The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  “You leave me no choice. My life is on the line, Nimia. I don’t know who I can trust, or which path will lead me to the crown, not the grave.” He backed me to the bed and pushed me down.

  I arched my back and whimpered. “I can’t lie on my hands like this. It hurts.”

  He grabbed a pillow and wedged it between my hips and my hands, cushioning them both and canting my pelvis upward. My legs dangled uncomfortably off the bed, not reaching the ground. “You can guide my way,” he said. “You can keep me alive. Why don’t you want to do that?” He knelt on the floor between my legs and lifted my feet to his shoulders, holding them there with his strong, warm hands. “I had thought you cared something for me.”

  “I was once stupid enough to think you cared something for me. I will never make that mistake again.”

  “You call this not caring?” he said, and bent his head to my sex. His tongue laved me, and my vision flooded with gold.

  “No! No!” I pushed with my feet on his shoulders, trying to get him away from me. I got one foot free and clouted him on the ear.

  A moment later he had both my ankles in his grip, and was winding my copper girdle around them, fastening them tight.

  I smiled inside, glad to have my legs together. I’d stopped him.

  “You look pleased with yourself.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? You can’t very well pet me if you’ve tied my feet together.”

  He chuckled, then laughed outright. “You really don’t have much experience, do you?”

  “Enough to stop you.”

  “Foolish girl. Then why didn’t you see this coming?” And so saying he pushed my bound ankles up and toward my body, and my knees came apart like butterfly wings, leaving the petals of my flower exposed to the cool night air and his warm breath.

  I had no leverage, lying on top of my bound hands. My ankles, being crossed and bound, meant my legs had no direction in which to push or struggle. My muscles were trembling, feeling the strain of holding up my legs, and it was a shameful relief to them when Clovis held my feet against one shoulder, taking the weight.

  I was bound and opened, and completely at his mercy.

  “I wouldn’t enjoy this so much,” he said, “if I weren’t so certain that you enjoyed it, too.”

  I tried to struggle, and got nothing but a twinge in my arm. Clovis ignored my meager effort, and lowered his mouth to my sex.

  It took only one stroke of his tongue for the swarm to descend upon me. As his tongue swirled around my stamen, the golden wings lifted, revealing curtains of thin white fabric, glowing with sunlight. They swayed, and I saw I was in a covered carriage, the curtains hiding the view. The buzzing turned to a low rumble, as of wood wheels turning, or the distant threat of thunder.

  Clovis sucked on my peak, and then brushed the flat of his tongue against it, and again, and again.

  The carriage came to a halt, and the curtains to my side parted. I saw a man with teeth tied in his long brown hair. He was as tall and strong as an oak. He held a sword.

  “What do you see?” Clovis asked. “Tell me, Nimia.” The tip of his tongue flicked at my stamen, so quick and light that I flinched with each hit. It was another teasing touch, building my hunger and granting nothing. “Tell me what you see.” He gave me one gentle stroke of his tongue, a promise of the reward I would get for obeying. “Tell me.”

  “No,” I cried, though my whole body begged for yes.

  He thrust his tongue inside my passage, one deep thrust that was far too little for what I needed, and my whole sex convulsed in need. He went back to my stamen, flicking and teasing, driving me beyond thought with wanting. “Tell me.”

  I told him.

  He rewarded me with the warmth of his mouth, his lips sucking and pulling, his tongue stroking. He went lower and licked at my outer gates, a blunt warmth that had me spreading my thighs wider, trying to open myself to him. He darted his tongue inside me, thrusting in quick, unsatisfying jabs that had me digging my heels into the back of his shoulder, trying to drag him closer, trying to force him deeper. “Tell me more,” he said.

  I told him I saw a huge snake slither out of a stream and come toward the man with teeth in his hair. Thunder rumbled in the distance. He sliced the snake in half with the sword, and it writhed and twisted on the ground, spurting blue blood. The sky darkened, thunderclouds rolling in to cover the sun.

