The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  “And Constantinople, you’d want to come with me?”

  I realized then that this is what she’d intended all along. Sell her brother to Druce, end her mother’s life (or hope it came to its own inevitable conclusion), and take advantage of what must seem to her a rare opportunity: to have in her power a young, ignorant, yet potentially powerful Phannic woman. She’d never met a Phanne she couldn’t control, and would have no doubt of her ability to do the same with me. Even Maerlin had run from her when young, rather than stay within her reach.

  “I don’t know why you speak of making our fortunes in Constantinople,” I said.

  Tanwen raised a brow.

  “Gold and silver are easy enough to come by,” I went on, and flicked a fingertip against my silver goblet to show what I thought of it. “Tanwen, we could conquer the Eastern Roman Empire. Together we would be an unstoppable force.” I took on the role of persuader, hoping it would make my lies more believable. “We’d have the emperor prostrate before us, begging for our visions and the secrets of his enemies. I know I’m untrained and a bit . . . well, out of control, but with your guidance I could harness my powers, and together we could rule this miserable shit-smear of a world.” I was guessing she’d want me to think myself capable of being her equal, which, given her much greater powers, would make it easy for her to keep control of me. I wouldn’t rebel, if I had nothing to rebel against and thought myself her respected partner. Tanwen had her petty vanities, but her pride, I’d noticed, took a distant second to getting what she wanted. She was admirably pragmatic in that way, and all the more frightening for it.

  Tanwen breathed out a sound halfway between a sigh and a laugh. “You don’t know how relieved I am to hear you echo my very thoughts.”

  “When do we leave?”

  “I have a man at Fort Seiont who will send word when a suitable trading ship comes into port. There aren’t many at this time of year, but there are still a few willing to brave the winter seas. Better to risk a sea voyage than to go by land, and put ourselves at the mercy of barbarians.”

  “So it could be a week, it could be a month. We can send a message for my friend to meet us with the dog, at Fort Seiont. They’re good bodyguards, and I’d hate to travel without them.”

  Tanwen put on a worried frown. “We dare not delay for them. With winter closing in, we may only get one chance to leave. If your friend’s not there by the time we find a ship . . . ?”

  I knew then that she had no intention of sending a message to Corinium. She wanted to know if I was going to be stubborn, and make a problem of it when Terix was not at the fort to meet us. “I’ll leave a message saying where we’ve gone. He’ll catch up. It’s easier for a man to travel, than a woman. I’m not going to give winter a chance to trap me here.”

  Tanwen leaned forward and grasped my hands, sending a surge of warmth up my forearms. She beamed at me, her eyes twinkling. “Nimia, I am so happy. I feel as if the dreams of a hundred years are finally about to come true. You don’t know how I’ve longed to leave this place; it was only duty to my mother that kept me here. You and me, with a couple of acolytes to act as maids, and your friend and dog for protection: we’ll take on the world.”

  I squeezed her hands in return and gave my best faux smile, and wondered if Una was nearby listening, and taking note that her mother hadn’t said a word about bringing her along on this grand new adventure. “I’ll go write out my message,” I said. I released her hands and scrambled off the couch.

  “Nimia?”

  I turned, halfway to the door. “Yes?”

  “Best, perhaps, not to talk about our plans with the acolytes. Let me break it to them myself, once we know when we’ll be taking ship. With Mother’s death, they’ll be upset enough as it is.”

  “Of course. If we’re stuck here longer than we expect, we’ll still need them to perform well at the banquets. They won’t put their backs into it if they know we’re leaving, and every extra coin will make our way easier.”

  I had the pleasure of seeing Tanwen blank-faced with surprise at my apparent coldheartedness. It only lasted a moment before she broke into gales of laughter. “We’ll go far, you and I,” she said when she caught her breath. “We’ll make Julius Caesar look like he lacked ambition.”

  I left her laughing, and as soon as I was in the corridor and the door shut tight behind me I called out softly, “Una?”

