Speak to them. Witgern should have said—Lie to them. But I cannot. Witgern will not like it, but the hard truth will have to do.
She put her palms on the crude wood image of Fria she had planted in the earth in the center of her tent. “Great, bright protector of us all,” she prayed, “give me the strength to hold us together…so we can die together.”
Then she strode into the center of the restlessly milling camp, propelled by her fury—at the Romans, not the deserters, whom she pitied. She saw that Sigwulf, Coniaric and Thrusnelda stood across the camp gate as though to bar it. Sigwulf bullied those who tried to pass; his words, like wildly thrown blows, cut through the din. Coniaric, smiling and showing neat teeth, used his usual honeyed persuasion—though today, she saw, that mask of bland charm was askew and a hostile underside was revealed. Thrusnelda, her face tear-swollen as she wrung her hands at them, was a regal mother turned into a beggar.
Auriane mounted an overturned water trough. Warriors stood in groups, revealing ultimate loyalties—some crowded round kin, others preferred the company of their warrior companions. The armed Holy Ones stayed in a flock. Most looked stunned and lost as prisoners awaiting execution. Some, with upturned faces, uttered endless prayers to an iron sky. Wan-faced mothers held tightly to children whose cries could not be stilled. At the camp’s center a group of the warriors’ wives chanted round a need-fire; they had blackened their faces, loosened their hair and torn off all their jewelry, tossing it into the fire in hopes that this small sacrifice would soften Wodan’s wrath. The sight of them disconcerted Auriane; they seemed so pitifully pale and bare they looked like ghosts. Surely, she thought, our humanness is more than the treasure about our necks?
Gradually they saw Auriane in their midst and turned toward her with curiosity. They found it unsettling to see such wrath in eyes normally so gentle. A winter wind invaded the camp and tore through the sheds and tents, whipping cloaks like pennants, setting trees in ecstatic motion. The fine, sharp fury in Auriane’s eyes was reassuring; surely, many thought, that will alone could halt a legion. Gradually they gathered about her as they might around a bonfire. Behind her an army of hostile winter clouds massed in the northern sky, promising a long siege of darkness.
“My friends!” she cried out, bringing a halt to all talk. “I hear that four thousand have laid down their arms and fled.”
Witgern grinned. He thought: No matter how many evil spirits creep into camp, that voice banishes them. How the gods must love her.
“Four thousand forgot who they were and abandoned our sacred ground. The Romans have in abundance all the rich things of the earth. Because we have no riches they’ll have our souls instead…. Shall we so easily yield them up?” She paused, waiting to feel their minds press still closer.
“You must not flee! It may seem we’ve a choice of one sort of death or another—but truly, one is death in fact, and the other is life. This is a fearsome thing, but you have the hearts of mountain cats—you who of all the free tribes refuse to be herded into the ungiving land of the north, you who live proudly on this last scrap of land the Romans have not thieved. If we die together, we shall not die, for the gods will know us and love us. If we die together, we multiply a hundredfold the strength of our fate and luck.”
Witgern’s grin abruptly faded. He felt a winter cold on the back of his neck. What in the name of the gods is she telling them? Die together? She is telling them she too has given up?
And for the first time he knew fully the urgency of their situation. For one frantic moment he struggled against a nearly overwhelming desire to flee to the hills.
“This is our land. The ashes and bones of a hundred generations of ancestors lie in the belly of this earth. We are the Ash; the ancestors are the deep roots, fixing us in this place. They need us to stay together if their spirits are to one day have new life. Do you want to be cast into a pit in some barren soil ridden with foreign gods? If you run off into the hills it means naked death, unholy death, stripped of kinsmen’s love and comfort. Those who flee die alone, motherless and in darkness.
“We face not warriors but arrogant bandits who have gotten off unpunished after stealing half the world. These swaggering thieves think we raise children to provide thralls for their army. Your goodness and courage shames them, you with the blood of mountain cats mingled with mother’s and father’s blood. Do they fight in sunlight, striking at the front like a worthy foe? No. They sneak up behind us and steal our food!”
