House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  It didn’t help that, in a race of red-and yellow-haired giants, he’d been born not just deformed, but strangely dark, and of comparatively modest stature. There’d been whispers, after his birth, that he’d been sired not by Tintigern, but by some foreigner during a trading excursion by his parents to Narbonensis, the Roman colony on the southern border of Celtica. Bran’s mother, Vlatucia, had silenced that rumor by slicing out the tongue of the woman who’d had the poor judgment to start it. There’d been not a peep since.

  It was just Bran, Artaros, and Vlatucia in the house now, so it was fairly tranquil all the time, but not usually so deathly quiet first thing in the morning. After checking the main hut and those of his mother and grandfather, and finding no one about, he stepped outside and ducked into the cooking hut.

  “Bran.” The vassa Adiega looked up from the butter she was churning to give him one of those big, sweet smiles that were like rays of sunshine warming his soul. Her eyes were the clean, bright blue of a cloudless sky, her hair alight with streaks of gold. Even with her braids tied back with a strip of rag, and wearing the patched old dress in which she cooked and cleaned, she was the most radiant creature Bran had ever seen.

  “Morning, Bran,” greeted Adiega’s widowed sister, Paullia, as she stirred a pot of porridge over the central hearth. “Hungry?” Leaning over the pot so as to display her ample bosom above the neckline of her red dress, for she was as voluptuous as Adiega was slender, she tossed him a saucy grin. “See anything you like?”

  “Yes.” Taking Adiega by the hand, he pulled her away from the open door—and the view of passing villagers—and drew her into his arms. Without being asked, Paullia moved to the opposite side of the hearth so that she could see through the doorway, the better to watch out for prying eyes. If Vlatucia were to find out about Bran and Adiega, who knew what retribution she would exact.

  “You’re trembling, my love,” whispered Adiega as they embraced.

  He told her about his dream.

  “What could it mean?” she asked.

  “Only bad things,” he said gravely. “The oak tree is Vernem, or possibly even Celtica as a whole, and the ramparts are the type the Romans have built around Alisiia to keep Celticum relief forces at bay.”

  “And the eagle?” she asked. “The two fledglings?”

  “I’m not sure,” he lied, loath to even think about the implications, much less voice them.

  “Did you have the other dream, as well?” she asked. “The one about the demon from the north?”

  “I have it every night. He’s getting closer.”

  “You think he’s really out there somewhere, in the woods?”

  “I know he is,” Bran said, although right now, a wandering demon who seemed content to keep his distance from their village was the least of his concerns. “Adiega, have you seen my mother and grandfather this morning?”

  Nodding, she said, “A messenger came, and they went running out to a cart coming into the valley along the road from the north.”

  “Running?” Vlatucia never ran; it lacked dignity. And Artaros was aged and nearly blind. Bran went to the doorway to peer at the road, some distance away. He saw the cart sitting still, the driver hunched over in his seat. Two tall figures stood nearby, with a smaller form, that of Artaros’s gray wolf, Frontu, pacing back and forth. A pair of horses was harnessed to the cart, with three others tied to it in back.

  Bran concentrated his hearing, sorting through the morning cacophony of the village—goats bleating, geese honking, children shrieking with laughter, Vectito Donati’s fat little dog yipping and barking, the clack-clack-clack of a loom, the ringing strikes of Brude Ironsmith’s hammer…All of these sounds he filtered out of his ears as he focused in on the conversation taking place next to the cart.

  “I know he’s only nineteen,” Artaros was saying, “but he was always a clever boy, and he’s wise for his age, with a quiet strength.”

  “What are they saying?” asked Adiega as she peeked out from the edge of the doorway.

  “I think they’re talking about me.”

  “Let me hear,” she said.

  Bran waved a hand in the direction of the cart, murmuring, “Uediju rowero gutu,” and suddenly Vlatucia’s voice was as audible as if she were standing right in front of them.

  “Strong? He’s the runt of the litter, and a cripple, at that. I should have drowned him at birth.”

  “Shit,” muttered Paullia, sounding both awed and appalled by Vlatucia’s cold-bloodedness.

