“Latin’s a very straightforward language,” Flavius said. “German’s enough to make someone crazy.” They looked at each other and laughed.
“Morgian decided to go with them,” Fiorgyn said. “I think she is trying not to think about what the fleet prefect told us. Nyall was the last of her children, and her grandson died in the last war.”
“He was your husband,” Flavius said. “I am sorry that it came to that.”
“She had him longer,” Fiorgyn said. “I did my mourning a long time ago. I think she finds it hard to see that. So when they all went out and Barden went to talk about healing herbs with some man he met in the market, who looks like a spider, I was glad enough to stay by myself.”
Flavius put his wine cup down. “I am intruding.”
“No. I don’t know why I don’t think so, but you are not.”
Flavius picked up his cup again. He was finding it a strain to keep up the talk in his shaky German, but he didn’t want to leave. It’s odd, the back of his mind thought. I don’t like women like this. Correus does. Flavius kept his life neatly compartmented. Fiorgyn would never stay in a compartment. He looked at her sideways and caught her sky-colored eyes watching him uncertainly. I don’t need this, he thought desperately.
“I have a wife in Rome,” he said, not quite knowing why.
“I see.”
Fiorgyn’s women had all gone into the next chamber, apparently thinking him no threat. She made as if to call them back.
“No. Don’t.”
There was something in the air, a feeling like the spark from rubbing a hand on wool on a dry day.
“I am a Semnone. We will be at war soon, I think,” she said in the same tone in which Flavius had said “I have a wife.”
Her face seemed to him to shimmer like a lamp flame, and her hands were perfectly still in her lap, as if she were afraid to move them.
He leaned forward in his chair, put down his wine cup, and placed his hands on her shoulders. The warmth of her skin came through the soft wool. She moved her hands then and put one on his arm, and he bent his head and kissed her, while something in the back of his mind screamed Don’t!
Fiorgyn’s lips quivered under his. Then they parted, and she turned her head a little to fit the two of them closer together, and her other hand came up and rested along the back of his neck. She never made a sound but her body leaned into his, against the silvered figures on his cuirass. Aemelia always sat still under his kisses, affectionate and obliging, but Fiorgyn was like a flame in his arms, and he knew with a horrible certainty that he was going to burn himself at it.
There was a sound from the next chamber, sharp in the taut silence, and they sat back at the same time, looking at each other desperately.
“I didn’t mean to,” Flavius said.
“No, Centurion. Neither did I.” Her voice was low but not a whisper.
“Don’t call me centurion. My name is Flavius.”
She nodded silently.
He stood up. “I will go.”
She nodded again, watching him.
“If you want to, I will be at the path that goes by the northwest tower, day after tomorrow, in the morning.”
* * *
“That is not possible,” Correus said, translating Ranvig’s speech. “Hear now the, uh, alternative proposals of the chieftain.” The German interpreters weren’t fast enough with their Latin to suit the emperor, and Correus, to his dismay, had been appointed to the job. It was frustrating enough to watch the Semnones bring their own doom down on their heads, and he didn’t much want to translate while they did it. And he didn’t like to think about what the fleet was doing; although he had given his second-in-command a hefty chunk of extra authority in his absence, a unit that was short its regular commander could go to Hades on a horse in a week.
“The tribes of the Free Lands are free people. It is not possible that they should pay tribute to the emperor of Rome,” Correus translated.
“Do the Semnones speak for all the tribes of the barbarian lands?” Domitian interrupted. There were several other tribes whose lands lay between the Semnones and the Rhenus, or to one side. Most of them had cooperated informally with Rome, at least off and on.
“Yes. There is agreement among us that the chieftain of the Semnones shall speak for all,” Correus translated. He thought
Ranvig was lying, at least about the tribes nearest the Rhenus, but he would tell the emperor that later. He could hardly say so now, with Ranvig listening. “The tribes of the Free Lands will agree to the following terms…”
Flavius listened to Correus’s voice droning on, listing an interminable set of arrangements that were not quite so outrageous as to anger the emperor, but clearly unacceptable to Rome. The chieftain had unbent slightly from his previous proposal, but if Domitian hoped to make a client state of the Semnones, these negotiations could go on forever.
