by Lisa Cach
I could hope that the same thought possessed Clovis, and that it would add strength to his determination to work whatever manipulations he could to get me into his power.
He’d free me if he had me, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t keep me as a slave. He wouldn’t use me. That wouldn’t be what he wanted me for.
Would it?
Was it better to be wanted for sex than for prophecy? It dawned on me that neither man, Sygarius nor Clovis, knew anything about me. To them, Nimia was a pretty girl with exotic tattoos and eyes that glowed copper when she was aroused by any passion, be it lust or anger or grief. They knew nothing of what went on inside me.
Clovis, at least, seemed willing to learn more.
I was no more than a sexual fantasy to Sygarius. The power of that was not to be underestimated, but there was more to me. The tattoos upon my body were a reminder of that, if nothing else was. My mother had put those marks upon me, over endless hours while I, a small child, had been drugged against the pain. When I’d cried at being told that more tattoos were coming, she’d told me I was Phanne. To be Phanne was to be decorated with these designs, whose meanings I would learn when I became a woman. “They’re your destiny,” my mother had told me. “And they will never let you forget who you are.”
Sygarius made a noise of disgust. “Superstitious fools! They almost had me believing you could make prophecies.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Look what a mess you’ve made. What’s wrong with you? How could you sing such nonsense to them? I ought to have you beaten for the trouble you’ve caused me. And the gold, no doubt.”
“You won’t give me to them?”
“I should. It would serve you a fitting punishment. And it could be useful to have a spy amongst them . . .”
I stared at him, willing my face blank. I trembled, but prayed he’d think it in fear, not hope.
“Why did you have such a spell of madness, Nimia? You’ve never done such before.”
“I . . .”
I looked down for a moment. These visions had been growing in me since I’d first shown signs of becoming a woman, and I suspected that losing my virginity had been the final uncorking of my prophetic wine. So to speak.
“I have been in a terrible state since the last lesson you gave me. I cannot think clearly. My body does not obey me. My thoughts wander. I cannot concentrate.”
The ill temper on his face smoothed out. His eyes crinkled. He chuckled, then laughed outright. “By Jupiter!” He laughed again. “So it’s my fault, for teaching you too well. If there was ever any sign that it was time for your lessons to end, this is surely it.” He grinned at me, then shocked me by laying his hands on my hips and pulling me toward him. He didn’t touch me elsewhere, but I felt the strength and heat of his palms on my flesh.
After being with Clovis, I thought I would recoil at another man’s touch. But I didn’t. When Sygarius gently squeezed my hips, I felt an answer in my cunny.
He had taught me too well.
I didn’t want him. I wanted my freedom. I wanted Clovis.
But Sygarius had made me his slave, and it was more than a golden torc that held me.
Why did you do it?” Clovis asked, his voice low so as not to carry. He looked angry, his face pale and strained. We stood a few feet apart on a path through the main courtyard garden, the midmorning sun far warmer than the look in his eyes. “I’ve been trying to figure it out; trying to figure out everything about you.”
I’d chosen the open garden to talk with him, knowing that the only place safer than the utter privacy of the pressing room was to be in sight of all, in daylight. After last night, no one would question that Clovis wanted to exchange a few words with me. I felt helpless as he glared at me, and wanted to tell him of how Sygarius had ordered me to spy; wanted to tell him of how terrified of my fate I’d been since inviting him between my thighs. I wanted him to rescue me from the mess I’d made for myself. “The vision wasn’t on purpose; it just happened,” I said.
“At first I was angry. Then I thought: Clever girl! She’s giving us an excuse to demand she be given to us. It was only afterward that I thought to wonder at such a strange plan. But you’re a strange sort of slave girl, aren’t you? At least according to Lady Lydia.”
“You talked to her about me?”
“Talk is not entirely the right word. She was . . . remarkably eager to soothe me last night, although it did seem she wasn’t having much fun until I had a slave girl kneel over her face.”
My mouth dropped open as hurt slammed through me: he’d slept with Lady Lydia.
“Now move your tongue up and down, and you’ll have an idea of what Lady Lydia did to that girl while I was thrusting in her cunny.”
The hurt stabbed deeper. “You’re telling me this to wound me. Why?” I said, my voice pleading and confused.
“I’m telling you this so you know that I know how sex can be used to manipulate. I don’t have a thoughtless prick for a brain, like some men.”
“You accuse me of manipulating you? I gave you my virginity,” I cried softly. I looked quickly round the garden to be sure no one was near enough to have heard.
“A very clever thing to do, too, I thought. But then Lady Lydia told me more about you. To hear her tell it, you’re Sygarius’s obsession. You’re his exotic pet, cosseted and watched over, taught music and to dance and to read, and protected from hard labors that might roughen your hands or mar your beauty. He’s sculpted you into his fantasy of a graceful, artistic lover, who lives only to ease his sexual desires. Or will live only for that, once he’s broken your seal.”
He looked at me with a small furrow between his brows. “A seal that is no longer there, which is a puzzle. If what Lady Lydia said is true, then I don’t know how you could be so careless of your life as to lie with me. You’re either stupid and careless, or this was all part of a plot. Or maybe Lady Lydia lied to me, too.”
