by Manda Scott
Dubornos was already kneeling by the bed. Cwmfen opened her eyes but could not hold them so. The singer felt her pulse and her forehead. From the doorway, Cunomar could see the latter was clammily wet.
“She has a fever,” said Caradoc woodenly.
Dubornos said, “It’s not as bad as it looks. Half of this is the exhaustion of childbirth.” It may have been true. A bucket of water sat by the bed with a cloth over the rim. The singer laid a damp compress across Cwmfen’s brow. Water leaked into her hair, diluting the sweat. Caradoc stood still as stone at the bedside. Dubornos looked up. “This is not your fault.”
“No? I think I could be held at least half to blame.” It was said without humour where once irony would have lightened it. Cunomar heard the change and his heart ached at the sound of it.
Dubornos moved to the foot of the bed. The concealing sheets, brought in after the birth, had long since been stained and cast aside. He knelt, seeking the source of the steady trickle of blood. It was not yet a flood; that much was good. Somewhere outside, a detail of armed men marched through the claustrophobic streets. The stamp of two dozen feet rocked the walls of the apartment. That, too, was something to which Cunomar had not and would not become accustomed: the nightly arrests of the innocent and their disappearance thereafter. They had grown more frequent of late. Perhaps with good reason, Claudius was becoming increasingly paranoid, and more men were required to die for his safety. An officer called the halt, his voice so close he could have been in the room.
Dubornos shuddered. He, too, hated the legionaries. “Rome is to blame,” he said. “Or Claudius, or Breaca’s godforsaken brother, but not us. Or, if you are to blame, I am equally so. She was in my care when we were taken.”
“Ha.” Cwmfen twitched under his probing fingers. The husk of her voice said, “You are become Roman, Dubornos. I am a warrior. I live under no-one’s care.”
Caradoc knelt and took her hand loosely in his own. “You are the finest of warriors. You will pass this test as you passed all the others.”
“Of course.” From the doorway, Cunomar could see the love as she smiled into his eyes and felt, as he always did, the odd mix of grief and displaced envy that twisted his gut whenever he saw Cwmfen taking the place that was rightfully his mother’s.
Ashamed, he turned away, that he might not be seen. Cygfa appeared at his side and draped his cloak over his shoulders. “Here,” she said. “It was under the bed and I couldn’t find it.” Outside, in the streets, men of the Guard were running at the order of their officer.
Cunomar drew his cloak up round his shoulders and stopped, feeling the coarse weave and the old, musty smell that marked it as his old cloak, the one he had cast aside at midsummer when the leather-trader had given him an extra coin for his work and he had bought a new cloak with it. Cygfa had been there to help him pick it. She had stitched the care-marks of the Ordovices along the hem as protection; she should have remembered it.
A day’s worth of resentments spilled over in Cunomar. Throwing the cloak on the floor, he said, “This is old and it smells. The new one’s on the bed under the blanket where I—”
He stopped, frozen. From a street full of armed men, someone had entered the apartment block. Light feet ran up two flights of stairs and stopped at their door. Cygfa, who had more courage than he could begin to imagine, stepped past him to open it.
“Good evening.” Philonikos, apprentice to Xenophon, hesitated on the landing. Dubornos had always said the lad was Hermes come to earth, inadequately fed. His hair was a dusky brown, heading to gold and too straight to be truly beautiful, and his features were pinched and hollow-cheeked, as if his mother had starved him in childhood and the habit had continued beyond her care. His long, artist’s fingers were already swollen round the joints, the product of hours spent grinding pastes in a pestle.
Xenophon had found the boy in the library reading medical texts written by Largus, the emperor’s former physician, an act at once of folly and astonishing precocity. They had made an agreement soon after: Philonikos would cease to study texts by those whose writing Xenophon deemed unworthy, and in return he would be considered for an apprenticeship. The consideration period was a fiction; there had never been any doubt as to the youth’s application or ability. He was obsessive in his care of the sick and gifted in his diagnoses and healing. For the past eighteen months, Cunomar had watched with something close to envy as the other youth trailed after Xenophon in the way a stray cur follows the one who feeds it, listening always, speaking rarely and learning a trade that would keep him rich and healthy long into old age as it had done Xenophon. Then that same youth was here, in the doorway, and that could only be on his master’s orders.
