposing headdress of gray waves anchored in ascending tiers and stuck through at the top with an ebony comb.
“I am Publia Livilla,” she said firmly, as if to set matters straight at the outset. “I expect you have come from Julius Agricola.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Correus had his helmet and vine staff tucked under one arm, and the governor’s letter in the other hand, but he felt as if he were somehow expected to kiss her hand. He settled awkwardly for a sort of half bow. “I have a letter from him for Ygerna.” He still didn’t know whether the governor had sent him with that as reward or punishment, for too-frank advice.
Publia Livilla gave him a look. “Are you Centurion Julianus?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Was she going to throw him out on those grounds? He thought she looked as if she might.
The old lady seemed to come to some decision and rose from her chair. “Very well, Centurion. You may wait here.” She departed through another doorway, leaving Correus to fidget and count tiles in the mosaic of Sisyphus pushing his rock uphill that gave an air of Plutonian gloom to the floor.
He was beginning to feel a certain kinship with the doomed king when a voice, near and heartbreakingly familiar, said his name.
She was older somehow, but the same somehow, in a gown of rose pink silk with a pattern of young ivy twining diagonally across the breast. There were roses in her hair and pale green sandals on her feet, and her face was painted – Ygerna’s cheeks had never been anything but white, white like the rest of her, white as the white horse cut into the chalk downs by Calleva.
Correus got a grip on himself. Don’t think like that. Think that you are a Roman officer. Give her the letter. “Here,” he said gently. “It’s from Julius Agricola. I hope it’s what you wanted. I tried, too.”
She looked up at him. She still didn’t come above his collarbone. “You don’t know what’s in it?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“You looked so solemn, I thought it must be bad.”
Rome never let go of anything that might be useful, he thought, watching the hope in her face. They would keep a string on her somehow, but he thought Agricola had decided against making her queen. “It depends on your definition of bad, I suppose,” he said.
She took a deep breath and lifted the purple seal with her fingernail. “As well now as later. Better yesterday than today. The Druids say that – they always give you answers like that when you ask them hard questions.” She had started to read. “Mother-of-All! Correus! What did you say to him?” She sat down in a chair and looked up at him with her mouth open.
“Just what you did. What’s he done?”
“Listen to this! A pension as a ward of Rome – a dowry if I marry – and he’s even going to set it about in Venta that I’ve died – listen, he says, ‘in case any of your loving family should decide to take precautions.’ And Roman citizenship, too, though I don’t know what good that’ll do me.”
“You don’t know enough, my girl. That’s the most useful of the lot,” Correus said. “And the hardest to get.” He was stunned. It was unthinkable. Why had Agricola done it? But he had, and Ygerna was free to go where she pleased. The unattainable had come suddenly into his hand, and here she sat in a chair smiling up at him, her dark eyes shining, and her heart written plainly on her face.
And then the fear hit him, like a wet, cold wind with rain in it, and he thought for a moment that he was actually looking at Freita’s grave. It faded away again into the Sisyphus tiles under his feet, but he knew that Ygerna was waiting, waiting for him to say the words that any man in his right mind would say – and he couldn’t. No more! Freita had been the other half of his soul and had left a hole as deep as Erebus when she died. To love Ygerna, to marry her, to let her into his soul under the old scars, and then to lose her, too – his whole body went cold with the fear of that. And that bone-deep fear outweighed everything, even love or lust or pity. Never again would another woman follow the army with him and die in a mud hut on the frontier.
“That’s wonderful,” he heard himself saying, like someone else’s voice, some silly fool with a Rome accent in his educated Latin. “You’ll be able to set up housekeeping for yourself anywhere you like. You could even go to Londinium – you’d like it there. Or travel—” He broke off because the look on her face bit through his platitudes like a knife.
Ygerna let the letter slide out of her hands onto Sisyphus’s rock. Something was the matter. Something terrible that she didn’t understand. I will not cry. I am a Silure, she thought desperately, repeating the childhood formula. I am a royal woman. But she wasn’t, not even that, not now.
“Ygerna, forgive me.” The words were whispered, twisted harshly out of his throat. He put a hand to her hair, and then turned and ran as if the Furies had flown past his head.
Outside the great bath of Sulis Minerva, he stopped and pressed his hand against the cool stone of the facade. Isis Mother, what have I done? And something in the back of his mind said with a sad certainty, Don’t go back. Let her go now, and she’ll forget you. There isn’t another way. The stone was cool against his face, like a gravestone. He was a soldier, and there was a new campaign coming, a grand adventure to be the capstone of Julius Agricola’s famous career. Nothing had changed, really. For a moment, he could have had Ygerna for the asking, and then h
e had found that he couldn’t. But there was the army that had always been the core of his life since before he had ever seen Freita. He lifted his head from the gray stone. And if I begin to think otherwise, he thought, I will go and look at Freita’s grave again.
* * *
Appius Julianus lounged in the chair behind his desk in his private study, his face as uninformative as the plain, buff plaster walls. He had successfully resisted the urgings of both his wife and mistress to have the walls painted with something fashionable, and the only adornments in the room were in the objects scattered on the scroll shelves – curios of old campaigns mostly, odd barbarian weapons and small pieces of artwork.
Appius’s hands lay loosely on the chair arms and his iron gray head dropped as if asleep; but his dark eyes were awake, and Helva was not deceived.
“You’ve had a letter from Correus,” she said briskly, settling herself into the chair opposite with her usual flutter of draperies.
Appius lifted his head slightly. “So have you. I sent it to you straightaway.”
Helva smiled. She rested her elbow on the desk and put her chin in her hand. “But he never tells me the interesting things.” She was still pretty. Pretty enough to be a menace, he thought, smiling back at her.
“That’s because you’re the least discreet woman I’ve ever known. If you’re looking for something to crow about to my wife, forget it.”
Helva looked offended, and then giggled. “No, I promise. But he doesn’t tell me what he’s doing. He just sends his love and says he’s well, and he doesn’t sound like himself.” She looked honestly worried now, her blue eyes thoughtful, and Appius relented.
“No, he doesn’t sound like himself to me, either, my dear. I’m afraid he’s still grieving for that German woman.”
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