The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  Clovis came to us, his expression haggard. He glanced at me, then went to Remigius and took both the priest’s hands in his own. “I have terrible news, old friend.”

  Remigius’s look of happy expectation fell into one of worry. “The vase? Someone took it?”

  “It’s worse than that, I’m afraid. It was destroyed.”

  “No!” I cried, jumping up from my stool.

  Remigius’s face went white. “How?” he whispered.

  Clovis released his hands, and ran both his own through his hair, pulling on it in frustration. “I blame myself. I asked that I be allowed to take it for you, separate and above the allotment of spoils that were to be mine. One of the men—no friend to your church, I’m afraid—took offense, drew his axe, and smashed it in Wotan’s name.”

  Remigius crossed himself. “It is a grievous loss to the church. If, if you’ll excuse me . . .” Clearly shaken, Remigius went to Albus to deliver the bad news.

  “Smashed!” I said. “By whom? I’ll smash him. How could he? How?” Tears started in my eyes. “Now I won’t even be able to visit it in that cursed church. How could you let it happen, Clovis? How?”

  I was making a scene, but Clovis let me, and I didn’t care that I was attracting attention. Even Remigius was looking over at me in concern.

  When I’d raved myself into an exhausted, tear-streaked mess, Clovis took my hand. “Come, my love. No use regretting the arrow already flown from the bow.”

  “Could I at least have the shards?”

  “Shh. Quiet yourself. It is gone.” He nodded to Remigius, and led me away, back to our quarters.

  I spouted dark words beneath my breath the whole way, and cast murderous glares at the Franks who crossed our path. Barbarians! I would find the guilty one and I would, I would—

  Clovis shut the door to our quarters, and pulled me over to the bed.

  “Not now, Clovis.”

  He chuckled. “ ‘Not now,’ she says. You’ll be tearing my clothes off in a few moments.”

  I snorted, and swiped angry tears from my eyes.

  “I have something for you,” he said.

  “I don’t want it. All I wanted was the vase. No jewel can make up for that.”

  “I didn’t think it could. Open the chest by the window.”

  “No.”

  “Nimia.”

  I rolled my eyes and stomped over to the chest, and flung back the lid.

  The vase lay within, on a bed of crimson cloth.

  My breath left me and I froze, not believing it. I began to tremble all over.

  “I found a somewhat similar vase and exchanged them, and then set up the angry scene with Ragnachar. He’s the one who smashed the false vase. No one was there who could have said it was or was not the original.”

  I carefully lowered the lid of the chest and turned to look at Clovis. “You did that for me? What of Remigius?”

  “What of him? And thank you for your performance in the atrium. It will have left no doubt in his mind that the vase is well and truly smashed.”

  I ran to him, and threw my arms around his neck, kissing him all over his face. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. How will I ever repay you?”

  “Such a silly question,” he said, his hands going to my buttocks and pulling me against him.

  Which reminded me of something he needed to know. I pulled my head back and looked into his eyes, and placed my fingertips over his lips. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  His arms around me tensed, and his face went smooth. His eyes that were laughing a moment before turned still and cold. “Whose?”

  “Yours. If the gods are kind.”

  “And if they’re not?”

  I shook my head.

  “And if they’re not?” he repeated.

  “You know,” I whispered. “His.”

  He swore darkly, and dropped his arms from my waist. And then he left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Leaving me alone, but for the babe within me.

  And for a third time, to my beloved aunt,

  RHODA MCLAUCHLAN.

  This is what you get for complaining that I’d never

  dedicated a book to you.

  My muscles contracted hard, pushing downward, and I screamed. “Juno, Wotan, Latona, any goddess—help me!” Pushing my baby out through a flaming circle of pain, I felt like I was about to split from arse to navel, and I cried out again.

  “It comes,” the midwife said, her hands reaching out to cup the head.

  Behind her, Basina shifted forward, her cold eyes eager to see if the child had the face of her son, Clovis . . . or that of the routed Roman ruler, Sygarius.