The boy was a wraith, unable to cross thresholds uninvited. His eyes were widely pale, like a monkey’s. His shadow fell like a handful of twigs across the floor slats, cast by half a dozen lamps. Of all the adults, Dubornos had had most dealings with him. The singer stood up, squeezing blood from his hands. He spoke in the old-fashioned Greek with which the lad was most comfortable and all of them now understood.
“Philonikos, be welcome and enter, please. Xenophon told me he was not a dreamer. It appears he was being unnecessarily modest.”
The physician’s apprentice hovered yet in the doorway, his gaze switching from Cwmfen on the bed to the sleeping, silent infant at Caradoc’s shoulder. “Is she sick?” he asked. “Did the babe come out badly?”
Cunomar slid past him into the room. “I haven’t asked him for the ergot,” he said. “Should I?”
Ergot, it seemed, had only one use in the post-partum woman. Philonikos was transformed. “She’s bleeding?” In two steps, he had crossed the room and knelt where Dubornos had lately been, squinting in the inadequate light.
“It’s not too bad. She will live if she doesn’t get milk fever but we should pack her to be sure the bleeding doesn’t start again,” he said. “I can’t go back to the palace. They’ve sealed it off. Largus will have ergot but he’s across in the Aventine; we won’t get to him in time. We need cold water and linen, torn into strips. This will do.”
He picked up a clean sheet, saved for the first day after birth and not yet befouled, and threw it to Cunomar, who caught it without thinking and began to tear, his mind unwillingly dragged to the world outside. “Why is the palace sealed off?” he asked. And then, because the adults all stood in silence and he realized he did not want to know the answer, he asked, “Why did Xenophon send you here now if not to tend Cwmfen?”
Philonikos looked at Caradoc for permission to speak and, after a moment, received it. He had his message by heart and delivered it without emotion. “Claudius is under siege,” he said. “He may already be dying—poisoned by Agrippina—but if not, it will come within the next half-month. They will blame Xenophon although he has done his best to prevent it. Agrippina has control of the palace. She will put it about that the emperor is ill and we should pray for him. Her astrologers will wait until their stars are more fair and then, when the time is right, she will set Nero on the throne and rule through him. From that moment, you are not safe here. She hates you. In the wave of deaths, of Narcissus and Callon and all those others who have opposed her, or angered her, or witnessed her humiliation at the hands of Claudius, yours will be one of the many that no-one notes.”
The speech had Xenophon’s cadence, if not his warmth and passion. Cunomar watched Cygfa step to her mother’s side. For a long time, she had simply ignored Philonikos, staring through him as if he did not exist. Then, he had not been a physician with the skills that might save her mother’s life. There was defiance and guilt and a more basic need to erase the past when she said, “The people love Claudius as much as they despise Agrippina. If we let out that the emperor is threatened by her, they’ll storm the palace, surely?”
If Philonikos understood the change in Cygfa, he did not let it show. He was absorbed in his care for her mother. Already Cwmfen’s bleeding had lessened. He reached for her
wrist, his head bent over the better to feel the pulse. “You can’t,” he said absently. “The guards won’t let you.”
Sharply, Caradoc said, “What guards? The ones outside?”
There had been silence after the marching and the shouted orders and the short burst of men running to station. Sniffing the air, Cunomar smelled burning pitch, which meant torches, which meant, in turn, there would be fire. It should not have surprised him; too many of the recent executions had been covered by convenient fires. He watched realization take shape on the faces of his father and Dubornos, even on Cwmfen on the bed, and saw them all turn to him and try to disguise it.
