Ranvig put his arms around her, and she huddled against his chest, sobbing. He looked helplessly at Morgian.
“These men will live, or they will not,” Morgian said. “There is nothing you can do. I will send Barden to put salve on her face when he has finished here.”
Ranvig looked at the sobbing child in his arms and picked her up. He went into the back of the house, holding her.
* * *
“There will be no peace,” Flavius said dully.
“Did you think there would be?” Fiorgyn said.
“No.” He sat miserably on the edge of the bed, looking up at her. “But I always told myself there would be a little more time.” The time was gone now. He had taken a room at the only good inn in the vicus because of it. It didn’t matter anymore.
“No,” Fiorgyn said. “No more. Only until midday.” Because Ranvig was going at midday to tell the emperor one last lie. He would send his people out of the vicus before that, in case the emperor should choose not to believe it.
Flavius’s face had grown desperate. “Stay with me,” he said suddenly now. “Stay with me. Go back to Rome with me.”
“No,” she whispered. “Don’t even try.” She backed away from him. “You are the other half of me. I love you. But I can’t go with you. Don’t make me say it for both of us.”
“No. No, I am sorry. I couldn’t take you if you could go.” He stood up and laid a hand along the side of her face, lovingly. “But go somewhere else, somewhere you’ll be safe. Do that for me. If the emperor doesn’t like Ranvig’s answer, he may decide to hold all of you.”
“It wouldn’t do him any good,” Fiorgyn said. “The tribe has Ranvig’s orders not to buy him or any of us back if it comes to that. He made them swear an oath, and he put the chieftain’s curse on the man who breaks it.”
Flavius had been in Germany long enough to know that that was no laughing matter. The chieftain’s curse’ was reputed to kill – always the man who was cursed and sometimes also the chieftain who had set it. Ranvig’s men wouldn’t break that oath. “I will tell the emperor that,” he said, relieved that he could discourage Domitian from hostage-taking with a clear conscience. After this morning, he didn’t care what the emperor did with Ranvig, but Fiorgyn – Fiorgyn was another matter. But there was still going to be a battle, and Ranvig was still going to lose. “Please,” he said desperately, “please go away from here, away from Ranvig and his damned war. They will take prisoners afterward. I don’t know what might happen.”
Fiorgyn put her hand on his. “Flavius, think. If it were the other way – if your soldiers were outnumbered, and the tribes had called up a great war band to fight them, and if I told you not to fight, but to go and sit in a hole somewhere safe – what would you do?”
He looked into her eyes, sky colored, honest, stubborn. “I would like to say that is not the same thing,” he said. “But I suppose it is, really, isn’t it?”
“I matter too much,” she said. “Even if I wanted to go and hide, I cannot. I am Nyall Sigmundson’s widow and Ranvig’s kinswoman. That counts for too much among the tribes. My place is with my own kind. And I am thinking that maybe I owe Nyall that much, now.”
“I know,” Flavius said. And the bitter part of it was that he did. Before Fiorgyn, he had never thought that a woman had more to do than to follow the man chosen for her and to let his loyalties be hers. He had never understood Correus’s German wife, Freita, and her divided heart. Now, miserably, he did. He would never ask a man for whom he had any respect to desert his own kind with a war coming. Now he couldn’t ask Fiorgyn, either. Slowly, trying to make it last, he pulled the silver caps off the ends of her braids and shook the pale hair loose, and she came into his arms for the last time.
It was cold in the room, but they didn’t notice. They lay on the bed and traced their hands across each other, memorizing every line and scar and curve. There was an old scar on Flavius’s cheek, souvenir of a hunting mishap, and she ran the tip of her finger along it as if she would remember even that. He cupped both her breasts in his hands and put his face against her throat and lay there, letting the misery wash over him until finally it ran away, spent, and there was only the woman in his arms. The cold air stung his back, and he pulled the rough blanket up and wrapped his body around hers under it.
