by Jack Whyte
"Alaric? What do you think of this conversation?" The bishop blinked his eyes slowly and thought for a few moments before he began to speak.
"Well, my friends," he said at last in his moderate, deliberate tones, "I hear strange and unexpected sounds and great bitterness coming from two people whom I love and respect. I hear you ascribing a sinfulness worthy of eternal damnation to a man whom neither of you has seen or heard of for twenty years, while both of you admit to each other, and to me as witness, that neither of you has any reason to do so, other than an old dislike. I hear no charity in you, my friends, and I hear none of the forgiveness that the Blessed Christus begged us to apply to our enemies."
Caius and I regarded each other with wry looks.
"Alaric's right, Cay," I said.
Caius heaved an enormous sigh. "I know," he replied, "I know he is." He shook his head, sighed again and rose to his feet. "And we will take his unspoken advice, and talk of other things. Another cup of wine, either of you?" As he poured he said, almost to himself, "But tomorrow, I will send word to my agents in Londinium and Glevum that I wish to buy his villa anonymously, for a fair price." He put the wine jug down firmly. "I will send one of our fastest couriers, first thing in the morning."
And so it was arranged that our Colony would increase by the size of the Ascanus estate, and the three of us spent the remainder of the evening talking pleasantly of other things.
The following morning, I set out on my monthly rounds of the Colony estates. The day passed slowly and uneventfully, one of those plodding, rural days unmarked by anything but drudgery, hard work and meticulous, painstaking efforts to maintain an inventory of crops in progress, grain supplies in hand and the multitudinous details of keeping a growing community alive and well-fed. I was homeward bound by late afternoon, and it started to rain, spattering heavy drops, as I entered the boundaries of the land belonging to the Villa Britannicus proper. Looking up at the suddenly leaden skies, I blessed Luceiia's foresight in convincing me to take along my cloak. The day had started well, but early in the forenoon dark, scattered clouds had started blowing in from the west, and I had begun to realize she had been correct the night before when she had predicted heavy rain by afternoon. Now all the rifts between the clouds had been sealed up and it looked as though this was not a shower that would blow over quickly. I was riding in a cart, since I had decided to drop off a load of new tools to several of our outlying farms, but Equus had taken the leather covering off the day before, to mend a rent in it, and it had not yet been replaced. It took me only a moment to retrieve my heavy cloak from the box on the back and I swaddled myself in it completely, pulling the cowled headpiece well over my head and slipping my hands through the vents provided for them before taking up the reins again. A cold, gusty wind began to blow the rain in sheets, but I remained sheltered beneath my cloak as both wind and rain picked up in strength, throwing themselves uselessly against the thick, tight, wind- and waterproof weave of the warm garment. For all that, the rain was icy and my bare hands were chilled and stiff from holding the reins by the time I eventually reached the gates of the villa and turned thankfully into the courtyard.
I had been driving fast, driven by the weather, and when we arrived my poor horse was coated with mud and steaming like a sudarium. The rain had stopped somewhere along the way and the clouds overhead were broken again, showing widening reaches of blue sky. I threw my reins to a groom and my wet cloak to Gallo, Caius's major-domo, and ran into the house, calling aloud for Caius. He was not there. Nor were Alaric and Luceiia. The house was empty, except for servants. Frustrated, I then made my way directly to the smithy, but Equus was gone too, on a visit to one of the other villa forges. Thoroughly deflated, I went back to the villa, where Gallo informed me, politely, now that I had time to listen, that Caius and Alaric had been collected by a wagon sent for them from the villa of our friends, the twins Terrix and Fermax, widely known as Terra and Firma. They were to be guests of the twins for dinner and an entertainment that night and would return to the villa in the morning. My wife had gone, he also informed me, with several of her women on a mission of mercy to the home of yet another neighbour whose wife was having great difficulty in birthing a child — her fourth. Even my three daughters were gone for the day, out on a visit to some friends at another villa, accompanied by their nursemaid, Annika. I asked after the boy, Simeon; had he been left alone? No, I was told, he had been moved out to the home of his mother, now that she and her daughters were comfortably settled in a new home and the boy was out of danger. Defeated, I decided to bathe and asked Gallo to organize some food for me and replenish the brazier in Cay's study.