An old, familiar nausea returned. “They’ve come for us,” he said. He had always known it would happen.
“Yes, but not to arrest you, to help. They come on Claudius’ orders and are still loyal to him. That doesn’t mean they’ll let you raise a riot in Rome on their watch, though.” Philonikos looked up. “The bleeding will stop soon. It was not as bad as it looked. Can someone get Cwmfen some clean water, perhaps with a little honey in it? She will be better if she drinks.”
That much Cunomar could easily do. He ran for water and returned. Cwmfen drank and lay back. Her breathing was easier than it had been. The apprentice boy stood. He was fastidious in his personal hygiene. Cunomar watched him tear a fine strip of linen from one of their best sheets and use it to wipe the blood from his hands. Clean and with the sick woman settled, he returned his attention to his message.
“You have to leave,” he said. “The guards will arrange that your absence is not noted, at least in the first instance, possibly ever. Ostia is watched by men loyal to Agrippina. You cannot go there, so you will be escorted instead to the northern Gaulish coast. If you ride hard and fast you should reach it before the middle of October. If you do so, a vessel will be waiting. It is not yet too late for a ship to sail across the ocean to Britannia, provided you do not delay. The emperor has given his consent to this. The officer of the escort has a signed order for one family to leave Rome and travel to the port of Gesoriacum, there to take ship. Your descriptions are accurate; only the names are different.”
Philonikos could have been a singer as good as Dubornos. He had the memory for the lengthy tales and lineages, learned back down the ages, if not the capacity to think through what he had said. Or perhaps his attention was still elsewhere. He hovered uncertainly by the bed, watching Cwmfen take her infant son to her breast to feed. His gaze was clinical, assessing the flow of milk and the evident strength of the infant. Cunomar watched his father melt at the unspeakable beauty of it.
“Philonikos?” Dubornos shook the boy’s arm. “Why should Claudius do this? He has no love for any of us, no wish to see Britannia rise against him again.”
“He knows he’s dying.” It was Caradoc who answered. Rousing himself, he sat down by the bed and slid a scarred and cramped hand beneath his child, supporting the infant’s weight to spare Cwmfen’s arms. “Britannia was his conquest, his passion and his claim to immortality. He has no reason to bequeath it in peace to Agrippina. This is his revenge.”
The physician’s apprentice nodded. “And he may repent past acts. It is not unknown in one who feels the cold wind of death; he wishes to make amends in life that he may not be called to account by the souls of the dead when he meets them. Certainly Xenophon believes this. You are not the only ones tonight for whom messengers bear signed warrants of release. But there is need for haste. These few apart, Agrippina has control of the Guard. If she hears…” He faltered. The two parts of him, messenger and physician, came together for the first time. “But you can’t,” he said. “Cwmfen and the babe—they can’t ride yet.”
It had been obvious from the start. Cunomar had known it and seen the weight of it in Caradoc’s gaze. He had not counted on Dubornos’ seeing it, too. The singer said, “I’ll stay with Cwmfen. Caradoc will take his children home to their birthright.”
“No.” From the far side of the bed, his father’s stone-grey eyes met the singer’s quiet brown, both resolute.
Cunomar felt a fault crack along the foundations of his world. For more than two years, living so close as to step on each other’s toes, these two men had striven to hold a family together, had laid aside their differences, such as they may have been, and had worked together more closely than brothers. Now, most of all, it mattered that they not come into conflict.
Desperately willing it otherwise, he heard Dubornos say, “You are needed on Mona, by the tribes as much as the dreamers. The governor is weak; the western tribes have set the boundaries and the legions dare not cross. With you back, the warriors of all the tribes will be united as never before. East will join with west to drive the legions back all the way to Rome. They’ll see it as a gift from the gods, a demonstration of their unqualified support for our cause—and fairly so. You have no choice but to return. The gods and the people need you. Mona needs you.” At the end, unsaid, because no-one ever spoke the name aloud, or needed to, Breaca needs you.