  I gripped the rails of the birthing stool, giving myself over to the demands of my body. “Mother,” I cried in Phannic, as the contractions carried me beyond myself. “Mother!”

  Maybe she heard me, wherever she was, for my baby finally emerged, and I felt the snakelike slither of its cord leaving me a moment later. Despite my exhaustion, I bent forward to see as the midwife cleared the baby’s mouth, and a squeaking cry emerged. It was a boy, as the vision I’d seen in the labyrinth-etched vase had predicted. A floating sense of wonder came over me as I gazed at his scrunched pale face, still coated with birth fluids.

  My son.

  Strings were tied around the cord; a slash of the knife; and then Basina was taking the baby to be cleaned while the midwife reached out to massage my belly. “Let’s have the rest of it, then.”

  My body complied, ejecting the afterbirth as I gazed at my baby in Basina’s arms. Though I knew her capable of murder, she held the child tenderly, with a mother’s instincts.

  The midwife wrapped up the afterbirth and placed it in a wooden box, and as she did, I felt another warm rush of fluid leave my body. I looked down at a pool of blood on the floor between my spread thighs.

  Was that normal?

  More blood trickled from my cunny, expanding the burgundy puddle. I must have torn myself as the baby was born; I’d heard of such things happening.

  Tiny stars speckled my vision, and I was having difficulty holding my head up. I let it flop back against the chair, my arms falling to my sides as I felt more liquid warmth seeping from me.

  From beneath half-closed lids I saw Basina turn back to me with my clean, swaddled son, a smile on her lips. Her eyes widened, her mouth dropping open. I heard her shout, and saw the midwife turn. Then the blackness that had been edging round my vision swept in, and I knew no more.

  I awoke to aching, burning pain all through my body, with my belly at the heart of the fire. I moaned and opened my eyes, and saw Clovis leaning toward me, his face strained, his lips pressed together in a white line.

  “Nimia?”

  “Baby,” I croaked. My baby. Where was he?

  “How do you feel?”

  I rolled my head, rejecting the question. “Where . . . my son?”

  “Safe. With a wet nurse. You’ve been in and out of consciousness for six days; you have childbed fever.”

  A chill ran over my burning body. Childbed fever. A death sentence.

  When I died, what would become of my son?

  With a burst of frail strength, I clasped Clovis’s wrist. “Our son?”

  He turned his face away.

  “Ours?” I repeated urgently.

  “I don’t know. My mother thinks so.”

  “You don’t.”

  “How is anyone supposed to tell? Babies all look the same. This one has dark hair. Sygarius has dark hair.”

  “So do I.”

  “I look at the child and see him.”

  My hand fell away from his wrist. He wasn’t going to acknowledge the child. And maybe he shouldn’t; maybe he was Sygarius’s.

  But if Basina thought my son to be Clovis
’s child, surely he was. Who better than her to know how Clovis’s features would appear in a newborn? And who less likely than her to acknowledge a child not of her blood?

  “When I die—”

  Clovis grabbed my hand in both of his, squeezing hard. “You won’t die.”

  “Wishing . . . won’t make it so.”

  “But you’re awake, you’re speaking. You’re getting better.”

  I had heard of this sudden improvement before. The family was tricked into joy at what looked like renewed life, but in truth, this surge of energy came shortly before the end.

  “When I die,” I insisted, “protect our son.”

  By the set of his jaw, I knew he rejected the burden.

  “Clovis. A dying wish: it must be granted.”

  He stood and turned his back to me. “I’ll allow my mother to tend to it,” he said, his voice too low and strained for me to know what emotion he felt. He gave me one burning glare over his shoulder—of anger? of grief?—and then left.

  Tears stung my eyes and seeped down my temples. So this was to be my child’s life: rejected by his father, seen as the child of his enemy, and raised under the cold, murderous hand of Basina. And I—was I to die tonight, without seeing my son again?