  Bran suddenly regretted having made the sisters privy to this particular conversation, especially his beloved Adiega.

  “Bran is your son,” Artaros said sternly.

  “He’s an embarrassment.”

  Adiega reached over to squeeze Bran’s hand.

  “He has powerful gifts,” said Artaros, “the like of which I’ve never seen.”

  “But not the kind of gifts that make for an effective leader. Branogenas is weak, Father, and well you know it, weak not just in body, but in spirit. He’s not equipped to lead the Vernae, especially in a time of war. It was his brothers who were trained for that role, not he. His role is to serve the gods, counsel the elders, and prophesy the future. He was to be our druid someday, not our chieftain.”

  “But the fates have changed all that,” the old man pointed out. “Your husband and your two elder sons are gone, Vlatucia, and now it is Bran who must wear the golden torka.”

  Bran leaned against the doorsill and closed his eyes. He’d known, from the moment he’d awakened, what that dream had meant; he just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it.

  “Bran, I’m sorry,” said Adiega as she embraced him from behind. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I must go speak to them.”

  Bran’s mother glanced at him as he approached the cart, then carried on with her litany of his shortcomings. Vlatucia matir Saveras was tall even for a Celticum female, with sharp, alert bird eyes. By all accounts, she’d once been the most beautiful woman in their clan, but in recent years her face had begun to collapse from within, like a bad apple shriveling around a puckered little wormhole of a mouth. She was clad, as usual, in a dress hemmed short to reveal a pair of men’s plaid trousers, a dagger and a ring of big iron keys hanging from her belt. Her long mane of wiry hair—iron gray with some strands of copper still remaining—hung loose but for two side braids strung with golden beads.

  Bearded old Artaros, leaning on his gnarled oak staff, his eyes as eerily pale as Frontu’s from the film that clouded them, patted Bran’s shoulder.

  There were three corpses on the back of the cart, each hidden beneath a blood-soaked blanket save for their mudcrusted boots. On the chest of each body sat an iron helmet. Bran recognized the one in the middle as Tintigern’s because of the boar tusks.

  “I want to see my father,” Bran said.

  “You haven’t the stomach for it,” Vlatucia replied.

  Artaros pulled the blanket away.

  The air left Bran’s lungs. Tintigern’s face was blackened and swollen, with a yawning wound where his right eye had been; his mouth was agape, his other eye half-open. Blood caked his trailing moustache and his magnificent head of silvery, limewater-stiffened hair, scraped back from his head to reveal the small gold hoops piercing his ears. Around his neck, half-hidden beneath his cloak of shaggy, crimson-dyed fleece, he wore the golden torka that identified him as chieftain of their clan.

  “Look, he’s gone white as milk,” Vlatucia told Artaros with a little sneer.

  Gathering all his strength of will, Bran whipped the blankets off the other two bodies only to find that they weren’t his brothers at all, but two other men of the village who had accompanied Tintigern and his sons to Alisiia.

  “What of my brothers?” he asked.

  “You have no brothers,” his mother replied.

  Artaros said, “Dovatucas and Narlos surrendered and were taken as personal slaves of Roman soldiers.”

  “My own sons,”
said Vlatucia, her face twisted in disgust. “They should have cut their own throats rather than allow themselves to be taken captive. Their subjugation only makes our defeat more shameful.”

  Our defeat. So—the Romans had vanquished the forces of Vercingetorix and taken Alisiia. Bran pictured the burning oak tree from his dream, wondering how much time they had—weeks? months?—before there were Roman soldiers marching into their little valley.

  Vlatucia leaned over the side of the cart to wrest the bloodstained torka from her dead husband’s neck and close it around her own.

  “That torka belongs on Bran,” Artaros said.

  “He hasn’t the right to wear it,” she said, as if he weren’t standing right there. “Not yet, anyway—probably not ever.”

  “That’s for the elders to decide,” Artaros said.

  “The elders will follow my lead,” she said. Of that, Bran had little doubt; they were all utterly cowed by her. “When Branogenas grows a set of balls—and a sense of duty—he can wear this torka.”

