by Jules Watson
The Boar Stone is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
Published by Juality Ltd
Copyright © 2012 by Juality Ltd
All rights reserved
Watson, Jules
ISBN 978-0-9572714-4-9 (ebook)
ISBN 9780752856889 (hardback) - ISBN 9780752885926 (trade paperback) - ISBN 9780752893389 (mass market paperback)
BOOK ONE
LEAF-FALL, AD 366
Chapter 1
‘May the Christos be with you in love,’ the old priest wheezed, gripping the sandstone altar.
Minna snorted under her breath. It might be the Sabbath, a sacred day for the Christians, but as she stood in the chapel of the Villa Aurelius she knew there wasn’t much love coming her way today.
We have to make a decision, her brother Broc had said. About you, Minna. Now his words flew dizzily around inside her head, like moths. About you. About you. About you.
She caught the gaze of Severus, overseer of the Aurelius estate. He was a plain, solid man with pepper and salt hair. His face was florid with ale and sun-creased from being in the fields with the slaves, his palms callused from the whip handle, and his brown eyes speculative as they rested on her now. Next to him stood Broc. He watched Severus watching Minna, but there was no softening in his sour expression.
She flicked her black braid off her clammy neck, squaring her shoulders. Let them look.
‘Minna!’ little Marcus whispered, pressing his face into her arm. ‘Is it over yet?’ He was only three, and his voice echoed in the austere surroundings.
Master Publius Aurelius and Mistress Flavia turned as one, frowning not at their son but at his nurse. Minna gave Marcus a smile, pressing a finger to her lips. His brother Lucius, all of ten, rolled his eyes, and she shook her head. Master Publius was too free with the leather strap on his sons, and she had just sat up all night nursing Marcus through a fever. Thankfully, he seemed better this morning.
The heat of sunseason had bled into leaf-fall, and although the chapel was cool and dark, with plaster walls and a new mosaic floor, it was tiny and everyone was crushed in together. Although the Master and Mistress were Christians, most of the native estate workers still clung to the old gods, to the Mother Goddess, and attended this ceremony only because they had to. The air was a miasma of sour sweat and the Mistress’s cloying Egyptian perfume.
The boys settled into mutinous silence as the priest continued. Minna sighed, peeling her scratchy dress away from her hot skin. The only time she could stay still like this was when Nikomedes, the Greek tutor, told the boys tales of Trojan and Roman wars, of the capricious gods and jealous goddesses. The walls of the chapel were painted with red and white diamonds and she counted them three times, until she caught the cook’s two daughters glaring at her. Ah, yes, she’d forgotten them. She could read their thoughts on their plump faces. What right did she have to stand before the Christos, with her unnatural eyes and strange ways? The girls whispered behind their fingers, and she turned her flaming face away. Severus was the only worker on the estate who didn’t think her one of the fey, the touched, the half-human. How ironic!
‘Amen,’ the priest coughed at last.
‘Amen,’ everyone murmured with relief. Minna forgot to say the word, gazing longingly out the door instead. She could just smell the tang of smoke from the burning harvest stubble, and the scent of ripe apples floated from the orchards as the slaves piled them into barrels. Mistress Flavia had told her to take the boys away from the house for the day. She could hardly wait.
At last, Master Publius, all severe brows and clipped hair, pinned his cloak and bustled out. As one of the rich villa owners on the fertile vales east of the city of Eboracum, he was a councillor and had important meetings to attend in the nearby town of Derventio.
After he had gone his sons burst outside with relief. Minna followed them, squinting in the sun that bounced off the white walls and redtiled roofs of the villa. The main house and its two wings enclosed a courtyard splashed with light. Beyond, the green hills beckoned.
But before she could call to the boys, Minna was caught by Broc’s fingers around her wrist, pulling her back. ‘I meant what I said, little sister,’ her brother muttered. ‘I’ll have no more arguments about it.’
He glanced over his shoulder as Severus left the chapel. The overseer tipped the whip handle to his forehead, and his eyes never left Minna as he loitered by the wall for Mistress Flavia.