  “Baby,” I whispered past dry lips.

  Polina, a fair-haired girl who served as my maid, came to my bedside with a cup of water and helped me to drink.

  “Bring my baby,” I said.

  She chewed her lip, her brows furrowed. “They said no, my lady.”

  I started to protest, struggling to sit up. Polina gently pushed my shoulders back down. “Hush, my lady! Calm yourself. It’s to protect the child from the fever.”

  How could I argue with that? My strength was gone, anyway. I closed my eyes, seeking inside for some knowledge, some shred of prophecy or magic that might release me from the prison of my fate.

  It couldn’t end like this. I couldn’t end like this. There was so much yet to do. And my son.

  “Terix.” He always saved me. He always had a clever solution. “Terix!”

  “I’ll fetch him, my lady. At once.”

  As Polina left the room, I sank into the violent images of a fever dream.

  Blood. Screams. The black corruption of infection, rotting my body from inside. The death within me had its lair in the womb that had so recently brought forth life. It lurked there like the Minotaur at the center of its labyrinth, and sent out its tentacles to grab my organs, wrap around my heart, and reach up through my spine toward my brain. I tried to struggle against the decay, to fight for my baby’s sake as well as my own, but it ruled inside me and would ride its power to my death.

  Despair swept over me, and the exhaustion of defeat. I felt myself falling toward the dark monster, with no hope of arms to reach out and save me. It was over. It was all over.

  Then, somewhere in my dream, I heard my mother’s voice call, “Nimia! The chalice.”

  Chalice?

  “Nimia.” Her beloved face shimmered before me, with her dark eyes and the high, strong cheekbones of a woman whose ancestors had ridden in hordes across the steppes of the distant east.

  “Mother!” In my dream I reached out to her, seeking to touch her face. But she was distant and insubstantial as a cloud.

  She lifted before her the carved, pink crystal bowl that had graced the church in Soissons. Clovis had tricked the Christian bishop Remigius into believing the bowl destroyed, because I had wanted it. “The chalice,” she repeated.

  A sense of knowing flooded through me, and with it, the fluttering of hope. As the knowledge came, the vision of my mother faded away.

  I felt cool hands on my cheeks, and heard Terix’s voice, cracking in grief. “No, don’t go. Nimia! No!”

  I peeled open my eyes to find his face hovering above mine. “Wine. Honey,” I rasped.

  “Oh, gods. It’s me, Nimia. It’s Terix.” A tear spilled out his eye and plopped on my nose.

  “Stop crying. I need you.”

  “I need you, too.” He clasped my hand in both of his and brought it to his cheek, cradling it there.

  I pinched him.

  “Ow! Nimia!”

  “Wine. Honey. Send for it, Terix. Now!”

  I saw his confusion, and he hesitated for a moment, but then sent Polina to do as I had bid. I rested my eyes while we waited for her return. Terix tried once to speak, and I raised my hand to stop him. “If you love me, do as I ask. No strength to explain.”

  A few minutes later Polina was back with the wine and honey. I had Terix send her from the room, bolt the door, and then find the crystal bowl in my chest and bring it to me.

  “Help me sit up.”

  Terix put his arms around me and pulled me upright, propping pillows behind me to keep me there. He did it with ease, and the thought drifted through my mind that he had grown and filled out in the past year: he was looking less like a boy and more like a man. The fear and desperation on his face, however, were those of a child about to be abandoned.

  I tapped my lap. “Bowl.”

  Terix lifted it onto my thighs.

  “Honey.” I guided his hand to pour a pool into the bottom of the bowl, then waved him aside. I reached into the bowl and sank a finger into the honey, at the center of the carved labyrinth. Words I didn’t understand flowed from my lips as I dragged my honey-coated finger from the center and along the path of the labyrinth, re-dipping my finger in the pool when it dried and stuck. Around and around my finger went, walking the path and coating it with honey. In my ears came the distant buzzing of a thousand bees.

