by Lisa Cach
Had I seen what I thought I had?
Doubt flickered through me. I did not believe in gods and goddesses, however often I might send up prayers to them. Maybe the kraken and all those sea creatures with their eager mouths had come from my own twisted mind. I had been in the throes of a vision, surrounded by my golden swarm, which meant anything could happen . . . even spreading my legs for a dolphin cock.
I forced a smile. “Your goddess’s beauty is beyond mortal comprehension.”
“I knew it.”
I dropped down onto a bench at the stern. Bone had risen and was looking over the gunwale at the gentle waves, thinking his dog thoughts. I scritched the base of his tail, making his hips lower in pleasure and one foot lift to pretend to scratch his side.
Terix stirred and sat up, his dark curls a tangled mess, stiff with sea salt. He looked around in wonder at the moonlit sea. “We lived through it?”
My loins were warm and relaxed with sated desire, my limbs weak with the passing of terror. I had sung; I had heard my golden swarm and seen not only a sea goddess (perhaps) but a vision of a white stag and a golden bear that I could not yet understand. The gray lethargy that had clouded my mind had been blown away with the storm.
“Yes, Terix. We are alive.”
It’s too dangerous.”
“We cannot be your passengers forever, Jax.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Protective? You?” I teased. We were in a small fishing village on the north coast of the peninsula known as Dumnonia, in Britannia. Terix held the reins to our mounts, drowsy donkeys well beyond the sprightliness of youth. They were the best Jax had found along the coast, and we counted ourselves lucky to get them, given how sparsely populated the shore was. We would ride them inland, along an old Roman road.
“You know nothing of these Britons. Savages, the lot of them. I feel like Charon, delivering you to Hades,” Jax groused.
“You have delivered me from Hades back into the world of the living. This is where I need to be, Jax, and I refuse to believe anything bad will happen to us before I find Maerlin.”
“And after?”
“I never took you for a worrier.”
“It’s not worry. It’s my nose for survival, telling me your odds are not worth taking.”
“I have Terix for protection.”
Jax cast a glance over Terix, who, though tall and armed with a sword, still looked a fresh-faced youth more inclined to laugh over a cup of mead than slit anyone’s throat. Which he was. “Goddess help you,” Jax breathed.
“And I have Bone.”
He tilted his head in acknowledgment. “The dog is worth five of the boy.”
I disagreed but wouldn’t argue. With Britannia at last under our feet, I was eager to be on our way. “Thank you, Jax, for all your help.”
“I owed you a debt.”
“Which you’ve repaid in full.”
“I still don’t like it, leaving you here.”
I laughed, and while my mouth was open, he bent down and kissed me, his arm going around my waist to pull me close. It was a passionate kiss but brief; he let me go again before I’d had a chance to enjoy it.
“To remember me by,” he said.
“As if I could forget?”
He touched my cheek and smiled, and for a moment I saw something wistful in his pirate eyes. Then he was turning away, and I knew it was good-bye. I let him go, watching his narrow-hipped swagger back toward the shore, and wondered if I’d ever see him again.
“I thought he’d never leave,” Terix said, leading the donkeys to me. “I’ll never look at Jax without feeling his cursed boat rocking beneath me. Promise me, Nimia, that we’ll never go to sea again.”
“You want to live out your days in Britannia?”
He made a show of looking about him at the few little rough, round stone houses interspersed with fishing nets hanging in disrepair and boat carcasses being scavenged for wood; a winding, narrow track of mud that served as a street; fish guts and human waste with their stench; and a few scraggly cats and geese, looking for food. A woman of unknown age sat on a bench outside her hovel, her hair, skin, eyes, and gown all of a color lost somewhere between gray and brown; she might have been carved from driftwood. “It looks like a fun place.”
“Pleasant climate, too.” I adjusted my lambskin cloak over my shoulders. Autumn was upon us, chill and gray, and a fine drizzle was drifting down from the clouds.
Terix helped me up onto my donkey, checked that the lead to our pack donkey was secured to his saddle, then mounted his own. Bone dashed ahead, and we followed him along the track out of the village and up a ravine cut by a stream. Small trees and bushes softened the landscape along our route until we emerged onto the gently rolling land above. This close to the coast, the winds had scoured the land of all but low grasses and tough little leathery plants. The sharp air bit at my cheeks.
In past ports, Jax had helped us buy the clothes and supplies we would need to travel across the land, and we were ready to spend our nights outdoors. We did not count on finding friendly strangers willing to offer a space beside their fire; I wasn’t certain we’d even have the words to ask. The well-born Britons could speak Latin, Jax had told us, as could traders in the busier ports, but among the common folk they spoke their own Brittonic tongue. He said it was similar to Gaulish, which both Terix and I could speak somewhat, as several of the older slaves in Sygarius’s household had been Gauls uncomfortable with Latin. It had been easier for us to learn their words than for them to force their aged and stubborn tongues around ours.
Jax also warned us that the Britons had no love of strangers. The Irish raided from the west, the Picts from the north, and the Saxons from the east. A foreign face meant a face bent on theft, rape, abduction, and murder.