The emperor’s clerk had finally achieved an arrangement agreeable to both sides, and Ranvig sat now in his ebony chair, widthwise across the hall from the emperor, with his councillors at the polished oak table behind him and fifty guards leaning on spears ringed on three sides of them. The spears were ceremonial weapons with collars of white heron’s feathers, but their iron blades were perfectly functional and they represented the major concession on the emperor’s part. To make up for the spears, Ranvig wore only a jeweled silver-hilted dagger in his belt. An equal number of the emperor’s Praetorians, fully armed, stood behind Domitian, and the emperor’s gilded chair was set facing Ranvig on a dais. The dais raised it only six inches from the floor, but there was at least two feet of significance in that six inches. Rome did not sit on level ground with a barbarian. Between the two of them Correus stood in his parade kit and all his medals, looking like a man who wished he were elsewhere.
Flavius listened with half his mind to Correus wading through a complication of water and timber rights, road taxes and guarantees of privilege, and tried not to look at Fiorgyn. She sat with Morgian and Barden at the graceful thin-legged table behind the chieftain’s chair. There were carved animal heads on the bow of the table legs, fanciful faces with wild, protruding tongues and unlikely appendages sprouting behind their ears, which ended in a single splayed foot at the base of each leg. Flavius studied them with an absorbed expression when Fiorgyn looked across at him. Then helplessly he felt his eyes slide back to her face. In the bright white light reflected from the Basilica walls, she had a cold, snowy beauty again, her braided hair shining nearly silver and her eyes and lips pale at this distance. She was wearing another blue gown, with a shorter gown over it in the German fashion. All her clothes seemed to be blue. Flavius thought that she might have more vanity than she showed. Her looks were at their best in blue. She is like me, he thought ruefully. She cares what she looks like. And cares that no one should think so. He found the idea unnerving that a woman should be like himself. It let her too close to the bone. There was a thin silver torque around her neck, and she was wearing the arm ring with the carnelian clasp, although Lady Morgian, he noted, was not. He wished suddenly that he had bought silver instead. It would have suited her better.
“I must discuss that with my council,” Ranvig said again, maddeningly, for what seemed like the fiftieth time. So far he had conceded one point to the emperor, on the matter of trade between the Free Lands and the empire, but it was enough to make Domitian hopeful. Soon he would have to put troops in the field against Marbod, and in the unconsolidated parts of the Agri Decumates too, if he didn’t wish to have them threatening his back. If he could bring the Semnones into the Roman fold as a client state, it would be a double victory; client states had a way of becoming provinces when Rome got a foot in the door.
“Subject to an emergency, the emperor Domitian grants the chieftain the time he asks,” Correus said tiredly.
* * *
The northwest tower loomed over Colonia’s gray stone walls, an immense circular bastion, the top of which could be seen rising a
bove the morning mist, if one were a bird. From below, it dwarfed the scattered huts that lay outside the walls and the wet darkness of the woods that grew nearly in its shadow. The stone was still damp with dew, and Flavius could see clearly the patterns that were set in it, beginning just above his head – rosettes, half-rosettes, triangles, and bands of lozenge-shaped stones, some given color by blocks of red sandstone and limestone. They soared away above him until the mist that still hung thick in the air obscured his vision. A hundred feet away a path ran out of the sparse jumble of huts and into the wood beyond.
The mist had nearly burned off by the time she came, and a thin band of sunlight flowed over the top of the tower. Flavius was standing in the shadow of the wall where anyone passing was less likely to notice him and wonder why the emperor’s aide was spending the morning here, twisting the fringed ends of his sash of office around his fingers. The purple sash looked as if it had been chewed. He hoped alternately that she would come and that she would have more sense than he had, and wouldn’t.