They were weapons Dubornos had no right to use, and he did so shamelessly. Caradoc stared down at his feeding son. From the bed, Cwmfen said, “He’s right. You have to go. You and the children.” She was a warrior; her voice never wavered. That Agrippina would kill both her and the infant was obvious to them all.
The babe squirmed and was changed to the other breast. In the streets outside, a hound barked and was kicked to silence. A legionary coughed and his armour rattled. Caradoc knelt by the bed, staring at a world none of them could see. Cunomar set his fingers to his brow as he had seen his mother do before battle and prayed to Briga and Nemain and the great, vast god of the ocean that his father might, this one last time, set aside his pride and let Dubornos have his way.
The ringed scar left by the shackles at Caradoc’s neck wavered in the fey light, pulsing to the slow and steady rhythm of his heart. Without doubt, Cygfa got her courage from her father. Cunomar kept his gaze on his father’s face, offering silent support. He brought his mother to mind as he had not done in two years and sent the essence of her into the room to call him.
When Caradoc raised his eyes, they fell first on his new son and then on Cunomar who saw the full measure of pain and unbearable burdens. The voice he heard was the one his father used in council but only rarely, announcing the dishonourable death of a warrior. “I rode away from battle once leaving others to die in my place,” Caradoc said. “I do not believe the gods would ask it of me again. We go together or not at all.”
Cunomar choked and did his best to keep it silent.
After a space that lasted for ever, Dubornos said, “Then we stay. Cwmfen can’t ride.”
“But she might travel if we find her a litter. Is that not so?” Caradoc turned aside to Philonikos who was standing apart, doing his best not to be included. Pressed into a response, the lad gave a half-hearted nod.
“Good.” Caradoc stood. He had more certainty then than Cunomar had seen at any time since the day on the plain under the burning sun when he had faced down the emperor. Cunomar thought he might break with pride until he heard the next words his father said.
“Dubornos will ride ahead with Cygfa and catch the ship. They can carry the news that we’re coming. The rest of us will travel slowly, at whatever pace Philonikos allows, and if we reach the coast late we’ll find another ship, or wait until spring. The fighting season is over. Mona will live without us another half year and if the dreamers know we are coming, that will be enough.”
Dubornos and Cygfa, the two warriors, who could ride and fight. Cunomar heard the names and his breath clogged his throat. His mind screamed, an incoherent welter of pain without words behind it.
Dubornos, friend for ever, heard him and shook his head, saying, “The ship can carry the message, but not us. You said it: we go together or not at all. I will not sail to Mona without you.”
So then, whether it was safe or not, the mettle of each man was tested and found equal by the other. The hush of the r
oom held them long enough for this last confrontation, for the seeking of weaknesses and the acknowledgement, at last, that they did not exist.
Caradoc broke away first. Rising, he gave his son to Cwmfen and kissed her. To Cunomar and Cygfa, he said, “Start packing. You will need travelling clothes, gold and a knife each, nothing else.” To the physician’s apprentice, who stared as if his ears had lied, he said, “Philonikos, bring what you need to care for Cwmfen on the journey. If Xenophon sent you now, he meant you to come with us at least to Gaul. He values your life and safety as much as ours. If he is in danger, he would want to know you were safe.”
It was not a request but a command, given by one with long experience of leadership. Philonikos opened his mouth and shut it again. In eighteen months of service in the palace, he had learned when not to argue.
The fire began as they packed. Smoke leaked through the floorboards, giving form to the lamplight. In the next apartment, the fat Latin woman howled in alarm and was echoed by others on either side and across the street. The guards posted outside were already helping to evacuate the building. A detachment crashed upstairs, passing in single file up the narrow space. They came burdened, their footfalls weightily unbalanced as if by firewood or weapons or both. It would not be the first time; everyone knew someone who had died at Claudius’ command and others who had succumbed to fires in the ill-protected tenements.
Cunomar was carrying his father’s pack to the front room when the soldiers reached the door.