  Nothing, except a cool whisper of air that might have been a draft. Or might not.

  “Everything I said in there was a lie,” I whispered to the empty air. I moved toward my room, wanting space between me and Tanwen. “I have to get away from here: I think your mother sold Maerlin to Druce, and I’ve got to help him. Druce’s lands are two days’ ride away. Do you think I can catch up to them, when they camp for the night? Though that’s assuming that they have Maerlin.” A horrific thought struck me: what if they’d killed him? Dumped him in the lake? Taken his head in a bag, to send to Ambrosius . . . I felt a rising panic, and flung open the door to my room and started throwing my meager belongings into my bag. “I have to save him,” I muttered to myself, no longer certain that Una was listening. “He saved me from Fenwig and Mordred. Sort of. In an odd way, and a little too late in some respects. But he saw the only path to get us all free of a very tricky situation, and he took it. I can’t just leave him to Druce. If he’s even with Druce. If he’s not dead.”

  I was in a strange land, and I was going to try to rescue a wizard from a band of Briton warriors. Alone. I stopped my packing and stood still with my fingertips pressed to my closed eyes, taking deep breaths and trying to calm myself. “Diana guide me,” I prayed aloud. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You took Druce to your bed,” a soft voice said out of the silence, and for a moment I thought it was the spirit of Diana speaking in my mind. I opened my eyes and saw Una standing in front of me, insubstantial as a ghost. I almost thought I could see through her. Could I? “You can look into his thoughts, and see if he still has my father,” she said.

  “And if he does?”

  “We’ll track them. And then we’ll get Father back.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll slit all their throats while they sleep.”

  I shook my head, liking neither the thought of so much bloodshed, nor the chances for success. It wasn’t as if there wouldn’t be men on watch, or that those who slept would all stay asleep, waiting for death to take them one by one. “Have you ever killed someone by your own hand?” I asked.

  “Nearly.”

  “Neither have I.”

  I tilted my head and studied Una, the invisible girl, and the vague notion of a plan formed in my brain. “I have an idea, and if everything goes right, we won’t have to slit any throats.”

  Una heaved a disappointed sigh and cast me a dirty look.

  “Cheer up. Maybe things will go wrong,” I said.

  I was rewarded by a spark in her mountain-ice eyes and a smile as cold as snow. “There’s always hope.”

  I couldn’t reach Druce. I didn’t know what his mind felt like, I couldn’t pick his essence out among the chaos of my internal world, I didn’t even know what to look for. I had been in such a confused state when we joined our bodies, all I could remember was his surprise at how good it could feel to churn his short, thick cock slowly inside a woman instead of jabbing it in and out like he was trying to stab a weasel with it.

  It was Pyrs I reached. Faintly. Just a glimpse, a few flutters of emotion, a scattering of thoughts. Among them a flush of worry about the druid they’d captured, and fear of what Maerlin would do when he woke.

  That had been in the morning. The short day was ending now, the skies darkening, the cloud-hidden sun heading for deeper cover beyond the horizon. Una’s arms were wrapped around my waist as we rode as quickly as we dared down Watling Street, conscious of missing stones and the danger o
f the horse making a misstep. The Isle of Mona was miles behind us.

  Slipping away had been easier than I’d expected. Una had readied my mount and led it on a roundabout path to the woods, where I met her, and then together we’d galloped down the forest trail, seeking as much to put distance between ourselves and Tanwen as to reach Maerlin. The thought of the green stone pulled at the back of my mind, but I forced it away. I couldn’t lose time looking for it, or have Una put herself at risk of discovery by her mother while she searched her room.

  We’d lost time waiting to cross the channel, with Una hiking off to find a fisherman with a small boat, who could go hire the ferry for us. I’d used the waiting time to reach out again to Pyrs’s mind, confirming that Maerlin still breathed.