I hoped that Terix and I looked friendly and harmless but not so harmless that we’d be robbed, raped, or murdered.
Staying out of sight was the easiest path to safety but impossible while trying to cross unfamiliar territory to an uncertain destination. Jax had ferreted out more information on Maerlin for us: he was in the household of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Briton whose lands lay a few days’ travel inland, northeast of our landing spot. The Roman road we should stumble upon shortly would lead us to a crossroads; from the crossroads we’d go north and end up in Aurelianus’s territory.
Given his name, I guessed that Aurelianus’s family had been Romanized Britons, either soldiers or bureaucrats working with the Romans before they left this isle some seventy-five years earlier. The name gave me hope that we’d find civilization here, not an endless wild land filled with lawless brutes. I had no love of Romans, but they did maintain order and get things done. At the moment, looking at this alien territory with its unknown dangers, that sounded comforting.
“This must be the road,” Terix said, reining to a halt.
I drew up beside him and looked down at the stones barely visible through the grass and weeds. The road stretched off to the west, toward the coast; to the east, it rose into hills covered in forest turned rust and yellow with the season. “It doesn’t look like anyone uses it.”
“No reason to, I suppose. Where would they be going?”
I nodded. The roads had been built to move Roman soldiers and their supplies quickly, across long distances, in as straight a line as possible. They weren’t meant for peasants who might never step beyond the valley where they were born and who would prefer to follow meandering footpaths that had been trod into the earth over centuries by man and beast.
“It’s unsettling, how quickly the plants and dirt have taken over,” I said. “Another fifty years, and it’ll be buried and forgotten.”
“It will be as if the Romans were never here at all.”
I shivered. “I feel like I’m looking at the future. Gaul might look like this soon. “
“Never!” Terix said, feigning shock. “Clovis loves road maintenance. He’d far rather spend his coin and energy on them than go to war.”
I grinned. “Pah! He’d rather survey the aqueducts and make lists of repairs.”
“Don’t forget the public latrines. The man loves them so much he ought to live in one. Then we could call him Prince Shithead.”
I howled. Poking fun at my former lover lightened the weight on my heart. I had to move on from Clovis, but it would be hard work to douse the coal of yearning that burned inside me for him. My mind knew he had treated me badly, but my heart couldn’t yet understand and kept expecting him to come chasing after me, begging forgiveness, declaring his love and undying devotion. My heart couldn’t understand that Clovis wasn’t all that I’d thought him to be—that he’d never been.
He had never pretended to be, though. He hadn’t lied to me, but I’d lied to myself.
My mind had dragged body and soul to Britannia. My heart, however, wept in a corner and dripped its wretched thoughts on me in the lonely hours of the night. Give him another chance. He does love you, and he’s the father of your child. Go back to him. Go back, before he forgets you and falls in love with his new bride. Yes, he’s ruthless, but what choice does he have? A king has to make terrible choices, and you’re weak if you can’t stand by him through it. If you were stronger, you would have stayed with him. You wouldn’t have run away.
Dawn was a relief. The light of day sent such treacherous ideas scurrying back into the pit from whence they’d crawled. During the day, I could feel the first stirrings of anger at Clovis, which felt better than the heart-twisting doubts and loneliness of night.
“I don’t think we should ride on the road,” I said. “Too conspicuous.”
Terix nodded. “And too predictable. Anyone could set up an ambush miles ahead of us.”
The roads in Gaul were notorious for such ambushes, and I couldn’t think that Britannia would be different. “Riding overland will be slower, but I’d rather not pit Bone and your sword against bandits.”
He gasped. “Have you no faith in me?”
“Of course—” I started, alarmed that I’d insulted his manly pride, but he interrupted me with a chortle.
“I’ve no doubt Bone and I could take a bandit . . . if he was underfed, leprous, and missing a leg.” His jovial expression faded. “Though I was trained to fight with the Franks, it wasn’t enough. Warriors start practicing with a toy sword as soon as they learn to walk. As soon as I could walk, I was being taught to serve food to Romans.”
I reached over and took his hand. We’d been slaves together, and his lost childhood was also mine. “Given the choice, would you have wanted to be a warrior?”
He grinned, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “And waste this fine wit on a soldier’s filthy life?”
“Plus, you’d have fewer chances to seduce serving girls.”
“Or noble matrons bored with their noble husbands.” He squeezed my hand and let it go. “I only regret that I’m not better able to protect you.” He looked around at the empty landscape and at the wooded hills that could conceal so much. “It scares me.”
It scared me, too. I’d faced enough violence to know how suddenly it could strike and destroy a life. We had chosen to be here, though, risks and all. Dwelling on the worst that could happen would not get us to Maerlin any faster. We would keep the road in distant sight—we needed it to find our way—and take our time to stay as hidden as we could. An extra couple of days’ travel was worth it, for safety.
“Tell me a funny story to keep me from thinking of bandits,” I said, and kicked my donkey into motion.
“I don’t think you’ve heard the one about the emperor’s son and the nanny goat, have you?”
