The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  Correus raised his eyebrows and did some thinking, and Ranvig, in the chieftain’s hall three hundred miles away, sat and glared at Marbod’s messenger until the man began to fidget.

  His name was Hadden, a red-faced, big-boned man, with a gold torque around his neck and an iron ring above it. Hadden would have fought against Ranvig in a raid with no complaints, but when the chieftain merely sat and looked at him with those oddly set eyes, it made him nervous.

  “I left men with Marbod because he asked it, as a sign of faith,” Ranvig said after he had looked at Hadden for a while. “He did not ask if he might take them to the Romans and say, ‘Look you, Ranvig of the Semnones wants to make a war!’”

  Hadden grasped for the upper hand. He shrugged. “Ranvig of the Semnones talked of war and alliance to Marbod. Is it that he does not mean it when it comes to making good on his words?”

  The men around Ranvig bristled, and a woman in a blue dress spoke from the fireside. “Semnone men are for the Semnone lord to order, not for Marbod.”

  “And who is the woman who speaks for the Semnones’ lord?” He made it insulting, but neither the woman nor Ranvig seemed to find him of much matter. They sat and looked at him thoughtfully again from both sides.

  “I am Fiorgyn Arngunns-daughter, wife to Nyall Sigmundson, who fought the Romans while the Chatti sat by their fires and thought great thoughts, no doubt.”

  Hadden looked back and forth between them. They stared at him unblinking as owls, and Ranvig’s council lords began to do the same while Marbod’s messenger silently cursed his chieftain. Marbod had forced the issue because he thought Ranvig might leave him to fight the Romans alone, and then he had sent Hadden to tell Ranvig that.

  Now the hall was very full of Ranvig’s men, the younger ones who were the chieftain’s Companions, and the older lords who had come from their holdings for the spring council. Each had four or five of his warriors with him, and there were several women besides: a red-haired woman with a swan’s wing of gray who was Steinvar’s second wife and Nyall Sigmundson’s mother; a younger woman, with rose-gold hair and round blue eyes and a baby in a fur blanket, who was the chieftain’s wife; and Fiorgyn Arngunns-daughter, who was Nyall Sigmundson’s and whose voice might count for more than even the new chieftain’s woman. Hadden sorted them out carefully. The women of the Kindred, the families from whom a tribe’s chieftains were chosen, were listened to respectfully, and a chieftain’s wife or mother had a place at the council. They could be more dangerous than men.

  “Now the Chatti are standing alone to deal with Rome and Rome’s new Caesar,” Hadden said. “And the new Caesar has come with an army of his own to add to the army of the Lands-across-the-River. As Ranvig of the Semnones said he might,” he added. “Now will the Semnones stand too, to push him back?” The fire in the hearth was beginning to smoke, and he coughed and stamped his foot in the new rushes on the floor. It had begun to rain, and water dripped loudly from the eaves outside.

  Ranvig spoke to the thrall who sat crouched at his feet, and the slave went off through the leather flap of a door at the far end of the hall. Ranvig let his eyes run along the shields and spears that were racked along the white-plastered walls under the withy shutters that covered the high windows, waiting until the thrall came back with three more thralls carrying heavy pitchers that dripped with beer foam. They passed the beer among the council lords on their benches. Someone handed Hadden a beer horn, while the first thrall knelt down to fiddle with the fire.

  “I said that the Caesar before this one might come looking at the Rhenus again,” Ranvig said when all this fuss was ended. “But also that it might be made troublesome enough for him to decide not to, with Theophanes or another like him to keep the patrols busy. This is another new Caesar, and I think he is different from the last. He wants to fight someone and prove himself, like a boy at his spear-taking. If Marbod is wise, he will change his tactics with this one.”

  “The Chatti don’t dance for the Romans!” Hadden snapped. “Already the Romans have taken men from the Usipi for their Eagle armies, against their treaty.”

  “And the Semnones do not dance for the Chatti! If the Chatti know only one way to fight, then let them. We will come to this council that Marbod makes with the Romans for his amusement, but let Marbod be remembering that he commands his own tribe, not mine!”

