by Lisa Cach
“Looks like we’re staying here,” I said.
“But who’s our lucky host?”
The answer came a moment later, when a plain, square-faced girl of about fourteen came out, hurriedly tying off her long brown braid with a strip of leather. She squinted at the daylight and had a crease in her cheek; she must have been stirred from sleep. She wore a long tunic of bile-yellow and brown plaid, given its only shape by the broad leather belt at her waist from which hung a knife in its sheath, a metal object of some sort, and several small leather pouches. She was barefoot.
“Good morning,” she said softly in Latin, barely able to look at us.
“Good morning,” Terix and I said in unison.
“Speak a little Latin,” she said with a shy smile. She peeped up under her strikingly thick eyebrows at Terix, then looked quickly away, her cheeks blossoming with color. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling; young girls always fell for him. “My grandmother teaches me. My name is Daella.”
We introduced ourselves in turn, including Bone, who took to her at once, leaning against her as she scratched the base of his ear. She examined the wound on his haunch with a light touch and then, with a renewal of blushing and shy glances, unfastened the belt from Terix’s thigh to see the damage. “Grandmother and I . . . help,” she said, gesturing into the house. “You,” she said, pointing to me, “take care of animals?”
“Yes, I’ll see to them.”
With much fluttering of her hands and grimaces of apology, she made Terix sit on a bench beside the front door and dashed back inside, where we could hear her talking to someone—her grandmother, apparently. I unloaded our belongings beside Terix, then saw to the animals’ needs behind the house, and by the time I came back around to the front, Daella and an elderly woman were bent over Terix’s thigh.
“This good woman is Marri,” Terix said through clenched teeth, nodding his head toward the crone.
Marri glanced up at me and nodded, her dark eyes bright and bold in a face as wrinkled as a withered apple. Her white hair was tied back in an elaborate braid that looped upon itself in a knot, then hung down her back to her buttocks; she looked to have slept in it, for long, wiry strands stood out at odd angles. She was dressed in the same style as Daella, only her plaid was gray and muted green, and she wore leather drawstring shoes on her feet. Despite her simple dress and mad hair, she had a powerful presence.
“If you will wash the dog’s wound,” she said, “I’ll tend him next.”
Daella pointed me to a bucket of water that smelled of herbs, and I called Bone and did as Marri bade, all the while watching surreptitiously as Marri muttered over Terix’s leg. Her back was hunched with age, but her movements were as quick as a bird’s. When she took a thick bone needle to Terix’s flesh, I met his gaze and held it.
He was suffering this pain because he’d come with me to Britannia. Guilt washed over me. He saw it and shook his head. “Not your fault,” he mouthed. I saw shadows of emotion pass over his face and guessed at the thoughts he had. He was blaming himself for our getting lost and being attacked by Mordred and his men.
“Not your fault,” I mouthed back, and knew it wasn’t enough. Terix was changing. The fun-loving youth was giving way to a man who felt it his duty to protect those he loved and who measured himself against the fighting prowess of other men. Today he found himself lacking. He and Bone had the same self-loathing droop to their expressions, along with their similar wounds.
Had he always been this way, measuring himself against free men? It made me wonder if he’d fled from Sygarius’s household only because of our friendship or if he had been longing for the chance to go out into the world and discover who he could become.
I felt the threat of impending loss, wondering how long it would be before Terix decided he would rather follow his own path than tag along on mine. It would be selfish to ask him to stay with me if he yearned to go elsewhere. Would I ever be willing to follow him?
I dropped my gaze from his, feeling unworthy of his devotion. No, I wouldn’t follow him, at least not now. My own need for self-discovery was too strong.
Marri made swift work of the wounds, and a short time later, we were settled in the house, Terix and I sharing a wobbly bench as Daella stirred a kettle of porridge over the hearth in the center of the dirt floor. Smoke filled the rafters hung with herbs, yarn, and meat, then seeped out an opening in the thatch. Sleeping pallets had been rolled up and tucked aside, and the rest of the space was taken up with shelves full of roughly made pottery jars, a loom, and a narrow worktable. The only light came from that small hole in the roof and the open door.
