by Alex Faure
Darius stared. He had no idea what he was expected to do. The heart was unexpectedly small, a bloody, delicate thing on the Celt’s pale palm, like a drowned flower. Was this some sort of threat?
The assassin smiled slightly as Darius continued to stare. Then he popped the heart into his mouth, and turned to the other rabbit. Darius tried not to grimace as he licked the blood from his lips. He shook his head when the assassin offered him the second heart.
Within moments, the assassin had the fire going, lighting it with a bit of flint drawn from a pocket, and the rabbits were bubbling in a pot dangling from a spit over the flames. Darius felt his mouth water as the smell reached him. The Celt added some unfamiliar leaves to the pot, and something that looked like a sickly, gnarled potato. Darius watched him move to the edge of the river and crouch beside it in an easy, feline posture to wash the blood from his hands. He paused there a moment, the water swirling over his fingers, as if lost in thought.
Darius’s gaze lingered on his profile, the tousled waves of moonlight hair, the slender build. How old was this strange Celt—twenty? In that moment, it seemed impossible to believe that this was the man who had taken the lives of Darius’s men, and was among those responsible for the destruction of Sylvanum. Though Darius thought it unlikely that the assassin had taken an active hand in the Robogdi plot. It was difficult to fathom any of the Robogdi constructing a scheme of such breathtaking malevolence, its melding of brutality and humiliation that would make Roman chroniclers for generations to come shudder over their quills. Clearly King Culland possessed hidden depths of deviousness.
As Darius continued to regard him, the assassin met his eyes.
Darius started. There was something in that gaze that struck him like the embrace of icy waters. It stirred something inside him that he could not articulate. As he had before, he felt himself frozen, transfixed. Yet this time, there was no arrow pointed at his chest. There was only the strange, silver gaze of a young man, the reflected light of the river playing across his pale skin.
The assassin rose. He came to sit before Darius, barely an arm’s length away, folding his legs beneath him as gracefully as he did anything else. His eyes roved over Darius’s face, then down the lines of his body. Darius had never been studied in such an open, intense way before. It would have felt rude, except that there was an artlessness about it, an almost animal absence of self-consciousness.
Darius stared back. The assassin’s face seemed paler than before, as if he’d slept poorly. The blemish by his mouth was gone, his skin all milky smoothness, but the shadows remained under his eyes. He searched Darius’s face as if seeking something lost. Darius was unable to comprehend that expression. The assassin had looked at him that way before, when they had first lain eyes on each other. The Celt’s gaze ran over his body, fixing curiously on the scars that criss-crossed the backs of Darius’s hands. Darius felt a strange urge to hide them.
Minutes passed, during which it seemed that Darius did not breathe at all. With a dreamlike slowness, as if unaware of what he was doing, the assassin reached out to touch Darius’s face.
Darius flinched.
The assassin drew back as if burned. A new expression surfaced—something surprised, and uncertain, and hurt. For a moment, he seemed years younger, merely a boy. The emotion faded as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by a wary regard.
Darius was utterly baffled. Thrown off his guard, he felt a ridiculous urge to apologize. The assassin rose, disappearing into the forest without a backward glance.
The rabbit continued to bubble over the fire. Darius stayed where he was, partly because he hadn’t the energy to move. The rock was sun-warmed and pleasant. The fever had eaten at his strength, and he felt old and frail. He knew soldiers who had died from infected battle wounds. He wondered how close he’d come. He would certainly have succumbed if he’d been left on the riverbank.
It was an uncomfortable thought. The assassin had saved his life twice now—if deciding not to kill him counted. Why? If he intended to ransom him, would he leave him alone, unrestrained? Perhaps he simply trusted that Darius didn’t have the strength to flee.
And what of Sylvanum? Darius desperately needed to learn the fate of the fort—had any of the men managed to reach Attervalis and summon reinforcements? If so, perhaps they would send out search parties to locate survivors. Certainly now Agricola would declare war on the Robogdi, and send additional legions to scourge them from their forests. Everything Darius knew of Agricola told him that the general would not allow such an insult to stand.
