by Jules Watson
After a week, she learned to parry rude quips from the men and hostile glares from the women. But, one night, as she was wending her way to the fire from her tent, a young actor grabbed her in the dark, pushing her up against the stinking leather and thrusting his tongue in her mouth as a hand groped for her breast. Her cry was muffled by his lips, until something that Broc taught her kicked in and she brought her knee up sharply between the boy’s legs.
‘Ow!’ he howled, releasing her and grabbing for his groin.
Minna shrank back against the tent, panting.
A cool voice sliced through the night air. ‘The little tiger has a bite; you should have known that, Bren.’
Minna’s assailant squinted at the tall figure standing in the open, shoulders outlined by moonlight. ‘Off with you, Cian,’ he growled. ‘She’s fair game.’
Cian took a step forward, stretching his frame by leaning one arm on the tent-pole. ‘There are plenty of slack-eyed whores around for you to take your pick,’ he said evenly. ‘Leave her alone.’
Bren was still panting, cradling his crotch. ‘And what’s it to you?’ he slurred. But he was already backing away, for though Cian was slim, he was by far the tallest of the men, and Minna had already seen him easily win at least three fist-fights.
Cian shrugged, but his eyes did not waver. ‘You don’t need to know my mind now, do you, Bren?’
The young actor glanced belligerently between them, but he was swaying with drunkenness and contented himself with spitting on the ground and staggering away.
Minna’s tension rushed out of her. ‘I … thank you.’
Cian shrugged again, then tilted his head, the moonlight catching his one-sided smile. ‘Not a bad little move you have there, Tiger.’
‘My brother showed me,’ she said faintly. She should be relieved, but it was hard to feel so before those glittering eyes, shifting with indecipherable thoughts.
‘Then you’d better keep in practice, just in case,’ he said, and was gone.
That night, she appeared to pass some unspoken test. For the very next day Cian began riding the acrobats’ pony up behind Letitia’s cart, regaling Minna with tales of his travels, most of which she only half-believed.
‘Wherever did you become so good with horses?’ she ventured once, seeing how carefully he brushed his pony at the end of each day.
He paused imperceptibly, his fingers easing knots from the horse’s black tail. ‘Where we all did, Tiger: on the road.’ He cast a mocking glance at her. ‘Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to ask travelling people about their past?’
Minna bit her lip, watching him. ‘Sorry.’
‘Anyway,’ he went on, tossing his head, ‘I have better taste than to get stuck with a grouchy old mule.’ His eyes glinted at her, and she smiled.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she returned, encouraged. ‘You and mules seem a good match to me.’ That was another thing he’d taught her: banter provided a refuge. Never stop to think or be quiet and still; talk fast, jest about everything.
He snorted, rubbing vigorously at the pony’s flank. ‘You’re right about that.’
He was certainly unlike anyone else in the troupe. While juggling he was fluid and graceful, but outside the ring his movements were contained, his habits rigid. The other men had wild hair they never combed, dirty skin and stained clothes. But Cian carefully washed his worn tunics, and though threadbare they were of good wool, the hems stitched. Each morning he sat down with a blade and scraped his jaw and cheeks clear of stubble, and every week took shears and cropped his hair into short, Roman lines.
And he kept himself aloof. The other men brought whores back to camp, when he did not. The girls in the troupe tried hard to get his attention, scowling when he spoke to Minna, but he never indulged them, merely overwhelming them with merciless teasing until they gave up and backed away.
But his eyes missed nothing, Minna saw. They were always darting about the camp, never at rest.
They travelled further north, into the realm of the Brigantes, the last people conquered by Rome below the Wall. They still wore skins and checked cloaks, and sported long, braided hair. Cian scoffed at their gaudy brooches and neck-rings, their raucous speech and songs.
Roman soldiers also became more numerous in every town, and at last Minna remarked nervously on it.
‘The Dux Britanniarum has his frontier army, the limitanei, spread all over these lands,’ Cian informed her. ‘He has to guard the Wall against the barbarians on the other side.’ He glanced north as he said this, to where the hills rose higher along the knobbed spine of the land, dark and clouded.