She came around the tower quickly, holding her skirts up out of the dirt, and stopped suddenly when she saw him. The sun made her hair a pale aureole around her head. “I was hoping you wouldn’t be here,” she said.
“Oh, no.” Flavius shook his head. “I said I would. I was hoping you wouldn’t come.”
“Now that I have, what shall we do?”
“Go for a walk.” He held out his arm, and she laid hers across it gravely. The bracelet was a bright band across pale skin.
The path through the woods was cool and inviting, splotched with sunlight through the newly leaved trees and only slightly clammy. There was a furious rustling in the undergrowth and a half-grown pig looked out at them, startled, with a twist of wild blackberry hanging across its snout.
“How did the chieftain and his wife enjoy the theater?” Flavius asked, making conversation.
“Signy liked it,” Fiorgyn said. “None of our poets do things that are meant to be acted out like that. The chieftain explained things as they went along. It was something for Signy to see. It is tiresome for her, with nothing to do.”
“Lady Signy is very young,” Flavius said.
“Yes, poor thing. Ranvig married her because there was no one to take care of her, and she is so pretty, but I don’t think he really wanted another woman after his first wife died. It hasn’t been easy for her.”
“Or for you,” Flavius said. “Why have you let them do that to you? Ranvig carries you before him like a figurehead on a ship. The great Nyall Sigmundson’s wife. I’m willing to bet he uses you to keep his council in line.”
“When I give advice it is listened to,” Fiorgyn said, “and not just for my husband’s sake. Ranvig was the best choice for chieftain. They are my people, Flavius, and my responsibility, and that is not something I will argue with you.”
“No, I suppose not. I’m surprised you are willing to talk to me at all.” He halted and stood looking into her face, while the forest murmured to itself around them, a sound that was birds and insects and just the noise of the trees themselves. A squirrel swayed on the end of an oak branch over their heads, squawked at them, and ran back.
“I wasn’t going to come,” Fiorgyn said. “I told myself until I went out the door this morning that I wasn’t going to.” A dry leaf, caught in a branch since the winter, fluttered down and clung in her hair. He pulled it out gently and stroked her pale head.
“If I kissed you again, would I be able to stop?” he said huskily.
“I don’t know.”
She didn’t say not to, and he realized that Fiorgyn had no more control over this compulsion than he had. That frightened him, and he backed away a step.
“I am not sure there is even a choice to make,” she said softly.
This time it was Fiorgyn who reached out for him, with a low sound in her throat, and then he was pulling her hard against him, and her arms were around him. A desire that was stronger than anything he had ever encountered shook him from head to foot while he kissed her. It was like floating on the current of a river, the direction inevitable but no longer in his control. When he stood back finally, his skin felt hot and the forest air sharp and cold against it. He didn’t know how long they had stood there.
Fiorgyn drew in a long shuddering breath. He could see her breasts, achingly close, rise and fall under the loose overgown. Her hair was ruffled at the back where one of his hands had been. Suddenly, more even than he wanted to hold the body under the gown, he wanted to pull the braiding from that pale hair and see it ripple down her back.
A sound rustled in the forest, and an old German came stumping down the path, with a trio of yapping hound puppies and an older dog, wise in the ways of the hunting trail, that stopped and cuffed the puppies when they ran into the undergrowth.
They stood silently while he passed, and the mood that had nearly let him make love to her here on the ground passed with it. It was growing late, and they would be missed. He gave her his arm, and by mutual consent they turned back toward the city. But he knew with a certainty that needed no questioning that she would come to him by the tower again in the morning, and that from that point there would be no turning back.
* * *
Fiorgyn’s hair lay spread on the rough, unbleached cloth of the pillow. The braiding had left crimps in it, so that it rippled like a little sea.
