The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  I lost sight of Clovis for a moment in a crowd of nobles on the far side of the pit, and panicked, but then his golden-brown head emerged again, surrounded now by a cadre of soldiers.

  Bodyguards.

  Would a Frank dare attack a man at their king’s funeral? Apparently.

  “Nimia, look,” Terix whispered.

  I turned my attention back to the pit, and my eyes widened. The bees. The gold and garnet bees that matched the one hanging from my neck, which had been part of the payment given to Childeric when he reached his last agreement with Sygarius. The older and younger women spread them over Childeric’s body, alongside him, on the ground. And one final bee, they placed between his teeth: a gold offering to their god of the underworld, I guessed, to pay for safe passage to eternity.

  A small knowing inside me denied it. No, that’s not the meaning of a bee. A bee is sacred.

  Was it? I’d never heard such said.

  At last the women left the pit, and the naked women stood. They and the drummers took up their beat and their ululations, and led the way from the pit back toward town. A small army of men went to work with shovels, throwing dirt back into the grave, while a group of soldiers guarded the ramp. With all that gold shining in the open air, there wasn’t a need to question why.

  The Franks around us began to stir and rise to their feet. Terix and I exchanged a quick glance, rose to our feet, and dashed as quickly as we could manage through the crowd, trying to reach the last place we’d seen Clovis.

  On the edge of town, wagons full of wooden barrels had been brought in. The somber mood quickly turned brighter as the meaning of that sank in. Drink, free for the taking!

  Terix cast a longing glance at the barrels, but we had no time for that.

  I’d lost sight of Clovis again.

  Going on the assumption that he would be headed back to the palace somewhere in town, I shoved through the milling people, Terix and Bone at my heels. Back inside the town wall, I spotted a group of richly dressed people and followed them, guessing them to be nobles. They turned a corner, and when I followed I saw Clovis up ahead, amid his soldiers.

  I hurried my steps, pushing past dawdling nobles, and was but twenty feet behind him when I ran face-first into the wall of a soldier’s chest. His hands gripped my shoulders with crushing strength, and he said something low and warning in the Frankish tongue. I looked up at his hard face and saw what he must see as he looked down at me: a filthy, poor, black-haired girl who looked as if she’d been sleeping out-of-doors for two months.

  I craned my neck to look past the soldier at Clovis’s retreating head. “Clovis!” I called out. “Clovis! It’s Nimia!” He didn’t hear me. The soldier, annoyed, gave me a shake.

  I dredged up some of the Visigoth tongue that I knew. “Clovis. He knows me. I must talk to him.”

  The guard’s face twisted in confusion. I tried the same words in Latin, and must have made some impression, for the confusion partially cleared. “No,” he said, and turned me around and gave me a shove back the other way.

  Terix and Bone had caught up to me. “The bee, Nimia. Show him the bee!”

  Of course! I drew out the bee from the neckline of my tunic and, turning back to the guard, held it up. The leather thong was wound in a crisscross around it, but the gold and garnet shone brightly, and there was no mistaking what it was. “Clovis,” I said firmly.

  The soldier looked uncertain, then scowled and put out his hand, palm up. I took the bee off over my head and laid it in his hand, although not without a good deal of misgiving. If he were to take it for himself . . .

  The soldier pointed to me. “Name?”

  “Nimia.”

  “Stay.”

  I nodded, and watched as he jogged after the cadre, now out of sight around another corner. We stood in the middle of the street, the heat of the day making the dust stick to our skin. I realized we hadn’t had anything to eat since a heel of stale bread this morning, soaked in water to soften it. I swayed, and set a hand on Bone’s back to steady myself.

  As the moments passed without anyone appearing around the corner ahead, all my doubts and fears began to bubble to the surface. He didn’t care about me; he felt he owed me nothing; he would be ashamed of me, a slave; I had been a means to an end, and he didn’t need me anymore.

  “If he doesn’t come . . .” Terix said.

  “He has to.”

