by Jules Watson
Cian was briskly brushing crumbs from his lap. ‘I must thank you, friend, for your hospitality.’ He got up, hauling Minna with him. ‘But we have an early start and will seek our beds. We can make our own camp—’
‘No, you must sleep here!’Jared frowned as if offended.
‘We’ve abused your goodwill quite enough.’ Cian polished his meat dagger down his trousers before sticking it back in his belt, unsheathed.
‘Nonsense! I insist, for your own good.’
Cian’s jaw tensed. ‘All right,’ he said evenly. ‘Then we’ll just spread our bed rolls on the edge of your camp.’
Jared hesitated. ‘As you wish.’
After some hearty farewells they took themselves off to the north side of camp, near a copse of birch trees. As they rolled out their sleeping hides Cian muttered, ‘When they are asleep, we go.’
Minna nodded, and, as they stretched out side by side, she was surprised at the comfort she felt from his nearness and his familiar scent, the wool-fat that greased the pony harness and oiled his body when he juggled. The brittle smiles of those men had unsettled her. But then, there were the wolves.
Cian put his hands behind his head, letting his tension out in a snort. ‘Honest traders! Thieves, more like. They’re up to something, and we’re in enough trouble without getting wrapped up in theirs.’
Cian’s fingers pressed on Minna’s lips, waking her. ‘Hush,’ he breathed. ‘I think I heard something.’
She rubbed her eyes, annoyed she had fallen asleep. The moon was higher now, silver not bronze as it wove in and out of the clouds.
‘I can hear snoring,’ Cian whispered. ‘But not the dogs. I think—’
There he was abruptly cut off as the black shapes of men swarmed about them, spidery shadows in the moonlight.
Cian was hauled away, scrabbling and swearing before he grunted as if he’d been thumped. Minna got out one scream, struggling up on all fours, before a hand clamped over her ankle. Then it gripped her thigh before others came down on both arms, wrists and neck. Men were shouting at each other in Latin.
Cian cursed and cried out to her again, as feet thudded in the turf all around her head. Her ear was ground into the soil and someone stood on her wrist, pinning her there.
‘Get the damn cub down!’ There were more muffled yells.
‘Thump him, Ori, in the head!’
Cian bellowed again as Minna was roughly flipped over, and then someone was kneeling on her arms. ‘Get it in, then, Jared!’
She choked on a horrified cry, squirming with all her strength, arching her back.
‘Little wildcat, she is! Hurry up!’
Fingers pinched her nose and her mouth gaped to breathe, and then something cold was pressed to her lips. A stream of foul-tasting stuff poured down her open throat. Spluttering, Minna tried to tear her face away, to spit, but the hands were implacable. They held her jaw closed, her head still.
‘Enough! Don’t kill her,’Jared barked, ‘and get it down him before he kills us!’
Minna kept trying to struggle, but something was happening. Her thrashing limbs were losing their strength and a mist was closing in around her. Everything grew blurred and slow-moving. Her soul was shrinking, disappearing down into a pinprick. And that pinprick was receding along a dark tunnel, away from everything that was sharp and loud and clear.
At last the tunnel ended in darkness, and she fell away from the solid earth into nothing.
She must have been dreaming, though it was unlike any dream she had ever had.
Awake-dreams were sharp and vivid, but now she was heavy and trapped, forced down into a dark, viscous soup that bound her limbs and flooded her throat, silencing her screams. She was drowning.
Every now and then, she gained a sense that she was struggling up to the light, fighting free of the dragging weight. At those times, other snatches of sense would filter through.
A rumble of wheels. The stink of urine. The close reek of bodies. Cold metal around her neck.
And then the hands would grip her again, and bitterness flood her tongue, and she would find herself sinking back into the sticky mire. No! she cried, inside where they could not silence her.
But then, as the black despair claimed her, she would hear a voice singing close in her ear. She would feel warm lips breathing into the side of her own. Safe you will be, the voice sang, when you come to me. Come. Come.
Chapter 8
Minna woke at last to a stench that clawed its way up her nostrils and down her throat, and she immediately gagged it back up again.