I shook my head, his accusations making it spin. “You’re confusing me. You seem to think that everyone lies to you, or has motivations three layers deep. I don’t; I don’t! I want freedom; I want to find the Phanne. I want you,” I said, and was scared he’d see just how deep that truth ran: straight to my heart, raw and vulnerable.
For a moment, his expression softened. “Your eyes . . . there are sparks of copper. Do they tell the truth, even when I do not know if your lips do?” His expression hardened again. “Your eyes were the same color while you spoke of the white horse, the shield and crossed swords. Was it a vision? Or was it a lie? That’s what I don’t know. How do I know you’re a seer, like you claim? How do I know Sygarius didn’t order you to seduce me in order to set in motion this entire series of events, so that he could place you as a spy in our midst?”
My breath caught, my eyes widening at how near he had brushed by a version of the truth.
“By Wotan,” he swore. “I see the guilt in your face!”
“No! You’ve picked up the right thread, but followed it to the wrong end. Sygarius did want me to spy upon your father, but I couldn’t do it.” My telling Sygarius what Clovis had said about Childeric’s motivations burned like hot coal of shame within me, but I would keep that secret. Clovis would not love me the better for revealing it. “Meeting with you was my own choice; you know that. You sought me out first. You are the one who should be questioned: did you truly meet a man named Maerlin, with tattoos like mine? You could have made it all up, to lure me to you, and make me a spy for you.”
He gaped at me for a long moment, then let out a loud laugh of disbelief. “You think to distract me by accusing me of dishonesty—I, who tried to tell you of your people, and would have preserved your virginity if you hadn’t forced it on me.”
I felt tears sting my eyes, my throat tightening. “You misunderstand me, Clovis!” My hands fluttered as I sought words to explain the jumble in my mind and heart. “I’m frightened; I im
agine shadows in you, and jump at them before I see they are not real. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, and I’m scared.”
He looked at me long and hard, his lips pressed into a thin line. I could feel him trying to read my sincerity. “Tell me, then: was it truly a vision you had last night, of my father’s death?”
I held my hands open. “I saw what I saw. I cannot tell you what it meant, or if it is true.”
“A convenient caveat.”
I shook my head, frustrated by his stubborn refusal to believe me; frightened that he might follow that stubborn refusal to a severing of all ties. “What else can I say?” I pleaded. “How can I prove myself to you?”
“You can’t.”
I gave a small cry of pain. To be so mistrusted; to be discarded, all hope gone . . .
He tilted his head, cold eyes upon me. “I’ll let Sygarius prove your honesty.”
“Wh-what?”
“My father completes negotiations with him as we speak. If Sygarius lets us have you, I’ll know you for a liar and a spy.”
I closed my eyes. It was hopeless. What a fool I had been, to believe there was a bond between us that was meant to grow; to believe that Clovis felt anything at all when he looked at me. All he saw was the potential for plots and lies, and a pretty face atop a body he could fuck.
I turned and walked away.
I played the half-written tune over and over again on the cithara, losing myself in the story the melody was trying to tell me. After my fight with Clovis, I’d spent all the rest of yesterday and last night secreted here in the music room. It was the only place I knew I could hide from my own feelings: if I concentrated hard enough on the music, I would forget who and where I was, and everything I felt. The world would shrink down to the vibrations of the strings under my fingertips, the shimmer of sound in my ears, the thrum of the deeper notes in my chest. Day would slip into night, and night into exhaustion and sleep without my noticing.
Such blissful oblivion was eluding me this morning. Whatever deal Childeric and Sygarius had worked out, no one had told me. All I knew was that the Franks were leaving the villa any moment now, and it was all I could do not to run from the music room and try to catch one last glimpse of Clovis.
Perhaps they’d already left.
Whether they had or hadn’t, someone would have told me by now if I was to go with them. I plucked a plaintive melody on the strings, feeling despised and like an outcast. I must have been mad to think that a handsome princeling, barbarian or no, would want me. Lust had clouded my thinking; lust had tricked me into thinking there was some grand fate we were meant to live out together. Terix had known me better than I had known myself.
Had Sygarius offered me to the Franks? Maybe, and maybe Childeric had rejected me on Clovis’s advice. If I ran away I could never go to them for refuge now; they wouldn’t believe I hadn’t been sent as a spy by Sygarius.
But maybe Sygarius hadn’t offered me. Maybe Clovis now knew how wrong—or largely wrong, anyway—he’d been to accuse me of such convoluted plots.
I strummed an angry chord. Listen to yourself, Nimia! Grasping at hope again! Stop it!
“Nimia?”
I looked up and saw Terix in the doorway. His face was twisted with uncertainty, as if afraid of my mood.
I sighed and set down the cithara. “Tell me they’re gone.”
He nodded, and came in.
“I should have listened to you,” I said.
His eyes widened. “Oh Nimia, you didn’t . . .”
“I did.”