Minna followed his gaze. Those gloomy hills led to the Wall, and the Wall meant safety – and so many other things. Memories starting up again.
She picked bark off an alder tree as Cian filled a leather bucket with water from a stream. ‘Listen to you,’ she said, falling back into the comforting speech that had grown between them. ‘You’re just like a tutor I knew once: facts, facts and more facts.’
His eyes narrowed and he flicked water at her. It just missed as she ducked aside, and when he went to do it again she dashed away, sliding on the muddy bank. By the time he caught up she was ready, scooping a handful from the icy stream and tossing it over him.
As he stood there with his hair plastered to his face and water dripping down his cheeks, she pressed her knuckles to her mouth to stop a laugh.
His eyes sparked, his mouth twitched. ‘That was not very polite.’
The laugh burbled out of her, for it was the first time she’d seen him anything but immaculate. He looked like a little boy, like Lucius. Like Broc a long time ago. Without thinking, she reached out as if to flick the dripping hair from his brow.
With an imperceptible movement he was out of range and she touched nothing but cold air. She froze as the shutters came down over his eyes, then, embarrassed, she spun on her heel. ‘Come on, the cooks are waiting for the water.’
He was silent as they walked up the bank, toting a bucket each, but then took her by surprise, elbowing her in the side. She stumbled and spilled water over her feet, and he grinned, tossing his wet hair. ‘That’s for soaking me when night is coming on.’
She stamped her boots, relieved by his smile. ‘I’ll dry your tunic at the fire.’
‘And give me your share of meat.’
She elbowed him back, and he shoved her again, and there was less water in the buckets when they got back to camp.
Cian was grooming the pony one chill dusk, scrubbing its flank with buckhide, while Minna sat in a patch of withered blackberries, tossing them at him every now and then.
‘Letitia said we’re going to cross the mountains now,’ she said.
Around them spread a rough plateau of heath and wind-blown birches, some still dressed with their last tatters of gold.
‘Mountains!’ Cian scoffed. He flung a berry up and caught it in his mouth, as Minna looked deliberately away. She hated him showing off. He stifled a smile, chewing. ‘They aren’t mountains, they’re hills. If you want mountains, go to Gaul.’
Her mouth tightened. ‘They’re the biggest hills I’ve ever seen.’
Grinning, he threw himself down beside her. ‘Aw, Tiger, don’t grimace at me like that. It squeezes your pretty face up.’
She whacked his arm. ‘And don’t call me pretty!’
While she dug about in her lap for more berries, Cian faintly shook his head. It was a mystery to him why she thought herself so ugly. He found her appearance – her ebony hair, crystal eyes and marble skin – both startling and unnerving. What was more, a certain untouchable air about her, a sense of being lost in her own world, somehow kept all the men away. To his surprise, he found himself hoping she kept that knack. Too many things had been spoiled by associating with him.
Uncomfortably rubbing the back of his neck, Cian pointed past the bare, hunched trees along the river to the northern hills, their crags already dusted with snow, slopes red with dying bra
cken. ‘We can’t go dead north any more because we’d have to climb those hills. The road to the Wall forks left and west over the pass, or right and east. We are going up the west side, which is better, as on the east we’d be closer to the Painted Men.’ He scrubbed his stained fingers on the grass.
‘Painted Men?’ she repeated. The edge of her mouth was stained with blackberry juice, like a child’s.
‘You haven’t been listening, have you, Tiger?’ He held up one purple finger. ‘First history lesson: the Emperor Hadrian built the Wall across Britannia to keep out the tribes of Alba in—’
‘Two hundred and fifty years ago,’ she interrupted crisply. ‘I looked after my master’s boys, and they had a Greek tutor.’
He saluted her with a finger to his brow. ‘Then you’ll also know that some of the men up there in Alba – only in the east – are tattooed all over with blue markings.’
‘Blueskins?’
‘Yes, but the Roman nobility, the learned types, call them Picts. Painted Men, see?’