  He had to, because we were out of ideas. We’d been on the run for two months, and all at once I felt the weight of that strain. The fear, the physical exhaustion, the uncertainty, the hunger, the dirt. I was sunburnt and bruised, and had lost so much weight that when I lay on my back, there was a hollow between my hip bones where the softness of a well-fed stomach should have been. No man would want to lie upon such a bony bed.

  If Clovis didn’t come . . .

  I was too tired to think beyond that. He had to come.

  The time slipped by. The numbers of passersby dwindled, dispersing like smoke in the breeze until Terix, Bone, and I were the only creatures left in the street. I could hear the revelry from the edge of town, where the barrels were. We’d have to find shelter, or leave, before that rowdiness spilled back into town.

  A voice, somewhere behind me: “Is it really you?”

  I spun round and saw him a short distance down the street, his guards hanging back. “I don’t forgive you!” I shouted. I don’t know why; my stupid tongue had a mind of its own.

  Clovis came toward me, a chuckle rumbling in his voice. “So you came all this way to tell me.”

  “I would show you, if I had the strength.”

  “You have only to lie back and let me do the work.”

  I made a noise of annoyance. He was always joking with me, never serious. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Do you know, Nimia, I can go nowhere near a grape-pressing room without my rod growing stiff as a sword?” He had reached me, and looked down into my face with an expression of bemused affection—such a pale, halfhearted emotion, compared to all those I felt for him. “By Wotan’s breath, Nimia. You look awful.”

  After all I’d been through to get here, this is what he had to say to me. I laughed, the laughter edging into a hysteria born of exhaustion before it turned to tears, and I was weeping. Two months’ worth of tears based on fright and misery came pouring forth. I stood alone with my sobbing, my chest heaving, and my breath keening, but then I saw movement from the corner of my eye—Terix gesturing. And his voice, “Hold her, you idiot.”

  Clovis’s arms came around me uncertainly, bands of support reluctantly given. I sank against his warm, broad chest. For the first time in two months, I allowed myself to forget the world.

  Remembrance would come soon enough.

  I was handed off to palace servants to be bathed, a horror from which I thought I might never recover. It was a bad enough shock to have the hands of strangers strip off my filthy clothes and touch my body with as little hesitation as if they were wiping their own asses, but the process took far longer and removed more of my skin than I thought within the bounds of hospitality. The Frankish women took cleanliness seriously, and grunted and sighed over my tattoos, frustrated that the spiral markings were impervious to their soap and scrubbing.

  Such a short time ago, I had hungered for touch. At the moment, I would give anything for it to stop.

  A woman lathered my hairless armpit, muttering. At my raised brows, she pulled her own arm out of the wide neck of her gown and lifted her arm to show me her thick bush of brown hair. I couldn’t help my grimace, at which she scowled, then at a comment from another woman she burst into laughter. She jabbered merrily as she went back to work on me, her hands not shy about cleaning every nook of my person for a second time. I wondered if this was how babies felt, helpless in the hands of their mothers, given no chance for modesty.

  T
he Frankish women might laugh at my hairless body, but I was proud I’d at least maintained that basic grooming during the two months of flight. Many evenings as we sat by the fire, I’d soothed myself by plucking each hair on my legs with my tweezers. Plucking my armpits required more sunlight, and my loins the help of Terix (who made raunchy jokes the whole while), but it was a task that let me feel I was still human, and not turning into a hairy wolf-child of the forest.

  Like these women were.

  The women toweled me dry, wrapped me in a sheet, and led me out of the stone-floored bathing room. Terix was waiting outside the door, still in his travel-stained clothes. Bone lay in the shade of the garden, gnawing a pig’s knuckle. The “palace” was at its core a small Roman villa of stone and brick, complete with a pleasant little courtyard garden, but the Franks had added on two two-story wings built of timber, wattle, and daub, with covered galleries running their length to reach the separate rooms. They’d also built a great hall of massive, hewn logs, apparently in the style of their tribe. The result was a sprawling monstrosity of a palace, more functional than pleasing, but I was glad enough that the Roman bathing room remained, even if it was infested by soap-wielding Furies.

