“They must have crept out to dig them on moonless nights,” she said. “If that is how they are dug, when we find the first row, we know the position of the rest. We could crawl on our bellies like snakes and thread our way through. We must attack at night then.”
“Yes. I’ve learned they protect two gates—the Main and the West. My guess is Julianus got impatient and cut off support and money before Wido had a chance to dig them everywhere he wanted them. I know he was not given the material and men to fortify the West Gate as he was the other three. It is there we should break in, of that I have no doubt. But what I do not understand is…” And then they were lost in speculation, without even a word of greeting. Neither thought it odd. It had always been that way.
The sun was directly above, sending a shaft of light through the smoke hole, before he looked up and truly saw her. He regarded her for a long, full moment, nodding faintly, a well-pleased look on his face.
“My little hunting cat.” He caught her hands and pulled her closer. “You have done us great honor, great honor indeed. The tales that have come of you! I tell you, I do not like to be outdone!” He smiled broadly, but his face saddened her—the sorrowing he felt was written there clearly as the word signs on Decius’ bookroll.
A kettle of herbs—a preparation to aid the knitting of bones—boiled over then, making the fire spit and hiss. She moved quickly to take the kettle from the fire before he reached for it, for she knew that moving about caused him much pain, though he would never speak of it. Then she poured it into a clay vessel for him, dropped to the ground and sat next to him, looking at the injured leg with concern.
“It is a small matter, and it quickly heals,” he said, following her gaze. But she wondered. Bones did not heal quickly at his age. He smiled. “It pleases me, Auriane, to see the god’s gift is a gift to you as well!”
She gave him a quick conspiratorial smile. “Do not priests always say the willing sacrifice is best?” The smile vanished, and she went on, her voice taut with grief—“But nothing has happened that is good that was not bought with more than we had to give.” Tears came, and she did not try to stop them as she would have with her mother.
He put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “I know. I ask it again and again of the gods—why are we tormented so? Why did they not take one of my limbs instead of Arnwulf? Take me, not my child, I would have said…but the gods did not ask. I would walk in fire myself, if I thought it would bring an hour’s solace to Athelinda. The beast strikes hardest at the vulnerable and the young. Day on day, I try not to think of how we bleed. In the end, fighting’s better than grieving; sorrow keeps the wound open. Ah, I praise the gods for your brightness! You are shining proof we’ve life in us yet!”
She looked into the fire, pushing sorrow away for his sake, her gaze fixed on a wood louse as it scurried to safety from a log that took flame. She felt sharply the agony in his words and thought suddenly: One day he will die. Yes, he will die, and the world will move on, dumb and unknowing. How can it? He is the center beam for the sky itself.
But by my hand? How could Hertha foul the air with those words?
He caught her gaze and held it. “Auriane, tell me—how did you get free?”
She felt a lurch of sickness in her stomach. Why is it I have no good fortune whatever that is not ridden with maggots?
If Baldemar knew the truth, she was certain some of the horror of it would be released. But the words would not come.
Why heighten his wrath against Wido and his son when he is wounded and cannot fight them? It would be a cruelty.
“I won Ullrik to my cause and he cut my bonds. It was night and there was carousing in the camp. It was not difficult.”
He studied her face gravely, with a trace of wonder and pity. She sensed he discerned the lie.
“And…that was it. A simple matter, to get free,” she added.
“You do not wish to tell me then,” he said gently.
She met his gaze once, then fled from it, looking hard at the fire. A storm brewed in her chest. “How foolish of me to think I could hide it,” she whispered. “I beg you, don’t ask me to tell it, let it die with me. You do not need more horrors to bear in mind. And we have reason enough already for vengeance.”
“Then raise your head up, and do not act as if you merited such a fate,” he said with gentle sternness. There followed a long pain-filled quiet. “My poor child. You do not suffer alone. What befell you befell all of us. When one part of the body is injured, what is healthy marshals strength to heal it. When vengeance is taken, the memory will not hurt.”
Still she looked away.
“Auriane. Why do you not see your own formidable innocence? You must be greatly beloved of the god, or he would not have given you the standard or accepted you as bride.” He covered her hand with his heavy one and left it there; gratefully she drank in its strength.
But still she struggled through confusion and shame. And over it all leered the vision of the violence done her mother, which was in a way the more painful memory. Odberht’s attack on her was terror-ridden, but it could in the end be contained as some sort of loathsome practical necessity. The memory of the attack on her mother could not be contained—it threatened to unravel the world.
She was aware of him watching her kindly, of the wordless love in his eye.
“Tell me, did Ramis ask you to follow her?” he asked finally.
This, too, made her uncomfortable, but in a way she did not understand. “Yes. She did.”
“I thought as much when that strange story was brought to me. You know, she will ask again. She never asks just once. I bid you…refuse while your mother lives. She fears that so much.”
“While Mother lives? You think truly one day I will be tempted?”
“Yes.”
“Never will I! I despise her as much as Mother does.”
“So you say now. But the human spirit is of the substance of clouds, always shifting shape.”