Breathless, she wrenched herself from Broc’s grip. ‘I told you—’
‘And I told you!’ Sweat and chaff clumped Broc’s red hair. Though she was two years younger she often brushed his heavy fringe back with a maternal swipe. But not today. As the servants poured out into the courtyard, Broc dropped his voice. ‘You can’t be a nursemaid for ever, Minna.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘You are already eighteen!’ he hissed. Anger sharpened his freckled face. ‘We have lost too much time as it is, because I’ve indulged you. But no more.’
Their ancestors were once slaves, freed by Master Publius’s grandfather as servants. But Broc and Minna’s parents had died young – their mother from a fever, their father after a fall from a horse – both so long ago that Minna had no memory of them. They had lived with their grandmother ever since. Now there were just the three of them, safe in their little house by the stream. How could Broc say these things?
Her shoulders stiffened. ‘I am happy with you and Mamo.’
‘Mamo won’t always be here.’
‘Then there’s you.’ She held Broc’s gaze, her chin up.
Just then they became aware of people staring at them as they whispered furiously together. With a scowl, Broc dragged her around the corner of the building, where a yard opened through a gate to fields.
‘You didn’t need to do that!’ Minna cried, rubbing her wrist. But something in her brother’s face silenced her.
‘I will tell you why we’ve no more time.’ The tendons stood out in Broc’s wrists, and Minna realized he hadn’t only changed in mood lately. His shoulders had thickened: he was a boy no longer. Her belly flipped over as Broc took a deep breath, bracing himself. ‘I’ve joined the army. I’ll be leaving for the Wall in three days.’
All the blood drained from her face.
‘The Master has already let me go,’ Broc hurried on.
She watched his lips move, but could not take in his words. At last she croaked, ‘But you’re going to be manager one day and … you have us, Mamo and I, to look after …’
‘I will not moulder away here until I’m old and fat!’ Minna gaped at his outburst, and he grabbed her hand. ‘Ah, sister, it’s a great honour, see? I’ve been accepted into the areani, the scouts, and they only take the best riders.’ His eyes were alight with a flame that passed straight through her, as if she and it were of such different substance it couldn’t touch her.
‘And what are we supposed to do?’ she demanded, but her voice quavered. ‘You’d leave Mamo and I alone?’
‘I cannot stay just for you: you’re my sister, not my child. It’s time for some other man to have the keeping of you, under the law.’
She slowly withdrew her hand. She had been clinging to dreams of this life going on for ever: Mamo’s stories around the fire; afternoons roaming with Marcus and Lucius. And look at her! Her sandals were caked with mud, her dress streaked with grass stains. She had been running about like a fool, lost in fantasy. ‘B
ut there’s no one, is there, brother, because of my – what do they say? – my strange ways.’
‘And when you have these awake-dreams, as you call them, and flail about with glazed eyes, talking nonsense, what do you expect? People hear of it. You never heed me about acting more modestly.’
She gasped, clenching her fists, but Broc rushed on. ‘As it happens, one man has at last offered to wed you and keep you – and only one. It’s got to be done.’
‘No.’ She struggled for breath. ‘No.’
Broc folded his arms. ‘Yes. Severus has the best job on the estate. He is respected. And he hasn’t been put off by all this talk, so he must be a sensible man.’
Sensible. Severus breathed hard when he was near Minna, through his nose. Why, oh why, did he not find her repulsive like all the farm boys did? Then she knew, like a lamp flaring to life in her mind. Severus considered himself on the way up, salvaging chipped pottery, tarnished dishes and broken tiles from rich houses to furnish his own. It would have been amusing if it didn’t now mean this: he liked odd, exotic things no one else had. Unusual things.
‘Not this way,’ she ground out. ‘Not him. I won’t do it.’
Broc tried to argue again but Minna tore free and stalked away, shutting her ears. Her throat ached and she swallowed it down impatiently.
The boys were swinging on the gate to the fields. Seeing her stricken face, Lucius grinned a smile chopped in half by missing teeth. ‘Just think, Minna, a day away from all of them!’