An hour later, bathed, fed and warmly dressed again in loose, comfortable, indoor clothes, I sat down at Cay's desk by the window and gathered my patience to wait for someone to come home.
It was growing dark by the time I heard the noises that told me my children had finally arrived home from their excursion with their nurse, and I went looking for them, unusually excited by the prospect of being able to spend some time with them, without other pressures demanding my attention. Luceiia and I were regarded as peculiar by some of our friends, in that we tended to spend a great deal of time with our children, enjoying them as much as we could. But other priorities seemed to intrude more and more all the time, and time spent with the children was something that happened all too seldom nowadays. I felt my usual surge of pleasure in seeing that they were all happy to see me: Veronica, the eldest at ten, Lucilla who was bewitching at seven, and Dorathea, breathtakingly beautiful and four years old, but feverish this evening and sniffly with a cold.
We were still together when Luceiia arrived home from the birthing with the news that Margaret Lupidus, one of our newest colonists, had safely given birth to twin daughters who seemed to be identical. This was not good news. Twin sons had been revered in Rome since the birth of Romulus and Remus, but twin daughters were a burden to any family and were not looked upon with favour. Luceiia and I shared a cup of wine after the children had gone to bed and drank in commiseration for the Lupidus family, which now consisted of five living daughters from seven birthings, none of which had yielded a son. We loved our daughters dearly, but few families could afford a brood of girls as well as we could. There were times when I longed for a son, but I made it a point of honour never to mention that to Luceiia.
When our single cup was empty I rose to replenish it and told Luceiia the story of my day on the land, amusing her with the comments and observations of the farmers, who, like all farmers everywhere, tended to see life from a different viewpoint than other men, and frequently to hilarious effect. Finally I leaned over and kissed her.
"It's early enough to be sinful. Come to bed with me."
"Why? Are you tired?"
I laughed aloud at the tone of her voice. "No, but it's a cold, wet night and I want your heat."
She sniffed disdainfully. "Heat I have, and to spare, but it's a beautiful night and not cold at all."
"It's pouring!"
"Nonsense, the rain stopped hours ago. The weather is beautiful and the sky is clear. There will be a moon tonight."
I blinked at her. "It must be wet somewhere," I said.
"It will be. Come."
We stood up together and my throat was choked with lust, but propriety still made demands of me.
"What about dinner?" I asked, rasping the words.
"What about it? There's only us. Everyone else is gone. I told Gallo I would cook for us in our own chambers. What would you like for dinner?" Her voice was low and throaty, intimate.
"You."
"Well, Master," she replied, smiling, "dinner is almost ready, awaiting only a few, last-minute touches."
Soon, we lay panting on our bed like a pair of newly-weds, too impatient for each other to bother with removing our clothes. I was more than ready, and as I entered the loving warmth of my wife's body my mind was filled with the need to control my surging seed. Luceiia took me smoothly,
and I lay securely lodged, fighting to empty my mind of where I was and straining to relax and make no movement. But I knew it would be to no avail; my mind and my body were united to defeat me, and I felt the pressure mounting, spurred by the sheer sensations of such hot and moist containment. And then I was saved and yet frustrated by the sound of a howling, childish wail from somewhere deep in the house. Luceiia froze immediately, her head cocked to one side, the transition from lover to mother instantaneous.
"It's Dora."
"I know," I said, willing her to ignore it. "Annika will see to her."
"No, the child's sick. She has a fever."
"She has a cold, that's all. My problem is more urgent."
She ignored me for a moment, head cocked, straining to hear, but the cry was not repeated, and at length she relaxed and returned her attention to me.
"Problem? You have a problem? What problem?" She moved her body delightfully, then. "Oh, that problem?"
I sensed her smile as she moved in the darkness beneath me.