“Others may change, I will not! You need trouble yourself over that no more. I want vengeance, not gray robes, trance sittings and silence.”
They dropped into companionable silence. Then she ventured, while closely watching his face: “The Roman thrall that came with me knows many marvelous things—the arts of constructing Roman javelins and swords, and all their machines of war…” She hesitated, then eagerly leapt in. “I have been thinking, if he were to teach us some of what he knows….”
Baldemar said nothing for long moments. She knew at once he was much opposed to the idea, and this startled and saddened her.
“He is useful in understanding the enemy,” Baldemar replied, choosing words cautiously, for he disliked dampening her enthusiasm. “But I will not use him in any other way, nor will I attempt to change our rituals of war. You must understand something—some ways are not meant to be altered. A tree grows always with roots in the ground. In this matter you uproot trees. To battle other than as we have is to give insult to our ancestors. We are fighting to preserve our ways. Is the best way to do this by abandoning our ways?”
“But I am not always certain our ways are best. I have heard it said, for one, the swine’s head formation was learned from the Romans. And now we use it always. Why is that not unholy?”
“Like all good hunting animals you do not give up! The swine’s head was accepted slowly, over several generations, and was blessed by the Holy Ones. The better part of our people hold we received it from Wodan. There’s much difference between that and supplying everyone in one journey of the moon with foreign weapons. It is not change I stand against, but how swiftly you wish to bring it about. No one knows our people better than I. New ways must be presented as old, or you get nowhere with them.”
“How then have the Romans captured through arms almost the whole of our Middle-world—”
“Through treachery and trickery. Is that truly what you want? I would choose to fall in battle before I would win that way. Watch and wait. Perhaps year
s will bring you to sharing my mind.”
She concealed her bitter disappointment.
He met her eyes firmly. “We must send the Roman thrall back. His presence here might anger the men.”
She nodded. But she knew with sudden certainty she would not obey.
What dark spirit possesses me? Father is right, but I do not care. Has Decius worked some witchery on me? Hide him. I’ll conceal Decius here, and have him teach me what he knows in secret.
When she took leave of Baldemar, she went to the casting ground.
Until dusk came, she practiced spear-casting among the other newly made warriors while Sigwulf looked on with a sour, critical eye; their target was a swinging grain sack suspended from a bough. The native spear was light and familiar in her hand. It was the universal weapon of the tribal army because it was effective both in the forest and on the plain, for it could either be hurled or used as a lance. The majority of the warriors would never own a longsword and Baldemar never mentioned equipping her with one; she knew he would oppose her taking up a weapon that forced her to get so close to the enemy. She was relieved that the other newly made warriors were easy with her and showed little deference for her rank.
As evening came, Auriane walked alone to the old well that lay outside the camp, by the great north-south trackway. She shed sadness into its depths, breathing the fungal smells, listening to the rustlings of ancestresses, letting the earthy vapors hold her. The solace that came was strangely intoxicating; that luminous state in which she pried the stone from the hoof of the mare settled on her briefly, then flitted off. She felt the presence of Ramis so intimately close she shivered and looked restlessly about.
Then she saw that a woman approached on the pathway from the north. She felt a start of unease. It was odd for anyone, woman or man, to be traveling alone and on foot in this country. And this twilight apparition seemed made of the stuff of ground mist. Auriane tensed to run, frightened of ghosts. Finally she realized the traveler’s spectral appearance was but the effect of the wind pulling at the fine-spun cloth of her gray cloak. She judged the woman was an apprentice, from what grove she could not tell.
The woman approached boldly, and Auriane suspected this stranger had been camped nearby, awaiting a time when she came to the well. She was big-boned and strong; slung over her back was a sack of provisions that would have been a burden to any man. Her face, however, was soft and mild; her great round eyes seemed hungry for sight. The woman’s silver ornaments flashed in the last of the light. A falcon claw hung from a thong about her neck revealed her as an apprentice of Ramis.
“I greet you in the name of the High One,” she said, slightly inclining her head. Her voice was gentle and direct. “I am Thora. Grace and luck to you.”
“What do you wish of me?”
“I am sent to you with a gift from Ramis. She fears for you greatly. She cannot give you warriors or weapons of iron, nor will she speak of the methods of war. But she can give you the favor of the moon. Watch and wait while it completes one cycle. When next it’s one day from greatest fullness, at the still time when night is nearly done, the moon will be swallowed by a wolf.”
Auriane stood still, mildly stunned, then managed to reply, “The gift is great. Please bear to her my gratitude.”
Thora made an avertive sign while reciting words of blessing, then turned round and went north once more, leaving Auriane’s mind in a fever.
More than ever she sensed how gravely all was threatened. Why would Ramis tell her of a fearsome prodigy in the sky? She never involved herself in the outcome of battles; that she did so this time was extraordinary.
She must think all that is holy faces extinction—the sacred groves, her centers for apprentices, the holy wells, the fields of grain, the children of the villages.
But why could Ramis not call the wolf sooner? Surely they would be lost if they waited through two cycles of the moon.
