House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  “I’ll stay here when the Romans come,” Bran said.

  Darius turned to look at him, as did Artaros and Vlatucia. The elders all started talking at once.

  Holding up a hand to silence them, Artaros said, “I shall stay. It is my place.”

  Bran shook his head. “You must leave with the rest of the villagers, Grandfather. I know I’m just a uelis, but you can teach me what I need to know before the Romans come. I would hate for you, in your advanced years, to have to endure the rigors of slavery under the Romans, and the Vernae need your druidic skills.”

  “More to the point,” Vlatucia told her father, “Darius needs a young druid, one who won’t be dropping dead in a year or two.”

  “Thank you for pointing that out, Daughter,” said Artaros dryly.

  “And Bran can father druidic offspring to ensure Darius’s continued safekeeping,” Vlatucia said, adding pointedly, “so long as he consents to marry Briaga matir Primius before we leave, so that she can stay behind with him.”

  “Briaga has to stay and be enslaved?” exclaimed her father.

  “No, surely not,” said Bran, picturing Briaga as she’d appeared earlier that day at his father’s funeral, dressed in a multicolored silken dress with her face brightly painted and her fingernails stained berry-red, a beaded comb bag dangling from her wrist. She’d giggled and whispered with her friends throughout the solemn rite.

  “Of course Briaga must stay,” said Vlatucia. “We must all make sacrifices for the good of the clan, Brennus.”

  “Y-yes, but—”

  “I’m willing to leave Bran behind, aren’t I?” she asked, to which her father responded with a dismissive little snort, knowing full well how much of a sacrifice that was for her.

  “But if you end up a slave,” Tolagnas Rodani asked Bran, “will you even be able to protect Darius? Will you have the freedom to do so? What if the Romans sell you to some soldier on his way back to their homeland?”

  “I’ll teach him some spells to prevent that from happening,” Artaros said, adding, to Bran, “But I don’t like the idea of you and Briaga being here all alone. Your children will need other Vernae, unrelated to you, children with druidic gifts whom they can marry in order to perpetuate the druidic line.”

  Vlatucia said, “We have but two gifted children in the clan, Sergonas Rodani and Lasrina matir Temari. We shall leave them behind.”

  The grandfathers of the two children grudgingly consented.

  “Their mothers should be encouraged to remain behind with them,” Artaros said. “And there may be others who are willing to stay, but they must do so of their own free will. No vassi are to be pressured. Bran will act as both druid and chieftain, but in secret, otherwise the Romans will kill him.”

  “It is decided, then,” said Vlatucia. “Father, you must perform the rite of marriage between Bran and Briaga first thing in the morning.”

  “So soon?” asked Bran, panic speeding his heart as he thought about Adiega. Surely, if he sorted through the problem carefully, he could think of some way to make her his wife and keep her with him.

  “We needn’t rush the wedding, if Bran would prefer to wait,” Artaros said. “Do we have any way of knowing when the Romans will be arriving?”

  “I have scouts to warn us when they start advancing on Vernem,” said Vlatucia, “but I should think they’ll be here by the Cold Time. That will give us time to pack up our households and prepare for our travels. Meanwhile, we’ve discussed all there is to discuss tonight, so I declare this council—”

  “There is actually another matter that hasn’t been addressed,” said Artaros. “We’ve resolved the issue of who will stay behind, and how to ensure the druidic line here at Vernem, but what of the Vernae who leave to settle elsewhere? Without little Sergonas and Lasrina, and with no married couples who are both gifted, there will be no one to serve as druid to us after I’m gone.”

  That observation was greeted with confounded silence.

  “There is a way,” Artaros said.

  All eyes turned to him.

  “Branogenas has detected the presence not far from here of a…nonhuman traveling south, through the deep woods.”

  “A god?” Vlatucia asked.

  “Not precisely,” Artaros hedged. “He’s…well, from what I can surmise based on Bran’s dreams, he’s more of an elf, from somewhere far north of here.”

  “Benign or demonic?” inquired Tolagnas.