It was an astonishingly primitive home. I felt as if I was seeing five hundred years into the past, before the Celts of Briton and Gaul had been conquered. Why would any people who had seen the comforts of Roman-style homes choose to live like this? It must be a misery in the rain, with that hole in the roof and a dirt floor.
Marri must have seen my thoughts on my face. She sat on a low stool across the fire, grinning with her remaining yellow pegs of teeth. “You wonder why a woman who speaks as a Roman does not live as one.”
My cheeks flushing, I admitted to my curiosity with a nod. “I wonder at all we have seen during our journey. The Romans seem to have left very little influence from their centuries here, beyond their roads.”
“Their influence is felt more strongly in some places than others.”
Daella set out a wooden bowl of boiled duck eggs and gave us spoons with which to share the porridge in the kettle.
Marri rolled an egg between her hands, the shell crackling, and started to peel it. “My father and his father, and his father before him, had long been in the service of the Romans, keeping the healing waters flowing at Aquae Sulis. When the Romans left, my father was one of many who tried to keep civilization flowing smoothly along familiar lines, like the waters in the baths; and they did, for many years. But without the money of Rome . . .” She shrugged and took a bite of the egg. “No free man repairs a road or digs a latrine without pay. Ideals come second to hunger, and they had their own fields to plow.”
“Yet you taught Latin to your granddaughter.”
“It is the language of the civilized. Few here learn it, but it can be useful elsewhere. A woman needs as many skills as she can learn, yes?” She gave me a knowing look.
I nodded as if I understood, but I was more interested in the implications about life at Tannet Fortress.
“In Gaul,” Marri said, “you earned your keep as singers, dancers?”
Terix answered, “We were musicians and actors, yes. But slaves in a Roman household. When the Franks took control, we were freed. And so we have come here, to seek Nimia’s family.”
“You are a Briton?” Daella asked me, her shyness forgotten as she gaped at me in disbelief.
“I don’t think I’m a Briton, but I may be kin to a man named Maerlin.”
Daella gasped. Marri blinked and set down the remains of her egg.
“You’ve heard of him,” Terix said, and sent me a sidelong glance full of meaning. What have you gotten us into?
Marri wet her lips and spoke carefully. “Why do you think you may be kin?”
I tried to judge how much it was safe to say. I liked Marri, with her bright eyes and wild white hair, and her self-confidence made me want to sit at her feet and tell her everything. It was clear that she was the healer in this hill fort and that she was educated more than most, given her Latin. Could I assume that she was trustworthy for me, with my strange powers and troubled past?
No. I could give her some of the truth, though. “I hear Maerlin is of my tribe, the Phanne. And that he carries marks such as mine.” I lifted the hem of my gown to show the edge of the spiral tattoos on my thighs. “My mother put these upon me as a child.”
Marri leaned forward to see better and traced the edge
of a spiral with a dry, crooked finger. She sat back and nodded, her expression wary of me now. “Maerlin carries marks much the same.”
I sat forward. “You know him?”
She lifted a hand in a quick denial, as if to ward off an evil accusation. “I saw him only once. Here, at Tannet. I saw the spirals on his neck and arms.”
“What sort of man is he? Mordred seems not to like him.”
Marri cackled. “Mordred fears him as he fears little else.”
“Why?”
“Because Mordred is a Celt, and Maerlin is a druid. Every Celt fears a druid.”
“A druid? But I thought they were no more?” And my mother—surely she had not been a druid? Druids were Celtic, not Phanne. I was confused.
“The old ways are not dead, for all that the Romans tried to destroy them. The Isle of Mona lives.”
“What do you mean?” My heart began to race. Was it a stronghold for those with powers? Maybe my mother . . .