  “Then let Ranvig command his, before they take him for a woman and choose another chieftain!” Hadden lost his temper, between being goaded by Ranvig and being sent to play go-between by Marbod, which was not a job for a man, anyway. He threw his beer horn to a thrall and stalked out, bumping into a priest in a white robe in the doorway. The priest gave him a black look, and Hadden made the Sign of Horns, just in case, and flung himself onto the horse he had left tethered in Ranvig’s courtyard. The three warriors who had ridden with him came running from the guest hall and reined their ponies in behind. They thudded out through the courtyard gates onto the wet track that led through the village of thatched huts below the hold.

  Inside, the council exploded into fifty voices, each one trying to shout his arguments above the others. When the shouting reached the point at which no one could be heard, Ranvig nodded at Barden the priest, and he stamped his staff on the floor until they stopped and listened to him.

  Barden was young for a priest, his hair and beard still a light brown clay color, but a priest was never someone to argue with. He walked too close to the gods.

  “Very well. The chieftain will speak his thoughts to the council, and then the council may speak theirs,” Barden said. “This is no time to shout like hound puppies over a bone.”

  Ranvig leaned back in his chair, his pale braids hanging over his shoulders, and watched while the council settled themselves into silence. They were dressed in their best, with gold torques, arm rings, and shirts of good wool bought with the money from Theophanes’s trade, but it was not the show it would once have been. There had been too little left after the last war with Rome, and most of the money had gone to weapons, cattle, and seed for replanting. There were too many missing faces and not enough young ones yet grown up to take their places. Every man of the Semnones from gray warriors like old Hauk, sitting wrapped in a wolfskin to ward off the chill of age more than the spring rain, down to boys of fourteen fresh from their spear-taking, had gone with Nyall Sigmundson to fight that war, and pitifully few of them had come back. That had been eight years ago, and now the strongest part of their fighting force was boys in their teens. There were a few of them on the council who had inherited their votes along with their fathers’ holds, and they watched Ranvig with the eager eyes of children. Their fathers and older brothers had gone to fight the Roman Eagle armies and had died, and now they were grown old enough to take a fine red revenge for that. The older warriors, tall, broad men, fighting-bred, had a different look – darker, men with an old shame to erase. The Romans had beaten them, and they had limped away leaving their dead behind them. Now was the time to make up for that.

  Ranvig spoke carefully. There was wounded pride to bypass here, and that was more dangerous than plain hatred. It touched on honor.

  “Marbod wouldn’t make peace at a treaty table with his own grandmother,” Ranvig said. “He won’t do it with the Romans. So now Marbod is going to learn a thing that we already know, and the knowledge has been dearly bought: No one can beat the Romans in a war if the Romans decide to put enough men into the fighting of it. There are Eagle armies in Gaul and Spain and the southern seas and all along the Danuvius. If Rome brings enough of them here, Rome will win. Nyall Sigmundson gave himself to the Romans so that Rome should not do that.”

  “Nyall Sigmundson kept his honor thereby,” Hauk growled. “I am old, and I want to go to Valhalla. I am thinking that the Valkyrie will laugh and close the gates if I come with a Roman thrall collar.”

  Barden thumped his staff. “Your turn will come, Hauk. Be quiet. You are too old for me to send out in the rain.”

  The
re was a laugh and a spate of mutterings. When Barden scowled at them, they fell quiet again.

  “We have kept Rome from looking into the Free Lands for eight years, one way and another,” Ranvig said. “The old Caesar was afraid to bring enough Eagle soldiers to the river forts to take the Free Lands, for fear his own generals might turn them on him. The Romans are not above fighting each other if the chance comes. The last Caesar might have thought differently, so we began to keep him busy along the seacoast. Now there is yet another Caesar, and the seacoast is quiet, and this Caesar wants a name to outshine the other two.”

  “Now it is time to fight!” a man yelled, and the others’ voices swelled behind him. “It is shame if we don’t!”

  “We are the Free People!”

  “Nyall Sigmundson would have fought!”

  “Be quiet!” Ranvig’s voice cut through the clamor before Barden could thump his staff. “It is the privilege of the council to argue,” he said sarcastically. “Let the council wait until it knows what it is arguing about. Did I say we would not fight?”