"Well, my love, that one is easily dealt with." She reached down towards her waist and pulled her skirts higher, then seemed to flex her entire body and wrap it around me, gripping me with her thighs and grasping me by the ears as she pulled my face down and filled my mouth with her hot, thrusting tongue. I felt her belly writhe and rise to meet me, her body opening and engulfing me like the hot waters of a bath, and I exploded, losing all awareness of everything except the crashing roars of ecstasy in my head. Then, while I was still spent and gasping, I felt Luceiia move beneath me and away from me, slipping her body free from mine.
"Don't go to sleep, I want more," she whispered.
I rolled onto my side. "Where are you going?" But I knew, and she was already gone. The lover had merely abetted, not replaced, the mother.
I lay there for a long time, recapturing my senses, and then I rolled off the bed and adjusted my clothing so that I could stand comfortably before crossing to the window and opening the shutters. It was a warm, mellow, late-June night and it bore no signs of the torrential rain that had poured down for so long earlier. I hitched up my robe and threw one leg across the sill and perched there, feeling the coldness of the stone against my naked skin and listening to the sounds of the early night as I thought of the pleasures I had found in the woman I had married. My loins were empty, almost achingly drained, and I luxuriated in the joy of satisfaction, idly attempting to recall the furious sensations so recently stirred up in me by my lust. But that was fruitless, of course, since our minds and bodies are no more capable of remembering fleeting pleasure than sudden pain, and I soon became distracted by the sounds out in the night. I could hear voices, nearby, man and woman, though I could discern no words, strain as I might, before they moved off and died away and a cacophony of barking dogs sprang up to fill the night with chaos and comfort. And then, somewhere far off, a nightingale began to sing, and I sat for a long time, entranced by the beauty of the sound, lost in a land of fantasy that knew no rhyme or reason until a drunken voice broke out beneath me, startling me with its suddenness, bellowing a tuneless song that spluttered into silence and was followed by the sound of a body falling heavily, and then more silence. The nightingale began to sing again and I shifted restlessly, moving my now-cold buttocks in complaint against the harshness of the stone window-sill. I had not heard Luceiia return, but suddenly she was behind me, running her fingers through my hair and breathing gently on the soft skin at my neck. And, all at once, the passions that I had sought in vain to recall came back to me, overwhelming in their urgency. I withdrew my leg from the cool night air and returned to our bedside, my hands, my lips, my awareness filled with the reality of Luceiia, and this time, we took the time to remove our clothes before offering our nakedness to one another. Our coupling now was wondrous and filled with love and leisure, the joining of two lovers who enjoyed perfect familiarity each with the other's body. We melted together, moving in loving fidelity and reaching that peak together that leaves both partners hanging between life and death, knowing that happiness is achievable on either side of the divide.
And suddenly it was I who was raised, tensed on one elbow, my head cocked to hear again the alien sound that had jerked me back from the edge of sleep.
"Publius? What is it? What's wrong?"
"Shh! Listen! What's that noise?"
"What noise?"
I sat up, my face pointed towards the open window-shutters. "That noise! Listen!"
It came again, a man's voice, raised in a shout of panic, faint and far off, smothered by distance, but now taken up and repeated by another, nearer, and then another and several more. I leaped from the bed and ran to the window, leaning out, straining my ears, and heard the dreaded word, "Fire!"
"Fire," I said, over my shoulder to Luceiia. "They're raising the alarm. There's a fire." I could see nothing, could smell no smoke, but my guts churned in apprehension. "Quick! Light a lamp." I began scurrying to find my clothes in the darkness, dragging them on somehow and running from the room before Luceiia was able to find the tinder-box.
I emerged from the main door to find the courtyard already filled with running bodies and saw a horseman thunder into the yard and head straight for me. He saw me and leaped down from his horse's back, almost falling at my feet. I grabbed him and held him erect.
"What, man? What is it? Where's the fire?"
"The granaries," he gulped, drawing a deep breath. "The granaries, Commander, up on the hill! Four of them are in flames."
