by Manda Scott
“It might.”
Neither of them believed it.
Bán reached into his tunic and pulled out the small calf’s-hide bag that Airmid had given him after the meal. “We could play knucklebones,” he offered, “if you know how to play?”
“Of course. Everyone knows that.”
The lad was nimble-fingered and had a quick mind. Bán was losing the second game when he heard footsteps on the path. The tread was less measured than the Sun Hound’s but had a similar cadence. He looked up, blinking the wet from his eyes. His gaze passed over a tunic dyed a deep purple that appeared to be running slightly in the rain and a cloak of brilliant Trinovantian yellow. The armbands were gold, inlaid with coral but not overly gaudy. The hair hanging in sodden ropes at the shoulders was red, darkened to the colour of dead oak by the rain. With a tightening foreboding, Bán craned his neck beyond the belly of his horse. The man crouched down, bringing his head level so that Bán looked into eyes the colour of snakeskin and a smile that haunted his dreams. It was Amminios and he was laughing.
“I thought I might find you here.” He jerked his head back in the direction of the forge. “They’ll be in there arguing for ever. It’s my father’s way of ensuring they’re not overheard. You don’t have to stay out in the rain and wait for them.” He was wetter than they were and he had walked from the great-house to find them. His tone was conciliatory, almost conspiratorial, as if they were old friends, and Cunobelin the only enemy. Bán hooked his elbows round his knees and edged back towards the mare’s head, where he could make a quick grab for the reins.
“I have to stay here,” he said.
“Then you should let the slave take your mare into the horse barn. She is too good a horse to let her go stiff standing out in the rain, and my brother’s colt, also.”
Bán stared. He hoped, sincerely, that his ears had deceived him. He was not certain it was so.
Amminios grinned, his eyes wide with a deliberate, mocking frankness. “Iccius is a slave. Of course he is. Did you think we sold them all before you came? Or that we have them hidden in huts awaiting your departure? Grow up, child. This is not the horse lands. My father will only go so far to avoid offending Eceni sensibilities, and freeing the slaves is a step beyond his limits. The child is Belgic. His father sold him when he was six years old. I brought him from Gaul to decorate my hearth and table and I would say he fulfils his purpose amply. Today, however, he is a horseboy and he is going to take my father’s horse to the barns.”
The man had spoken in fluent, flowing Gaulish. Beside him, Bán felt Iccius flinch. The knucklebones had dropped from his hand. His skin turned the colour the smith’s had been: a pale grey, tinged with an unhealthy yellow. In a voice quite different from that with which he had been speaking earlier, he said, “My lord, I have to await the great lord—”
“No, you don’t,” said Amminios pleasantly. “You’re mine. If I order you to take my father’s horse to the barns and rub it down before it stiffens and tears a muscle, then you will do so. If our guest has any sense, he will let you take his horses with you.”
The boy was caught, miserably, between two conflicting orders. The difference was that Amminios was present and could enforce his. The battle lasted only a moment. Iccius ducked his head and took the reins of his charges.
Amminios rose, extending his hand. Rainwater coursed unheeded over his bare head, blotching the fine wool of his cloak. “Bán? We are older than we once were. We are both younger brothers who will have to make our own way in the world while our elders lead the warriors of our people to battle. We should be allies, not enemies. This is not an attempt to wrest your mare from you. The guest-laws forbid it and I would be a fool even to try. I am concerned for your horses and for you. At the very least, you should stand out from under the oak tree. The fact that it has seen lightning strike before does not necessarily mean that it will not do so again.”
It was a day in which the gods spoke often. The thunder sounded again, closer, and a flash lit the sky. Bán might have stayed for himself but he was not going to risk the life of his mare and Caradoc’s colt. He ducked out from under their feet and reached for the reins.
“I’ll bring them,” he said. “Iccius has enough to contend with leading my sister’s battle mare and your father’s horse.”
“As you wish. In that case, perhaps we should run? The weather will not improve with our standing here and we are all of us wet enough already.”