“Jupiter’s balls.” He gaped at me a few moments longer, and then the creases on his brow lowered from arches of surprise to wedges of worry. “Your hymen—”
“Poof. Gone.”
“But your initiation with Sygarius—”
I hadn’t even the energy to shrug. What could I do? The die were cast; the bones were thrown; the entrails of the bird laid out and examined. My fate was written.
“We’ve got to think of something!” Terix said.
“All I can think is to avoid it completely.”
Terix threw up his hands and paced round the room. “How? You can’t plead a headache or your menses for the rest of your life.”
“No.”
He stopped in his tracks and looked at me in horror. “You’re not going to kill yourself, are you?”
“No! Although, come to think of it, my plan may just be a long way of reaching the same end . . .”
“What? Nimia, what crazy thing are you going to do?”
I gestured him closer, and lowered my voice. “Run away.”
His face went slack, and the color drained from it. “N-n-no. Nimia. No. You’d be caught before you’d gone half a mile. And then what?”
“What will happen to me if Sygarius finds out I’m not a virgin?” He had no answer for that. “I have a better chance by running.”
“There’s got to be another way.”
I shook my head. “The solstice is only six days away.”
“I’ll think of something. I have to! I can’t let anything happen to you, Nimia. You’re the only family I’ve got.”
My throat tightened. I felt a tingling in my nose, my eyes stinging. Family. I reached out, hesitated . . . and then laid my hand on his forearm. He stiffened in surprise, and then looked with wonder at my hand on his skin. “You’re all I have, too, Terix.”
I noticed something clenched in his hand. “What’s that?”
“Oh! I forgot. Clovis asked me to give you this.” He handed me a small twist of parchment with a lump inside.
My heart jolted to life, racing in my breast. With trembling fingers I pulled the parchment open. A solid gold bee with garnet wings tumbled out into my palm. I blinked at it.
“That’s one of the bees,” Terix said in surprise.
“What bees?”
“Sygarius gave hundreds of them to Childeric, as an apology for your spate of madness. He told Childeric that maybe you had seen the future, as Sygarius had been planning all along to give the bees as part of his payment, and surely that was all that had been meant.”
Clever Sygarius.
I started to crumple the parchment, but then I saw the words written inside it:
Forgive me.
Such simple words.
If I were a smarter girl, I’d toss the gift aside. I’d say, in my pride, “Too late! You should have trusted me!” I’d say he should have known who I was inside; he should have felt the same toward me as I had toward him, no matter that we’d only spoken three times.
I had been certain.
I had trusted.
Why could he not, until a man—a man whom he wished to be his enemy!—proved to him that I was as I had said?
I felt the anger. The hurt.
And yet . . .
Those simple words.
Forgive me.
They changed everything.
I have important news for you, Nimia,” Lady Lydia said when I answered her summons. She was lying on a couch at the edge of the small courtyard garden on which her rooms looked out; a small table held a platter of stuffed figs, honey-glazed nuts, and dried apples soaked in spices and wine. She licked honey off her fingertips and smiled at me.
“My lady?” What on earth?
The solstice was now only three days away, and with Terix’s help I had been putting together a plan to flee on the night before my initiation. We had a stash of food hidden in the pressing room, and Terix knew where to get an old hooded cloak and sandals for me. He still insisted he would think of something to make it possible for me to stay through the initiation . . . but I could see in his eyes that he knew it was pointless. I didn’t want to stay. I wanted to go to Clovis.
“We’ve noticed—Sygarius and I—how very tense you’ve been these p
ast several days.”
I swallowed.
“You fairly vibrate with it, Nimia; like a string on your cithara. You are not yourself.”
I made a sound something like a whimper, then coughed to cover it up.
“There, you see? You are discomposed. And we know why.”
I stood mute, watching her face for signs of anger or accusation. There were flickers of annoyance, maybe even of dislike; but no more than usual. She had never particularly liked me; never particularly despised me, either, as far as I knew. I was useful to her, and that was as far as her feelings went, beyond the odd flares of sexual interest.
“You’re frightened, aren’t you?” she asked, tucking in her chin and making a moue. I imagined she thought she sounded motherly.
I nodded. It didn’t matter what she was referring to; the answer at this point would be yes, I was scared.
“It’s the waiting. The anticipation of it. Better to get it done with, don’t you think? So we’re having your initiation tonight.”
The words meant nothing to me for a long moment—and then the meaning sank in. My knees went weak; my hands gripped the back of a chair for support. “Tonight,” I repeated dumbly.
“We’ve all waited long enough, don’t you think? We’ll hold it in the pressing room, in honor of Bacchus. The room is being prepared even now.”
My stash of food . . . Gods help me! Was it found?
“You’ll no longer be sharing a room with other slaves, either. The little room off the music room is to be yours. Go take your things there now, and then go to the baths. Hermina will meet you there and prepare you for tonight.” She picked through the stuffed figs to find one that she liked and put it to her lips, her tongue darting out to lick the filling. “Well, Nimia? Aren’t you grateful?”
“T-t-too grateful for words, my lady. You’ve stunned me. Th-thank you.”