The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  I’d spent two years waiting to meet Maerlin, and traveling at an oxcart’s pace when he was finally so close was torment. I wanted to kick my heels into my mount and race ahead.

  “I’ve never met a Saxon,” Daella said, riding on a donkey beside me. Bone loped along nearby, occasionally running off to chase hares or roll in interesting smells. “I hear they’re tall and thin, with legs like birds, and that their heads are like this.” She held up her hands, palms facing each other, and pressed them together. “Their faces have no color, but their lips are red like blood.” She shuddered. “Animals from a bad dream.”

  “Are you afraid of them?”

  She shook her head, her jaw jutting. “I am a Briton! I fear no Saxon.” Her eyes then flashed to me, and I saw the uncertainty beneath the bravado.

  “I met some Saxons, on my way to Dumnonia. They seemed normal people to me, more interested in fishing and farming than in hurting anyone.”

  Daella nodded and put her hand on the knife at her waist. “They will not hurt me.”

  “You’re right. But . . . maybe a Saxon boy will think you are sweet enough to take home and keep forever as his wife,” I teased.

  “Ugh! That is . . . that is . . .” She held her stomach and mimicking vomiting.

  I laughed.

  Terix rode up beside me, smiling at our laughter. He’d been angry when I told him that we were going to take Daella away with us; I’d seen in his eyes the same fear of failing her that I had. He’d softened once I told him all that Marri had said, though, seeing that as fumbling and lost as we were, as vulnerable and desperate, we were still Daella’s best chance to find a better life.

  Daella herself had only started to sense that life at Tannet Fortress would not suit her. She didn’t have Marri’s larger perspective—how could she, at fourteen, and having never lived any other way?—and even now seemed to think that this was a grand adventure, after which she would return to her grandmother. Her tears upon parting from Marri had been wrenching, but they had not been the tears of permanent separation.

  I wouldn’t tell her that fate had a way of upsetting all one’s plans.

  Although I felt ages older than Daella, much more than the mere four or so years that separated us, most of the time I still felt like a child myself, worried about pleasing those who were older than me and uncertain of how to take hold of the reins of my life. When did one become fully adult, in charge of one’s fate?

  Did one ever?

  To our collective dismay, Daella’s brother, Uern, was also along on the journey, shadowing our every move from a distance. It was clear to Terix and me that Mordred had set him as a guard on us, albeit not an obtrusive one. It seemed Mordred was canny enough to keep his hold on the reins sufficiently loose that we might think we were free. Free people did not try to run away, whereas obvious restriction would turn our thoughts to escape.

  Though Uern did not value his sister, I thought he’d object to losing her to the “enemy,” be that me or Ambrosius Aurelianus. Marri had assured me that all would be well but hadn’t explained how that miracle was to occur.

  Ah, well. Terix and I would deal with that problem when we came to it. There was too much else to get through first.

  Neither Terix nor I could figure out what Mordred wanted from us; all we knew was that we had not been brought along out of the goodness of his heart. Then there was Maerlin. Was he the monster the rumors suggested? Was he kin to me or not? Would he take me under his wing?

  Would Mordred let him?

  There was too much that must be gotten through before we need worry about how to part Daella from her duck-wit brother.

  A murmur went through our train of riders and carts. Calleva was ahead.

  “It looks like a Roman town,” Terix said.

  I nodded. Calleva was surrounded by a wall in the Roman style, though there were un-Roman gaps and places where the stones had either tumbled or been pulled down. To the right of the road were the remains of an earthen amphitheater. I saw a sheep perched on it, watching us go by.

  No one manned the gates to the town—why would they, when there were holes in the wall?—and we passed through them without challenge.

  At my first glimpse of the town, I thought it had been sacked and burned to the ground. Rubble and litter were heaped in piles along roads that were more dirt than stone. Here and there, the foundation of a Roman wall or pillar poked up among the weeds and brush, and one half-demolished building still had part of a tiled roof—though there was grass growing on it, and I spied swallows’ nests tucked under the eaves.