  Clovis rose from the floor and pressed my ankles toward my chest. My knees came farther apart, my whole body bound together except for my sex, laid bare to him and his rod. I felt him press the head of it against my entrance. He put his hands on the backs of my thighs and rocked me onto him, impaling me on the head of his member. He slid in on my flood of wetness, my body weeping with gratitude to have him entering me at last. He moved my hips, giving me shallow thrusts that had the tip of him hitting at that place his fingers had sought out so much earlier. “What more do you see? Tell me, Nimia. Tell me.”

  I moaned, too caught up in pleasure to answer.

  He stopped moving, and held me still, his cock barely inside me. “Speak to me.”

  I tried to rock onto him, but he had all the power. He wouldn’t let me. The feel of him just inside me was unbearable; I had to have more. I wanted all of him; I wanted him deep; I wanted to feel as if I were stretched beyond what I could take. “He puts the sword in your hand,” I said, seeing the scene.

  Clovis rocked me onto him. He slid in deeper, deeper . . . And then as slowly slid out. Again in, deeper, deeper . . .

  “Faster, oh faster. Please,” I begged.

  “Tell me more.”

  “You hold the sword pointed at the sky.” In my mind’s eye I saw a flash of lightning. Thunder cracked and roared. I cried out, blinded and deafened. “Lightning strikes you! Oh gods, you’ve been struck. Thunder. Thunder.”

  In answer, he plunged inside me, thrusting hard as if possessed by a sudden mad fury. He seemed to care no more about giving me pleasure, and seemed himself to be at the mercy of his cock as it raged inside my passage. “Nimia!” he cried out, and in answer to his crazed, uncaring thrusting I felt myself tumbling into waves of my own release. He gripped my thighs, his back arched. I opened my eyes to see his face turned upward, the tendons standing out in his neck.

  And then I felt his cock pulse within me, and knew he, too, had found his release.

  Clovis wouldn’t tell me what the vision meant. If I were a proper seer, I thought to myself, I would be telling him how to interpret the prophecy. Instead, he’d left me in his bed and stationed guards at the door to his quarters, and I’d only seen him again near dawn when he’d crawled into the sheets and pulled me close, and sunk into slumber. I’d lain awake, examining the unusual feel of sleeping with another.

  His skin, his warmth, the sound of his breathing, the weight of his arm holding me close and holding my hand in his, both of them wedged between my breasts . . . and despite the lush comfort of all those, there was the discomfort of his other arm under me, the sweaty heat where our bodies touched, and my fear that any movement would disturb him. So I lay with limbs going numb and muscles going sore, his breathing in my ear too startling a sound for me to slip back into sleep.

  Although sleep I must have, for when I woke again the room was filled with bright sunlight, Clovis was gone, and his mother, Basina, was beside the bed, staring down at me.

  That was enough to startle anyone into full wakefulness. I scrambled up, holding the sheet over my breasts. Had she stood there contemplating whether to smother me?

  “We have in mind a small entertainment we’d like you and your friend Terix to perform for us this evening,” she said. “Clovis tells me you both have talents of that sort.”

  “I dance and play music.”

  “And act.”

  I nodded. “Is it a play? Or a song?” My mood began to lift, and I felt a familiar e
xcitement. I had not played much music since fleeing Sygarius, and I missed it. “I have pipes, but a cithara would be so much better. If you don’t have one, I suppose a lute would do.” I missed the rich tones of the eleven-stringed cithara, a difficult instrument that few could master.

  She ignored my enthusiasm. “Do you speak other tongues than Latin?”

  “I know a Visigoth dialect . . . and Phannic, of course.”

  “Phannic. I’ve never heard of that; no one else will have, either. Say something in it.”

  “I’m astonished that children survived the cold nest of your womb,” I said in Phannic, a smile on my face.

  She narrowed her eyes. “That sounds almost . . .”

  Oh gods, she hadn’t understood, had she?