On the next day Auriane sent Decius out into the forest to gather kindling for cookfires. Then she crept off herself and met him in the beech grove behind the well; together they searched and found a place to conceal him that was near enough to the camp, but arduous to reach. Here they built him a shelter beneath an outcropping of rock. It could only be reached by an exhausting climb up a steep grade through thickets of scrub pine. She would gain in endurance from this journey when she stole off daily for his teaching.
Decius fashioned two crude wooden swords out of pinewood, making them roughly twice the weight of a legionary sword so when she wielded a real weapon it would feel weightless. She managed to obtain from the camp two round shields of lindenwood. Slipping off from the camp was not difficult; hunting expeditions went out every day, and no one wondered when she was diverted off on her own. Her greater fear was that she and Decius would be seen. She had lied to her father. The thought of the disappointment in his face should he learn it was past bearing. And if Geisar learned somehow that she spent much time alone with a man who was an enemy and a thrall, she scarcely dared guess what might happen. Geisar once condemned a village maid of lying with a foreigner. He had ordered her hair shaved off, then had her whipped naked through her village, and finally drowned beneath hurdles in Wolf’s Head Lake.
Auriane was impatient with those early lessons; why, she asked him, must they take so long with such tedious things as proper grip, the angle of the wrist, the calculation of striking distance? Barbarians, Decius complained in return. Like all of them, you want no hard work, no planning—just the headlong rush into battle.
Every day before they began, he had her run an ever-increasing distance with a pack stuffed with stones and straw strapped onto her back. In the early days he spoke the lessons, demonstrating a maneuver, then requiring her to copy him. He often emphasized the inferiority of the native sword—unlike a legionary short sword, it could not be used as a stabbing weapon, which rendered it near useless in close quarters. He taught her fundamental anatomy. The lung is here, he warned again and again. Always keep your arm low, to prevent a strike to the ribcage, which causes the “sucking wound” and eventually, lung collapse. The abdomen is best for a kill, he insisted repeatedly; do not bother with the region of the thorax—its bony protection is a nuisance. He warned her to shun the long, slashing strokes favored by her tribesmen—such barbarian foolhardiness, he insisted, exposes the whole side of the body to attack. Then he proceeded to show her the basic cuts used by legionary soldiers, and how to execute them with economy and safety; in the beginning she practiced against a stout post.
In those early days it surprised her that Decius did not simply run off in the night, for the border was temptingly close. He meant to be true to his word, it seemed. She dared think hopefully it might be for devotion to her. But words he spoke one day suggested there might be another reason.
On this morning they sparred together for the first time, fighting a mock battle using the elementary advance and retreat he had just demonstrated to her. As usual, she pushed herself to near exhaustion before she would agree to rest. Her wrist and arm ached fiercely. When she finally sank to the ground, he sat beside her, took out a flask of watered wine and asked suddenly, “There is a thing that troubles me, my pet. What happens to the fortunes of this miserable thrall if your people do not win?”
She waited until her breath slowed, her cheeks flushed rose from exertion. “I will not speak of our defeat in battle—it brings ill luck.”
“All right then, I’ll speak of it. Wido’s wild men will seize me in one of your people’s blood orgies and nail me to a tree as a gift to his god. Or perhaps I’ll be more fortunate, and my own people will pick me up—and torture me to death for collaborating with the enemy.”
“Or perhaps a certain maid will pour a horn of mead over your head for using on purpose words she does not know!”
He explained the meaning of “collaborating” and she gave an inward sigh. He did not stay for her sake, but because he feared his people counted him a traitor.
; The days flowed quickly, blending to one. Painfully, slowly, she began to learn the nuances of turning a retreat into an attack, of tricking an enemy into exposing himself to her blade. All went well but for his habit of belittling her efforts, which grew worse as they became more accustomed to each other.
“Now pay close attention while I show you the right diagonal cut,” Decius began one day. “I pray all the gods the ghost of my father isn’t watching. For the fifteenth time, or is it the sixteenth?—you are not standing right.” He took hold of her shoulders and forcefully moved her. “There. Now do as I do. What I will not endure for freedom!”
She imitated his downward cut a little unsteadily at first, then after several repetitions, with smooth sureness.
“A bit better, but not much. Now stand, again, in the balanced position.” She obeyed.
Not much better? She could not argue it—she had no one with whom to compare herself.
“That’s passable, but just. That expression on your face is not necessary, though. Frighten the enemy with your skill, instead.”
“Oh, let me be!”
But she knew, too, there was much wisdom in his teaching.
“Now ready yourself,” he began on another day. “I am the enemy, I am gaining ground. Now when I think I have mastered you, I want you to strike. Remember, choose the moment when I lift my foot so you’ll catch me off balance—then lunge forward into my step.”
Without warning he leaped at her and made a powerful downward cut, almost knocking her wooden sword from her hand. She recovered and met him with strokes that were broad and clumsy but also, he thought, surprisingly brisk and aggressive.
“Press on! Advance!” he ordered.
She came at him steadily, doing exuberant imitations of the two basic cuts he taught her; he gave ground. Then he snapped forward, easily evading her defense, and delivered a blow to her stomach with the point of his wooden weapon.
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