I shook my head, and Terix began his tale, making it up as he went along, I was sure. He had a talent for that, and I was selfishly glad that he’d been with me as he grew up, rather than swinging a sword. My life would have had so much less laughter without him.
Stories weren’t going to be enough to keep us safe, though, as we learned a few days later.
We were lost.
All had seemed to go well enough for two days, but then a fog had settled down into the forest while we slept, and when we awoke we went the wrong way and lost the road.
We reassured each other that sooner or later the fog would lift, and sooner or later we would come upon a Roman road running along a ridgeline. We kept on through the forest, following animal tracks up and down slopes and crossing trickling streams, though with each step of the sturdy donkey, I felt doubts rise higher within me.
Once, we heard the distant baaing of sheep; at another point, my heart leapt into my throat as a snarling dog lunged out of the mist. Bone sent him on his yipping way with his tail low and a torn ear.
Whose land were we crossing? What people were they? We might stumble into a village before we knew it was there, and how would they treat strangers who could not speak their tongue?
Maybe we were going in circles and would never cross a road. It was an eerie land we were lost in, the tree bark black with damp and the withered yellow leaves falling to the sodden earth like reminders of death. In sunlight, it might have been beautiful; in fog, it felt as if we wandered through the realm of ghosts.
And then, when my panic was chilling me far more than the dampness that had seeped through my clothing, we found the road.
At least, it looked like the same road.
We stayed much closer to it this time and continued on our way. Every sixteen or seventeen miles, we passed the ruins of Roman way stations, half their stones missing. The locals had doubtless taken them for their own use.
A day later, we reached a crossroads. If there had once been a Roman mile marker giving the names of routes, it was gone. We turned left. The forest canopy obscured the sun; we cast no shadows and couldn’t tell which way was east, which was west. But if we’d been heading east, then left should take us north.
We came to several more crossroads, passing straight through them; although, with each crossroads passed, I grew more uncertain that we were going in the right direction. Each crossroads offered a decision that may have gone wrong. Terix was not more confident than I, but neither of us was yet ready to seek out a Briton to ask.
On our sixth day of travel, we came down off the hills and started to cross a wide, flat valley; as we came out from under the trees, we saw that our fears were accurate, and we had been headed east, not north. Terix let loose a string of curses involving pig anatomy and priests, while I sat with the donkey’s reins slack in my hands and tried not to weep. I was cold, damp, and exhausted, and our food was running low. I was growing frightened that we’d wander these misty wilds for eternity, like spirits of the dead.
We chose to leave the road and head to the northwest, and as the sun lowered toward the horizon, we caught a hint of woodsmoke on the air. The scent was comforting, speaking of a warm fire with family gathered around for an evening meal, and also alarming: we knew we were far from Maerlin, the only person on this isle who might welcome us. People lived nearby, but who or where they were we had not discovered by the time darkness began to fall. The cursed fog was returning, too, and we decided to make camp.
“There’s a ruin of some sort over there,” Terix said, pointing through the growing mist.
I could just make out the shadows of a structure. It would give some small protection from the night, and as we were now miles from the road, we needn’t fear being set upon by bandits as we slept. “If there’s a flat space inside free of roots and rocks, I’ll count it the softest bed in Britannia.”
The structure was farther off than it had looked; we realized it was no ruined cottage but something much larger. The moon illuminated the fog with gray-white light, and as we drew closer, we realized what it was.
Standing ston
es.
We’d seen them once in Gaul: a circle of stones, placed by unknown people in the past, perhaps as a temple to worship a god. But those stones looked like children’s toys compared with these.
Rough rectangular stones three times my height loomed out of the mist. Across some of their tops, yet more stones stretched, turning them into immense gallows. Some had toppled, their impossible weight lying at pained angles like fallen soldiers. The mist drifted between the silent rocks, caressing them like old lovers.
We drew our mounts to a halt at the edge of a wide ditch that surrounded the circle, and without us looking at each other, I reached out my hand and found his, already seeking mine. Bone whimpered. Terix and I stared at the stones and felt ourselves in a place that touched between this world and the next. A shiver shuddered up the back of my neck and across my scalp.
“Sleeping out in the open suddenly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea,” Terix said.
“They’re just rocks,” I said, trying to convince myself.
Terix snorted.
“I don’t believe in ghosts and gods,” I insisted, letting go of his hand and nudging my donkey forward. It wouldn’t go, so I dismounted and led it down the bank of the ditch. Bone whined, then followed.
“Nimia . . .”
I knew Terix well, though. He’d rather be with me and Bone inside the unsettling circle than alone outside it in the dark and mist. He dismounted and followed.
There was a second ring of stones inside the first, and at the center of it all was a stone laid on the ground that looked to be an altar or dais. The eeriness of the stones continued to make my skin prickle, and I didn’t know if it was out of a sense of some otherworldly power or my imagination. I was too weary to think clearly, which in itself was answer enough for what we should do.
“We should spend the night here,” I said, and then went on over Terix’s groan. “Our fire will be better hidden from view; if we sleep out on the plain, we don’t dare build one.”