Minna hooked her arms around her legs, the trousers grubby at the knees. ‘And you’re Roman nobility, I suppose?’
Her words stabbed right through him. ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ he shot back. ‘It is the greatest empire in the world, after all: wine, wine and more wine.’
She snorted, because she must have seen he didn’t drink wine. ‘Have you gone north of the Wall, then?’
He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Of course. There are outpost forts there for the areani. They are the scouts that patrol the borderlands and keep the tribes under the thumb of Rome.’
She went still at that. ‘But aren’t you afraid to go among the barbarians? They attack the Wall, don’t they?’
‘The western tribes of Dalriada have treaties with Rome.’ His lip lifted ever so slightly. ‘The Picts don’t, but you just take your chances with them.’
‘But they go about naked, my brother said, covered in bloody furs with hair grown to the ground, and they spawn children together, all the men with all the women, and they eat raw meat—’
‘Gods, Tiger! You’ve been listening to too many stories from people who have never set a toenail north of that Wall.’ Her words triggered a surprising bleakness in him. He gazed over the river, where wisps of mist were curling up from the dark water, winding about the bare alder branches. The lonely cry of geese floated over the marsh beyond, wings black against the pink sky. ‘Everyone is the same everywhere, and none of it any good,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve seen more of life than you. There’s only one person you can rely on, and that’s yourself. I have no loyalty to anyone. I look after me, and me alone.’
There was a pause. ‘That’s a foolish thing to say,’ she whispered.
The murmur of pain was there between them again: from him, her or both of them, who knew? He often glimpsed it bared in her face, because she hadn’t learned to hide it yet. But now, when she turned those unearthly eyes on him, he could swear she saw right into him, too, stripping away all the masks. His throat closed over with fear.
‘It’s not,’ he returned harshly, ‘it’s reality.’ He leaped up, brushing himself down briskly. She was staring at him, and so he deliberately breathed out and veiled his eyes with a smile. ‘That’s why this life suits me, see?’ He took a few steps and flipped over into a handstand, balancing there on his palms in the damp grass. ‘I drift around on the wind, wherever it takes me. And if I trip, I look down …’ He righted himself, landing neatly on his feet, ‘and there I am to catch me. Just me.’
Minna was regarding him warily now. He threw himself back down. ‘Oh, come on,’ he prodded. ‘You are a girl who relies on her own wits, aren’t you? You were running away, after all.’
She stiffened, turning away to the streambank. ‘I am running to something, not away.’
Cian stared at the curve of her cheek. She’d never offered anything of herself, and he didn’t know why she did now.
‘My brother joined the army on the Wall. And my grandmother …’ She pressed her hands into the cleft between her knees. ‘My grandmother got sick and she’s … not here any more. Broc, my brother, doesn’t know she’s gone, so I have to go to him now.’
‘Live with him?’ Cian determinedly shut out the weight of her grief. ‘But he’s in the army.’
‘The families of the soldiers live in the vicus at each fort, you told me.’
His brows drew together. She was running away from something, whatever she said. ‘And you have some plan of what to do when you get there, assuming you can find him?’
She braced herself and turned, defiantly lifting her chin. ‘I’m going to become a shopkeeper or learn a trade. I can make honey and herb-simples, even teach children grammar. I’ll get a little stall, and sit out the front like the butchers’ wives and make my own money.’ Though she spoke as if she’d rehearsed this, her face was wan and lost.
This was too much for Cian. ‘Good luck to you, then,’ was all he could think to say.
He got up and held out his hand for her to take. After a moment of looking, she did. Cian was tall for twenty-one but Minna almost came up to his collar-bone – no fragile child, but a woman with braced chin and stiff shoulders, whose luminous eyes held secrets like his own.
His breath stirred the black hair at her brow, and he reached for the horse’s bridle, clinging to the reins.
That night, after the voicing of her desperate plan, Minna heard a voice in her dreams.