It was some time before the assassin returned. By then, Darius had added wood to the fire and stirred the stew. The sun had fallen behind the trees, and the shadows were lengthening. Birdsong faded into quiet as the forest prepared for the arrival of night.
The assassin dropped another armful of wood by the fire. Then, moving warily, he approached Darius’s side. There was something in his hand—it looked like a clump of green moss. He settled next to Darius without looking at his face, then pushed back Darius’s tunic to reveal the bandaged wound. His attention was cool and impersonal, his expression once again unreadable. Darius reacted involuntarily to the assassin’s hand on his skin, and forced himself to be still. The man was unlikely to kill him now, after all this. Carefully, the Celt unwrapped the bandage, revealing Darius’s skin to the cooling air.
Darius drew in his breath. The wound was red and inflamed, surrounded by dark, spidery lines. The assassin removed what looked like a wad of the same green moss from the injury. Despite the wound’s angry appearance, it seemed to be healing, or starting to, the edges of the hole drawing together. The Celt made a satisfied sound, and then, to Darius’s astonishment, placed a portion of the fresh moss he had gathered in his mouth. After chewing for a moment, he removed it, crushed and moist with saliva, and pressed it against the wound.
It stung, but that soon faded, leaving a cooling sensation in its wake that came as a sweet relief. Darius felt himself relaxing under the Celt’s ministrations, even as a part of him watched as if from a distance as the Robogdi assassin who had cut down his men treated and cleaned his wound with deft, gentle hands. The young man applied more moss, then retied the bandage.
“Thank you,” Darius murmured.
The Celt met his eyes. Then he turned back to the fire.
“Where are the others?” Darius said. The assassin pressed a bowl of stew into his hand. “Your men. Have you been watching me in shifts?” Clumsily, he tried to act out what he was describing. “Robogdi. Others.”
The Celt gave him a look of such unambiguous exasperation that Darius gave up. In any event, the smell of stewed rabbit was too distracting. Darius paused in the act of wolfing the meal, forced himself to slow down. The assassin ate while gazing abstractedly into the fire. The breeze played through his pale hair. He didn’t wear it long enough to tie back, like many of the Celts, but it was looser than Darius’s, who wore his in the practical, closely cropped style of all Roman soldiers.
It was impossible not to stare at him, sitting there with the wind and the firelight in his hair. It wasn’t just his colouring—that was unique enough. It was the supple way he moved, the unselfconscious grace that revealed itself even in the way he sat—an easy, boneless crouch. Darius recalled the way he fought, the speed and ruthless efficiency with which he had disarmed Marcus, and a little shiver played across his skin. Darius had roamed over much of the Empire in his twelve years of service, meeting people as strange in appearance as in lifestyle. Yet the man before him seemed almost a separate species.
Darius finished his meal, which was surprisingly good, the sinewy meat tendered by the fire and the unfamiliar forest vegetables lending sweetness to the broth. He leaned his head against the rock. A few stars had appeared in the darkening sky, flickering like a reflection of the campfire in a violet pool. He felt, in that moment, strangely content. The violence of Sylvanum and its aftermath seemed an unreal dream. For the first time in days, he fel
t almost well—the fever beaten back, his belly full, his wound numbed to a distant throb.
He started awake at the feeling of the assassin’s hand on his shoulder. The sky was black now, thickly woven with stars, and the damp air was chill. The Celt had cleaned up the remains of their supper and allowed the fire to die down, flames sinking into their embers. Now he helped Darius into his bed in the cave and pulled the blankets over him. His touch remained impersonal, though Darius sensed a tension in him as he leaned over Darius’s body.
“Thank you,” Darius said again. The assassin heard the question in his voice, but gave him only a brief look. The cave was small; they were very close together. The air was thick with things that could not be communicated.
After placing at Darius’s side the knife he had used to clean the rabbits, the assassin disappeared into the night.
