by Jules Watson
When sunlight was falling through the window to the bare floor, the door opened once more. Minna struggled to sit up, stiff and cold, blinking in the sudden glare.
Into the cell came a soldier wearing a well-oiled mailshirt and helmet with cheekpieces that framed a pair of pale grey eyes. A sword was looped over his back. He carried a stool which he set down, then occupied.
He braced his hands on both knees, his neck roped with tendons, forearms thick and scarred. ‘I am the optio reporting to our commander. We have been informed that you are closely attached to the household of the Dalriadan king.’
Minna kept a still face, though her heart had broken into a gallop.
The man folded his arms, reciting a well-worn formula. ‘I want to know exactly how many men he has, what his plans are, and his aims. You will tell me.’
She pulled herself straight. Her thoughts darted to Broc, and a wild pang came to name him, to beg this man for her brother’s aid, to pretend. But then she knew she could not. She would dishonour Donal and herself. She would dishonour Cahir’s love. She had made her choices. ‘I don’t know anything,’ she said clearly, though she quailed inside. ‘I feel I am unable to help you.’
The optio’s eyes flickered at her perfect Latin. Then he smirked. ‘By the blood of the Christos, I’ve lived my whole life among you heathens. I know when you lie, how you lie, and how long it takes to get the answers I need.’ From a belt at his waist he withdrew a dagger and turned it over in his hands.
Minna’s eyes followed it. The soldier smiled and sat forward again, placing the dagger across one knee.
Chapter 53
‘The Romans have run before us, like women!’ Gede scorned. He and Cahir were alone in the Pictish king’s tent, the two armies having met up once more at the appointed time south of the hills. Now, the wide and fertile vale of Eboracum lay flat and open before them, leading on into Britannia.
Gede snorted as he poured two cups of mead. ‘They are cowardly, mindless beasts. We should have faced them like this long ago.’
Cahir took the proffered cup, then nursed it on his lap, wondering how to reply. For him, winning was all that mattered – the thrill of that still burned his heart. He glanced at the vessel of mead Gede was propping on a side-table, and saw it was a silver ewer of Roman make, the table a carved one of shale. Above them, an ornate Roman oil lamp hung from the roof pole, dainty and incongruous in this tent of rough furs and bloody weapons.
He wondered for a brief moment where the plundered goods came from – how many villas and towns burned, how many women killed. Minna had begged him to take his men’s oaths that no civilians were to be harmed by the Dalriadan army. He had gladly given her that promise, but there was no way to control the Picts. He hoped that most of the populace had fled before the might of their advance.
‘What news have you of the Saxons?’ he said, briskly changing tack.
‘I have had word from King Cerdic that they intend to land at Petuaria on the estuary, and take the town and river crossings. They can hide their fleet there and come down upon the Roman flank from the north.’ The two kings had decided to move rapidly down the main Roman military roads and take a stand above the colonia of Lindum to await the southern forces which no doubt were already being gathered. If Nectaridus took the bait, enraged at this invasion of the rich midlands, then he would find not only an Alban army waiting for him, but the bloodthirsty Saxons bearing down on him from an unexpected direction.
Cahir nodded, staring into the pool of amber mead. Neither had drunk yet, for the air between them was, as ever, prickly rather than companionable. He glanced up and saw Gede’s piercing eyes fixed on his hands around the cup, which robbed him of any desire to stay and trade war stories.
He swiftly decided his presence was better served elsewhere. With the Pict and Dalriadan armies camped beside each other, the atmosphere was tense with brittle talk and sneering laughter. Fistfights broke out every day between the two tribes, and there were squabbles as the men scoured the land for food. Some groups had even drawn swords trying to scrounge from the same abandoned farmsteads.
‘I thank you for the offer of a drink,’ Cahir said politely, rising, ‘and yet I remember I have called a meeting of my own men, and will be late.’
Gede shrugged, the tattoos on his face stark in the overhead pool of lamplight. Those painted falcon eyes stared right through Cahir’s flesh. Unhurried, Gede sipped his mead. ‘Then we will leave tomorrow to give us time to scout out our flanks and rear. Some petty commander might yet be regrouping the remnants of their northern forces behind us.’