  “He’s not Branogenas any longer,” said Artaros. “He’s Brantigern, chieftain of the Vernae.”

  Vlatucia chuckled disdainfully.

  “Have I not proven myself a dutiful son?” asked Bran, in a rare display of boldness. He’d learned long ago that it didn’t pay to go head-to-head with his mother.

  “If you truly knew your duty, Branogenas,” she said, “and were willing to accept it, you’d have married Briaga long before this.”

  The cart’s driver, Adiega’s brother, Sedna, glanced from Vlatucia to Bran, then looked away.

  “If you were a man,” Vlatucia continued, “and not a selfish little boy, she would already be big with child, and I wouldn’t have to fret so over the fate of our druidic line. It’s dying out, or haven’t you noticed?”

  There remained but thirteen other members of the clan who shared Bran’s increasingly rare gift of spellcasting and second sight, though their powers were, like those of Bran’s parents, far weaker than his, and undeveloped through druidic training. In order to produce children with druidic gifts, it was necessary for both parents, not just one, to be gifted, but an appalling number of gifted men had died these past few years fighting the Romans. Two of the precious thirteen, a boy and a girl, were small children with widowed mothers. The rest, Bran’s two pregnant sisters and eight others, were adult females wedded to ungifted men. That left Briaga matir Primius, who was not only gifted, but a highborn uxella, as the natural choice of a wife for Bran—the only choice if, as his mother was forever reminding him, he was to be ensured of druidic offspring.

  Much as Bran hated to admit it, she had a good point. For the sake of their clan’s druidic lineage, he really should marry Briaga. Were he not so passionately in love with the lowborn, ungifted Adiega, he might have already succumbed to his mother’s unceasing pressure and asked Briaga to be his wife, though she left him entirely cold. But Adiega, who’d grown from a childhood playmate into the woman he loved with his entire heart, was the other half of his soul. The notion of forsaking her for the vain, shallow Briaga was unthinkable.

  “If your children aren’t druids and druidesses,” Vlatucia said, “if they aren’t born with your gifts, then you will be the last in a line of Vernan druids stretching back centuries. Is that really what you want?”

  “What I really want,” Bran said wearily, “is to mourn my father in peace, without having to argue with you about whom I’m going to marry.”

  “You go ahead and wallow in your grief,” Vlatucia said. “I’ve no time for it. The Romans are advancing on us even as we speak. I must make plans for the future of our clan. Your father would have been the first to understand that.”

  “We must make plans,” Artaros said. “Tintigern never acted without my advice and that of the elders, nor shall you. Tomorrow, we shall bury our chieftain and his fallen comrades. Afterward, you and I and the elders will gather for a council in the nemeton and sort out what needs to be done to protect us against the Romans.”

  Vlatucia conceded to that with a sour little nod of her head. To Bran, she said, “See to the funeral preparations. Tintigern is to be buried with his best possessions. His sword and helmet, obviously. His comb bag, razor, daggers…his favorite drinking horn, the one with the silver on it. Have Adiega and Paullia wash him and dress him in his finest clothes, with his gold wrist torkas and enameled cloak pin. Make sure they arrange his hair the way he wore it in battle, like a horse’s mane. And tell them to gather as many flowers as they can from the fields and the woods. Oh, and keep an eye on them. Don’t let them steal the torkas and cloak pin.”

  She turned and left without so much as a backward glance at her husband.

  Artaros told Sedna to take the bodies to the nemeton and the horses and cart to the family stable, and then he and Bran started back toward the village, Frontu loping along by the old druid’s side.

  “Did you have the dream again?” Artaros asked. “The one about the demon from the—”

  “Every night,” Bran said.

  “Are you still unsure of the sex?”

  “He’s male, I think. But he still occasionally appears to me as a female.”

  Artaros nodded thoughtfully. “How far away is he now?”

  “Eight or ten luegae, not much more than that.”

  Artaros stopped in his tracks. “That close?”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Bran said. “He doesn’t seem interested in coming here. Quite the opposite, actually.”