  “That took you long enough. You must have been even dirtier than you smelled,” Terix said by way of greeting. He’d been sent to eat while I got cleaned up.

  “This is the day your dream finally comes true,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I know you’ve fantasized about lying naked in the bath while a half dozen women run their soapy hands all over your body . . . and I do mean all over.”

  Terix looked at the hearty woman still squeezing water from the ends of my hair, and pursed his mouth as if considering whether that was a good or a bad thing. Two of the other women grabbed him by the elbows and started to haul him into the bathing room. His eyes went wide and he tossed an alarmed look over his shoulder to me. “You are joking, aren’t you?”

  “Give in to the pleasure, Terix. They’ll have their way with you whether you like it or not.”

  “Nimia!”

  But I had my own Fury to contend with. Bone got up to follow as the woman led me from the Roman portion of the palace into one of the Frankish wings. She brought me to an upstairs suite of rooms, surprisingly bright and pleasant. The daub walls were washed in warm peach, and the floor was made of smooth, oiled oak. Several small windows let in light, their shutters fastened open, and the peaked roof overhead was newly thatched with sweet-smelling reeds. There was more furniture, all of wood, than I was used to seeing in a Roman home, and the cushions and rugs scattered upon it had bright, intricate designs that bespoke an exuberant love of embellishment.

  The woman went to an inner doorway and said something to whoever was in there, then left me and Bone; I was glad that no one seemed to care that the dog stayed with me.

  The pretty young blonde I’d seen at the pit appeared in the interior doorway. “There you are,” she said in accented but fluent Latin, looking at me with what I could only think was a cautious antagonism—the way you might look at a horse that had just bitten you. “I was beginning to think they’d drowned you.”

  “My lady?” From her expression, I thought she’d been hoping that to be the case.

  She came to me with her hands outstretched, though her eyes were hostile. I did what I had seen my betters do, and laid my hands in hers—keeping my elbows tight against my sides to hold the sheet up—and she leaned forward and kissed both my cheeks. “I’m Audofleda, Chlodowig’s sister.” She looked at me expectantly, as if this was supposed to mean something to me.

  I shifted uneasily. “Your pardon, my lady. Who’s Chlodowig?”

  She cocked her head at me in puzzlement, then her brow cleared. “Oh, that’s right, you must know him as Clovis. That’s what the Romans call him.”

  “Audofl-fl-” I started, but to my chagrin could not remember how her name ended.

  “-Fleda. Audofleda.” She smiled tightly. “I rather wish the Romans would give me a more melodious name, too, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with this one.”

  “Excuse me. Thank you. And ‘Audofleda’ seems a perfectly lovely name.”

  She snorted. “Nonsense. But you are Nimia, and Chlodo—Clovis, I mean—has told me I must look after you.” Her eyes went to Bone, who was sitting beside me and watching her with his big brown eyes. “Clovis didn’t mention the dog.”

  “Bone Cruncher. Say hello, Bone.”

  He woofed.

  Audofleda jumped.

  “Don’t worry, he likes women.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it.” She eyed the dog askance, then gestured me to follow her to the other room.

  It was a bedchamber, and a chest was open and several gowns were spread about the room, being fussed over by a serving woman. I spotted my leather bag, lying open on a chair, the gowns I’d packed when I fled the villa nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t worn them while we traveled, for fear of spoiling them.

  Audofleda noticed my gaze. “Your clothes are being cleaned. They look a little too . . . Roman for here, so I’m to let you wear something of mine.” She didn’t sound happy about it.

  “Surely there’s a simple worker’s tunic somewhere? Your clothes are much too fine for me.”

  She gave me a funny look. “I can’t let you wear a servant’s clothing. Clovis would skin me. He said to treat you gently and kindly, and with all generosity.”

  “He did?” The thought was rain to my parched heart. “What else did he say?”

  Her lips tightened and a small scowl lowered her brow. She turned her attention to her gowns, muttering in Frankish to the serving woman, and tossing the gowns aside one by one. I had no reason to expect her to be open and friendly toward me—I was a stranger, after all—but I feared Clovis might have said something that made me distasteful to her.