"Four of them? Damnation! Where were the guards? Are they all blind up there?"
One granary alight was a tragedy; four meant catastrophe. We would be hard-pressed to save enough food for the coming winter. I gripped him firmly by the shoulder and seized his horse's bridle in my other hand.
"I'm taking your horse. Give me a leg up, quickly."
He hoisted me up cleanly, and I fought for a second to control the animal, which resented having someone new leap onto its back so soon after shedding one rider. Finally I brought it under restraint and swung it around in the direction I wanted to go.
"Summon every man in the Colony," I yelled at the rider. "Every soldier, every colonist. Get them up to the hilltop as quickly as they can run. Who's fighting the fire?"
"Only the soldiers who were on duty up there. There's no one else nearby."
"Damn and blast! I'm going up there now. Get the others on the road as quickly as you can. Tell them it's going to be a hungry winter if they're slow." I put my heels to the horse, and as soon as we were on the pathway that rounded the south-west end of the villa I saw the baleful, smoky glare of the fire on the hilltop ahead of me.
The hours that followed are hazy in my memory, so intense was the frenzy with which we fought the blaze. It burned with an ugly, sullen fury, refusing to be mastered, its roots smouldering deep within the piled banks of dried grain. I remember clearly, however, that I found signs, early on in the struggle, that the burning piles had been soaked with oil before being set alight; around the edges of the conflagrations, there were scatterings of grain, kicked away from the flames by the first discoverers of the catastrophe, and they were glued into clumps, held together by the viscous, flammable stuff poured over them by the incendiary madman who had done this.
That knowledge, that there was a madman among us, startled me into realizing that there might well be no men at all left down at the villa, and that this madman, whoever he was, would almost certainly not be up here at the fire.
The man working beside me was Erasmus Sita, a young giant and a decurion in our colonial forces. Sita was huge and strong, a full head taller than me with a mighty breadth of shoulders. I tugged him by the arm and motioned him to step away with me, back from the noise of the fire and the smoke. He leaned close to hear what I had to say. I ordered him to select ten of the youngest, strongest soldiers he could find and take them at the double, forced-march pace, back down to the villa as quickly as he could. He was to find Luceiia and make
sure that she was in no danger, and then he and his people were to remain at the villa, standing guard and at the ready for anything that might develop. I saw the puzzlement and curiosity in his eyes and I waved towards the fire.
"This was deliberate, Sita. There were four separate fires here, now threatening to grow into one big one. Somebody set this place alight on purpose. I don't know who and I don't know why, but I don't want to be caught unawares if the whoreson has other plans for tonight. So get down to the villa quickly, but take the longer route down, not the main path; that way you'll avoid the people coming up. If they see you going back, it could cause confusion. But get there quickly. You understand?" He left at a loping run and I saw him begin to pick out his men.
I remember then that I left him to it and turned my attention to organizing a bucket-chain from the unfinished cisterns in the fort, and that there were not enough men available to make it work. And I remember the arrival of the first newcomers, a trickle that grew to a flood as the flames rose higher and the wind sprang up again to whirl blazing sparks towards the four minor granaries that were still untouched by the fire.
The granaries themselves were no more than stout wooden boxes, bins pitched at the seams and raised on stilts to protect their contents from the damp earth, and covered with heavy, sloping roofs. They burned disgustingly well. I don't know when I realized we could not win, but I think the awareness came only slowly to me. Dense, awful smoke swirled everywhere, roiling obscenely upwards. It filtered everywhere through the piles of grain, ruining the food forever, even before the wooden side panels burned through, allowing the grain to gush out onto the ground. In a short time, all our vigilance was dedicated to protecting the four silos that remained.
I staggered off at one time, away from the searing heat, in search of some clear air, my insides raw and burned from inhaling the smoke-laden air close to the fire. I found a wooden saw-horse to lean against, and someone handed me a jar of water. God! I remember still how good it tasted. I drank deeply and then sat there for a while, looking at the activity going on around me. I was exhausted, but then, everyone else was, too, by that time.