“No more than I say.” Her eyes rested on Daella. “Once it would have been a choice for women such as us. But not now.”
“Why not?”
She shook her head, her mouth tightening. “It is not what it was.” She reached her spoon into the kettle and ate.
I was frustrated but sensed that Marri would tell us no more about the Isle of Mona, at least not today. “Mordred said Maerlin did bad things.”
The words hung in the smoky air. Marri didn’t look at me, focusing instead on her food. She seemed no more willing to explain about Maerlin than she was about the Isle of Mona.
“Please, Marri. I do not know the man. You would do me a great service by saying what you know of him, before I chase him down and claim kinship.”
She scowled. “I hear only rumors and cannot speak to their truth.”
“Rumors start for a reason.”
“Gah!” She tossed her spoon into the kettle with a clatter and crossed her arms, glaring at me. “It is said that he sacrificed an infant to gain the power to speak to the dead.”
I sucked in a breath. “Surely not!”
“But if so?”
“Then I could never call him kin.”
“It is said he calls up storms to smash the ships that would trade in Mordred’s ports.”
I saw the kraken in all her wet, tentacled glory. Had I calmed the seas, or had she? Could I also rouse the waters? So this feat of Maerlin’s I could not discount.
“It is said he fornicates with she-animals—pigs, goats, wolves, wildcats—so that they will bear his young and that he sends these monsters to devour the livestock of his enemies.”
My brows drew down in doubt. If men created monsters by such acts, then there would be thousands of half-human creatures running around, most of them looking like bewildered sheep. Unless one had to be a druid to get his seed to set . . .
“It is said that no woman willingly goes to his bed, for he is perverse beyond all nature. He practices such depravities upon them that they are forever ruined for normal men.”
“What kinds of depravities?”
“All one hears is that the women’s minds and bodies are never the same afterward.”
I dropped my gaze to the kettle of porridge as if it could help me make sense of this. Was any of it true?
Was all of it true?
We sat in silence until it grew uncomfortable, and then Terix cleared his throat. “Why were Mordred and his warriors hunting in the night?”
His question broke the tension. Daella rolled her eyes and made a face and muttered something in Brittonic. Marri shushed her, which earned another eye roll from Daella.
“They were pretending to be a Wild Hunt,” Marri said, “to scare Saxons.”
Terix and I both gaped at her. Mordred and his men dressed up in costumes to gallop around the countryside pretending to be ghosts?
Daella snorted. “My brother,” she said, and made a face. “Idiot.”
“Daella’s brother is one of Mordred’s warriors,” Marri explained. “They much enjoy these Wild Hunts and raiding under the guise of Woden.”
“We’re close to Saxon lands?” Terix asked.
Marri nodded. “To the east. Horsa’s land is like a wedge between Mordred and Ambrosius Aurelianus to the north. It’s rich land, controlled by a Saxon named Horsa. Horsa would live in peace, but how can a man do so when his land is fertile and his neighbors greedy?”
“What good can scaring the Saxons with a Wild Hunt do?” I asked. “What type of warfare is that, dressing in costumes and blowing horns?”
“Painting the dogs,” Daella added. “White bodies, red ears.”
“It’s insane,” I said, and then remembered that in my vision, the stag had had a white hide and red antlers.
“Is it?” Marri said. “Horsa has no sons, but he has a daughter, Wynnetha, ready to be wed. Mordred wishes to be Horsa’s son-in-law, and the Wild Hunt may speed the event. A nervous, frightened man will seek alliances.”
I pitied Horsa’s daughter, to end up with a trickster like Mordred as a spouse.
“Mordred sounds like Clovis, the Frankish king,” Terix said.
I opened my mouth to disagree, then shut it. What could I say? Compared with Clovis’s murderous plots, Mordred’s Wild Hunt was no more than a mischievous prank. Painting dogs and riding with antlers on one’s head? My lips quirked. It was the act of energetic youths with too much free time and wine and too few women. Where was the harm?