  On the crossing, Una told me what had happened to Maerlin. “Mother drugged him,” she said. “She put the same potion in his food that Grandmother took for her pain.” The same potion Tanwen had poured down my own throat. “That was before the banquet started. When Druce and his men left, she gave my father to them. Like he was a slaughtered pig.”

  “I thought you hated him.”

  “I do.” She was sitting on a bench seat in the boat, hunched over, her arms crossed tightly over her waist. “But I hate my mother more.” Tears filled her eyes. “She lied about what happened between her and my father.”

  “And she was wrong about you,” I said.

  Una blinked up at me in question. The redness around her lids made her blue eyes eerily bright, in contrast.

  “You have powers,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I’m an . . . aberration.”

  So she had been listening, while Maerlin talked with Akantha. I sat beside her and took her hand, feeling again the tingle of Phannic power. “I can sense it, here, when I touch you,” I said, lifting her hand. “Can you feel me? A warmth or coolness, unlike when you touch someone who’s not Phanne?”

  “I don’t touch anyone. No one touches me.”

  The words were an arrow to my heart, reminding me with a wave of pain of the years I had spent as a slave with the torc around my neck. Its inscription: “Touch me not, for Sygarius’s I am.”

  I put my arm around Una and leaned my head against hers. “People ignore you,” I said softly. “They don’t see you, they never notice you. It’s like you’re not even there.”

  By the slightest tilt of her head, she gave her acknowledgment.

  “It’s a cruel, cruel burden to have lived under. But Una, that’s your power. That’s why your mother and grandmother thought you had no gift. They couldn’t see it, because your talent is to not be seen.”

  She twisted her head away from mine. “That’s not a gift.”

  “Not until you recognize it, it’s not. It’s been a curse for you, growing up not knowing why no one looks at you. Why their eyes slide off you as if you’re not even there. Why they talk in front of you, saying hurtful things, as if your feelings don’t matter.”

  “It’s because they can’t bear the sight of me,” she said, but the words were tinged with uncertainty. “Isn’t it?”

  “They couldn’t see you. You’ve always been good at hiding, haven’t you? Of disappearing in plain sight. People forget you’re there. And the more they acted as if you weren’t there, the worse you felt, and the less you wanted them to see you at all. So they didn’t.”

  Una’s lips fell open, her eyes widening. “You think I’ve been making people ignore me?”

  “I think you somehow make it very hard to see you. You haven’t truly vanished, I don’t think; you’re just impossible to notice. That first day when Maerlin and I arrived, and you dropped out of the tree: he should have seen you in the branches overhead. He’s not the sort who wouldn’t be aware of a person lying in wait to ambush him. But you dropped out of nothingness, surprising him. You surprised Maerlin, who is not surprised by anyone, ever.”

  She shook her head, not believing. “You see me.”

  “Only when you want me to. You have wanted me to, haven’t you? Because I remind you of Ligeia, and you liked her.”

  Una shrugged and looked away.

  I hugged her stiff body, and kissed the side of her head. I whispered near her ear, “Una, you have to trust me. That’s what your father always says to me: trust me. I know it’s hard; almost impossible. I need you to believe me, though, that you have this power. If we have any hope of rescuing Maerlin, it depends on you, and this gift.”

  “This curse.”

  “It’s only a curse until you learn how to bend it to your will.

  She held silent for long moments, thinking, then shook her head. “It’s not real. You’re only seeing what you want to see. I have no gift, I have no tattoos. I might as well not exist at all.”

  I saw a glimpse of something in my mind, a picture of what should have been. I turned her so she faced me and I laid my hands over her brows, my thumbs below her eyes. “If you had been my daughter, I would have tattooed you here. Spirals on your lids—very difficult, I think—and around your eyes, like a mask that can never be removed. You are she who cannot be seen.” The words came out formally, my voice deepening as I said them. I felt a force moving through me that was not my own.

  Una must have felt it, too, for her expression changed and her eyes took on a Phannic glow. “Swear to me you’ll do it,” she said. “Swear to me!”