  When I reached the end, I called for wine. “Pour it in. Yes. Enough.” I looked at Terix. “Blood.”

  His brows drew down. “Blood?”

  “Few drops. Yours will do.”

  His lips parted, but he looked in my eyes and something he saw there silenced him. Judging by the hum in my ears, I guessed that my eyes had turned to flaming copper, as they always did when a vision gripped me.

  He took the dagger from his waist and cut his forearm, then held the wound above the bowl to catch the drips. The blood fell into the wine, and more unknown words spilled from my lips as a golden haze suffused my vision.

  “Help me drink.”

  He did as I asked without question, lifting the heavy chalice to my lips and tilting it until the blood, wine, and honey flowed into my mouth. The taste was bittersweet as I gulped it down, not stopping for breath until the chalice was empty.

  I let my head fall back, then gestured at the chalice. “Wash. Hide again.”

  While he did so, I closed my eyes and turned my attention inward. The stinging in my gut was transforming into heat, intensifying and spreading outward into my tissues. It felt like a fire kindling inside me, small at first, then growing as it consumed the flesh around it. The soothing warmth quickly grew into a burning conflagration and my body became a pyre, roasting the soul trapped within.

  The scorching went past pain, beyond being, and I lost all sense of my body. All I knew was a deafening buzz of bees, a brilliant yellow light, and an all-consuming heat as if I’d been thrown into the sun.

  Time vanished; all was heat and hum and light.

  And then, like the sun going down, the light dimmed and the heat faded, and then the buzzing went, too. I began to hear again. Someone was pounding on the door, and Terix was shouting, “Not until Nimia says so!”

  I opened my eyes to find Terix on the bed with me, rocking me against his chest, and behind him the angry face of Clovis as he climbed through the wide window from the garden. The pounding on the door went on, with voices offering all manner of threats.

  “Silence!” I cried.

  The vigor of my voice stopped everyone. Terix’s arms around me stiffened; Clovis froze with one leg still out the window; the pounding ceased.


  That was better. As was I, apparently. I felt no pain, no weakness, no fever. I felt better than I could remember feeling since before I was pregnant.

  I gently disentangled myself from Terix, sat up, and brushed my sweat-dampened hair away from my face. I sniffed. Gods, the room stank.

  Terix gaped at me, his hazel eyes round.

  “Not a word to anyone about the bowl,” I whispered to him. “On your life.”

  He nodded.

  In a normal tone, I said, “Now do me a great kindness and send for food. I’m starving.”

  Terix scrambled off the bed and went to open the door. His movement unfroze Clovis, who finished coming through the window and stood staring at me, as blank-faced with shock as Terix had been.

  “Hello, darling,” I said. “Be a dear and bring me my son, won’t you?”

  Baby Theo—short for Theodoric—lolled on a blanket in the sunshine of the courtyard garden, while Audofleda sat in the creeping thyme beside him and wove a flower chain garland to drape upon his head. Terix played tug-of-war with his finger in Theo’s hand, and Bone Cruncher’s brown eyes flicked between the three, his happy panting pausing only when he dipped his head to lick Theo’s black hair.

  I lounged on a narrow couch in the shade, a few feet away. Basina sat near me, picking favorites from a plate of sweetmeats and nuts.

  My miraculous recovery was two weeks past, and the shock of the household had begun to fade, forced into the past by the demands of everyday life. But a remnant of awe remained, and I could guess what the servants and slaves—my former fellow workers in this household, when it had belonged to Sygarius—were saying about me. This recovery, plus my playing the role of seer for Clovis while in Tornacum, would have them thinking me a sorceress and holding their fingers in the shape of horns when I turned my back, to ward off the evil eye.

  I didn’t regret the perception of power, be it true or false, but I did regret the further distance I felt between myself and others. I was no longer of them . . . though in truth I had barely been of them, even when a slave myself. Sygarius’s attention had always set me apart, and I had set myself apart as well, for I had known I was somehow different from other people.