“Go now,” he said gently. “I have to prepare for our departure.”
After a taut moment of hesitation, she asked, “Witgern, can you tell me for certain you haven’t refused me because . . . because of Decius?”
He laughed an open, free laugh.
“Now, what is so amusing?” she asked.
“I cannot seem to rid myself of that mountebank! First he took the woman I wanted, and now he takes our villages, his only coin a lack of scruples, and warfare-knowledge learned from books. He’s just not that important, Avenahar. In this band we have men fathered by murderers and thralls, and men who’d stop their ears if you threatened to tell them who their father was. I’ve always held the mother’s blood runs stronger.” He shrugged and smiled wistfully. “If Baldemar had had his way, so long ago, I would have been your father. You know, he chose me as Auriane’s husband.”
Avenahar was silent, momentarily paralyzed by the oddness of that thought. In that case, who would she be? Born to someone else? Or still herself—only more content?
“How greatly I would have preferred that,” she said softly. “But I think you’re alone in those mild thoughts of Decius. I fear to think what your men would do to me, if they knew.”
“Of course, there’s always a quarrelsome lot looking for people to blame for their troubles, and I do have a few of them here. But these men are oathed to me. They dare not injure those I protect.”
She rose to go, but paused a final time. “I should return to my mother. I should share her prison, and her fate.”
“I forbid you to speak so,” he said with soft ferocity. “She did not give you life so you could rush off to destruction. No doubt, her one comfort in these times is knowing that you live on.”
AS AVENAHAR RETURNED to Ragnhild’s shelter, she felt a fierce ache as she witnessed the band’s preparations for war. She passed a Wolf Coat who was naming before a seeress those of his fellows who were to receive his possessions, were he slain. This man’s face, so solemn with death-knowledge, further roused Avenahar’s curiosity about the nature of their expedition, still secret from all but Witgern’s inner circle of Wolves. Farther into the camp, another shaggy group was gathered about a fire; each, in turn, committed to the flames some small offering to Wodan. One among them—another of the Wolf Coats’ women—wore a wolf skull as a headdress. While chanting the god’s praise in a voice that poured from her as though some great creature were lowing, she held aloft a bronze belt buckle and dropped it into the fire. Avenahar had heard the men speak this woman’s name; it was Gondul. She was lithe and proud of aspect, with features boldly carved like an image cut in wood, her eyes incongruously wise and sad. How easily she walked with these wolves. Avenahar felt a hollowed-out sorrow, believing, just then, she would never be one of them.
Ragnhild brought Avenahar her share of this night’s meal. All the provisions women had to give them this eve was a thin soup in which floated nettles, sorrel, leaves of purslane, a few sad bits of barley. And along with it, misery bread. They sat and ate before the old woman’s fire. Two young herb women, also Ragnhild’s apprentices, sat huddled in hooded cloaks on the other side of the fire, making their own talk.
Avenahar was hungry and gratefully took the cracked wooden bowl, spilling hot, watery broth onto her hands. At the bottom of the bowl she found . . . pebbles.
“Leave them, Av—Peregrina,” Ragnhild said as Avenahar began to pick them out with distaste. “They strengthen the bones.”
Ragnhild had steamed the misery bread; Avenahar bit into it with a crunch. Ragnhild herself ate none of it; she would partake only of soups and gruel. Gradually Avenahar had realized this was because Ragnhild suffered from an affliction of many her age, in this country—severely worn-down teeth. When Avenahar once watched the provisions women grind einkorn wheat to make their hard, flat bread, she thought she’d uncovered the cause: The flour was never cleared of particles from the grindstone. When Avenahar had tried to convince them this was a harmful thing, she was tartly told to tend to her own matters.
“Ragnhild, do you know anything of what Witgern plans?”
Ragnhild brusquely shook her head, genuinely uninterested. What Avenahar had managed to learn only puzzled her the more; one man spoke of a plan to raise a mighty howl from the forest near a bend in the river Moenus. She failed to understand what harm this could do to the enemy.
“We’ve had this same soup for five days,” Avenahar said then. “Each night it gets thinner.”
“I’m sorry it isn’t villa fare.” Ragnhild tipped her bowl and emptied it with a fast, efficient series of slurps, then wiped her chin on her cloak. “The men had no time to hunt. Ermenhild set out nets today; perhaps she got something. Even a hare or a vole enriches the broth. Don’t think of it. Just eat.”