Outside were the sounds of voices and laughter, and then someone swearing, but neither of them looked toward the door. It was barred, and the inn was clean and respectable, but it was in the glassworkers’ quarter. No one would come to seek them there, and they had shut out Rome and the Semnones both when they had barred the door.
The bed was only a straw mattress on a low platform, and Flavius, in his tunic, sat beside it on the floor with his arms around his knees and just looked at her. She wore an old gown and overgown that could have belonged to any glassblower’s wife, and Flavius wore an old military tunic and a scarlet centurion’s cloak, much patched, which he kept for hunting. The innkeeper had paid them no mind when Flavius had taken the room. Soldiers weren’t allowed to marry, but plenty of them did anyway and brought their women with them. Or the officer could have been romancing some merchant’s wife. The keeper of the Dolphin didn’t care.
Flavius put out a hand, slowly, the way a man warms himself at a fire. She rolled into his arms, and he got up onto the bed with her, stroking her, trying to find his way through what suddenly seemed like innumerable layers of clothing. The Rhenus was a colder climate than Italy, even in summer, and the double gowns were of a heavier cloth than the fashionable nothings that Aemelia wore, and all the fastenings were in different places. In any case, he had never undressed his wife.
Her maids did that and left her in her night shift before he came to bed.
He found the clasp of Fiorgyn’s girdle, which was made of flat bronze squares linked together and worn low on the hips, and fumbled with it until it came open, only to discover that there was another above it, around her waist. It was leather, and buckled, and he undid it, too. There were more fastenings at the sleeveless shoulders of the overgown, and he thought Fiorgyn was laughing at him.
She struggled up in the soft mattress and pulled the overgown off over her head. When her face reappeared she was grinning like a naughty child, and Flavius started to laugh, too. He pushed her back down and kissed her while he wrestled with the fastenings of the undergown. It came off finally to reveal a white shift underneath.
Flavius groaned. “Oh, no. I don’t think there’s anyone under there at all. It’s just clothes, all the way through!”
She shook out the ripples of her hair and took his hand and put it against her breast. The shift was a fine, thin wool, as thin as silk. His hands cupped her breasts hungrily. She wriggled out of the shift, and his laughter turned to an aching longing and a sense of distance from the world that made the plain, whitewashed bedchamber a far country of their own.
She lay and looked at hi
m while he pulled off his own tunic, the rippled hair tangled under her and one white knee drawn up. She stroked a hand across his chest as he bent over her, and he felt the calluses on the palm and fingertips. Among the Semnones, even a chieftain’s lady had known her share of labor in the last eight years. But she was beautiful, with a skin like milk, and the color glowing from her eyes and lips. Her breasts were rose-tipped against the whiteness.
She gasped as he put a hand on the flat of her belly and drew it slowly downward. There was a look on his face that she hadn’t seen before, and the look in the dark eyes fixed on her own was almost triumphant. They were a part of each other now, no matter what, even if this was the only time they ever had together. She wanted to laugh with joy at that, and then to weep with pity for them both. She had been wed to Nyall because he was the chieftain of the Semnones and because there had been another man who wanted her whom she didn’t want to wed and it was the one or the other. She had come to love him and had mourned him honestly, but Nyall was not, she knew clearly, the one who could have been the other half of her soul. She had found him in the dark man who bent over her now, and to her utter horror he was a Roman.
It had been so long since a man had touched her. Flavius put his lips to her breast, and the sadness faded away, out of their private country. There would be time enough for sadness when there was no more time here. Like any warrior, he had old scars on his body, pale against the olive skin. She buried her face against his shoulder so she wouldn’t see them and wonder who had been killed in getting them.
* * *
“You are mad! What is wrong with you?” Ranvig’s face was honestly horrified.
“How dare you spy on me?” Fiorgyn’s eyes snapped.
“No one spied on you. I gave Signy some silver to spend in the glassblowers’ shops. She wanted one of those little bottles shaped like birds.”
The Emperor's Games Page 22