  “Please tell me what else Clovis said. Is it that I was a slave, is that it?”

  Audofleda spun round, a rust-colored gown in her hand. “You were a slave?”

  So that wasn’t it. “In Soissons, I still am.”

  She plopped down on the edge of her bed, the dress forgotten in her lap. “You ran away. Did your owner beat you? Or did you kill him?” Her eyes were wide.

  “No! And no, Sygarius never beat me. He—” I stopped, my cheeks flushing. I didn’t know this girl; I didn’t know how innocent she was, or what her judgments might be. I couldn’t tell her that I was Sygarius’s prized virgin sex toy, and that I’d fled because her brother had deflowered me.

  “Sygarius!”

  I nodded. The serving woman watched us, obviously curious, and obviously unable to understand the Latin.

  “You belong to Sygarius of Soissons. No wonder, then, that Clovis is so eager to have you under his protection, despite . . .” Audofleda bit her lower lip and stood, holding up the rust dress. “You can wear this. It will be too big, but we can tack up the hem, and a girdle will fix the rest.” She handed me a natural-colored, thin garment that I assumed was to be worn underneath.

  I took the undergown in one hand, and released the sheet with the other. As I pulled it away, I heard sucked-in breaths from both Audofleda and the servant.

  “They’re the tattoos of my people, the Phanne,” I said.

  “They’re—Do they mean—Why—” She stumbled over her words, as if thinking twice about everything her curiosity begged her to ask. “The marks don’t wash off?” she finally said.

  I shook my head. “Though it didn’t stop the women in the bath from trying.” I pulled the undergown over my head, my arms finding the wide openings in the sides, then I put on the rust gown. It was made of loosely woven linen, and was wrinkled from its time in the chest. It felt good to be wearing clean, soft clothing again, even though it was much too large; no matter, I was used to wearing other people’s ill-fitting cast-offs. The go
wn had wide sleeves that ended at my elbows, and the edges all bore a hand’s width of swirling, leafy embroidery in mustard, green, and brown.

  Audofleda found a girdle of linked copper disks, and the servant helped me to put it on, wrapping it around my waist, crossing in back, then coming forward again to fasten it in a V beneath my navel, the long ends hanging down almost to my knees.

  “Why did you flee Sygarius?” Audofleda asked quietly, as the servant fussed with the hem of the gown. “That must have been very dangerous.”

  “It was more dangerous to stay.”

  “Why?”

  I shook my head, not wanting to explain.

  The servant fetched a needle and thread, and sat at my feet to temporarily shorten the dress for me. Audofleda sat on the chest at the end of her bed. “Why come to Clovis?”

  “I had nowhere else to go. I thought he might feel . . . a sense of obligation toward me.”

  Audofleda said something harsh under her breath in Frankish, and turned her face away, staring out the window with narrowed eyes.

  “My lady,” I said, my voice pleading. “What did Clovis say about me? I can see it is something that distresses you. Please, tell me. If it’s true, then it will be nothing I don’t already know.”

  She turned back to me, glaring, with tears sheening in her eyes. “You think Clovis might feel a ‘sense of obligation’ toward you, for cursing my father?” she said. “For bringing death upon our king, throwing our tribe into chaos, and leaving Chlodowig to try to pick up the pieces? Yes, we all feel a sense of obligation toward you!”

  “I did not curse Childeric! Is that what he told you?”

  “More or less.”

  “What’s the ‘less’ part of it?” I asked, frantic to correct this monstrous impression. “What did he say?”

  Audofleda set her jaw. “It’s what everyone was saying, when Chlodowig and my father came home. The story had run through the ranks of how, at a banquet at Sygarius’s villa, a sorceress went into a trance and told everyone that my father would die. When I asked Chlod—Clovis—about it, he said it was true. And now, on the day of my father’s burial, you appear—Clovis told me you were the sorceress. You’ve come to see that your curse was fulfilled!”