“I’m not complaining, I’m just noticing that since I’ve been with you, the rations have gotten steadily more meager.”
“Well, it isn’t your fault, Peregrina, if you’re going to take that upon yourself, too. I told you, the Four came again.” Ragnhild ambled over to the back of her hut and returned with something precious cupped in one hand. “Here. Acorns. I was saving them for you. Eat them, they fill you up.”
“Keep your acorns. I don’t mind, really.” After a moment, Avenahar asked, “Cannot Witgern stop them? The Four, I mean?”
“They’re just one problem of many. Anyway, they have hostages. They threaten to kill their hostages if we complain about them to a Roman authority.”
“Hostages? At their fort?” Avenahar set down her bowl. “Ragnhild, things are not done that way among those people. There may well be hostages held at their home fort. But these four cavalrymen can’t be men of rank, if they’re on a patrol—they would have no power over the handling of hostages. They would report to a centurion, who reports to a camp praefect, who has that power. And since they’re breaking their own regulations, I doubt they’d be eager to give any report at all.”
“It’s no matter anyway. They’ve done it, they’re gone, we eat soup.”
AS FIRST LIGHT illumined the creamy mist pooled among the ash trees and the red deer began to stir, the Wolf Coats doused their fires, covered them over with earth, and shouldered their possessions. Clothed in great silence, they began to move off through the forest. The journey to the regions of the river Moenus, a middle-sized river that flowed into the wide Rhenus, would require two days. The Wolf Coats led the way, followed by Ragnhild and her apprentices, travelling with six provisions women. The women’s stores had been loaded onto sturdy ponies; wagons would only slow them. The Wolf Coats stayed well off from the traders’ tracks, pathways that led to villages and popular places for fording streams; they were a shadow-band, flooding into obscure valleys, flowing from meadow to meadow. By nightfall they came to country where pathways were better travelled. And on the second day, villages became more common; here the folk had commerce with the Roman forts. At dusk, Ragnhild and the provisions women fell back and camped in a thick forest of beeches. Just one hill beyond was the slope that led down to the Moenus. This was a dangerous part of its course; here, it flowed close alongside the Limes, the ever-onstretching ditch and wickerwork fence that marked the limits of Empire, with its regularly-spaced watchtowers and legionary patrols.
In preparation for battle, the Wolf Coats darkened their faces and limbs with soot and ashes and hummed the names of victory-runes over their spears. They shared the “raven’s bread” to draw in the Wolf spirit, while Witgern prayed over them. Then they melted off on their mysterious expedition.
As night deepened, the women heard faintly once, from the direction of the river, the swelling and fading of wolf cries; to Avenahar’s ears, they sounded fearfully agitated. Then the women heard no more. After two days Avenahar saw sharp concern in Ermenhild’s eyes. Surely all had perished or been taken captive. But when Avenahar spoke her fears to Ragnhild, the old woman reminded her that this country offered many places that were wild, still, where wolves might
hide, and that Witgern had studied the habits of the patrols along the Limes, and knew how to elude them.
On the third night, at staggered times, Wolf Coats began straggling back into camp. They did not look like victors. They looked like men who had been caught up in the fist of a giant and roughly hurled aside. Ragnhild set up shelters for the wounded and began by dividing them into two groups—those who she judged might live and those who would surely die. Ragnhild took the most difficult cases into her own care. While Avenahar was preparing lengths of wool for compresses, burning her hands on bronze pots as she boiled water for draughts, or staggering about under the weight of wounded men, she managed to learn in fragments that the Wolf Coats had been pursued by cavalry, then were forced to split off from one another so more might escape.
At midday, when Ragnhild became overwhelmed with critical cases, she gave entirely into Avenahar’s care a grievously wounded young man called Hagbard. “This one can’t be helped,” Ragnhild pronounced out of Hagbard’s hearing. “Note the coloring of the flesh about his wounds, and their odor. That smell is death. Four days, no more. You’ll ease his passage to the Sky Hall. You know what to do?”
Avenahar nodded bravely, though she found his fearfully mutilated hand frightful to look upon. Once she got him to the shelter, she started by giving him draughts of henbane and all-heal, for his misery, and blood-heating broths to warm his body, which hadn’t fully expelled the cold after he nearly drowned in the dark waters of the Moenus. Without deliberating on it much, she began dressing a gaping wound in the young man’s side, using herbal formulae partly of her own devising, partly remembered from medical books in Julianus’s library. As she pressed the wolfsbane compresses to his wounds, it seemed knowledge rushed into her hands. She found herself remembering charm songs Auriane had taught her, and would chant them with one palm on his forehead, the other on the amulet of earth her mother had given her. Sometimes, she just sat for long with her hands around his, thinking the gods into him.