They ran back along the path to the horse barns. Iccius ducked into a neighbouring house and brought out warmed mash and good hay. He fetched wads of rolled straw and pads of sheepskin and together they swabbed the rain from the horses’ hides. Amminios worked on the dun colt and it took to his handling as well as it had to Caradoc’s. Breaca’s grey mare would not have him near her but there were many, even amongst the Eceni, whom she treated the same; it was not necessarily a reflection of integrity or worth. Iccius was better. The mare snuffed him suspiciously but allowed him to dry her down. The saddles were stacked on harness stands at the end of the barn and another boy—another slave—of Iccius’s age was called out to dry and grease them. The air filled with the warm smells of boiled oats and neat’s-foot oil and steaming horses. But for the presence of slaves, it could have been any Eceni horse barn in the aftermath of a storm.
Amminios stood to the side, his hands on his hips and his sodden cloak thrown back over his shoulders. He turned to Bán.
“Happy now?”
“The horses are better, yes. Thank you.”
Iccius seemed better, too. His colour had improved and the shy smile was back, although there had been a warning in his eyes, and a plea, and Bán had not yet made sense of either. Until he had, it was best not to talk of it. He took a comb and began to tease out the mare’s tail, stripping out the mud and grit of the journey. Amminios laid a restraining hand on his arm.
“Leave that. It will wait. You are as wet as the horses. We should find you dry clothes and something warm to drink and a place to sit out of the rain until the others come back.”
“Where are they?”
“Your family, I believe, are being entertained by our craftsmen. The mariners have gone to see the new ship. Segoventos would have ruptured a blood vessel if he was made to wait any longer so Togodubnos took them all down to the anchorage on barges. They will have met the rain so their return may be delayed until the worst of it has passed. We will gather again in the great-house when they are back. In the meantime, would you like to see the whelp again? I understand she is to be a brood bitch to your war hound. Is that not so?”
“If she grows into her promise, yes.”
“Then you should spend time with her. Come, it’s not far.”
It was the stuff of fevered dreams and nightmares. Bán found himself drawn steadily away from the horse barns to the small harness hut near the great-house where the bitch lay with her whelps. The dark-haired woman had gone, for which he was grateful, but otherwise the place was as he had left it.
Amminios, the man who bought and ordered slaves, lit the torches himself and kindled a small fire in the corner, well away from the pups and the straw. He took Bán’s cloak and hung it up on a wall hook and put his own beside it. He left for a moment and returned with two dry tunics and a jar of hot honeyed ale flavoured with wormwood and stinging nettle, and some oatcakes. None of these was pressed on his guest. Of his own accord, Bán stripped off his sodden tunic and slipped on the dry one. The food was left at the side where it could be reached by either party. Amminios sat in the straw by the bitch, who knew him as well as she knew the dark-haired woman, and lifted one of the dog whelps to eye height. “Odras has said I can have the pick of the dog pups from the litter. I had rather thought this one would make a good war hound. What do you think?”
It was the biggest of the dog whelps and a good iron grey. Bán lifted up one of its smaller, paler litter mates and passed it over. “This one will be better. That one picks fights with anyth
ing that crosses him but he gives up too easily. This one only fights when the others push him but he doesn’t stop until he has won.”
“Let me see.”
They placed the two whelps in the straw. As Bán had said, the larger picked the fight with the smaller and lost. In the short time of watching, the pattern was repeated twice over.
“You’re right,” said Amminios, thoughtfully. “I had only seen that he fought well with the others. I had not noticed that the other waits and then wins. Was your war hound like that?”
“He was born alone,” said Bán. “He grew up with me as his brother. We don’t fight.”
“Of course not. Brother should not fight against brother. The gods speak against it.” Amminios smiled as he had done all along, warmly and with an unnerving intelligence. He clasped his hands and tapped the extended forefinger to his lips, thoughtfully. “You are not a warrior yet. It is right that you do not fight, but do you play?”