She tilted her head back to look at him and shivered as he entered her, a familiar touch now, welcome, need calling to need. He rocked back and forth gently, and the white legs tangled around his own. Her breath began to come faster, but it was his face that she gave her mind to. A sharp-angled face, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, a Roman face. But no longer alien. A beloved face, sure and familiar, a face she could call up in dreams. Don’t let me forget his face. She could bear it, she thought, if no one again could ever touch her body as Flavius did. But not if she forgot his face.
It had begun to rain outside, driven on a wind that came through the shutters like a knife, but neither of them felt it. They could have frozen there, still locked together, and they would not have known. Finally, in the still heaviness of spent passion, he rolled a little away from her, but his hands were still tangled in her rippled hair and he couldn’t bear to move them.
“There is a last time for all things,” he whispered. “I didn’t think until today that that was unfair.”
“We have been lucky to have had this long. Everything must change.” Let me remember his face.
He lifted his hand and touched her cheek. “Then maybe it will change again.” His natural optimism began to creep into his voice. He had always thought that one did better with some hope to hang onto. “Maybe it won’t be forever. Maybe—”
“Maybe,” Fiorgyn said, unwillingly. That was more than she wanted to hope for. It was too easy to break your heart on hope. If they did meet again, he would still be married. And so would she. It would have to come to that now, and there were one or two men in the tribe who would be willing to marry a chieftain’s widow, even if she was carrying another man’s child. For a moment she wanted to tell him, if only to take away the loneliness. But she knew what he would say if he knew, and it would solve nothing and only give them a quarrel to part on.
“We have an hour left,” she whispered. There was no more that her love for Flavius could do to her. She would take the hour, she thought, in payment, and put a whole life’s love into it.
* * *
“The chieftain has stalled long enough,” Correus said flatly. The emperor on one side and the chieftain on the other stared across him implacably at each other. The midday sun was dark behind the boiling rain clouds. Water splattered on the roof tiles and fell in a torrent from the eaves.
“The emperor asks too much,” Ranvig said. He glanced at Domitian and spoke directly to Correus. “I cannot accede to that. We are the Free People. Even after the last war we managed to hold our land. I cannot give it to Rome now.”
“I never thought you could,” Correus said. “What do you want me to tell the emperor?”
‘That I will talk one more time with my council. But that I am doubtful.”
“The chieftain says that he is doubtful, but that he will try to persuade his council,” Correus said. “He is lying.”
Domitian nodded. “Tell the chieftain that he is out of time. He has an hour to get out of my fort. And a day to get his people out of the Agri Decumates back where they belong.”
Correus translated, but he knew Ranvig had understood well enough. “The emperor thinks you’re lying. The emperor would keep you for a hostage, but he knows that if he does, your people will fight. He still hopes that that may be avoided. He hopes that you will go home and stay there.”
“Until he has leisure to come and see to us.” Ranvig dismissed all that. “You told him I was lying.”
“I did. What did you expect?”
“No more than that.” Ranvig stood. He raised a hand to the emperor, or maybe to Correus; Correus wasn’t sure. Then he was gone. The two warriors who had come with h
im stalked out behind him. Their horses were tethered in the rain outside the Principia, and they kicked them into a gallop as they hit the saddle.
The Romans didn’t stop them. Ranvig hadn’t thought they would. He had learned what he wanted to about the new Roman emperor in the months he had sat quibbling over a treaty that would never be written.
At the fortress gate, they swung their horses east through the vicus, toward where the rest would be waiting for them. Beyond the Roman zone was his war host: Arni with the Semnone warriors who had ceased their raiding in the Roman zone and pulled back to meet them; and Steinvar with his borrowed men, sent from Dacia by Decebalus. The Semnones had been chafing for months for a real fight, a battle with more honor in it than the raiding that Ranvig had kept them to, and Arni had been hard put to hold in line the hotheads among them. Arni hadn’t liked it himself. So many factions to quarrel with each other, Ranvig thought. But if he won, the Romans would look no more at Semnone lands. Not for a long while anyway, and that was the most that could ever be said of Romans.
