by M C Scott
He was not crying any longer. He wiped his face dry with his hands and let the colts lick the salt from his palms. He told them they were wonderful, and they would win if they raced, but that they must needs be patient in the morning when Brass and Bronze were harnessed to the big quadriga with the two trace horses who ran behind, and were never as important. They nudged him and flicked their tails and returned to the half-doze of sleep from which he had woken them.
My mother bred them, he had said to Pantera, which makes them easier to handle.
What he had not said was that his mother had bred all eight of the horses that ran for Ajax, the first and the second team, but that these two she had given to her son, taking him to the field on the day two long-legged bay colts were born, Sweat half a morning before Thunder.
She had let him name them and had kept him with her all the way through their early training, until the year when he was five years old and they were three, when she gave them to him as his gift at the midsummer solstice.
They were too good to be owned by a boy of five, of course, and had been sold, but Math knew that one of the conditions of sale was that he be taken on as apprentice when he came of age.
Gordianus, who owned the team then, had said no boy could be an apprentice before he was ten years old. After his mother’s death, nobody expected Math to make ten years, including himself. But Gordianus had broken both his legs the previous year in an accident at the close of the autumn season and it was only by chance that Ajax had been there, just walking in off the last boat before the seas closed for winter, with his shaved head and one ear missing and black, black eyebrows and the scars on his body from races and war and a flogging once. He was jeered for that, early on, before they saw how he could race, and if he had told a dozen different people the story of how he got the scars, he had told a dozen different stories.
To Math, he had said, ‘I was young and I hated the legions. I thought I could best them.’
‘And they caught you,’ Math had asked dutifully.
‘They did.’ Ajax’s quick grin set it on a par with being caught stealing fish from the docks, which happened to everyone. ‘And they’d have killed me after they flogged me. But my mother’s brother was an officer in the auxiliary and he was able to get me released. If your mother doesn’t have a brother in the auxiliary, don’t steal from legions, that’s my advice.’
Somewhere in all the racing and tale-telling, Ajax had shown Gordianus the weight of his money and the deal had been struck; for an untold amount of gold, the practice chariots, the racing chariot, the eight racehorses, sixteen head of young stock, the wainwright and his three apprentices, the loriner and his son, the various stud hands who had kept the breeding herds going after Math’s mother had died, the harness-maker Caradoc of the Osismi – who was Math’s father – and Lucius, the existing apprentice, had all changed hands. So too had the promise to make Math the second apprentice when he came of age.
At the midwinter solstice, not long after the fires had been doused and re-lit to honour the death and re-birth of the sun god, Ajax had come to Math and his father bearing a smoked herring and a sprig of mistletoe across his spread palms. His shaved head had shone in the candlelight as if he’d polished it with oil. The hole where his ear had been cut off was blue at the edges from the cold outside and his black eyebrows seemed drawn with charcoal. Even so, he had looked a little like the sun god, brought back from midwinter to give light to the world.
‘I am told I should give these to the mother of my future apprentice boy,’ he had said in formal tones, ‘as payment for the use of her son for the next nine years. But since he has no mother, I would ask Caradoc of the Osismi, father to Math of the Osismi, to do me the honour of accepting.’
Something had already been said, obviously; Math could see it in the way Ajax’s eyes met his father’s, in the silent communication that took place over his head. It was not the first time; Ajax and Caradoc had got along uncommonly well from the start, which was good, but also meant Math had two of them trying to change who he was.
His father had said, ‘Math? Do you still want to be a race-driver? The work will be hard.’
But not harder than working the docks. Math hadn’t said that, only thought it, but he saw his father read his face and was sorry for it. He was always sorry for the hurt he caused his father, but then almost everything he had done since his mother’s death seemed to bring it on, which was stupid, and made him cross.
And he did not want to be indebted to Ajax. Looking away, he had said, ‘I have work. I bring in enough for us both. I don’t need more.’