Spirited shouts of outrage were thrown up to the sky.
Witgern thought grimly, only Auriane could restore their faith while telling them they were doomed.
“How shall we answer this? I say, by meeting shamefulness with grace. They have stolen your food, but they cannot steal your love of the gods. I know I will never flee. If it comes to be necessary, I will stay to the last and face them alone.”
“No!” came a chorus of shouts, some sheepish, some passionate. “We are with you!”
“Who, then, marches on with me under the mantle of bright Fria?”
They raised a lusty roar, banging tin pots against staves, frightening the horses and dogs. But, Witgern noted, it is a thinner roar than the ones they gave at the war’s beginning.
She has done it, he thought. But how long can she bind them, once the starving begins?
The main body of the Chattian army was quickly reduced to thirty thousand, though their numbers could not truly be counted for the Warriors’ Council lost contact with the scattered bands led by lesser chieftains; the Council did not know if they had taken refuge in the gorges or lay slaughtered somewhere. The Roman forces advancing along the Taunus were once again overtaking them—they could not remain in this place. Marching north was impossible—though Odberht was gone, whether dead or taken alive, he had in effect broken down the gate, and now the whole of the north country was overrun with bands of hostile Cheruscans. Runners reported that every fort that could be securely held had been disabled by the legions.
And so the Warriors’ Council agreed there was nowhere to go but the fort of final refuge, Five Wells. The spies who reported to Hwala assured them that the Romans had no maps of this territory with its lonely hills of linden, beech and birch. Within a moon-time the Chattian host departed, eluding the Roman cavalry by constantly reversing direction under cover of darkness. For greater mobility they split once more into three divisions.
Overnight the hills whitened with snow, a soft, thin blanket broken by delicate black spears of grasses. To Auriane the winter hills did not look the same now that she knew the stores were gone: The cold silver-blue slopes with their complexity of ultramarine shadows were no longer a sight of haunting, solemn beauty; now they were chill and forbidding. The black lacework of branches edged in ice and fired by the sun was an exquisite web of death, which would trap and hold them. Unquiet ghosts rustled brittle branches. None here can stay alive, the skeletal arms of birches and oaks proclaimed.
On the midwinter eve called by the tribes the Night of the Mothers and by the Romans the ninth day after the Ides of December, they came to their destination, the fort called Five Wells. For Auriane the one joy in this was her reunion with Athelinda. They embraced for long moments, Auriane drinking in the scent of sweet woodruff that always lingered in Athelinda’s hair. When Mudrin and Fredemund came forward, she half expected to see Decius approach and felt a stabbing ache like a birth-pang.
“Mother,” she whispered in Athelinda’s hair, “you do not know what this means. You should be saddened to see me. We never intended to be driven back this far. You now are on the front line of battle.”
“It shall be as it shall be. None can harm me more. If they murder me, they send me to Baldemar.”
The Chattian host celebrated this holiest of nights ringed around a Mother-Fire, chanting prayers to the primal ancestresses from across the gulf of ages who hovered near in the dark. All felt wary lest these hoary spirits come too close—the Mother’s Night held terrors as
well as comfort. The wombs of the ancient mothers gave strength and life, but they were also graves, and it was said that if you glimpsed their hair, the flash of their eyes, or their girdles as they whirled about in the black night, within a day you would die. So all carefully kept their eyes on the fire.
On the following dawn Auriane took stock of the place. Five Wells was built by a Gaulish tribe and the walls were exceedingly well made, using crossed timbers solidly nailed in an open-box structure that was filled with rubble and soil. The whole was fronted by a thick stone wall, through which the ends of the cross-timbers were visible. It was a sort of wall known to give the Romans much trouble. Unless they were betrayed, they might evade discovery altogether. The fort had a good supply of fuel, and some provisions were stored here—there were bins of millet and rye, as well as barrels of apples, hazelnuts, peas and wild cherries—but she judged this would not last much beyond three cycles of the moon. They would have to supplement their stores by hunting. Hopefully the Roman plague would recede in spring, and they could find their way home and begin rebuilding their villages.