Her cheek was pressed into a slimy floor, while the world lurched underneath her. Pain lanced her temples and aching limbs. Far away a man shouted, answered by another. She dragged her eyes open. She was in a dark place, lit by a dull glow spilling down a narrow ladder from above. Thirst curled her tongue up like a shrivelled leaf.
The world tilted again, and Minna slid across the slippery floor and slammed into a wall, her arms brought up short by a chain locked to an iron ring in the floor. Whimpering, she gritted her teeth against the darts of fire in her head. She was enveloped in a musty fug of tar, salt and fish, urine and vomit. It was the reek of the docks at Eboracum, the stench of a ship.
‘By tomorrow you’ll be used to the smell.’
She turned her head, blinking. In the dimness she made out Cian. He was hunched against the other wall, his tunic stained with vomit. A line of blood curved from one eye to cheek, sickle-shaped.
She tried to croak his name, but was stopped by a cloying wave from her belly and she could only turn her face and retch weakly down one arm.
‘Good, good,’ someone rumbled cheerily, and Jared swung himself down the ladder with a lamp he set on the bottom rung. He crouched by Minna and lifted a cup to her lips. Seized by thirst, she forgot all else as she gulped greedily at the water.
‘That’s a girl,’ Jared cooed. ‘Keep purging the red flower from your belly. Its caress takes you to some fine places, but it’s not so good for your looks, eh?’ His voice was still hoarse, but the ingratiating tone had gone, replaced with a note of satisfaction. One callused hand turned her chin to the lamplight. ‘Well worth it indeed,’ he muttered. ‘A fine jewel from the moors of the north.’
Minna had heard that before. A rare jewel. Her mind stumbled, groping for the familiar. Mamo. Mamo.
‘Now.’ Jared turned to the ladder and came back with an iron pot. ‘Seeing as you’re awake, my lovely, I want you to piss in this now, and not all over your clothes.’ He smiled as he thunked down the pot. ‘No sense getting sores on that smooth white skin, eh?’ It was only then she realized she was no longer wearing her wool trousers, just her long tunic. Her legs were bare.
Jared spared a glance for Cian. ‘And you too, boy – your flesh is almost as sweet as hers. Kick it back and forth between the two of you, as you will.’
Minna’s head thumped back on the wall, some sense restored by the water. Jared glanced down. ‘You’ll need some fingers, though.’ Stepping over, he unlocked the chain with a key at his belt, freeing one hand, then re-locked the other. Fury flooded her, rousing anger, and she spat at Jared, spraying saliva over his fingers.
His smile did not falter. ‘Good,’ he chuckled. ‘Keep fighting free of it.’ He neatly dodged a feeble spasm of her heel, then freed Cian’s arm. ‘The weather will be smoother soon, my lovelies. Sweet dreams!’ He thudded back up the ladder.
Panting, Minna flexed her tingling fingers. Then she understood it all. For those fingers crept up to a metal ring encasing her neck. The thin shackle was in two neat halves joined by a hinge, with a forged ring at the other end. The ring could be attached to a rope – or a chain.
‘It’s a slave shackle.’ Cian’s voice was as thin and pale as his face.
‘I know.’ Her heart plummeted. ‘I know.’
‘They are slave traders … I should have known …’ Cian rolled his head on the wall, then thumped it back. ‘They ply their filthy trade in Alba,
and the Roman soldiers turn a blind eye to it – fewer barbarians to kill, after all.’
‘But we aren’t barbarians.’
‘No.’ Cian’s eyes, she could see now, were shadowed underneath. ‘Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
They were in that place and time because of her.
‘Gods! Don’t look at me like that, Tiger.’ His voice was sullen with suppressed fury. ‘I was beyond stupid. I knew we should have walked away.’
‘But I made you come with me in the first place!’
Cian mustered a tight smile. ‘Made me? I’m not a pony to be led about by a girl – and a clumsy one at that.’ She clenched her fingers, her eyes stinging, as he shifted to ease his back. ‘Think on this,’ he said. ‘Slaves are like any other goods. To get the best price you must look after them. If they were thieves they could have killed us there and then, but now they won’t.’
It was a bleak assessment either way. She closed her eyes, sick with guilt. ‘Do you know where we are?’
