“You look very pretty and restful,” he said admiring the view, and they smiled at him affectionately. They were dressed in light summer silks, and they were reflected in the clear waters of the fish pond behind them.
A cat had appeared from somewhere and was regarding the water thoughtfully. It stuck out a paw and ripples spread around it, and all the fish hurled themselves to the far end.
“Thank you, dear,” Antonia said placidly. “It’s very restful to have you at home. We were quite worried.”
“We had hysterics,” Aemelia said firmly. “At least I did. I’ve never been so frightened.”
Flavius took a deep breath of roses and warm air, and the faint lemony scent his wife was wearing. “I wasn’t exactly calm about it myself,” he said, and they smiled at him proudly, admiring such understatement. He felt like a cat, basking in so much patent admiration. He knew he shouldn’t do it, it would only give him a swelled head, but it was too pleasant to resist.
“I’ll need to go and see Forst about a horse,” he said. “I lost Nestor in Pompeii.” He grimaced, embarrassed at mourning a horse so much, but he’d ridden Nestor for seven years, since his cadet days. Even Bericus had cried when he’d heard that the big bay was gone. “I want one of that gray’s colts if Forst has one to spare,” he said, trying to bring the light mood back. “There must be some of the first crop ready to sell off.”
“You must ask him yourself, dear,” Antonia said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand Forst’s Latin very well.”
Antonia understood his accent well enough, Flavius thought. It was Forst himself she couldn’t fathom. The German had his mysterious moments for Flavius, too – he doubted that anyone in the family really knew what Forst was thinking, not even Correus – but he liked the German. “I understand he’s starting a family, too,” he said, jumping a bit as his daughter tested her gum power on one finger.
Antonia clicked her tongue. “Yes, with that red-haired girl from the kitchens that he made your father give him. I have never thought she was suitable.”
You knew she was sleeping with my brother and wondered if she was sleeping with me, Flavius thought, but there was no point in starting something. “Well, she only has to be suitable to Forst,” he said, extracting his finger from his daughter’s mouth and putting his arm around Aemelia. “If he’s happy, who are we to quarrel with him?” Personally, he thought Emer had too much red hair in her character to make a comfortable wife, but not everyone had the same notions. Correus, for instance. Flavius would as soon have had a she-cat to wife as Freita, and no one had a notion what this British girl was like. A barbarian in plaid trousers, Helva had said, weeping on his tunic front. Helva and Aemelia had seemed to see eye to eye on that. Flavius chuckled to himself and tightened his arm around Aemelia, and she snuggled comfortably into his shoulder. Forst and Correus could look out for themselves. As for himself, he had an overdue leave to enjoy.
* * *
Julia sat comfortably embedded in green silk pillows in a hooded wicker chair that kept the sun out of her eyes and watched Felix and Paulilla playing in the mint that grew in a damp tangle by the stone fountain. It looked very cool and wet, and she wondered if it was worth the effort of having her chair moved over there. It was a baking September afternoon, and she was pregnant again and disinclined to move anywhere if she could help it. The pale yellow silk of her gown stuck unpleasantly to her skin, and she had kicked her sandals off to wiggle her toes in the breeze. The breeze was provided by a page with a large silk fan on a stick, but since Felix and Paulilla were playing with a big-footed black and gray hound puppy, the page was inclined to let his attention wander to them, and the cooling breeze would go off in another direction entirely.
Their nurse was enjoying a well-earned rest (her afternoon breakdown, as Paulinus put it), and for the next two hours they were all hers, she thought with satisfaction. It wasn’t considered fashionable to spend too much time looking after one’s own children, but Julia had always looked forward to it. Maybe that was because she didn’t do it all the time, Paulinus had said the last time he came to keep company with them and had sat on an unnoticed, half-eaten sweet in the cushions of his chair.
Today she watched Felix wistfully. He was four years old, and he had always seemed like her firstborn. Maybe she should have pressured Correus to let them adopt him when Freita had just died and he didn’t really care. That wouldn’t have been fair, but she thought maybe she didn’t care about that.
There was a footstep on the polished stone behind her.
“You look very pretty,” Paulinus said. “Like a pear in a fruit basket.”
She made a face at him.
“Brooding?” Paulinus asked, watching her eyes turn back to the children.
“We’re going to lose him, aren’t we?”
“You knew you were going to eventually,” Paulinus said. He pulled another chair over and put his hand on hers. “You said yourself that Felix should be with his father.”
“I’d just… got used to things. But he’s going to come back with a wife, isn’t he?”
A year ago she had said Correus should marry this British girl, but now, watching Felix, she found that she didn’t like the idea so well as she had.
“I hope so,” Paulinus said. “Your brother’s been sitting damned close to the edge since Freita died. If this one won’t have him, I don’t know what he’ll do.”
“Oh, dear. And I’ve been hoping she wouldn’t.”
“Well, don’t.”
“But we don’t know anything about her!”
“That’s what Helva said, I understand. She had hysterics all over Flavius when it dawned on her why Correus hadn’t come home.”