  “Your father will give you the tattoos,” I said, and felt the rightness of the words.

  Her nostrils flared. “He’s disgusted by me.”

  “He’s disgusted by what Tanwen forced him to do, and the memory you represent. He doesn’t know you, Una. And you don’t know him.”

  “I’m his daughter. He should have tried to know me.”

  “Yes, he should have. There’s a lot that Maerlin should do, that he does not. That he can’t. He’s not like most people.”

  “I don’t like most people.”

  “You may hate Maerlin even more once you get to know him. He’ll never give you what you feel matters, but he will always give you what he thinks you need.”

  “Why is that bad?”

  I laughed. “Give yourself five years, and you’ll have new ideas about men.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not touching the swinish things, unless it’s to slit their throats.”

  “You’re Phanne. You’ll soon feel differently.”

  “The tattoos won’t make me feel that way, will they?”

  I shook my head.

  She chewed her lip. “Only my father can give them to me? Not you?”

  I nodded, not knowing if it was true, but feeling that it was right.

  The cold fire in her eyes burned brighter. “Then we have to get him back, even if he is a wet pile of duck shit.”

  I explained my half-formed plan to her, and whether she believed me or not about her gift, the promise of at last having the tattoos of her tribe was enough to have her agreeing to try it. Those marks, that acknowledgment of belonging, meant more to her than her own life.

  And why shouldn’t they? My own quest to find my mother and others of the Phanne was a species of the same. How much worse for her, to have grown up both loathed and invisible, and told repeatedly that she was not of the tribe that created both her mother and her father. There was a reason that banishment was the harshest punishment a group could inflict upon a member.

  Una seemed drawn to any show of kindness and attention I made, yet I was wary. This was not a stray puppy, who would by nature be loyal and true to whomsoever raised and protected her. This was a girl who had been formed in a broken mold, her soul growing in the sour light of neglect and the predatory cruelty of others. She was well on her way to being who she would become as a woman, and a few hugs and compliments from me were not going to turn her from an aspiring assassin into a gentle, loving girl.

  But I didn�
��t want her to change. I liked her wildness, her urge to attack first and defend later, her instinct to reach for a blade rather than bend to others. I would heal the wounds to her heart, though, if I could.

  Now it was nightfall, and we’d slowed the horse to a careful walk on the old Roman road. Somewhere ahead were Druce, Maerlin, and a band of warriors suffering—I hoped—from an excess of drink and spent lust.

  With fumbling awkwardness and the help of a tree we switched places, Una now mounted in front of me, holding the reins. Anyone watching the maneuver would have doubted us capable of making it to the next village without falling off and cracking our skulls, much less that we could free a prisoner from a band of warriors. I closed my eyes to seek Pyrs.

  The night advanced, and I was like a dog on a scent, catching whiffs of Pyrs’s thoughts in the air. Yes, they’d stopped and made camp. No, not in the forest. Along the road, in the ruins of one of the long-abandoned way stations. The closer we drew, the stronger the glimpses of Pyrs’s mind became, until I tapped Una’s leg and whispered that we should leave the road.

  We tied the horse in the woods and advanced on foot, Una picking a silent path as I stumbled along behind her. She had a cat’s eyes, seeing branches, roots, and holes where I saw nothing, her impatience with my heavy-footedness showing with hisses when I made a noise and a tight, bruising grip on my hand when I tripped on invisible stones that were as clear to her as if we were under the midday sun, not the cloud-shrouded light of a quarter moon.

  We hid, crouched, behind a bush and peered around it at the flickering orange light of a campfire, reflecting off the inner stone walls of the ruined way station. Its roof had fallen in long ago, and half its stones were missing, no doubt dragged off for newer uses. We caught the murmurs of tired male voices, and a smell of boiled meat that set our stomachs rumbling. We’d last eaten at Fort Seiont, a wedge of cheese bought from a stall and devoured on horseback.