  Scattered among the ruins were a few long, low timber houses somewhat like those I’d seen among the Franks, which housed cattle at one end and people at the other. I caught glimpses of the inhabitants—a woman, a few children—stopping their work to stare as we went by.

  A vegetable garden’s even rows stretched across what had once been a courtyard; a house’s foundations had become a pig pen; a Saxon house had taken advantage of the cleared surface of the road as a place to build and so blocked the way, forcing a detour down another street.

  “Why?” Terix asked softly, as disbelieving as myself.

  Daella asked, “Why what?”

  “Why don’t they use the Roman buildings?” I explained. “Why don’t they use the foundations and walls for their own homes? Why don’t they keep the wall in good repair?” We passed a dry fountain that once would have provided water to the inhabitants. Baths with no roof that would have bathed them. Crumbled latrines for their waste. I pointed it all out to Daella, who stared in puzzlement at the tumbled blocks of stone, not able to understand what they once had been.

  The Roman ruins were a welcome distraction from the anticipation that was making my stomach feel as if I’d drunk a goblet full of vinegar. My cheeks were flushed, my armpits damp; I smoothed my hair with my hand, knowing it would make no difference to my travel-worn appearance but helpless to stop myself.

  I might be meeting Maerlin mere moments from now.

  Our train of riders and carts drew to a halt in front of a rectangular great hall built of wood, with a high, peaked roof of thatch, out of which woodsmoke slowly seeped. The noise of our arrival drew the Saxons out through the immense carved double doors. Tens of them came forth, and forth, and forth, until at least eighty people milled in the dirt yard before the hall. Most of them definitely were Saxons, based on their garb, but a few wore the plaid of Britons.

  I searched through them all, seeking a male head of reddish-blond hair and spiral tattoos on a neck. Mordred and his warriors blocked much of my view, high on their tall horses, and even as they dismounted, the horses and carts still obscured my view.

  I also dismounted, only dimly aware of Terix speaking to Daella or of Mordred being greeted by a potbellied man who must be Horsa, with his fair-haired beauty of a daughter at his side. I pushed through Mordred’s men and horses and then, to one side, caught a flash of reddish hair.

  A cold flush went through me, followed by a wave of heat. My hands shook, and, blind to all else, I stumbled toward him—only to be brought up short by someone I’d never expected to see again stepping between me and my target.

  “Fenwig!” I gasped. He was one of Clovis’s warriors, who had once been assigned as my bodyguard.

  “My lady.” He nodded his head in greeting, his soldier’s mask of indifference slipping as a tight smile of satisfaction touched his lips.

  “What—what are you doing here?” I asked in Frankish.

  “I’ve come to take you home.”

  I shook my head, not believing this could be happening. “No.”

  “We leave on the morrow. With swift horses and willing winds, you’ll be back with Clovis inside a week.”

  “No!” All my plans, all my hopes, falling apart, breaking away. My future shattering before me.

  “Yes, my l
ady. Clovis wants you back, and I have pledged on my life that I will not fail him.”

  A deep, smooth voice spoke behind me. “Come, Fenwig. That wasn’t quite what we agreed.”

  I turned and looked up into the pale green eyes of Maerlin.

  They were the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, as pale and pure in their center as a new leaf in the spring and rimmed with the dark black-green of a pine. They slanted up at the corners and were thickly fringed with dark lashes; his brows were dark, too, slashing upward, their color at odds with the light hue of his short hair. He looked to be in his late twenties.

  I couldn’t judge if he was handsome, for the power of his presence threw such shallow considerations out the door. His attention was so intently focused on me that it was overwhelming. There was hunger in his gaze, both sexual and something else, something deeper and more personal.

  “Nimia,” he said, and I felt a thrumming vibration of recognition course through my soul, though I was certain I had never met him before.