Julia made an irritated noise, and her face took on an expression strongly reminiscent of her mother. “I don’t know what Papa sees in that woman.”
“I do,” Paulinus said bluntly. “Don’t be girlish. And you can hardly blame Helva. She had something better in mind for Correus than some obscure niece of a British clan chieftain, with nothing to recommend her but a citizenship and a bit of a dowry that Julius Agricola pried out of the Senate.”
“Oh—” Julia waved both hands in the air, trying to pinpoint her objections. “What if she doesn’t want Felix?” Felix’s head snapped up at the mention of his name, his green eyes curious, and she lowered her voice. “You know how difficult he can be.”
“He’s a terror,” Paulinus agreed solemnly.
“He has an inquisitive mind,” Julia defended.
“That’s what I meant. But there’s nothing you can do about it. If Correus wants him, you’re going to have to let him go, Ju.”
“Correus can’t give him what we can.”
“Do you mean money? And are you going to be rude enough to say so? Besides, I’m not so sure. If we adopted Felix, he’d have to come second to our sons, and that’s not much of a start.”
Julia was silent, watching Felix and the puppy falling on each other in the mint.
“Would it comfort you any to know that I’ve made my peace with Titus? After this baby comes, we can go somewhere – wherever you like this time. Would that help?”
Julia kept her eyes on the children. “It doesn’t help tonight,” she said sadly. “I expect it will tomorrow, though.” She put out her hand, and he took it in his again.
* * *
The channel was gray, the water the color of ashes, and the air above was heavy with the feel of something coming. The boom of the hortator’s mallets made a hollow note from under the decking, and the oars swung at double time. The Arethusa was trying to outrun the storm.
Correus leaned on the bow rail waiting for the low, green shape of Vectis to lift itself out of the water, oblivious to the weather and the rhythmic creak of the oar locks. He didn’t much care if he got rained on, but he cared violently if a storm made them tack their way laboriously into Vectis water or, worse yet, blew them miles off course down shore.
“First posting to Brita
in?” the captain asked him genially. “Most folk aren’t so eager to make shore. Damned heathen outpost,” he added emphatically. “Steal the sandals off your feet while you’re watching your cloak.”
“No,” Correus said. “This is… a visit.”
“Can’t say I admire your choice,” the captain said, “but each man to his own. Me now, I’m going to retire to a little place on Sicilia someday where a man can get some sun. Hang onto your bags, Centurion, we’ll make Portus Adurni by nightfall if Sea Father doesn’t blow up any trouble.”
Poseidon obligingly restrained himself, and the Arethusa slipped past Vectis into Portus Adurni as the harbor torches began to glow. They made gold patterns in the water with the Arethusa’s bow lights, and the dock crew ran out to tie her up as the captain wiggled her into port, without a bump, between a transport and a grain ship.
Correus slung his kit over his shoulder and gave the Arethusa a last glance. She would sail again in a week with a cargo of tin from Dumnonia, and he had booked two return passages on her. But there was something he had to do first.
Antaeus came lumbering up out of the hold, snorting at the salt air in his nose, and Correus wondered for the thousandth time why he had bothered to bring him instead of just hiring a horse. He thought maybe it was because he wanted the company… someone who had known them all those years back.
* * *
The road into Isca was properly surfaced now with well-cut stone, built to last longer than the sweating legionaries who had made it. Correus sat leaning on the saddle horns with the bunch of blue cornflowers beginning to droop in his hands. There were more graves than before, he thought. But he could have found Freita’s in the dark. He swung himself down from the saddle and walked to it, a plain gray stone among the wild grasses. In the spring, someone had once told him, there were anemones here.
DIS MANIBUS…
TO THE GODS OF THE SHADES
He knelt and put the little handful of cornflowers by the stone.
FREITA, LOVED WIFE
OF CORREUS APPIUS JULIANUS,
CENTURION OF THE NINTH COHORT,
LEGIO II AUGUSTA
It was all such a long time ago, he thought. He wondered if he had kept such a grip on her memory that he might have held her earthbound here, and kept her from Elysium, or whatever paradise her soul had chosen. I should have let her go.
“Forgive me, my dear,” he whispered, and put a hand lightly on the grass. Then he swung back into the saddle and pointed Antaeus’s nose for Aquae.
* * *
Somehow, without their noticing, summer had faded to fall in a flurry of dry leaves that rustled down the streets between the tidy houses. Ygerna, sewing a fine stitch by lamplight with Aunt Publia, heard them and wondered if there was anything blowing with them in the wind tonight.
It was Samhain, the ancient Night of the Dead, that was older than the houses and graceful temples of Aquae Sulis, although maybe not older than the sacred spring itself. Samhain, when the gates of the sidhe and the Underworld swung open, and those within were free to roam the land above. Every British hall would be shuttered tight tonight against whatever might walk the Samhain wind, and every feast table would have its empty place and turned-down cup in case the dead should come and dine.