He felt their eyes meet again over his head. His father had wanted to answer. Ajax had forestalled him by standing up, saying, ‘Of course. I apologize for insulting you. We don’t have to speak of it again.’
He had shaken Caradoc’s hand. To Math he had said, ‘You have made the horses well. They’ll miss you.’
He had gone then, taking the mistletoe, but leaving the herring. Two nights later, Math had been passing the horse barns and found Ajax trying to use a straw wisp to bring out the shine in Brass’s coat. The horse had a ticklish stomach; there was a certain way to wisp him that worked and Ajax didn’t know it.
Taking the pad of woven straw from his hand, Math had shown him how. Ajax had been leaving when the boy had said, ‘I won’t stop working the docks.’
Ajax had gone as far as the door at the barn’s end before he turned round; far enough for Math to feel real fear that he had lost his chance.
‘I won’t ask you to,’ Ajax had said. ‘Just know that work for me comes first, before anything else. If you leave things undone, you’ll be out of a job. To save me having to watch you, do you give me your word to put race work before everything else? That’s all I ask.’
Nobody had ever asked him for his word. Alarmed and flattered at once, Math had spat on his hand to seal the oath, knowing full well that Ajax planned to work him to exhaustion, so that he wouldn’t have time to go down to the docks.
That had been over half a year ago, at the winter solstice, and now it was nearly the equinox and Ajax had become distracted by the need to win the emperor’s race. It was not his idea – anyone could tell he would rather have spent another half year getting to know his horses – but he had promised to race, and to win, too, spitting on his palm and swearing by his Greek bear-gods, for Gordianus, and for the shade of Math’s mother, just as Hannah had said.
So he had been more than usually busy of late and Math had taken the opportunity to go back to the docks again, and had found himself free there and happy. Until today, when Pantera, the Leopard, had stepped from a boat and Math had followed him up the hill and by the time he came down again his life had changed and he had failed in the eyes of a man he did not even know.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hannah the healer, known in Coriallum for the calm she brought others, lay alone on her straw pallet staring up at the sky, seeking ways to find peace for herself.
The night was warm, not yet sharpened by autumn frosts. The roof of the healer’s booth was of sewn goatskin, with gaps at the ends of the ridge poles that let her see through to a blinking triad of stars. At the meadow’s end, a wide river ran lazily to the sea, hushing a lullaby for the lost of the world: for herself, for Math, for half of Coriallum if Ajax was right.
Too far from sleep, with her stomach still full from a celebration feast she did not want and the worry of Math crimping the borders of her mind, she let her eyes rest on the brief triangle of stars she could see. Presently, when her heart was less clamorous, she built the full sky around the three visible stars, setting the constellations in their places, naming them as she had been taught. Then, because she was still awake, lying in a tent in Coriallum, as far from Rome as she could get, she tried to remember instead the alien names and shapes of Gaul in place of those she had learned as a child.
The crocodile and the hippopotamus were gone, and she had no idea what replaced them. Amon, s
he thought, was still the ram, but Mentu, the bull, sacred to Mithras and Serapis, was named instead as a she-bear and worshipped by the warriors as a pattern on which to mould their own courage.
She had seen bears only in the market at Alexandria, sorry beasts chained through the nose and made to dance, but even in her short time here, the bards of Gaul had woven word-pictures of bears that matched the gods; great-voiced, great-hearted, greatly wise in the ways of beasts and humankind and possessed of a courage and ferocity that no other living thing could match.
She felt it, and then heard it, and then smelled it; richly, warmly dangerous. She was not asleep. In that moment, in fact, she could not have been more sharply awake.
She sat up. The beast padded past a second time.
‘Math? Is that you?’ She whispered it. The beast, unsurprisingly, did not reply.
In all the turbulence and wonder of her life, in the months of training spent in the desert, facing the demons of the inner and outer worlds, in the complex intrigue among the sisterhood in Alexandria, nobody had ever suggested that Hannah was a coward.