  They looked at him suspiciously. “Then what is this talk of treaty tables?”

  “That is good enough for the Chatti!” Arni yelled. “We are Semnones!”

  “Be quiet, Arni,” Barden said. “You I will make leave.”

  “No Chatti has ever sat at a treaty table longer than it takes for him to lose his temper,” Ranvig said. “They will be fighting soon enough. But we will not. Not at Marbod’s beckoning, and not at Rome’s. We will fight when it will serve a purpose, and not only trade a life from this tribe for every Roman dead. That is the knowledge Nyall Sigmundson has bought us, and while I am chieftain, you will keep your faith with him.”

  They muttered warily. Keeping faith meant fighting, and if death was the end of it, it was a warrior’s death, and there was a place in Valhalla for the warrior. Keeping faith by waiting was new to them, and it sounded like a Roman thing to do. But they were so few – the death of any could mean the death of the tribe, and that was a different thing.

  Fiorgyn sat by the fire watching them puzzle it out, and then she stood up. She was still beautiful, with eyes the color of the sky with the sun out and pale braids that hung past her waist, but beauty counted for very little in a council meeting. She was also Nyall Sigmundson’s wife, and that counted for very much. “My vote is for the chieftain.”

  Only Fiorgyn had called him “the chieftain” from the start, Ranvig thought. To the rest he had been “the new chieftain” for nearly a year. It was Fiorgyn who had proposed him at the council, or the tribe would never have accepted a man who was not born to them. She was kin to Ranvig, but he thought that she had done it for Nyall’s sake, so that his sacrifice shouldn’t be whistled down the wind by a chieftain who couldn’t bring the tribe back from the brink they had sat on. Her face looked cold now, as if it were sheeted with the rain.

  The woman with the red hair, Morgian, Nyall’s mother, stood also. “I vote with the chieftain.”

  The gold-haired girl, Signy, the chieftain’s wife, said nothing. Her agreement was expected, and she was uncomfortably aware that the other two women counted for more than she did. Even Ranvig seemed uninterested in her voice. She was his second wife. His first had died of a sickness, and Signy’s father and brothers had died in the war, and so he had married Signy when she was old enough. She was never sure why, except that he wanted the men, such as were single, to marry – there were always too many women after a war – and it was easier to make them if he did likewise.

  She pulled the fur around the baby and went out, leaving them arguing behind her. The council would do what Ranvig wanted them to – they always did. Ranvig was smarter than they were, Signy thought, in the quick, uncomfortable way that priests were smart. The rain had stopped, and she walked through the courtyard, picking the fur hem of her gown up above the mud, and sat on the broad stone lip of the well. One of her women came hurrying after her and took the baby in a shocked sort of way, although it wasn’t raining. She had never had a baby before, and no one seemed to think she knew what to do with it. She curled her feet up under her on the lip of the well and looked out through the sodden hold. It was bigger and grander than her father’s holding, with timbered houses heavily thatched and a green patch of garden in the middle where Barden grew his healing herbs. The streets were packed dirt, slick with mud now, and gray smoke rose above the roofs with the sharp smell of wet wood. A hound galloped by, exuberant, shaking dirty water from his coat and trailing a chewed rope from his collar. A small girl ran frantically behind him. She had wet paw prints on her dress, and her face was tear streaked. Signy got down and caught the dog as the child trotted up.

  “Here. Hang onto him now.” The hound fanned his tail in the mud and lolled his tongue out in a friendly way.

  “I will. Th-thank you, my lady.” The girl sniffled and rubbed a dirty hand across her face, smearing it further. “He will chase the other dogs, and I locked him in because there are so many here today, but he chewed his rope.”

  “I see. Well, take him back now before your mother finds you gone.”

  “Yes, my lady.” The girl gave the chieftain’s wife a shy smile and tugged the dog along with her.