“With Hail?”
“No, with other men.” A square board stood in the shadows beyond the fire. Leaning over, Amminios lifted it and the leather bag beside it. He laid both in the flat earth by the straw. The board was finely made, with a chequered pattern of pale and dark wood and bronze bindings at the corners. The playing pieces were red and yellow tablets, like small, flattened pebbles, smooth to the touch and uniformly made. Amminios tipped the bag and they spilled out, mutely clashing, onto the board. “The Gauls and the Romans call the game Merchants and Bandits,” he said. “My father’s people call it the Warrior’s Dance. I prefer to think of it that way. Have you ever played?”
“A little. Gunovic the iron trader brought a set with him these last two years. He taught me the essence of it—enough to see that it takes greater skill than I have got.”
“A pity.” Amminios scooped the counters into his palm and slipped them back into the bag. The board folded in half to protect the smooth inner surface. He laid them both against the wall. “In that case, we will have to content ourselves with watching the whelps test each other’s weak points until the seamen return.”
He reached for the ale jug and drank. It was a breathtaking breach of protocol, not to offer it first to the guest. Bán watched, speechless, as the man finished and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You don’t trust me,” said Amminios. “You would have thought it poisoned and turned me down, which would have been difficult for us both. I drink, therefore it is safe, I swear it. Will you share it with me?”
He held the jug out, one-handed. The smell of it was dizzyingly good, the rich, fiery, bittersweet memory of winters at home and kin-deeds told by the fire. Bán took it and drank; it would have been a gross discourtesy not to. It was stronger than the ale given out at the meal and more recently heated. The wormwood sang through his head and lit the fires in his guts. It was a pleasant feeling, but not a safe one. The elder grandmother—the old one—had used wormwood when she needed urgently to speak with the gods. It was not advisable to drink to excess when one needed to settle the affairs of men. Bán closed his eyes and let the heat spin out to the ends of his fingers and toes. He remembered Iccius and the second game of knucklebones. The lad was good and would have won had Amminios not interrupted them. He remembered the way the boy’s voice had changed when confronted.
Opening his eyes, he reached for the gaming board and bag of counters. “I would like to play with you,” he said. “It does not take so much effort that we cannot watch the whelps at the same time.”
It was a simple game on the surface; a child could have learned it. Twelve counters of each colour were placed in a row along either edge of the board. The thirteenth was smaller and more densely coloured and Bán was not familiar with its use. Amminios, who played yellow, held his up between finger and thumb. “This is the dreamer piece. It can move three squares at a time, jumping sideways at will, but if it is taken, the game is forfeit. Have you played with this?”
“No. Gunovic played only with the twelve. They can move one square or jump over another to move into a space. A piece is lost if the enemy warrior jumps over it. The winner is the one who clears the board of his enemy’s pieces.”
“Then we will play that way. If you win a few, we may bring in the dreamers. As in life, they make the dance more interesting.”
The dreamer pieces were removed and placed carefully at the side. The remaining counters were lined up along the edges of the board. Bán, playing red, took first move. It was nearly a year since he had last seen a board and he moved slowly, as one waking after a long sleep, feeling his way into the strike and clash of the dance. He played the first game unimaginatively and lost. His first six counters were swept from play in a single, skipping race. The remainder were cornered and taken in pairs or singles. It was a swift, neat execution, achieved with no sense of hostility. At the end of it, Amminios scooped his own counters into his palm. He had lost three. “Again?” he asked.
“If you don’t mind playing against a novice.”
“Not at all. You played well. You were learning to look ahead by the end. You will improve quickly with practise.”
The second game passed less swiftly but the result was the same, and the third. The fourth took longer. Towards the end of it, both were reduced to three pieces. The space on the board made it more difficult to trap an opponent into making a mistake. The brood bitch stood and stretched, yawning, and squeezed out through the door-flap to relieve herself. The players abandoned the game to deal with the sudden flurry of squalling whelps. On her return, soaked to the skin, they agreed on a draw.