And I will return to you, Avenahar. It hardly seems possible that in springtime you will be older than a year, in the time of swift-growing intelligence and first spoken words.
But it is well I did not bring you to this sad place. The separation is the most barbarous of tortures, but it must be, so that you can live.
CHAPTER XXVII
“I WANT THESE STINKING BEASTS TO know we’ve won,” Domitian announced to Marcus Julianus one night in the deep of winter as they dined alone. “I mean to flush the last of them out of their holes. Hole, I should say. They’ve all scurried off to one place—an old Gaulish fort at the extreme northeast end of the range—we’ll get it in the spring, at first thaw.”
“You know that for certain.”
The start of concern Domitian saw in Julianus’ face the Emperor misread as skepticism about his conclusions on the matter. “Don’t pick at me with your doubts,” came the testy reply. “Six—no, it was seven—of this fresh crop of deserters described the same redoubt while being tortured in separate cells.”
Julianus nodded thoughtfully, feigning reluctant agreement. A faint noxious stench emanated from the preparation Domitian used to preserve his thinning hair: It consisted of oil of myrtle, the ashes of a burnt hare, and not enough nard to overcome the reek of its principal ingredient, the urine of a young ass. Julianus found knowing the Emperor set on a course of systematic murder altered the way Domitian appeared to him: The discerning light in Domitian’s eye seemed now to have a manic edge. The increasing fleshiness of his face, which might have seemed part of the normal progress to middle age, instead seemed a sickly symptom, soft and repulsive as the swellings or gatherings from illness.
“And such strapping specimens of barbarian manhood these deserters are!” Domitian went on merrily. “I’ve ordered the questioners not to break any bones—they’ll make fine gladiators. I’m having them sent home at once to be trained. But best of all I’ve found a way to take that fort without breaking in. This Aurinia has a daughter, a ‘child of the god’ as they delicately refer to the babe, which means they don’t—or don’t want to—know who the father is. We’ve had it described fairly well where the brat can be found. The unfortunate part is that the babe is in the hands of that northern Sybil called Ramis who so terrifies the natives we cannot find any willing to brave her lair. The Batavian auxiliaries refused me flatly—they say she turns men into hedgehogs. I’m assembling a detachment of our own men, handpicked, who claim they’ve no belief in sorcery and witchcraft…. Not an easy thing, since they know I myself have consulted such sorceresses on certain matters!”
Julianus felt a throb of alarm as he nodded with approval. “All the great strategists from Frontinus back to Xenophon would give you a nod,” he replied with just enough coolness to leave a measure of doubt as to whether sarcasm was intended.
She has a child, Julianus thought with alarm. Why did my informants not tell me? Curses on Nemesis, what to do now? Perhaps a single, unarmed native emissary bearing a warning might get through to Ramis’ sanctuary…. There is that frightful old woman of the canabae called Hwala who peddles aphrodisiacs, in debt to me since I bought the silence of that smithy ready to report her as a spy…I could enlist her to find someone fit for the task.
“High praise from one so miserly with it! I’m surprised your tongue didn’t shrivel.” Domitian returned to the platter of capons stuffed with truffles and lustily finished it off, not noticing Julianus scarcely touched his own portion. Then he turned to Julianus, suddenly intent, not bothering to wipe his glistening lips.
“My friend, you know the…the problem I spoke of once, with my concubines, the one I warned you if you spoke of it to anyone I would personally see your tongue cut out?”
He had to think for a moment. Then he remembered—that inability to “do his duty,” as Domitian had put it, with his women. Domitian’s physicians disagreed over the cause. Some said it was the wretched climate and the slow progress of the war; others laid it at the door of the concubines themselves, assuring Domitian their constant squabbling would leave the lustiest satyr of the wood unable to perform. Julianus realized then the amulet about Domitian’s neck was one of Hwala’s most popular ones for potency—the dried right testicle of a goat dipped seven times in oil.