  “. . . Almost Celtic. Different, of course, and wonderfully archaic. No one will understand a word. It wouldn’t do to have you speaking Latin, after all, when you are presented as a daughter of Nerthus.”

  “My lady?”

  “Frankish would have been better. But we must work with what we have.” She tugged the sheet out of my hands. Her eyebrows rose as she stared at my tattooed breasts. “Not that anyone will be listening to you, with those on display.”

  “My lady?”

  Her plans were soon made clear, and by early evening I found myself sitting inside a curtained carriage hitched to a pair of flower-bedecked cows. Two hugely pregnant young women led the team, and Terix, garbed in a peculiar brown wool outfit of short, knit breeches, tight ribbed tunic, and a pointy-topped wool hat that tied under his chin, walked beside my carriage. Bone refused to be left behind, and loped in protective circles around our procession, alarming the cattle.

  “These things are infested with lice, I’m sure of it,” Terix complained beneath his breath, for my ears only. I heard him scratching, though I couldn’t see him because of the curtains. “There’s no way wool can be this itchy.”

  “Surely a little itching is worth it, to appear before Audofleda in such manly garb,” I whispered back, and couldn’t help a snorting giggle. Terix had declared Audofleda the sweetest flower ever to grace a meadow.

  “Who could respect a priest who dressed like this? These Franks have fish sauce for brains.”

  “You’re supposed to look like an oak tree.”

  “I look like a turd.” I heard him scratch again. “An itchy turd.”

  “Think oaky thoughts.”

  “When I think of Audofleda, I get plenty of oaky thoughts. I could show her a tree she’d be glad to pray to.”

  “Gods, Terix, I hope you don’t.”

  “If you’re good enough for Clovis, no reason I can’t be good enough for his sister.”

  “Trust me. This is not a family you want to have angry with you. Or even annoyed.”

  “Why? What have you heard?”

  I hadn’t told him about Childeric’s murder. There’d been no chance, and this wasn’t the right time, either. Or maybe I was being cowardly, not wanting to hear what Terix would say about Clovis, and about me, when he found out. I knew he wouldn’t blame me for the death, but he would turn a beady eye on my sharing Clovis’s bed, and my obvious weakness where the princeling was concerned. “You don’t have to have heard anything to know they’re dangerous, these Franks.”

  “If I didn’t already know that, I wouldn’t be wearing a wool turd to please them. Jupiter’s balls, Nimia. I’m not sure we’re better off here than we were while running from Jax.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Food’s better, though.”

  I laughed.

  “Get control of yourself,” Terix mock-scolded. “We’re getting close. No one should hear the daughter of Nerthus laughing. They might think she was just some Roman trollop, no better than a slave or an actress.”

  “I am filled with shame.”

  “We are close now, Nimia.”

  “What mood for the audience?” I whispered.

  “They look hairy and tense. But they’re barbarians, so I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Smiles might be more frightening.”

  I had heard the murmur of voices all during the carriage ride, as our wooden wheels rumbled through the streets of Tornacum and the lesser folk of the town took notice of our passage. Drummers both preceded and followed us, attracting attention to this summer’s eve spectacle. We were taking a circuitous route to the great hall—because the carriage was part of the show, and it wouldn’t do to have it cross the piddling distance from the palace’s residential wing to the great hall. Better to have it wind through town and catch the eyes and tongues of all the people.

  This carriage that I rode in was known. It was the conveyance of Nerthus, a great goddess of these people, who once a year emerged from her home on an island in the middle of a lake, to roam the countryside hidden inside this carriage, accompanied by a priest. Everywhere she stopped, feasts were held and fighting prohibited. No one ever saw her, for she remained secreted behind her curtains, but the priest conveyed her wishes and words to the gathered people.

  And when she was sated with the peace and feasting of one village, she blessed the people with fertility and then she and her priest moved on to the next town. Together they circuited the countryside, until at last Nerthus returned again to her island home, on a lake deep in a wood, that wood itself on an island off the coast that no one had ever seen.