  “Maerlin.”

  His eyes crinkled at the sound of his name, and a spark of light ignited inside them, making the green flare. “I have waited many years for this,” he said in Phannic, the language of my earliest childhood.

  My eyes welled with tears, to hear the tongue that I had last heard spoken by my mother.

  Maerlin tilted his head, his lips twitching into a wry smile. “Though I did not know until Fenwig arrived with his tale of Clovis’s Phannic woman that it was you I awaited. Do you have that which I seek?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. What do you seek?” I had wondered if it was me he sought and felt a flare of disappointment that I seemed to have been wrong.

  A quick, cold smile flexed his lips, and he seemed to retreat from me, though he did not move. The emotion and recognition were gone; so was the warmth. He looked past me to Fenwig. In Frankish, he said, “She is to go with you only if she wishes it.”

  “My lady, you do wish it, do you not?”

  Hurt by Maerlin’s subtle rejection, I rounded on Fenwig, and in my confusion, the pain and fury of the past two months erupted at him, boiling up from a deep well inside me. “I do not wish it. Why would I wish it? Do you think I came all the way to Britannia only to turn around and go back again? Does Clovis think I do not know my own mind? If I had wanted to be with Clovis, I would be with Clovis! I would not be here.”

  Fenwig’s head pulled back, and he blinked at me in surprise. “But . . . he wants you. Do you not want him?”

  “No!”

  He gaped at me and then shook his head as if to clear it. “I am sorry, my lady; I forgot. I was to tell you . . .” He squinted his eyes as he tried to remember. “I am to tell you that my lord apologizes for the need to marry the Christian Clotilde but that you are first in his heart.” Fenwig’s face colored as he said it, his gaze skittering away in embarrassment. He cleared his throat. “You will have your own villa, and Theo will be brought to live with you.”

  A cry escaped my throat. “Bastard,” I said softly. And then more loudly, “The bastard! To use my child as bait to lure me back!”

  “No, my lady! No! Clovis regrets separating you from Theo and makes this offer as an apology.”

  For one wild moment, my heart expanded, a vision of myself in my own home with Theo filling my imagination. And Clovis looking at me with love in his eyes . . . And that was where my imagination failed. He had never said he loved me, had never put my needs above his own. Every moment of attention, every action seemingly in my favor, had a hidden benefit to himself. Even when he’d tricked Remigius out of the crystal chalice so that I might have it, he’d done so more for the joy of making the priest suffer than for the joy of pleasing me.

  The chalice. I turned back and looked at Maerlin. That couldn’t be what he sought, could it? The chalice that had given me the power to twice rise from near-death?

  I stifled the impulse to blurt out the question. If Maerlin wanted it, then having it gave me power over him. Gods knew I could use all the leverage I could get against the men of this world. Maybe Maerlin was different—surely he had to be, being of my tribe?—but maybe he wasn’t. That quick closing of his face, from warm intensity to cold lack of interest, should serve as a warning to me.

  “I’ll think on Clovis’s offer,” I told Fenwig.

  When in doubt, stall for time.

  In Phannic, I said to Maerlin, “I have come to learn what you know of our tribe and if you know anything of my mother, Ligeia, from whom I was separated more than ten years ago. Do you know of her? Do you know if she yet lives?”

  “Ligeia?” he said in surprise.

  “You know her!”

  He shook his head, looking amused. “I know of one who might.”

  “Who? Where?” I barely kept from grabbing his arms and trying to shake it out of him.

  All he did was look at me, eyes traveling over my face, a secretive smile on his lips.

  “Nimia?” Terix said in soft question, approaching with Daella. Bone trotted up and leaned his great weight against my hip, his brown eyes flicking from Fenwig to Maerlin with as much suspicion as Terix’s.

  “It’s all right,” I said with false calm, and made introductions. I didn’t want Daella to be frightened. Putting on a brave face for her benefit was easier than doing it for myself.