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Why was I not told of this?” Vlatucia demanded.

  “I was waiting until we had enough information to act upon,” her father replied.

  Vlatucia said, “The presence of a possible demon so close to Vernem, especially at such a vulnerable time for us, is a matter about which I should have been consulted long before this. We need to do whatever is necessary to keep him as far away from Vernem as possible.”

  “Actually,” said Artaros, “we need to lure him closer.” He waited for the uproar to die down, then said, “Unless I’m very much mistaken, and I don’t think I am, this particular elf is the type that can shift from male to female, and back again.”

  “He’s a dusios?” Vlatucia cried. “The dusii are demons, ravishers of women. Everyone knows that.”

  Speaking over the elders’ outraged mutterings of agreement, Artaros said, “But not everyone knows that after a dusios, in his female form, mates with a man, that man’s vital seed is transformed. When he becomes a male again, and mates with a woman, any child that might result from that union is blessed with druidic gifts.”

  The elders grew silent as they pondered the implications.

  “If we can capture him…” Artaros began.

  “And control him,” Vlatucia interjected.

  “And control him,” her father continued, “then we can use him to sire gifted offspring before we’re forced to leave here, thus replenishing our druidic line.”

  “And how do you propose to effect this…siring?” asked Vlatucia.

  “By mating him with as many of our married couples as would be willing,” he said, “first the males, then the females. If all goes well, by the time we leave, some of the wives will have babes in their wombs—their husbands’ babes, but gifted.”

  “I’m not sure I like the idea of it,” said Guthor, “mating our fellow Vernae like cattle.”

  “Do you like the idea of being left with no druids?” asked Vlatucia. “We shall do it, but—”

  “If the elders agree,” said Artaros.

  The elders were consulted, one by one. Of course they all consented to the plan, even Guthor, who was probably imagining how it felt to be burned alive in a wicker effigy.

  “My one requirement,” said Vlatucia, “is that this dusios must transfer seed only between uxelli husbands and wives. The wife must be gifted, and of course not with child. If gifted children do indeed result from these couplings, they must be reared in a manner befitting druids and druidesses.”

  “Of course,” said Artaros. “The dusios is traveling on foot, through dense forests and difficult terrain, and he appears to be keeping a deliberate distance between himself and us. We must summon him closer if we’ve any hope of capturing him.”

  “Do you have a spell to accomplish that?” asked Vlatucia.

  “My spells alone aren’t enough,” he said. “I’ll need a shrine to focus them, a stone figure representing the dusios himself. It must be erected in the Cella, and quickly, within a half-month or less, before he moves out of the range of my powers.”

  “Make it happen,” Vlatucia told Bran. “Any man who can move stone and wield a hammer and chisel must help.”

  “What happens once we lure him close?” asked Bemmos Modagni. “Will he just walk into the village of his own accord?”

  “Not this dusios,” said Bran. “I can feel his resistance to humans, his fear of them. We’ll have to capture him somehow.”

  “We’ll set a trap,” said Vlatucia. “We trap boar. We can t
rap an elf. Meanwhile, don’t mention this to anyone, even your wives. We don’t need to be alarming people by telling them we’re setting out to capture a demon.”

  “May I speak to you, Grandfather?” Bran asked at the conclusion of the council as Vlatucia and the elders filed down the path to the village and Darius strolled off to his cave.

  “Of course.”

  “In confidence.”

  “When have you ever had to ask that?”

  Taking a deep breath, Bran said, “I want you to marry me to Adiega.”

  Artaros stared at him. “The vassa?”

  “I love her, Grandfather. She’s—”

  “Oh, dear,” said Artaros.

  “Please, Grandfather. I can’t marry Briaga. She’s—”

  “She’s gifted. Adiega isn’t.”

  “But—”

  “I know, son,” said Artaros, resting a hand on Bran’s shoulder. “I was young once, too. Love is a powerful force. But so is duty.”

  “You sound like Vlatucia.”