“Well, I think I have found my tonic,” Domitian went on happily. “What I need is a simple, uncomplicated female, and I know where to find one. She’s loping free up in those hills, a little hungrier than before, but as you said a while back, somewhat chastened. This is one barbarian I mean to subjugate personally. She must be firm as a youth, war-trained as she is. What is it, my man? You look as if I stabbed at a quail’s egg with a carving knife before the eyes of the Parthian ambassador. You truly are a master of the look of delicate distaste.”
Julianus had never fought so hard to maintain an air of bored neutrality. “I assume you jest about this maid.”
“I know you said she was not particularly comely…but beauty I can command whenever I wish. What I want is a woman not schooled in feminine wiles—”
“I refer not to her charms or lack of them,” he said evenly, a curtain of darkness falling in his mind to shut out the sight; it was as though a tide of sewage rose higher and higher, threatening to choke him. “But to the fact that she hardly deserves you. Remember what she is. And who you are. Would you reward her infamy by elevating her to your divine bed?”
“Ah, late in life you’ve conceived a fussy concern over my loss of dignity.”
“The common soldier will think she bewitched you. They’ll count you a fool.” The taste of defeat was acrid in his mouth.
“Well then, no one shall know about her, Marcus, old friend—except you.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
WINTER WORE ON IN THE CHATTIAN camp, and the hunters could not keep apace. As Domitian intended, starvation did his fighting for him now. Hunting parties were sent out every day into the snows, seeking the gray-brown roe deer that foraged in morning or herds of elks with their young; once they caught an aurochs calf abandoned by the herd. They sought smaller creatures as well—the far-leaping red squirrels active just after dawn, the occasional hazel grouse, the mallard ducks in the frozen marshes, or the common brown hares with black-tipped ears that everywhere left their fast signatures across the snow. In spite of the hunters’ small successes, by the third moon after Yule the population of Five Wells dared not eat more than once every other day. Wolves were heard to creep close at night. Daily they lost warriors who fled from fear of starvation or of the coming final battle.
Auriane while hunting was glad of the snow—it blanketed the bodies of slaughtered refugees scattered throughout the forest, leaving all innocently white. Never had she been made so conscious of the struggle of all creatures to survive. Flocks of starlings pecked frantically at the snow, desperate for food. The frozen carcasses of deer lay everywhere, the delicate sick
le-curve of their white ribs visible where their flesh had been torn open by wolves.
Like the animals, now we too can be massacred by winter.
In the camp there was little talk or spontaneous movement; many passed whole days playing lethargic games of dice, using as stakes their rations of dried aurochs flesh. Some fell into a kind of human hibernation, crouching silently in their hide tents; others became wild and maddened. Sigwulf was like a nervous stallion confined too long in a stall. He strode about seeking fights, and eventually was avoided by all after he killed a man who accused him in jest of planning to “go over the wall.” Coniaric initiated contests to see who could bring in the most game, which he pursued with frenzied zeal and regularly won. Athelinda came forth from the isolation she had imposed on herself since the death of Baldemar and was like a mother with a thousand children, formidably patient as she sat all day with those stricken with illness, telling tales and wrapping wounds. Witgern’s placid wife, Thurid, cried constantly and her sixth child was born dead. Witgern himself divided his time between long stretches of sentry duty—he volunteered for more than was necessary to keep away from Fastila, who ever more piteously and aggressively showed her love for him—and concealing himself within his tent, where he composed mournful, meandering love songs to the tinny notes of his battered lyre. The songs were for Auriane, but he scarcely let himself know it.
Auriane was often alone on the palisade, a single sentinel ardently gazing southwest—as if by constant watching, she could keep the enemy at bay. As Athelinda comforted the aged and ill, Auriane gave strength to the warriors. The times enhanced the tales of her, and more than one man imagined as she restlessly paced the palisade on moon-washed nights that this great, somber spirit was kindred to the swift-flying Choosers of the Slain, the ghostly battle-maids of songs who were half warrior, half swan. She lit the way to vengeance. As Athelinda preserved life, Auriane promised death would have meaning. All felt that if there was purpose here, it was hers. Without her, when the Romans came the fort would become simply a slaughtering ground; with her, it was transformed into a temple of sacrifice.
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