XXII Autumn Battle
“Oh, Rapax troops are afraid of the dark,
And Adiutrix’s generals are crazy—”
The cheerful voice drifted over the glow of the cookfires, and an angry shout came back from Velius Rufus’s camp.
“The Ninth can’t be beat at sounding retreat,
And all of Augusta is lazy!
So who pulls you out when the heathen box you in?
Who do they send for when the going’s getting hot?
Gemina! Fourteenth Gemina!
Gemina, the best of the lot!”
The singer’s mates joined in the last chorus and drummed their mess tins on the ground. Correus grinned. The Fourteenth Gemina still didn’t have a legate, but they had lost their sulks and malingering and had earned their Eagle back fairly. They had had enough of building roads, and of sabotage and fouled water, and of raiding parties that dropped out of trees, while the Rapax and the British detachments under Velius Rufus were fighting proper battles with the Chatti. But Marbod’s Chatti warriors had proven to be as dangerous as Ranvig had prophesied, and now the other wing of the army had been called in too, to smash them and end it. The Fourteenth Gemina was plainly feeling set up about it, and the singer renewed his insults happily. Correus considered stopping him before he provoked Rufus’s generals too far. He decided not to. The Gemina needed to feel proud of itself.
The singer began improvising a new verse, and Correus went back to his dinner, which Eumenes was serving in his tent – a legate’s tent, red leather and gilded fringe, with rugs
on the floor: Correus knew wistfully that he wasn’t going to keep it. He didn’t have enough service behind him for a legate’s posting. Not yet. But for this battle it was his, and the legion was his. Even with his failure to make Ranvig see sense, and now the uncertainty as to just how many men Ranvig was pulling into his war band, Correus couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. It was no easy thing to turn a legion around when it had been spoiled, especially one that had been paid for it. A commander willing to bribe his men could have their total loyalty until the money ran out. It would ruin them in the long run, but Vettius hadn’t cared about that, and the common legionary didn’t think in those terms. The legionary served for twenty-five years in one legion, and it was his commander who shaped his life. The legionary thought only in the here and now. Correus’s first commander, Messala Cominius, who had a legion of his own now somewhere on the Danuvius, had taught him that. It had proved to be the most useful, and dangerous, thing Correus had learned in eleven years in the army.
The tent flap popped open, and Centurion Quintus came through. “All locked up, sir,” he said. “Pickets posted, and the watchword is ‘laurel.’ I’ll quiet our nightingale down when I go back through.” Quintus’s belt buckle proclaimed him as a man of the Gemina now. Centurions promoted from the ranks generally did not reach cohort level and so rarely changed legions, but Correus, serving as both legate and primus pilus of the Gemina, had asked for Quintus as a staff aide. It had seemed better than disturbing the precarious balance of the Gemina by pulling a man from its ranks for the job, and the Gemina First Cohort’s second centurion was going to have his hands full with Correus in the legate’s post.
Correus pushed away the remains of his dinner, and Eumenes splashed watered wine into the cup. “Have the scouts come in?” The emperor and Velius Rufus had scouts of their own out, of course, but Correus believed in firsthand information when he could get it. Tonight, it seemed, there wasn’t any.
“They’re in,” Quintus said. “But all they had to say was ‘Same as before,’ so I told ’em to go clean up before they came on to you. They smelled like bog trolls.”
Correus dismissed Quintus and sat watching the lamp flame in his wine. If he were Eilenn, maybe he would see something in it. Correus just saw wine, so he drank it and told Eumenes he was going to bed. Outside, the singer ended his song abruptly – that would be Quintus – and the camp began to doze. The scouts could report their lack of success in the morning. They knew that the Semnones were also massing their war band at last and were circling upriver to join the Chatti, but they kept shifting about, and so far no one had been able to tell whether or not Ranvig had all the allies he had claimed. There were other scattered tribes whose land lay between the Agri Decumates and the Semnones. They might ally with Ranvig, or they might lie low and hope the storm would pass them by. None had so far been willing to ally openly with Rome. Maybe Marbod would refuse alliance since Ranvig had left him to fight the Romans alone for so long, Correus thought hopefully. He turned over and went to sleep, counting Germans in his head.