  With a sigh, the old man said, “In this, unfortunately, she is entirely correct. A god such as Darius can only be properly cared for by druids. He’ll live long after you and Briaga are dust, but he’ll be safe because your children and your children’s children will have the gifts necessary to ensure that safety.”

  Bran looked off into the black forest of sacred, primordial oaks, fighting the unmanly urge to weep.

  “It would be a slap in the face of the gods and goddesses,” Artaros said, “for you to allow your gifts to die out with you. I told your mother they were the most powerful I’d ever seen, and I meant it. Mine are much weaker. I get by with powders and potions and shrines. You, my son, are that rarest of druids, a true seer. You whisper a few words, and your magic happens. You must perpetuate that power. You must wed Briaga and beget druidic offspring with her, and that offspring must in turn wed only those who are gifted. In that way, there will always be druids at Vernem, and Darius will live forever in peace and solitude.”

  Bran didn’t trust himself to reply, lest he burst into tears.

  “Debu e dibu,” said Artaros, pointing to the words inscribed on the altar. “To the gods and goddesses are our lives dedicated. So it has always been, and so it must remain.”

  Three

  ADIEGA AWOKE to a booted foot jabbing her in her ribs.

  “Wake up, you lazy slugo. You, too, Paullia.”

  Vlatucia!

  The sisters scrambled off their pallets in the cooking hut, squinting up at their mistress in the semidarkness, for it wasn’t even dawn yet.

  “Fetch something to eat—some bread and mead will do. And some soap and washrags, a razor, a comb, some shears, and two blankets. And a bucket. Bring them to the Cella. Move.” She clapped her hands twice and left the hut.

  “The Cella?” said Paullia in a tone of disbelief. The cave was the most sacred place in the valley, even more so than the nemeton. The only vassi Adiega knew of who’d ever been permitted to enter it were those, including her brother Sedna, who’d spent the past half-month building Artaros’s strange new shrine. She knew its purpose, Bran having told her even though he and the elders had been ordered by Vlatucia to keep their counsel. They had no secrets between them, she and Bran. He shared everything with her, even his mother’s insistence that he marry that strutting, primping little goose, Briaga.

  It will never happen, Bran had assured her time and again. I’ll find a way to make you my wife. I’d die rather than spend my life without you.

  His sincerity was unquestionable, but of course his mother had her ways. One thing Adiega had learned from her years under that woman’s roof was that Vlatucia got what Vlatucia wanted.

  Always.

  “I am Lothar,” said a bearish fellow with a truncheon standing guard outside the entrance of the Cella. Two others squatted on the cave floor, lashing tall, heavy stakes into a flat panel. All three spoke the Celtice tongue with heavy Germani accents, from which she deduced that they were the same men who had abducted and burned poor Gamicu Ivageni last month on Vlatucia’s orders. “You will leave the food with me. I will let him eat when you are done with him.”

  “Done with who?” asked Paullia, her arms laden with blankets and washrags.

  Lothar chuckled in a way that put Adiega instantly on alert. Turning, he ushered them over a little natural bridge that spanned the cave stream running along the front wall of the Cella. The newly carved shrine, a stone statue wearing iron torkas and inscribed DVSIVÆSVS, stood against the back wall. “Vlatucia, she say she want you to wash him good, shave the face, and cut the hair all off, for the bugs. Put it there, with his clothings, and I will burn it.” He pointed to a heap of tattered rags and animal skins in a bronze-lined fire pit.

  “Who are you talking about?” asked Adiega.

  He pointed behind them. She turned and started, her bucket of grooming implements clattering to the floor.

  Standing calf-deep in the stream, his arms stretched high verhead with his hands tied to a hook of rock, was a very tall, very dirty, very, very naked man. He was thin, but with long, ropy muscles, as if he ate just enough to keep himself constantly on the move. His dark blond hair hung past his shoulders in a snarled mass studded with bits of leaves and twigs; his beard was nearly as long and just as filthy. There were bruises all over him, a gash on his forehead that was just starting to scab over, a large and ugly abrasion on one shoulder, and smaller ones on his knees and elbows.