  The old man nodded again, then continued walking. “We’ll have to trap him, then.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain when we meet with the elders tomorrow night.”

  “‘We’? Can you imagine my mother’s rage if I show up at a council of elders?”

  “She may be too old for me to spank, though I’m frequently tempted, but she can be overruled. I still wield a certain amount of authority with the elders.”

  “Forgive me, Grandfather, but I think it’s safe to say Vlatucia wields more, if only through fear. Gamicu Ivageni is still fresh in their memories.” Shortly after Bran’s father left for Alisiia early last month, Gamicu, one of the elders, had had the temerity to question Vlatucia’s insistence on serving as chieftain in her husband’s absence. One night, Gamicu was snatched from his home by three Germani thugs Vlatucia had retained to do her bidding, though they lived in the woods somewhere nearby, not in the village proper. The next morning, one of the villagers on his way to do some trading with a neighboring village happened upon Gamicu’s charred remains in a field. He’d been enclosed in a man-shaped wicker effigy and burned to death.

  “I’ll never be allowed at that council,” Bran said. “She’ll order me away, and there’s no one in this village, including you, who would dare take her to task over it.”

  Artaros smiled. “There’s one I can think of.”

  Two

  WHAT IS he doing here?” demanded Vlatucia the following evening as the Vernan elders, all aged members of the uxelli class, gathered around the fire in the nemeton. She still wore Tintigern’s golden torka; Bran wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d slept in it.

  Artaros, standing behind the altar with Bran to one side and Frontu to the other, said, “Branogenas is a uelis, a gifted seer. Someday, he will take his place as druid of our clan. It’s time he learned how important decisions are made among our people.”

  Vlatucia fixed Bran with her most venomous look. “Leave,” she said.

  A gray cat jumped up onto the altar, prompting a flurry of mutters and bows from the elders. Frontu stood with his front legs on the edge of the altar to growl at the interloper, who hissed at him.

  “Down, Frontu,” commanded Artaros, whereupon the wolf seated himself, his silvery eyes fixed on the cat. Ignoring him with feline nonchalance, Darius settled down right in front of Bran and stared at Vlatucia, as if daring her to defy him; he’d always been fond of Bran.

  She looked away, coloring hotly in the w
ay that only redhaired women can. Lifting her chin, she addressed the assembled elders. “Alisiia was a tragic defeat for the Vernae, for our mother tribe, the Arverni, indeed, for all of Celtica. Our days of self-rule are numbered. The Romans have been invading our villages, executing the chieftains, and selling the people into slavery—an unspeakable fate. Our only hope is to do what our sisters and brothers elsewhere are doing, and that is to leave here before the Romans arrive.”

  “And go where?” asked Guthor Totavali.

  “Any place where we can be our own masters and worship our own gods and goddesses.”

  “What about Darius?” Bran asked. Darius, their god of fire from a far distant land, had made his home in their enchanted cave for centuries. It was the sacred responsibility of the Vernae to keep him hidden and protected, for the world was full of fools who understood nothing about his kind, except how to destroy them.

  Vlatucia glared at Bran for having spoken. He avoided her gaze, but Darius glared right back at her.

  “Bran is right,” Artaros said. “We must think of Darius first. It is he we live to serve, not ourselves. He couldn’t travel with us. It’s much too risky. He’d be bumping into people constantly, and sooner or later, he’ll be recognized for what he is. On the other hand, I hate to imagine what would happen if we were to leave Vernem and abandon him to whoever settles here after we’re gone. Even most Celtæ have lost touch with the old ways, the old beliefs and practices, from contact with the worldly Romans and Greeks. People are losing their respect for magic and for the deities who live among us. They think there’s only one world, the one they can see, and they’re becoming more and more intent upon being the masters of that world. Some of them,” he added with a sidelong glance at Vlatucia, who gave him a contemptuous look. “They don’t want gods and demons getting in the way of their power, so they pretend they’re not real. If we all flee the Romans, where would that leave a god like Darius, who relies for his very existence not just on the solitude of our cave, but on certain druidic spells of safekeeping?”