She rose and re-belted her tunic and pushed open the flap to her tent. Outside, a fire sent tendrils of sweet smoke to the clouded sky.
For one heart-stopping moment, she saw a bear crouched there, stirring the embers with a stick. Then she blinked, and there was only Ajax, the chariot driver, sitting with his back to her, staring at the new-wrought flames.
A smell of wetness came from him, of clean, cold river water. His body dripped star-silver dew. His head shone slick where his hair would have been had he not shaved it every morning. The gaping hole that was all that remained of his right ear was starkly black. He had not yet noticed her presence, so lost was he in the fire’s red heart.
She sank to a crouch, resting her weight on her heels, watching the lift and fall of his breathing. She saw the moment when he became aware of her presence and the moment after it, when he decided not to move. Some time later, when it was clear he wasn’t going to speak, she said quietly, ‘Do you never sleep?’
She saw the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘As much as you, it seems.’ He did move then; a small motion of his hand that invited her to join him at his fire, which had been her fire first.
She took her place at his right hand. ‘I thought I heard a bear,’ she said, ‘but it was you.’
He glanced at her sideways. ‘I was blundering more than I thought,’ he murmured. ‘I apologize.’
He had, in fact, been quite astonishingly quiet. They both knew that.
She said, ‘Was it the river caused your clumsiness? Did your gods speak to you there?’
He looked at her directly then, not a thing he did often. In daylight, his eyes were a curious pale amber, entirely at odds with the solid black of his brows. In the firelight, they glowed a rich copper-gold, bright as a hawk’s.
‘Am I still wet?’ he asked.
‘That, and you smell of river water.’ Hannah nodded to the barn. ‘I’ve been with Math, who has a new friend and has been learning to infer things from scent. Apparently one’s hair smells of horse piss if one stays too long in the stables.’
‘Good that I have no hair, then.’ Ajax laughed softly, and sobered. ‘Is Math all right?’
Hannah shrugged. ‘He has someone new who pays him in silver. And he’s … different, less petulant.’
‘That would make a pleasant change.’
Ajax smoothed his hand over his naked scalp. Watching him, Hannah realized she had no idea how old he was, only that he was younger than she had first thought, closer to her own age, in fact, and that the scars on his back and shoulders were not, as she had imagined, purely from falls taken racing.
It was a strange mistake to have made. Caught at an angle by the firelight, his scars were quite clearly layered, set years apart, and those at the top, the most recent, carried the savage incoherence of battle.
Beneath them, less chaotically, ran the ripped lines of the flail and beneath those, straighter yet, were splayed the regular cuts of ritual; a warrior ritual in all probability, although she had not heard of such things taking place among the Greeks since before the time of Alexander. She wanted to ask how he had come by them, but didn’t know how.
‘Did the river tell you about the race tomorrow?’ she asked instead.
‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I asked for help. Whether the request is granted remains to be seen. One can never fully know.’ His eyes returned to the flames a while, listening to the crack of green wood burning. ‘Do you have gods?’ he asked, presently.
That stole her breath. Such a question wasn’t asked of semi-strangers, here on the edges of the world, where Nero proclaimed himself divine and it was a capital offence not to worship him; where the dreamers of Britain, so recently vanquished, were said to visit and men still held to the old gods of moon and water and listened to what they said.
Ajax waited, looking into his fire. His face showed only polite enquiry. Unlike the Gauls, unlike any Greeks she had met, he was not a man to write his thoughts across his face.
‘My father had a god,’ Hannah said, surprising herself, ‘and died for it at Rome’s hand. After his death, my mother left her two sons and went to Alexandria. I was born there six months later. In Alexandria, I learned …’
On a whim, she looked up. Tents huddled about, but none too near, and the lines of the horse stalls were silent; nobody was close enough to hear. She made a decision and hoped she would not regret it.
‘What do you know of the Sibylline sisters?’ she asked.