  He was staring intently at Adiega and Paullia, his blue eyes pale and luminous against his grimy face. He said something in a low, hoarse voice, using words in a guttural language Adiega had never heard spoken before.

  “He speak the…I don’t know how you say,” said Lothar. “The sprâcha von Norvegen. You know. From the nord.”

  “From the north,” Adiega whispered as she crouched to pick up the items she’d dropped and put them back in the bucket. “By the gods, Paullia, this…this man is…Well, he isn’t a man at all. He’s a dusios. They captured him to put gifted babies in the bellies of the uxelli matrons before everybody leaves.”

  “A dusios? You mean one of those sex demons?” Paullia was eyeing the demon in question up and down with an expression of carnal fascination that was all too familiar to Adiega. Following the death of her husband in battle two years ago, which had put an end to eight years of misery and regular beatings, Paullia had resolved never to marry again. Instead, she cheerfully assuaged her lust with any man who took her fancy, an arrangement that suited both Paullia and the unattached males of Vernem.

  “You be good for these womens, ja?” Lothar went over to the dusios and yanked his head back by the hair. “So I don’t hurt you no more.”

  The dusios bared his teeth and snarled as he kicked out savagely, water spewing all over the Cella. The Germani landed on his back with a howl of pain. Sputtering invective in his own tongue, he leapt to his feet and slammed his truncheon into the stomach of the dusios, who kicked again, roaring, “Hrøkkva!” This time his captor managed to scramble away in time.

  Dusting himself off, Lothar told the sisters, “Vlatucia don’t want me to hurt him too bad. You tell me when you cut off hair so I can burn it.” He returned to his post in the corridor outside.

  The dusios, still a little breathless from his tussle with Lothar, was staring at them again, in a way that made Adiega shiver. He growled in frustration as he yanked at the ropes binding his wrists, but they held tight. That part of him that hung between his legs seemed to be somewhat larger than when they’d first entered the Cella, she noticed.

  “What are we going to do?” she whispered to Paullia.

  “You shave him and cut his hair,” she said, setting her blankets on the floor but keeping the washrags. “I’ll wash him.”

  “But…”

  Paullia took the dish of soft yellow soap from Adiega and approached the dusios slowly, giving him her best man-tamer smile. “I wash?” she asked, miming the rubbing of a washrag o
n the soap, and then on him.

  He stared in apparent bewilderment and suspicion at the soap as she stepped down into the stream, the bottom of her skirt floating on the surface of the water. “Hverr…?”

  “Soap,” she said, dampening the rag in the river and rubbing it on the soap. “Don’t you have this where you come from?”

  He recoiled when she reached up to wash his face. “Ekki!”

  “It won’t hurt you.” Paullia rubbed the soapy cloth on her forearm, then dipped her arm in the water to rinse it off. “See? Clean.” She sniffed her arm, smiling as if in pleasure as she inhaled. “Wouldn’t you like to be nice and clean?”

  This time, when she went to wash his face, he stood still for it, though he still looked apprehensive. He seemed to relax somewhat as she carefully dabbed the wound on his forehead; her gentleness must have put him at ease.

  “Could I have that bucket, Adiega?” Paullia filled it with water, telling him to close his eyes as she held it over his head, but of course he didn’t understand. “I don’t want your eyes to sting. Your eyes.” She pointed to his eyes, and then her own, which she closed tightly as she mimed pouring water over her head.

  He closed his eyes. She rinsed his face. “Adiega’s going to cut your hair and your beard now,” she said, making a scissor shape with her fingers and pretending to chop off her braids. “Go ahead, Adiega. I don’t think he’ll give you any trouble.”

  “Adiega,” he said, as if testing the feel of the word in his mouth.

  “Yes, that’s right.” Paullia pointed to Adiega and said her name again, and then she pointed to herself. “Paullia. Paullia.”

  “Paullia.”

  “You?” She pointed to him, waiting with an expectant expression.

  He hesitated, as if unsure just how friendly he wanted to be with members of a clan that had just captured him and tied him up in a cave. Finally, he said, “Elic.”