‘Tomorrow.’ Cahir picked up his helmet. ‘And it might be better to separate our men slightly as well. Their tempers will fray if the Romans take too long.’
‘Not too separate.’ Gede smiled coldly. ‘After all, we need each other.’
‘How can I know any more than you do?’ Minna repeated hoarsely. ‘They planned to land a large force and destroy the northern army – hasn’t this already happened?’
The optio’s face hardened at her faintly taunting tone. ‘I want to know their ultimate plan.’
Minna stared at the sunlight flaring off the dagger, then bared her teeth in a smile. ‘Why, to march south and attack Roman soldiers where they find them. But you already know this, too.’
Quick as an adder, the optio was on his feet. He grabbed her tangled braid and dragged her head back, and she bit her lip not to cry out. His eyes were pale orbs that showed no mercy, no vulnerability. ‘Enough insolence, my pretty whore. I want to know exactly where he is going and why.’
A stink of unwashed skin and sour sweat wafted over her, and garum, the fish sauce that laced all Roman food. Fish guts fermented in the sun – how Minna had loved the taste once. A whimper squeezed past her teeth.
‘You will answer me,’ the optio said with a brutish smile, ‘or I will hurt you.’
And without warning his dagger nicked the hollow of her throat. Minna cried out, the lurch of terror breaking something open inside her. And the sight came flooding in like a sunrise over hills, so strong and bright the truth was outlined for her to see in vivid colour.
There was a baby in her belly. Cahir’s child, a nub of a thing, its spirit no more than a faint echo of life.
She clapped her hand to her throat as the soldier released her. Blood seeped through her fingers … There was a baby, and it would die, too. She could not fill her lungs because of the vice that tightened around her.
Satisfaction flared in the optio’s eyes. His voice dropped, and he stroked the blade around the curve of her ear. ‘I need you to speak,’ he murmured, like a man would to his lover, ‘but that does not mean I need your body unmarked.’ And he took her arm and dragged the blade across her white wrist.
She moaned as another line of red appeared, the blood beading on her skin. The optio smiled and stepped back, and suddenly Minna was dizzily remembering Cahir drawing a dagger across his soft flesh, the same warm skin she had kissed. A fist seemed to squeeze her chest and it all started to go dark. Dark, and cold.
At the final moment, a warm light arrested her descent into blackness. She was supposed to listen. Rhiann’s voice came back to her, something she had forgotten from the saor dream. At the times of greatest travail we will be with you. Her Sisters, the priestesses. Minna clawed at the stone floor. Help … help me.
As she wavered on the edge of the precipice, there came a brush of butterfly wings on her shoulders and throat, a touch alighting on her temples and eyelids. But there was no one else in the room. She caught a sob in her throat. The optio’s smile blurred before her. A rustling began, like wind blowing through a forest. Her eyes sank closed. I’ve fainted, then. Cahir will think me so weak.
But the rustling became whispers echoing on the walls, layers of voices murmuring. Minna straightened, struggling back from the dark place. Each voice began whispering different things, snatches of thought and idea which wove into a kind of song, drawing her with them
. The butterflies became invisible fingers, soothing her, calming her panic to give her clear sight. Breathing hard, she blinked and raised her chin, listening.
‘Speak or I bring this blade to your veins!’ the soldier growled. ‘And worse, witch, will come when I give you to my men. Have you thought of that?’
She shuddered awake, stretched her chin high, no longer slipping into darkness. Her back was absolutely straight, the grace of the Sisters holding her. ‘Witch, you say?’ She smiled, her heartbeat striking loud and slow in her breast. ‘You have heard, then, Caecilius Rufus, of my island of witches in the Western Sea.’
There was a shocked silence. She knew his name. The whispers told her.
‘On a day of sunshine, the holy witches died on Roman swords. And have you heard, Caecilius Rufus, how for ever after those soldiers could seed no woman’s womb, their manhoods weakened and poxed?’