Chapter Five
Darius woke late the next morning to a grey sky. He crawled out from the cave to relieve himself, wishing he could go farther from the cave to do so, for hygienic reasons, but knowing that it was impossible. He could not stand on his ankle, and so was forced to crawl everywhere—yet even crawling was uncomfortable due to the ache in his thigh and his fever-weakened limbs. When he returned to the cave, he was sweating.
A little while later, he managed to rouse himself to retrieve the remains of the stew, which the assassin had left in the pot, covered with a stone. It was cold but still good, and Darius ate until his stomach began to protest.
He had expected the assassin to return, but the sun continued its slow march across the sky, and there was no sign of that now-familiar flaxen head. Darius found himself scanning the woods frequently, glancing up whenever there was a flicker of movement, which always turned out to be a bird. He discovered another satchel that contained the moss the Celt had used on his wound, and applied a new coat himself, chewing it first as the Celt had done. He was now certain that the injury was healing, though without stitches it would remain vulnerable to reinfection for some time. Darius inspected his ankle, which also gave him no cause for concern. Given the speed at which it seemed to be healing, he suspected that it was sprained rather than broken, which was some relief.
The assassin had left food in the cave—berries and mushrooms, as well as roots that would need to be boiled before eating. As night fell, the sky began to spit, discouraging Darius from attempting a fire, and so he ate what food he could raw. As he finished his meagre meal, it began raining in earnest, and he huddled in his blankets in the dark cave.
He was quite warm enough—the small space retained his body heat. But with the storm and the darkness outside, not to mention the precariousness of his situation, he could not sleep.
He thought of his men, cut down by the Robogdi. The brightness of the fire that had consumed Sylvanum. He had no love for the place—it was an outpost, like so many outposts Darius had served at, surrounded by dark, hostile forest. But it had been an island of safety, a piece of home. Now it was gone. That dark forest had risen up and swallowed a bastion of Roman might.
He thought of his father, and home. His olive groves in the dry sunlight. The darkness outside seemed to enter the cave and take up space in his chest, a cold, heavy thing, like the falling rain. He was alone, and helpless.
Not entirely helpless. In the darkness, Darius’s hand found the knife the assassin had left him. His thoughts shifted to the image of the Celt bent over him, tending to his wound. The gleam of silver eyes in the darkness. Finally, Darius slept.
*
The next day came and went, and still the assassin did not return. It rained hard, and Darius kept to the cave.
The day after that, he knew he would have to try to walk. He had no food left, and little water. His head was beginning to ache from lack of nutrition. He hadn’t yet regained his strength following the infection, and he wasn’t going to, huddled in a cave by himself without sustenance. It was imperative that he regain his strength. This was not a place for those weak in body or spirit.
He had decided to assume that the assassin was not going to return. Perhaps he had determined that the efforts of tending to a Roman captive were not worth whatever ransom he hoped to receive. Or perhaps the merciful impulse had driven him to spare Darius’s life had been satisfied now that he was on the mend. Darius had no idea. He didn’t understand what motivated the Celt, any more than he understood what motivated some winged denizen of these enchanted forests.
What was clear was that he was going to have to fend for himself.
Fortunately, the rain had stopped sometime in the night. Darius emerged from the cave, gazing at a green world that sparkled in the sunlight as if jeweled by a god’s hand. The river was engorged from the rain, frothing against the rocks. Darius hobbled to the edge of the water, not an easy feat. The cave was perched on a ledge too high above the river to reach it, and so he had to make his way down several steps in the rock to get to the bank. He soon gave up trying to stand—the rock was too uneven to traverse on one foot. And so he half-crawled, half-lowered himself down to the water’s edge, rolling the water jug alongside him.
It rolled too far, at one point, tumbling over the edge of the rock and into the river, where it would have been swept away, had Darius not made a desperate grab for it. Unfortunately, the movement unbalanced him, and he lost his grip on the slippery rock. With a startled cry, he tumbled off the rock and into the water.