  The dog was very nearly the taller of the two, Signy thought, watching the child put an arm around the beast’s shaggy neck. Signy had had a dog like that, a big brown and white hound with a flying ear, that had slept in her bed at night. He had died of old age the summer she was fourteen, just before the chieftain had sent for her. Now she was a married woman and had a baby and had to keep her hair in braids and go to council meetings where no one noticed her.

  Past the wooden palisade of the chieftain’s hold, past the village and the fields beyond it, the forest rose up, dark and inviting, and she could see a herd boy driving the pigs and cattle into it to forage. To the south and west it stretched away, a place with wet shadows and silent trackways through its depth. And beyond it, what? The Roman forts on the great river and the strange holds that they built, which Ranvig said were not holds at all but something entirely different, made of stone with an army kept inside, all dressed alike; or cities of stone and marble where great merchants lived and grew fat and didn’t fight at all, with the Eagle soldiers to protect them. I would like to see that, she thought. Inside, the sound of the council meeting had risen to its usual roar and then flattened into silence, which meant that Ranvig had told them what they were going to do, and Barden had said that the sacred white horses said the same (since the sacred horses spoke only to Barden, it was hard to argue), and now they would do it. Maybe Ranvig would take her with him when he went to make a council with the Romans. It would be something to go through that forest and come out to see whatever was on the other side.

  * * *

  The new emperor came to Colonia shortly after Marbod, with his Praetorians behind him, resplendent in scarlet plumes to overawe the natives. The guardsmen brawled in whorehouses and ran up bills in the taverns and generally made a nuisance of themselves until Governor Clarus protested to the emperor and Flavius was sent to smooth things over. The emperor installed himself in the best wing of the governor’s palace, hastily made over for him, and settled in to begin negotiations with the Germans. A messenger arrived to say that the Semnones’ delegation was on its way, and the city began to fill up with people: merchants and traveling stage troupes, priests and seeresses and simple onlookers from all the towns of Upper and Lower Germany. Everyone who had any business with Domitian or any stake in the fate of the Rhenus frontier had a spy or a petitioner in Colonia that spring. It was a jumpy, exciting place to be.

  The army staged cavalry sports in the emperor’s honor in the arena below the north wall, and the whole town turned out to watch. The cavalry sports were as good a show as any Circus Maximus race and gaudier than an emperor’s triumph. For them, the cavalry put away its regular armor and brought out the special sports armor, lovingly polished, adorning horse and rider both: silvered he
lmets cast in the shapes of human faces with golden hair, red-leather bridles with gilded eyeguards, gold and silver greaves and golden scale, and brilliant shields painted with famous battles. Each team carried Scythian standards with long snake’s tails and wooden pilums brightly wrapped with the team colors.

  The ostensible object of the games was to score a hit with the bright wooden spears on the opposing team, but the true object was just the glory of the games, the perfect precision of the charge, the interweaving columns that went at full gallop down the field, snake’s tails flying, the rainbow spectacle that they made.

  Almost as gaudy was the cavalcade that rode with the chieftain of the Semnones when they clattered across the bridge from the east, and the people of Colonia turned out to watch them with the same happy interest. The Germans wore little armor (indeed they often fought bare chested as a point of pride), but their horses were bright with green and scarlet saddlecloths, and their riders with gold jewelry and cloaks of the thick fur that northern winters bred.

  Three spearmen swept across the bridge first, past the first Roman pickets at the eastern side. They were tall, fair-skinned men, heavy boned, bearded, with their fair hair pinned up on their heads. Behind them rode the chieftain in a gray tunic sewn with amber beads, trousers that were tucked into wolfskin boots, and a gray wolfskin cloak fastened with a gold-and-amber pin. Behind him on a white horse was a brown-haired man with a flat collar of beaten gold, the pale robes of a priest tucked up around him in the saddle, and brown boots and breeches underneath. Behind and to either side of the priest were women, riding like demons as the men were, their braided hair flying out behind them, their skirts tucked up, their bare legs clinging to the saddle leathers. Then next behind them were the chieftain’s warriors. There were only a hundred of them, but they rode with the fierce grace of centaurs, with a white horsetail standard flying in their midst. A half-dozen hounds loped among the horses. The drumming of hooves echoed in the timbers of the bridge and shook the ground along the riverbank.