A pause. ‘What vileness is this?’ the optio demanded. ‘What madness do you utter?’
There were lights behind Minna’s eyes. She felt the blood drying on her skin. She heard the baby, a tiny, gasping cry, and held it close. ‘No madness, Roman. You have heard of this slaughter – for all these years later you still fear to violate the wise-women of Alba.’ She leaned forward. ‘Know then that I am of these witches, and I too can put a pox on you, and all that you are will wither away.’
Enraged, the optio stepped close and struck her across the face. ‘You lie … it is all lies!’
Her head snapped back, the lights dancing. She hardly felt the pain in her jaw and lip – she only saw the fear far back in his eyes. She smiled again, tasting blood. The voices flew about her head more urgently, the ghostly fingers stroking away her hurts. ‘Caecilius Rufus.’ The singsong voice that now came from Minna did not seem to be hers, and she listened to it with a distant dreaminess. ‘You stole three solidii from your father when you were nine, and he beat you until the skin came off your thighs. You killed a kitten once, by stringing it up in a noose of twine and watching it die. No one knows that. The first woman you bedded laughed at you …’
The optio grunted, his hand rising again.
‘On the Wall you collected taxes, and made money behind your commander’s back.’
The soldier’s fist wavered in the air, and he fell back one step and then another, the whites of his eyes standing out in his pale face.
She got up on her knees. ‘You raped a blueskin child once, and you’ve never banished her eyes from your mind. They haunt your dreams still.’
‘No.’ His voice was strangled.
Slowly, she pointed at him, the blood oozing from the cut on her arm. ‘You loved a man,’ she said softly. ‘It surprised you. He fought alongside you, and you loved him, and when nights were cold you shared warmth and showed nothing of what you felt in your face. He died, so near to you that in every dream you see the blade pierce his flesh again, and wonder why your own flesh was not there to take the blow.’
The soldier’s body was quaking now, and her finger with it. ‘Violate me,’ she said very softly, ‘and I will bring down upon you the wrath of every witch who died that day on the Sacred Isle. Your manhood will shrink and rot, until you scream for release from pain. Your shade will be followed even unto the halls of death, and never left in peace.’ Then she opened her throat, and what came were the first lines of Davin’s song, which spoke of the love of Rhiann and Eremon.
The barbarian words reverberated off the plaster walls, doubling back on themselves. They were words of great love, hope and belonging, but this soldier thought them curses, marking his flesh.
With a gagging sound he backed against the door. You are ours now, no matter what you say,’ he gasped. ‘We can use you as hostage to capture your lover, to force him to surrender. He is a man, and can die by the blade.’ Halfway out the door he forced himself to speak again. ‘Know that your men hang from the walls for the ravens to feed on. We toasted their deaths with ale.’
He slammed the door behind him, and Minna fell to all fours, panting. Gradually the butterfly touches faded and it became colder. The whispers in the room grew fainter, until there was nothing but the banging of a loose shutter outside in the breeze.
All the energy went from her and she curled up, arms about her belly, staring at the shadows on the wall. The soldier’s last words beat on her heart, one by one, until abruptly she began to weep for Donal, her tears dripping on the scratches and cuts that marked her. The light moved across the floor and dimmed as she cried, her grief and her guilt like the seizure of poison.
For the first time she tasted the full bitterness of being a seer, and how those bindings could strangle, tight about her neck as any slave-ring.
Two days later, she was taken away in the dead of night. Whether this was to avoid Maeve’s wrath, Minna never knew. The optio was not among the soldiers who guarded her.
In those first hours on the dark road, stumbling on the end of a rope, she discovered the reason for her swift removal. Her escort of ten muttered among themselves, their voices carrying in the cold. The northern army was scattered, with no central command. It wasn’t safe to keep the prize of the barbarian king’s whore in Luguvalium, where insurgents might take the town again. They needed to put her directly in the hands of someone who could decide how to use her best. This was to be Nectaridus, the Count of the Saxon Shore. They were taking her south, far from Alba.