‘I woke up yesterday. We stopped in some port where they were still speaking Latin. But whether we are for Erin or Gaul or Rome, I don’t know.’
Minna turned her cheek on the wall. She would never see Broc, or breathe the air of home again. She was a slave, after her family fought so hard to be free. She slowly curled on her side, her bound wrist caught by the chain. The drug that Jared had called the red flower still pulsed in her blood and she gave herself up to it now, tightening into a miserable ball.
An argument, raging above her head on deck, roused her many hours later.
‘But Jared,’ one of the men was whining, ‘she’s pretty flesh, what does it matter?’
‘You damn well know where we’re going, and it does matter,’ came Jared’s voice. ‘Those savages at Dunadd pay good money, but only for unmarked flesh, and if she’s a maid I want her to stay that way.’
‘Gods, Jared!’ another protested. ‘The barbarians don’t give a bear’s ball about women’s holes, open or shut!’ His tone turned wheedling. ‘So let’s have her, then, all of us. Finest flesh we’ve had aboard for years. Better than those poxed whores worn out by dirty Romans.’
There was a silence as Minna lay in the blackness, her skin crawling. ‘Few care for such things, aye. But some do, and they pay for it.’ There was a stomp of feet up and down. ‘So she stays untouched, or I’ll have your balls off with my knife here, and your cock not far behind.’ A few dared to grumble, and Jared raised his voice. ‘I have your whole year’s wages hidden ashore, you bunch of mangy mutts, and only I know where it is, and it ain’t on this ship. So obey me, or you’ll lose more than your cocks!’
The men dispersed, muttering, while Minna stared into the empty darkness, shame a burning trail from belly to throat. When she at last heard Cian stir she turned her head. Dawn had crept over the world outside and beneath the hatch she could see his face was grey, bleached of feeling.
‘We are going to Dunadd,’ she whispered fearfully. ‘Where is that?’
Cian’s eyes were suddenly blank. ‘Alba,’ he said. ‘It is a fort in Alba.’
*
On the fourth day the sickening yaw of the boat calmed. The blows of the waves echoing around the hold turned to slaps, and they glided on more sheltered waters.
For Minna and Cian, the taint of the red flower had lifted only gradually, dulling their minds and tongues. By the time Minna felt the ship nudge against something solid, however, a yearning for land had shaken off her malaise. She strained her chin up, longing for air.
Ropes rasped across wood; feet thudded on decks. ‘We’ll be ashore soon,’ she murmured, through cracked lips.
Cian’s eyes flickered towards her. ‘Yes,’ he said, and then laughed, a shocking, bitter sound.
‘Come on, then!’ Two sailors slid down the ladder, unchained them and bound their hands in front with rope. When she was hauled on to the deck, Minna’s eyes squeezed almost shut against the dull, grey light. Someone tossed them, stumbling, onto a wooden jetty.
Through slitted eyes, she glimpsed a silty beach and a humped rock outcrop scattered with little, round houses, smoke leaking from their thatched roofs. To the south were shining mudflats at a rivermouth, and all around, looming hills. The jetty was crawling with people unloading ships, the grey beach beyond scattered with hide boats and canoes. The air was split by shouts and laughter, the thump of barrels and crates. A cold mist hung over the black water of the bay, and a freezing wind cut to her bones.
Jared stood before them, scrutinizing Minna’s grimy legs and stained tunic. She wanted to spit at him again, but her mouth was too dry and she was weak after little food but stale bread.
‘This won’t do,’Jared muttered, taking her rope. She noticed dizzily that the dark water beside the jetty was growing paler as they neared the beach. Jared halted. ‘Into the drink, then, both of them.’
Minna was shoved from behind, her breath extinguished by freezing water. She scrabbled ineffectually with tied hands, struggling upwards, until someone grabbed her by the hair and hauled her head free. Above, Jared’s sailors laughed as she spluttered and gagged, curious faces peering over their shoulders. Alongside, another sailor was dunking Cian in the thigh-deep sea. Before Minna could speak, her head was shoved under again and shaken around.
Hands rubbed roughly at her legs, arms and hair, and at last she and Cian were dragged from the water onto the pebbly beach, where Jared sawed away their bindings as they crouched there shivering. He prodded Cian, tossing him a tunic and trousers. ‘Here.’ He dragged Minna to her feet. ‘Strip down and put this on,’ he directed, holding out a folded column of red wool.