‘All of them!’ chubby Marcus repeated.
Minna sighed, lifting her face to the sun. The trees, grass and birds didn’t judge her. ‘Then let us go,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Now.’
Up on the moors, her anger cooled and a sense of reality began to set in. Beneath a windswept expanse of heather lay the remains of an abandoned Roman fort, its ditches and banks mere humps in the turf. She sank into a ditch and left the boys to play, gazing blankly down at the patchwork of fields and pastures. A bumble bee blundered into her cheek. The shouts of the workers floated up from the orchards. Up here was peace, but down there the white Villa Aurelius stood out starkly in the green land. Severus belonged to that world. Minna’s heart plunged; her eyes closed.
As a woman she had no rights of her own. Her family was of mixed native and Roman blood, but Roman laws held sway in this land now. And the law said she had to be under the rule of a man: father, brother or husband. There was no middle way, no other choice.
Half the girls on the estate were after Severus; that much she knew. He was a widower with a secure job, and was trusted by Master Publius. He was weather-beaten, but not grossly ugly. He was a catch. That was the whisper from the spinsters and maidens. A catch, like a whiskery fish that gave good eating.
Her thoughts shifted to the mating part. She had been reviled by every man on this farm since she was a child so it was easy to bury the stirrings that came when her blood was first called by the moon. Now, the thought of a man grunting over her like a pig elicited no feeling at all – and that was the worse thing. Minna wanted to feel, to live.
The fear rose, choking her. She struggled with it until, all in a rush, dread turned to resolve and she opened her eyes.
No matter what she said to herself, or what Broc bellowed, something in Minna absolutely refused this path. She could not accept it and remain alive, she realized with a surge of passion, sitting bolt upright. She could not go back and say yes, for it would not be her blood in her veins, her heart beating.
‘Ho!’ Lucius screamed from the bank above. ‘I am a soldier and I come to kill you, barbarian!’ He hefted a bent hazel sapling as a spear, his face contorted.
She forced a smile. ‘Oh, don’t hurt me, brave soldier.’
‘Hurt you? You are a savage, my enemy, so here I come!’
‘Here I come, here I come!’ Marcus also screeched, and both boys crashed on top of Minna with shrieks and whoops. She wrestled and fought, until they were all lying in a breathless, tangled heap among the bracken.
She pushed her braids back, pulling down her dress. ‘Why do I always have to be the enemy?’ she wheezed, wincing.
‘Because you’re so pale and funny-looking,’ Lucius replied, with a quizzical frown.
‘Why, thank you, Lucius.’
Marcus collapsed over her legs, his plump tummy exposed under his tunic. ‘People say your eyes are odd but I think they look like water.’
Lucius rocked on all fours. ‘And they say your face is too bony and your eyes too large, and your skin too white with that black hair, and you look unearthly,’ he recited faithfully.
Minna’s smile faded. These were Broc’s thoughts, too. She could have her pick of men, he said, if she stopped scraping her hair back, making her features so stark, and began belting her tunics to give her body some curves. But she knew there was no solution for her reviled, mistrusted eyes, which were a pale, icy green surrounded by a dark ring that made them glow.
‘But …’ Lucius ran on desperately, his grin faltering, ‘we think you are pretty, just like the painting of Minerva on Mama’s wall! And the statue by Papa’s study of that lady in Rome.’
Marcus linked hands around her neck. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he lisped. ‘We’ll let you play battles with us.’
She cleared her throat, heaving Marcus off her lap. ‘But I can’t be a soldier, because I’m a girl.’
‘No, you can’t be a soldier because you’ve got barbarian blood,’ Lucius teased, relieved.
‘The blood of the Parisii tribe, who came from these very hills,’ she corrected. She was proud to claim that, for it was Mamo’s blood – even if Broc hated every drop, thinking it muddied his pure Roman aspirations with that shameful taint: the blood of the vanquished and dispossessed. He despised anything that looked back, not forward. The nights she and Mamo murmured the old stories to each other drove him mad.