Ygerna set another stitch and shut the whisper of the wind out of her mind. Samhain was a British festival, and she was Roman now, and in any case there were no ghosts to come and haunt Aunt Publia. And if there were, Aunt Publia would meet them at the door with a broom and beat them back. Magics didn’t work on people who didn’t believe in them, Ygerna had decided. It was why she made no more of her own now; she had lost the belief and the sense of power that she used to feel run through her when the Goddess was with her. The Goddess would have gone to another woman by now.
She had tried only once that summer, stifling by the fireside to make a singing magic. But it was only Ygerna, combing her hair by the hearth for the cat to play with, and not a magic at all; so she had put away the bone comb and the dried rowanberries and put her gown back on before Aunt Publia should come in and be shocked.
The wind came up a little stronger and rattled through the shutters, and Aunt Publia said, “Tchah!” as one of the lamps went out. She clapped her hands for a slave to relight it, and the girl came in looking jumpily at the vibrating shutter.
Aunt Publia watched in exasperation as the girl lit the lamp and scuttled out again. “That one gets flightier all the time.”
“It’s Samhain, Aunt,” Ygerna said.
Aunt Publia made a noise with her teeth and put her needle down. “Well, I don’t know what she thinks is going to get her here. This house was only built three years ago. Hardly long enough to acquire a past.”
“My uncle Bendigeid, maybe,” Ygerna said, and then wished she hadn’t. That was not a joke, and for a moment she almost saw the king’s dark face in the lamp smoke.
“Don’t be morbid, child,” Aunt Publia said and gathered up her sewing. “I am going to have Simplicia take my hair down. I find that this way of dressing it gives me a headache.” She stooped and kissed Ygerna on the forehead. “Don’t sit up too late, mind. Tribune Albinius particularly asked for our company tomorrow, and I think we should oblige him, don’t you?”
Ygerna smiled at her. “Yes, dear, I expect we should.” If Aunt Publia was hoping for a more flattering reaction to Tribune Albinius’s desire for their company, she was doomed to disappointment. She sailed away down the corridor, her gray coiffure bobbing regally in the lamplight and the doors opening in her wake as her maids scurried out to attend her.
Ygerna put her own work down and stared at the wall. Samhain made her sad. There was something pathetic about old ghosts coming back to sit invisibly where once they had lived, like herself trying to call a lost magic out of the fire. And in any case, the only face she wanted to see wasn’t dead, but only gone away. Gone far enough that even a Samhain wind couldn’t blow him back. And that left Aunt Publia or Tribune Albinius, and how could anyone spend her life with him, who’d had Correus?
The tribune was a good enough young man, earnest and honest, and he wanted to marry her, which was more than she could have hoped for, Aunt Publia had told her bluntly. He had taken them on a picnic and sat and held her hand and told her carefully how he would have a government career someday. And that no one would ever know, to look at her or talk to her, that she wasn’t a Roman. Except himself, he had said huskily and tried to kiss her. It was the wildness in her that set him wild and made him love her. She had pushed him away and had run off to feed the swans that sailed majestically on the pond in the public garden, but she had known then that she couldn’t marry him. If he ever did see the wild side, really, he would never understand it.
The leaves rustled in the street, tugging at her hearing. I’m not so Roman after all, she thought. If I opened the window now, would something come and get me?
She stood on a couch, gently slipping the shutters back, and peered out, braced a little against what might be there – the nameless things that rode a Samhain wind, or only the dead leaves. The courtyard was empty. There was a moon caught in the branches of a tree among the thinning leaves. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the click-click of the mailed sandals of the town’s guards as they made their rounds.
A solitary figure turned the corner into the courtyard, and a face, angular and infinitely familiar, turned upward to the face in the window. She closed her eyes tightly until white flashes raced across the blackness and opened them again carefully.
“Ygerna?” He halted, more uncertain now than ever of his welcome. She was gone from the window in a flash, and he stood waiting in the wind while someone inside scrabbled with the bolt on the door. The door opened and she was running across the courtyard, but she stopped three paces from him, her face white as the moonlight.
“What are you?” she asked, as she had once asked him all those years ago.
“Not a ghost,” he said softly, and her
eyes found his, but she didn’t move.
“Did you come back for me?” she whispered. “Tell me the truth, Correus.”
He nodded and started to say something more, some apology, but she was in his arms, and his face was buried in her hair. “Why didn’t you write?” she whispered.
“I was afraid you’d tell me not to come,” he said.
“If you leave me again, I will put a curse on you,” Ygerna said distinctly. “All your hair will fall out, and nothing will work, and no woman will have you.”
She tilted her head back and grinned at him, and suddenly he grinned back and lifted her off the ground in his arms. The Samhain ghosts blew by them like dry leaves; gone for good now, leaving only the two of them under the rising moon.
Cast of Characters
THE FAMILY OF APPIUS
Flavius Appius Julianus the elder, called Appius
A retired general
Antonia
His wife
Helva
His mistress
Correus Appius Julianus, called Correus
Son of Appius and Helva formally adopted by Appius
Freita
A German freedwoman
Julius
Body servant to Correus
Flavius Appius Julianus the younger called Flavius
Son of Appius and Antonia
Barbarian Princess Page 43