Rubbing her wrists, she looked behind him to his men. Most had gone to unload the rest of their cargo, but four remained, eyes greedily fixed on her wet, clinging tunic. It was too much; it would be her undoing. She looked Jared in the eye, though she trembled all over. ‘No.’
He considered her for a moment, gaze roaming over her fair skin. Then – utterly exhausted, shocked out of her old self – Minna’s mind made a surprising leap. She saw into Jared like a gull diving into the sea; sensed his thoughts, felt his emotions. She heard his mind. It had never happened before.
Jared was wondering how much she would bruise if they forced her, and how it would affect his price.
Her wrists were already chafed from the chain, and the slave-ring, though thin, was wearing welts on her neck. She clenched her fists, bracing her arms. If Jared forced her, she would bruise badly. She showed that with her face, her body.
‘Right!’Jared snapped, and pointed behind her with his dagger to a tumble of boulders at the base of the outcrop. Weak with relief, Minna wedged herself in and tugged off her wet tunic. Still shivering, she held its stinking folds for a moment, thumbs moving over the embroidery sewn by Mamo. She touched it to her lips, slowly, and then drew the barbarian dress over her head. It fell to her ankles, a shapeless tube sewn on each shoulder with long sleeves attached. Slowly, she emerged from the rocks, trailing her old tunic.
Cian had pulled on his trousers to the sound of jeering laughter from the sailors. A tremor ran across his lean muscles as Jared studied his naked torso with a keen eye. ‘Well, well, I had no idea you were as sweet and hairless as the girl.’ The trader’s teeth flashed. ‘Could get more money for him, lads. Might sell him to one of the warriors as a body slave, ha!’
The sailors yelped, and Minna stood defiantly by Cian’s side as he tugged the tunic over his black curls. ‘I am the finest horseman you’ll ever see,’ Cian announced suddenly.
Jared’s face hardened. ‘You keep your mouth shut and do what I tell you.’
Cian took a deep breath. ‘They can have me for the horses. They value their horses above all things.’
Jared’s eyes went blank as he moved closer, then, without warning, he sunk a fist into Cian’s gut. Cian grunted, doubling over, and Minna dropped her tunic and sank by his side, holding his shoulders. They were crusted with sand, quiv
ering between her fingers.
Jared ignored her, flexing his fist. When he spoke he was perfectly pleasant. ‘I think it’s time you learned your place, boy. No one cares what you think. If they say carry, you’ll do it; if they ask you to lick their feet, you’ll do that, too. Got it?’
Cian was winded, his chin tucked into his chest. It was Minna who answered. ‘You are an abomination to all the gods.’ Her voice was strained with fury. ‘I bring all their curses down on you, trader Jared.’
Jared grinned. ‘I’ve been called worse things than that, sweetness, and cursed better in a dozen languages. But don’t worry, you’ll have a new master shortly and if you’re lucky you won’t need to see my puking face again.’ He threw a bone comb in the sand at her feet. ‘Comb your hair and his while we unload.’ He yelled some instructions at his men and made his way back to his ship.
Cian knelt in the sand with Minna’s arms around him until he could breathe again. Then he pushed her away and staggered to his feet. He turned his back on land, faced the water, and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
When they were finally dragged away, Minna’s embroidered tunic was stamped into the sand by marching feet. She never saw it again.
As she was prodded inland along a road that hugged the river, Minna kept her eyes lowered, her breath swift and shallow. But she could not blot out this land that somehow still forced itself inside her.
Instead of pastures and tame fields, Alba was the hue of rusted iron and blood, with ruffled grasses bronzed by cold and wind. Yellow trees lined the brown, foaming river, and the marsh beside the path was a copper sea, carpeted with moss. The wind had a blade’s edge as it sliced down from the mountains, flinging spatters of rain into her face.
From downcast eyes, she caught glimpses of muddy boots as people passed. Voices babbled unintelligible words. Cart wheels rattled and the spindly feet of bleating sheep being driven along the track pock-marked the mud. Then her gaze came to rest on the painted hooves of what must be a warrior’s horse.