‘I’m no kin to the wild men over the Wall in Alba,” she added firmly to the boys. ‘If you blurt that to your parents, they will have a fit.’ Everyone saw the Alba tribes as vile, savage beasts, and even when Mamo protested the Parisii came from the same bloodlines long ago, Broc scorned her foolishness. Well, now he would get to face the northerners himself, across the braced shaft of a spear.
Lucius had begun tearing around the bracken. ‘Minna’s a barbarian,’ he chanted.
‘Barbarian, barbarian,’ Marcus mimicked, jumping up and down.
‘Baby eater, baby eater!’
‘Lucius!’ Minna choked. ‘Wherever did you hear that?’
Lucius looked guiltily at his feet. ‘I heard a soldier say it in the city. About the men over the Wall.’
‘Hmm, well, don’t repeat that around your mother.’ Minna peered at Marcus, whose cheeks were scarlet. ‘Come and climb on my back. You’ve had enough sun.’
In the hazel woods along the stream it was cool. Minna rubbed her cheek on her shoulder and dug in the pockets of her dress for the remains of lunch – an apple and a broken piece of bread.
In honour of Mamo and that old blood, she would leave a harvest offering at the little shrine to the goddess of the stream. And she had something to beg for now.
Among the trees the stream formed a pool bedded with brown pebbles, and on its banks sat a small cairn. Wedged into the stones was the barley-doll from last year’s harvest, decorated with faded red ribbon, and dying flowers were tucked into the crevices.
The boys ran around as Minna cleared the dead flowers and picked daisies from a sunny clearing. ‘Lady,’ she murmured with bowed head, as Mamo had taught her, ‘take my offering in gratitude for your blessings, and may your eye continue to favour us all.’
Please. Especially favour me. Just this once. And I’ll never ask again. Severus’s knowing smile was there before her, and she desperately squeezed her fingers over her eyes.
Mamo said she heard the Goddess speak in this place, yet nothing like that had ever happened to Minna. As a child she sat here for hours straining to hear, as if
the Goddess might at any moment step out of the trees to whisper in her ear. In Mamo’s stories the old gods spoke: Minna was still waiting.
Instead, only the awake-dreams came to her. They took her when she stared for too long into fire, water or clouds. They interrupted her sleep, set apart from real dreams by the sense they came from outside her, and because of their terrible, vivid power. Minna could never remember them clearly, though. All they left was an echo of darkness and fear. And death – always the foreboding of death.
That night, the air in the house by the stream crackled with resentment. Sewing in her bed-box against the wall, Mamo frowned at Minna and Broc.
‘What is wrong?’ she asked.
But as Broc’s mouth opened, Minna glared him into silence. ‘Nothing,’ she said curtly. ‘Nothing that need trouble you, Mamo.’
Broc glanced at Mamo’s shrunken face, the trembling hands that pushed the bone needle through the wool shirt, and he visibly swallowed his words. Neither of them must upset Mamo. After the fevers she had suffered all summer she wasn’t strong enough.
Mamo coughed, one gnarled hand reaching for a pile of Broc’s socks to darn, and Minna was on her feet, pressing her back. ‘Leave that now, Mamo, and rest.’
Mamo clucked at the fussing, but Minna had a right to worry. Though she had given Minna her almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones and pointed chin, her grandmother’s features were blurred by sagging, sallow skin now, and her fingers were as twisted and swollen as knots in an oak tree. She still sat upright against the pillow, though, and wore her white hair in six long Parisii braids, her frail carriage imbued with pride.
Minna turned away with a tight chest, her head brushing the bunches of dried leaves and roots tied to the roofbeams. She had been taught herb-lore by Mamo herself, and had been dosing her grandmother with strengthening tonics for months. She couldn’t face the fact they weren’t working.
Broc slugged his ale and pulled a face at her frown, and Minna turned her back to stir the pot of lentils and mutton over the fire-grate. Let him think her acquiescent; let him go off on his boy’s adventure, and then Mamo would surely come up with a way out of this. She would rally, she would plan and think and smile with Minna, as she always did.