  “I’ll leave you to get settled. We’ll talk later,” Maerlin said.

  Words leapt up my throat, and I caged them behind my teeth. This wasn’t the moment to ask all the questions that had built inside me for years. Maerlin gave Fenwig a look meant to send him on his way, too.

  Fenwig bowed his head to me. “My lady.”

  I nodded back, wondering at the orders Clovis had given him. If I did not wish to go with him, was he to take me anyway? I was suddenly glad of the lurking Uern, for he would be some protection against Fenwig.

  As the two men left, Terix wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me in to his side. I slowly relaxed against him, my muscles trembling.

  “I know of Maerlin. Who is Fenwig?” Daella asked.

  “An arm reaching out from the past,” I said. “A very long, very strong arm.”

  If I’d thought Mordred’s mode of living barbaric, I had no words for how the Saxons lived. Even farm animals had more privacy and cleaner air than were found in the great hall.

  It was one enormous space, down the center of which ran a long hearth continuously burning what appeared to be entire trees. Meals were cooked on it, hands warmed at it, garbage thrown into it. It provided the only light, save for what came through the doors

  At the far end of the hall lived Horsa, Wynnetha, and their servants. They ate there, slept there, bathed there, all within sight of the rest of the hall, which was filled with assorted relatives, dependents, and hangers-on, along with the general folk of Calleva, most of whom did not have separate homes. Meat hung from ropes strung between beams, turning black in the smoke. Clothing dried there, too.

  The floor bounced beneath our feet; it was made of loose, rough planks stretched across emptiness. Terix had surreptitiously lifted one, to find nothing beneath it but a space a foot and a half deep, serving no apparent purpose but to collect dirt, some old pots, and a single worn shoe in which mice were nesting.

  Families had been pushed aside to make room for Mordred and his retinue. We were all expected to sleep on the floor or benches with one another, which made me glad of my fleece-lined cloak. It was all the bedding I would get. Gods knew I didn’t need to wear it in the great hall, for the press of bodies and the incessant heat of the fire had set my sweat flowing.

  The housing might be rougher than expected, but the Saxons made a clear effort to be hospitable. To my and Terix’s relief, their tongue proved so similar to Frankish that we could understand one another without much difficulty, though the Britons had to resort to pantomime and
a few shared words of Latin. The Saxons brought us water for washing and platters heaped with simple fare to hold us until the later feast: sheep’s-milk cheese, tiny tart apples, and flat cakes of mixed grains and seeds. They gave us beer, too, a welcome change from the musty, sweet mead of the Britons.

  Terix, Daella, Bone, and I made our camp back by the wall, where the draft between the timber slats brought in thin rivers of cold, fresh air. Better to be chilled than to suffocate. I didn’t like leaving all our goods, including the hidden chalice, in an open room with so many people, but there was no way around it. I comforted myself that theft was unlikely, given the number of eyes in the hall.

  My own eyes scanned the murk, seeking again the brightness of Maerlin’s hair and also seeking the unknown Arthur. Either they weren’t in the hall, or the gloom was too thick to see them. I did see Mordred with Horsa and Wynnetha. He offered something small in his hand to the girl, and she scooped it up with delight. Mordred said something that made her smile and blush. I shook my head, hardly believing that he could so easily charm her.

  Perhaps Arthur really was a bear in comparison; maybe Mordred looked the better choice to innocent eyes.

  Terix and I left Daella under the watchful eye of Bone and her fellow Britons and went outside to stretch our legs and talk. Uern, lousy watchdog that he was, was too busy ogling a comely Saxon wench to notice when we walked out behind him; it was a good thing for him we didn’t intend to run. Instead, we wandered through the strange hybrid town, and I told Terix everything Fenwig and Maerlin had said.

  I started to cry when I told him about the offer to live with Theo. When I was done, he turned his worried, angry eyes on me.