He landed on his side, his injured leg striking a half-submerged rock. Pain exploded, sending spikes up his back. The river wasn’t deep here—sitting up, it wasn’t much higher than his waist. But it was so cold it left him gasping.
He tried to haul himself back onto the bank, but getting out was much more difficult than falling in. The height of the rock, slippery with spray and green lichens, and his throbbing leg conspired against him. Darius had managed to drag himself half out, falling onto his stomach in an ungainly flop, when strong hands wrapped under his arms, and pulled him onto dry land.
A familiar voice spoke words of little sense. Darius turned and met the assassin’s silver eyes. He was frowning, and on his face was a look of confusion and unaffected concern. Darius felt a surge of relief that startled him as he gazed into that pale face, but he had little time to process it, for the Celt was helping Darius to his feet, slinging his arm over his shoulders to spare his ankle from the weight of his body. Though the assassin was of average height for a Celt, he was perhaps three or four inches shorter than Darius, who was tall for a Roman. His inhuman grace compensated for the imbalance, however, and Darius found himself maneuvered over the rocks with ease.
The assassin returned him to the cave and helped him into a clean, dry tunic that he must have brought with him—Darius saw several new satchels leaning against the cave wall. Darius possessed a soldierly lack of modesty as far as nudity was concerned, but he noticed that the assassin turned his face away when he stripped. Then he was swathed in surprisingly soft blankets smelling of sheep, shivering gratefully as the feeling returned to his limbs, while the Celt spoke words in a disapproving tone. Darius had the distinct impression that he was being lectured for venturing down to the river, but what else could he have done?
He motioned to the empty satchel of food. The assassin made an exasperated sound, and pointed at one of the satchels he had brought. Darius lifted the water jug, overturning it to demonstrate its empty state. The Celt, shaking his head and muttering to himself, slipped out of the cave.
Darius sat there for several moments. He had the unnerving sense that he had just carried on an argument with someone, and been perfectly understood, despite neither speaking the other’s language. But then the smell of roasting meat drove all other thoughts from his mind. Tossing the blankets aside, he crawled out of the cave.
The assassin already had the fire going, despite the absence of dry wood. Though smoking mightily, the flames looked healthy enough. Balanced over them was a stick upon which a dozen small silver fish were pierced. The assassin was als
o boiling water mixed with leaves—some sort of tea. After a few moments of stirring, he poured a cup and handed it to Darius.
The liquid was sour and unfamiliar, but it was hot, and Darius drank it gratefully. Soon enough, the sun would peek over the trees and illuminate the riverbank, but now the air was chilly, particularly after Darius’s misadventure.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” Darius said. “I don’t understand why you did. Why you’re doing any of this.”
The Celt poured himself a cup of tea and drank deeply. The shadows under his eyes were darker today, and he moved in a way that communicated weariness. There was a cut on his cheek that looked, to Darius’s eyes, like the graze of a dodged arrow. It looked recent enough to still be painful, but it had stopped bleeding.
“What happened?” Darius said.
The assassin regarded him, understanding the question in his voice but not the semantics. Darius reached out unthinkingly and touched the man’s cheek with his fingertip. His skin was warm and as smooth as water.
The assassin gazed at him, and Darius realized what he had done. He pulled his hand back, feeling vaguely embarrassed, though the assassin gave no sign of discomfort at his touch. He brushed the mark and shrugged. He mimed an arrow being fired, which confirmed Darius’s guess but only increased his curiosity. Who had the Robogdi been fighting in the two days since the assassin’s last visit? One of the other tribes? Or had Attervalis and Undanum launched a counter-offensive, perhaps aided by an additional legion from Britannia? The uncertainty made Darius ache. He gazed into the Celt’s silver eyes, knowing that the answers were there, but entirely out of reach.
“What’s your name?” Darius said, so that the assassin could hear he was asking a question. He touched his chest. “Darius.” He then gestured at the assassin.
The assassin nodded. He said something—it was more than one word, and flowed so smoothly that Darius couldn’t catch it. The Celt read the confusion in his face. He repeated himself, more slowly.