At the moment, I was more worried about Maerlin and what sort of man he might be.
Mordred, I was confident, would pose us no problem at all.
It was said that the cithara, the eleven-stringed lyre-like instrument that I played, had a sound of such sweetness that it could bring the most callous of warriors to tears. As I plucked the strings and listened to the boasts and hollering of Mordred’s warriors in his large round house and watched the depravities they visited on their women, however, I had to think that the cithara had lost its magic crossing the Britannic Sea. Or perhaps Celts, being a more ancient people than the Romans, were attuned to a more primitive music.
When I stopped, though, the women pleaded for more. I guessed I was a welcome distraction from their lives. The men seemed happy to leer at an unfamiliar female and imagine treating me as they did their own women. It was a wonder they could see me at all, given the smoke from the central hearth, their eyes bleary from drink, and the frequency with which they had their faces lost in the hair or breasts of the unwilling women they were fucking in the not-very-private shadows.
Unwilling might not be the right word, I thought, my gaze sliding to a couple nearby. A man had pulled down the neckline of a woman’s gown and was roughly pawing her breast. Annoyed, resigned, or—the lady saw me watching, met my eyes for a sorrowful moment, and turned her face away—ashamed.
Though the Britons’ blood didn’t warm to the cithara, they hadn’t been able to get enough of Terix and his bawdy stories. With the help of Daella and Marri, we’d discovered that afternoon that Gaulish did indeed share much with the Brittonic tongue. While Daella’s face burned red and she laughed herself to tears, Terix had teased and cajoled Marri until she shared every filthy word he’d need to narrate his stories. The cruder the word, the better. His foreign accent while saying their roughest words for cock, balls, sex, and cunny was enough to set even reserved Marri to giggling like a naughty girl.
Telling stories was thirsty work, especially when you needed pantomime to fill the spaces where you had no words in either Brittonic or Gaulish. Girls with shining eyes and swaggering young boys had jumped to fill Terix’s ceramic tankard with musty, sweet mead whenever he waved it. Terix’s success had been his eventual undoing, however, and he had passed out on a fur-covered bench, half-propped against one of the many timber support pillars that stood in a circle several feet in from the sto
ne walls. Though these pillars were smooth and round and made of warm, waxed wood, I could not help but be reminded of the circle of dark, cold stones standing silent in the moonlight and mist.
I did not much like Britannia, so far.
It wasn’t only that so much was unfamiliar. I had a sense of forces—old forces and old ways—moving just beneath the surface of life. The skin between the past and the present seemed thinner here than in Gaul, and it made me uneasy. I found myself staring into shadows, certain there were eyes I could not see, looking back.
Some eyes did not hide. I’d felt Mordred watching me all evening, and glancing now to my left, I saw him sprawled in his broad wood chair covered in furs, one of his legs dangling over the chair’s arm, his head lolling against the back carved with oak leaves and deer. For all his indolence, his half-closed eyes were focused on me, and I saw speculation in his gaze.
He was handsome in a brutish way, with a heavy brow and jaw and brown hair that grew in unruly waves to his shoulders. As with all his men, a long, thick mustache clung to his upper lip like a fainting ferret. Only slightly taller than average, he had an impressive physical presence because of his thick, muscular limbs and torso. He’d probably grow a belly when he was older, but for now, in his early thirties, he looked as powerful as a bull and twice as ornery.
I’d been watching Mordred, too, and was beginning to get a sense of him. His people were cautious near him, and the women avoided eye contact, scurrying away as soon as they’d served him. He’d cheered when two youths started to brawl, then reacted with snarling violence when one of them stumbled against him, jostling his hand as he was raising his drink to his lips. As quickly as the anger had come, it was replaced by laughter when a woman bent over to pick something up and he took the chance to swat her plump behind, knocking her off balance and sending her to her knees.