Ajax bit the edge of his thumb, considering. ‘I know they’re Egyptian by habit if not by birth and that the Romans are in awe of them as they are of no other women, possibly even afraid of them. Apart from that, I know only that they are respected across the empire as oracles and prophets, that they live in seclusion, keeping themselves unmarried, and— Ah.’
That last a short, violent out-breath. ‘So will you never marry?’ For all his self-possession, he couldn’t hide the broken hope in his eyes.
The fire burned less fiercely than it had done. Hannah leaned forward and busied herself laying on more wood. ‘I’m not one of the sisters,’ she said. ‘My mother was, but she married my father in fulfilment of a prophecy. After his death, she came back. I was raised among them, and trained at their expense. I did—’
‘Find love among them?’
She had not thought he might read her as she read him. With a hazel twig, she stirred the fire. Sparks danced amid drifting ash. Memories returned, and were banished, as she always banished them. ‘The rashness of youth,’ she said reflectively, ‘is exceptional only in its self-belief.’
His gaze rested on her face. ‘I am at the behest of an oracle of sorts,’ he said at last. ‘My sister dreamed that I would come here, and perhaps return home in the high summer with a brother I had thought lost.’
‘Perhaps?’
‘If I find him. If he lives through what is coming. If he chooses to come back with me. It must be his choice, freely made.’ Ajax rose smoothly, with the grace of his professions. ‘But first, we must win a race, and for that we must sleep. Even you, I think? The team would be sorely pressed without its healer.’
‘You go.’ Hannah did not stand. ‘I’ll come later when the fire’s less.’
He swept her a salute she didn’t recognize and was gone, treading soundless across the grass.
Hannah stared at the space where he had been and thought of choices freely made, of oracles and dreams and the duties they imposed, of family and friends, of past, present and future and knew herself only at a crossroads, with no idea at all of which route to take.
CHAPTER SIX
Between one breath and the next, Sebastos Abdes Pantera woke to the grey stirrings of race day at the Striding Heron tavern.
He lay still with his eyes shut, waiting, as he did every morning and, as every morning, in that finite space between sleeping and waking, Aerthen came to him, alive in the bl
ack echoes of his mind, bright-haired, green-eyed and laughing as she raced him on her mouse dun gelding in their first meeting, touched him with her eyes across the fire on a smoky winter’s evening not long later, made love to him soon after that, holding him in her long, long legs, in her warrior’s arms, against the cushion of her breasts, breathing his name into his ear and that she loved him.
She came to him naked first, and then dressed for war in a stolen legionary shirt with armoured leather wraps on her forearms taken from the tall, bronze-bearded Rhinelander who was the first man she had ever killed in battle.
She stood before him, weapon-ready, as tall as her spear, so that the shine of her eyes and the shine of its blade were as one before the rising sun, and then again, before the setting sun, when blade and face and body were rusted with others’ blood, and her smile was savage, lit with the hope of victory.
In the thick of battle she came to him, fighting to be at his side, to keep him safe, trusting him to keep her safe, and they fought together until that moment in the evening of the battle’s second day, when it was lost and all were dead, or soon to be so.
Then, she came to him still smiling her love and her courage, holding Gunovar, their golden-haired, ocean-eyed daughter, who was named for a hero of the Dumnonii who had fought in the Boudica’s rebel army against the legions. Aerthen’s loathing of Rome was legendary and so her child must feel it too, when she grew; how could she not with two such brave, proud parents? She slept in her mother’s arms, her peace perfect in all the din and chaos of battle.
Except not asleep, because now, in this last part of the visiting, there is bright, wet blood scarfing Aerthen’s stolen shirt, gathering in pools at her feet, and the smile on the child’s face is matched by the broader, red-lipped smile in her throat, where her mother’s blade has sliced it, so fast and so sharp that the child has never woken from the tea-drugged sleep.
And as he feels her spirit leave her to make the last walk to the gods, the man known as Hywell, the hunter, feels his wife reach for his hand, and press the blade into the sweaty wetness of his palm.