  I suspected that this carriage got dragged around the countryside perfectly empty every year. There was no need for a “real” goddess if part of the tradition was that no one ever saw her.

  But today . . . Today, Clovis wanted more than an empty myth to persuade his people. He needed a spectacle, in the form of a flesh-and-blood “daughter” of Nerthus, come to give her prophecy. A daughter who had been enslaved by the foul Roman Sygarius, but who had escaped (with her priest, Terix), and returned to her homeland to pay homage to the new king. Whoever he might be.

  It seemed far too fantastical—far too silly—to work, but Clovis and Basina had been adamant that my appearance as a daughter of Nerthus would be taken for truth, my words for the voice of the goddess.

  Everyone already knew about my first prophecy, after all. They already believed in me.

  “They’ve opened the doors to the great hall,” Terix whispered to me. “They’ve put planks over the stone stairs, for the wheels. And here we go!”

  I heard the coaxing of the cattle up the ramp, and then the carriage jolted and canted, and I bonked my head against the back wall. This was not an elegant way for the daughter of a goddess to travel.

  The sound of the wheels changed as we entered the great hall, and the light behind my curtains dimmed to orange torchlight. The banging of the drums suddenly seemed twice as loud, and I could feel the presence of hundreds of people, as if their breath itself pressed in on the curtains, reaching for me, their curiosity and their tension a palpable thing.

  “Nerthus,” I heard in whispers. “Nerthus!” Awe. Fear. A trembling joy. I could feel it all, in the air around my carriage. These people, I suddenly understood, yearned for clarity and decision. They had lost their king, and they wanted to replace him quickly, before chaos descended and tore them apart. They knew they stood in a fragile moment.

  I heard a deep male voice speaking in Frankish to the crowd. The words were unintelligible to me, but the slow, booming delivery held passion and meaning. This was someone who felt strongly, and put his heart into his voice.

  The carriage stopped. Voices, rustling. Clovis’s voice now, from above the carriage—was he on a dais?—speaking with surety, then amazement. He dragged the moment out, and I imagined all the eyes of the hall on him, and on the curtains of my carriage. They’d never seen Nerthus, and never imagined her to have a daughter. To be so privileged as to see such a one . . . it would be a tale to tell their grandchildren, and to recount over beer and mead through all the dark
nights of their lives.

  They deserved a show.

  Clovis said something dramatic, the rising tone of his voice indicating that something more was to come, and then there was silence. Everyone seemed to be holding his breath.

  It was me they were waiting for. As I sat motionless inside the carriage, my hand poised a finger’s width from the curtain, I felt my own tension rising along with theirs.

  Wait, Nimia . . . wait . . .

  I’d long ago learned to prolong the anticipation for as long as the audience could bear. The greater their tension, the more they enjoyed the reward.

  When I imagined I could feel their tension ready to break, ready to shift into restless impatience, I dropped a veil into place over my face, put my hand to the curtain, and shifted it a hand’s width. Just enough that all could see the movement, and all could crane their necks, trying to catch a glimpse inside the carriage.

  Terix rushed to the opening and bowed low, and I tried not to look at the pointed brown cap that turned his head into an acorn. Now was not the time to succumb to a fit of the giggles. Instead, I extended one be-ringed foot out the curtain opening, letting those close by see the gold that adorned my toes and wrapped around my ankles.

  We’d debated whether a demigoddess would wear sandals, and decided not. Leather soles seemed far too mundane for one who walked between the heavens and earth.

  I pushed the curtains open wider with careful grace, letting my hands—with their own multitude of gold rings—show before my arms, with their twisted gold bands winding round me from wrist to elbow to upper arm. And then with all the skill of my dancer’s body, I flowed out of the carriage, moving with a gliding slowness like a length of silk being lifted by the wind. It was a movement of strength and control, although to my watchers it would—I hoped—look like the natural, easy motion of an otherworldly creature.