* * *
Marbod was willing to ally. He needed the men, and he knew it. But he wasn’t willing to listen to Ranvig’s strategy. He scowled, his wide, thin salmon’s mouth snapping at his red mustache. “That is a cowardly, Roman way to fight that I might have expected of one who has sat in the Romans’ holds for a year, drinking wine like a woman.”
“Of course,” Ranvig said sarcastically. “And Marbod is a great warrior whose strategy has driven the Romans back to Rome. Those are trolls that we saw camped yonder in their tents.”
Fiorgyn looked at Ranvig suspiciously. She thought he was deliberately prodding Marbod. Ranvig didn’t like Marbod, but it also had something to do with the argument he had had earlier with some of Arni’s men over his orders, and with the Dacian men in the peaked caps who had ridden in with Steinvar. She wasn’t sure what. Her face grew interested, and she laid a hand on Arni’s arm when he started to intervene. Arni might learn to keep his tongue between his teeth by the time his hair had gone gray, but she doubted it. He stood shifting from foot to foot and glaring furiously at Marbod and Ranvig both. Marbod’s insults bit too close to the tribe’s honor. But when Arni was through fighting Marbod, he wanted to fight the Romans, and he didn’t like what Ranvig was saying, either. Beyond Arni, some of the other Semnone warriors were nodding vigorously when Marbod spoke, while Steinvar stood stolidly, arms folded across his wolfskin jacket. The men in the peaked caps had sent none of their own number to the council. They seemed content to let Steinvar or Ranvig speak for them.
“We could have driven the Romans back across the Rhenus by now, back all the way to Gaul!” Marbod shouted. “If the Semnones had sent the men they promised!”
“I promised nothing,” Ranvig said. “I gave you a piece of advice that you chose to ignore when you insulted the Romans’ emperor to his face.”
“And now you bring me foreigners out of Dacia and say they may not fight!”
“Their lord cannot afford their loss just now,” Ranvig said. He shrugged and looked amused. “He has other uses for his war host, so that was our bargain. If the chieftain of the Chatti will listen, the Dacians will be useful without fighting. And I have not brought them to you. They are my men, Marbod.”
Marbod exploded. “We will not fight in any cowardly Roman fashion, with holdi
ng back and running. And if Ranvig of the Semnones does not lead this war band, he may go and sit and spin with his women and his foreigners and let his warriors follow me!”
The lord of one of the Semnones’ outlying clans pushed his way forward, with two others trailing him. “The chieftain of the Chatti is right! We did not come here to play children’s games with the Romans!”
Ranvig considered him, and his crooked face grew angry. “I had assumed that you came because the Romans are a danger to the Free Lands, and because I am your chieftain.” He eyed Marbod and the other man as if they smelled. “We fought in the last war while Marbod sat and got fat in his hold. Are you wishful now to break the oath you swore to me, for Marbod? So much for your honor!”
“We will not run!” The clan lord stamped his foot. If he had been a horse he would have laid his ears back. “We will fight like men, in a battle like men!”
It was supposed to be a meeting for the chieftains and their tribal lords, the men who carried a vote in council, but they were making so much noise that others began to crowd around, too – small holders and younger warriors and any man with a mind to make his voice heard. Ranvig, who was normally willing to shout his council to a standstill if they pushed him too far, eyed Marbod consideringly and seemed more pleased than not, Fiorgyn thought. He is setting them to quarrel with each other, she realized suddenly. He had thrown his plan into their midst like a bone to a pack of hounds and was sitting back now to watch them fight. There was a thrall’s tale that Ranvig had the elves’ blood in him, and he looked much like one now, his crooked eyes watching with veiled amusement, his long fingers playing idly with the red-gold band around his wrist, while mortal lords quarreled among themselves for some dim purpose of his own. Fiorgyn looked at him, exasperated. Whatever Ranvig was up to, the elves had nothing to do with it, and now was not the time to be goading Marbod or the discontented among the Semnones.
The Emperor's Games Page 40