Minna had little time to absorb this. No man was willing to lay hands on her after the optio’s interview, but that didn’t stop the small torments, the nips of pain that blended into one wound on her soul. The men prodded her with spear-butts, striking her in the ribs and legs with glancing blows until she was a mass of bruises, trying desperately to protect her belly. When they wanted her to move faster they used the barbed points.
She soon learned that if she raised her eyes she would receive a blow from a fist, and once, the crack of a lance across her skull. Warding signs came, too, of course: the crossed fingers and spit in her face. They tripped her to kneel at the end of every day, and poked her awake with spears.
So the desolated landscape through which they moved became no more than a blur of suffering.
The air was rancid with smoke, and all around were blackened shells of abandoned buildings, and the bodies of warriors of both sides choking streams and piled behind breached walls. The stink of rotting corpses and taint of smoke, the bleating of wandering sheep and cawing of ravens soon merged into one dark nightmare pierced with jabbing pains.
She stumbled along with her head down. Donal was dead. She repeated that litany to keep her feet going. This punishment was for Donal and the others, hung by their necks from the town walls. So Minna would endure and not fall. She would not die of exhaustion, or sorrow, or guilt, or the sting of cut flesh.
It would take more than that, for the sake of her baby.
In daylight, the land was almost deserted of life. The soldiers moved stealthily by hidden paths, avoiding the barbarians picking over burned farmsteads around them. Gradually, as Minna’s pain became constant, her mind broke free and drifted above her. And she realized that, as her body was bruised by her own people, cursed and spat at, cut and shoved, something in her was inexorably draining away. It gathered in from every part of her body, then flowed out of her feet to the earth.
Out went the old life and loyalties. The kinship with Broc, her unknown father, her dead mother. The heartbeat of Rome, of Eboracum, of Master and Mistress and the Villa Aurelius. Being Roman. Being Minna-the-nurse. Being someone else’s. All of it went, bleeding away in that tormented journey across a blasted land. Only the echo of Mamo remained, for she was wound into Minna’s soul.
So, step by step, Minna was stripped of her previous lodestones – blood, identity, birth – and what was left was a different being. She became only Minna of Dalriada, beloved and seer of the king. She found the mother in her, strong and fearless for the baby.
She would be these things alone, for the short span
of time left to her.
*
Six weeks after the barbarian armies landed in the north, the Count of the Saxon Shore, Nectaridus, hastened to confront them at Lindum with only the five thousand men he had left, and another thousand who had escaped the northern slaughter.
The Albans had chosen their battleground, using all those fine, straight Roman roads to march down in time to pick the raised ground above an expanse of boggier earth. The irony was not lost on Cahir, that their passage was made so much easier because of Roman engineering.
Behind them they left a land stained with smoke, and scoured of the people who had fled in terror before their armies. Food was there for the taking – the crops in the grain-stores, the meat on the hoof – and the Picts and Dalriadans were well-fed and rampant with eager bloodlust.
The Romans, however, were stunned by the Dux’s defeat, and had been driven north by their Count at a forced march. According to the Alban scouts, they were exhausted, disorganized and terrified.
Cahir smiled to himself. It could not have been better.
Chapter 54
Two days later Cahir raced down the high ground above Lindum towards the sea, his legs pumping, his sword held high beneath his streaming boar banner. His men bellowed as they ran. Around him, the advance of the Alban warriors was a great ocean swell breaking on a shore – a roar from thousands of throats, the flow of bodies a turbulent rush.
On his right flank Gede and his Picts were a screaming turmoil of hatred, with gaping mouths and rolling eyes. On Cahir’s left came Fergus of Erin’s men, red hair flying like the manes of their wild horses, their shields a battering wall; and the little, dark Attacotti, their arrows a rain of iron. And somewhere behind the embattled Roman army, another five thousand Saxons had just poured in from the shores of the estuary.
The Romans were caught between Saxons, sea and Albans like soft metal between hammer and anvil.
Screaming as he charged up and down on a white horse, the helmeted Nectaridus had put his army’s back to the coast. Now they were turning in horror at the sudden and unexpected appearance of the blond-haired savages from over the Northern Sea.