That was the turning point. Bán won the fifth game. The joy of it surged through him, fiercely, like throwing a spear and hitting the sweet spot of the mark at its centre. Amminios, smiling, left him and returned with a fresh jug of ale. “This is not as strong as the other,” he said, “but it is hot.” He placed it on the ground between them. “Shall we play again?”
Bán won the next two games in a haze of elation and ale. They introduced the dreamers in the game after that and he lost. The new pieces had greater flexibility than the warriors and, as Amminios had said, they made the dance more exciting. It took Bán three games and another draw to become easy with their use. Soon, Amminios offered a second variation where a warrior reaching an opponent’s corner could, for one move, become a dreamer. The games moved faster and the play became more subtle.
On the twelfth game, with the fire built up and a whelp lying asleep on his lap, Amminios said, “Winning is good, but we should play for something more than this. I will lay my armband on the next game. Will you wager against it?”
They played Bán’s bronze armband against Amminios’s gold and Bán lost. He lost his dagger and his belt in quick succession and then won them back; his sword changed hands three times in as many games; Amminios placed his horse—a sharp, fine-blooded bay—and lost it. The game in which he won it back was played faster than any before it and left them both sweat-soaked and shaking.
They played on. Time stretched and lost its meaning. The world shrank to the swooning firelight and the shadows of the pieces on the board, to the rush of blood in the ears and the trickle of sweat down the back of one’s neck. Bán heard his name called, distantly, and changed his mind on the piece he had been going to move. The game had hinged on that move and he won it, thanking the gods for their timely warning. Beside him lay everything that had been bet; each game had been cumulative and all was placed on each win. In his tally, he owned the bay horse and its saddle, Amminios’s sword and its belt, a dagger, two armbands and a torc. Amminios stretched his arms, hooking his fingers back and cracking the knuckles. “One more,” he said. “You were lucky on the last one. I want my horse back.”
Bán grinned. Runnels of sweat streaked his forehead and soaked the neck of his borrowed tunic. His legs were cramped and his bladder strained. His fingers reached for the counters even when they were not in play. He had rarely been so happy. “You lost your horse because you wa
nted your sword back, and lost your sword for your dagger. You should give up while you can. You have nothing else to lose.”
“Oh, but I do. I have Iccius. I will lay him against my horse and the rest of my war gear.” Amminios spoke easily, with disarming frankness. His grey-green eyes rested on the board, avoiding confrontation. A log cracked in the fire. Rain ran heavily from the roof. The hound bitch rolled over, sighing, and the whelps mewled in frustration at the temporary loss of the teats. Bán felt the sweat grow cold on his neck. The remains of the oatcakes churned in his guts.
“You cannot rest another man’s life on a board game,” he said.
Amminios arched a brow. “He’s not a man. He’s an eight-year-old Belgic boy who was sold by his father to a Roman in Gaul and I can do with him as I wish. I won him in a game; there is no reason I should not lose him the same way.” He arranged the pieces on the board, smiling. “Except that I don’t plan to lose.”
It was the smile that made the difference, and the memory of the terror in a boy’s voice, and the backwash of the ale and wormwood, cold now, but no less potent. Bán lifted the two dreamer pieces from the board. Spinning them in his cupped hands, he held them out, one in each closed fist. “Your turn to pick for start.”
“You accept, then?”
“I do.”
“What will you place against him?”
“All of this.” Bán swept his arm along the collection of worked gold, enamelled bronze, studded iron and leather at his side. “Mine as well as yours.”
“And the horses?”
It was a careful trap, as well set as any he had sprung on the board. The jolt of it made Bán shudder, as if more than his mind had to swerve to avoid it. “I will place your horse,” he said. “Not mine.”
Amminios grinned, sharply. “That’s not enough, warrior. If you have nothing to lose, you have no reason to play well. I have seen that. You take the most risks when you have the edge of fear behind you. It is no contest otherwise.”