Who are you, Minna-girl? it crooned. Who are you? Stirring, she felt fingers caress her face just like Mamo did: along one cheek with her palm, then the other with the soft back of her hand.
She woke abruptly in the darkness of Letitia’s tent. There was no one there, apart from the old woman snoring and snuffling in her smelly hides. Shivering, Minna got on hands and knees and crawled to the tent flap, huddling there. Outside, the sky was growing lighter grey over the black northern hills. Frost sheened the ground with white.
North.
Away from the villa with its moonlit fields of barley and hooting owls, the stream with the singing frogs, and the little house beneath the ash tree. She wrapped her arms tight around her thighs and pressed her face into her knees, grinding her eye sockets into flesh and bone.
Forcing her ribs hard against her heart.
Chapter 6
By the time they neared the Wall, Minna kept her feelings contained to an even more narrow place inside, allowing out only impatience. But the pressure was there beneath the surface, strangling her. She could not keep it at bay much longer.
They reached Luguvalium, the old Roman fortress and town, three weeks after leaving Eboracum. From a meadow to the south, Minna gazed at the ruins of its now disused stone fort, the twin forks of shining river and the mossy town walls. But then her attention was arrested by something far more exciting.
She could see the Wall.
An enormous, dark snake of stone, it wound across her field of vision as if uncurling from her dreams, driving in from the east and crossing the river, marching relentlessly for the coast. It was taller and grimmer than even she could have imagined, a stern slash dividing the green land – a line gouged by an Emperor’s pen on a map. An edifice that said, ‘This side, in here: that side, out there.’
Barbarian lands. Wild lands. Outlands. Minna had heard Alba called all these things. Mamo had called them simply the old lands, but even that conjured up a scent, a shiver, of something ancient and untamed. Her mouth dropped open and her heart began to race.
She was so taken away she did not at first recognize the shouts being passed back along the line of carts. The troupe would stay at Luguvalium for two weeks. As soon as the wheels rumbled to a halt, she jumped down and ran to Cian. ‘I can’t wait here for that long!’ she cried. ‘The weather is getting worse and I have to get to Broc. Don’t you know where the areani are posted?’
Cian pulled up the pony’s head from its feed-bucket, as all around them mules were unhitched to be watered, and people bu
stled about stretching their legs and unpacking. ‘Probably in the Cocidii outpost fort north of the Wall. You’d need to send a message, then cross over at Banna.’
‘Cross … the Wall?’ Minna was aghast. Her entire life she’d been told that the Wall repelled the murderous, barbarian hordes. And now he was talking about crossing into those wild lands as easily as walking out of the villa gate. The other side. But she had no choice. She had to get to Broc. He was all she knew, all she had left.
‘I have to go right now.’ Her voice quavered.
‘Not so fast, Tiger!’ Cian raised one hand. ‘You can’t travel on your own – you’d get eaten alive. Just send a message to your brother. I’m sure he can come for you.’
She tucked her cold fingers under her arms, stricken. Now she was so close, she had begun to remember the hard expression on Broc’s face when they argued.
Cian was looking at her shrewdly. ‘You never told him you were coming, did you?’
She turned her head to avoid those vivid blue eyes. What was the point of lying now? ‘No,’ she answered in a low voice.
Silence fell. When she dared to glance at Cian again his face bore an unfamiliar expression as he slowly rubbed the back of his neck. At last he put his hands on his narrow hips with a casual shrug. ‘I … ah, I suppose I could take you. It’s not that far.’
Minna blinked. ‘You?’
He smiled wryly. ‘Look, I’ll take you only because I need to go there anyway. I left some money at the Cocidii fort with an old friend, and I was going to pick it up before winter. And it’s not so bad. The tribes on this western coast are trussed up by treaties. Traders and whores go back and forth across the Wall here all the time.’
She hardly heard any of that, insensible with relief. Impulsively she clutched at his arm, holding it as if she were drowning. ‘Gods, thank you! That’s … so kind.’
At her touch he went still, then the muscle under her fingers moved as he slowly disentangled himself. ‘All right, come on,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t embarrass me now.’