Euphoria brought by the draughts inspired him to talk, and soon Hagbard came forth with the full tale. Avenahar, on hearing it, judged the expedition a complete, and probably fortunate, failure—it accomplished so little, with luck it wouldn’t provoke Rome to launch a punitive attack. In fact, she wondered if Rome would notice.
Witgern’s covert plan proved to be an act of sabotage on a trestle bridge spanning the Moenus. Through intelligence gathered from his spies, Witgern had learned the precise day that a detachment of one thousand men—a cohort from the regular legion stationed at the Fortress at Bonna on the Rhenus, with five hundred Arabian archers—would cross this bridge before beginning the overland stretch of the long journey to Dacia, where they were to join the great foreign war Rome was waging. As night fell, two Wolf Coats garbed in stolen legionary armor slew the sentries posted by the bridge’s approach. Then, twenty men who had volunteered for this dangerous work, Hagbard among them, crept onto the bridge and began their labors. The greater part of the band stayed in a protected place in a wood, where they raised wolf cries through the night to distract the attention of legionaries posted at the small bridgehead fort. The twenty lowered themselves down into the bridge’s wooden trestlework arches. Working through most of a moonless night, they sawed through the wood of the trestles, between the bridge’s second and third stone piers. This was carried out while dangling in darkness, high above the rushing water. Three plummeted into the river and drowned.
Hagbard had fallen, too, but had eluded the Nixes and hauled himself out. While night still shielded them, the saboteurs rejoined the main body. As soon as dawn illumined the forest, Roman cavalry were dispatched in pursuit. A grim battle ensued in a beech forest. Hagbard’s left hand had been pinned to a tree by a cavalryman’s lance; he’d saved himself from death beneath the cavalryman’s sword by tearing his hand free, then plunging into a part of the forest too thick for a horse to pass.
By midday Hagbard had found himself split off from his companions, huddled on a bramble-covered rise that gave a view of the bridge across the Moenus. And so he was witness to the grand Roman parade as it gradually began to appear on the river road—a thousand armored men, flanked by massive cavalry horses, their plumed riders bearing brightly colored flags, a startling sight against a land left bleak and brown by coming winter. The detachment moved onto the bridge. It was then, Hagbard said, he knew Witgern was the victim of the cold, unpredictable humor of Wodan.
For the bridge refused to collapse.
The Wolf Coats had lost nineteen of their own men to the long lances, and left them as food for ravens. Avenahar heard all this in sad amazement, for a short distance off in the forest, Witgern’s men gave themselves over to mead-soaked rejoicing that lasted through the night, as they celebrated their “victory.” They seemed to believe this dubious blow they’d struck would somehow prod the Governor into releasing Auriane. Avenahar could not see the use of it, and occasionally wondered if she was among fools, then felt mean and ungrateful for thinking these things.
Late into the following day, while her wounded charge was sleeping in draught-cushioned contentment, Avenahar took Hagbard’s spear and stole off to a remote meadow. She practiced with the native spear until dark came, hurling it hard at ever more distant trees. The next day, she did the same. On the third afternoon, she made off with Ragnhild’s sleepy dun horse, a good-natured-enough beast except that it refused to move faster than a lumbering trot, and would slyly attempt to pull at grass at a rider’s first lapse of attention. Sometimes, with great effort, she got the horse to canter, and she would cast the spear at targets she’d marked on trees. Slowly, she felt strength begin to flow up strongly like spring sap, and she was drunken on its rising. Her muscles awakened; her limbs began to remember the long hours of practice with her mother. This was her passage to freedom. Avenahar needed to invent many excuses for Ragnhild, to explain why the poor horse was so tired.
She knew she must find some fearful task to carry out, something marvelous enough to inspire the Wolves to welcome her into the band. Somewhere beneath all her bold intentions was a child’s terror. And dark mind-pictures of her mother’s fast-approaching fate. Grand plans helped keep these things at bay.
On their ninth day at the encampment by the river, Ragnhild came to Hagbard’s shelter to ask Avenahar about some pot of bear’s-fat ointment she couldn’t find. And Ragnhild caught sight of a thin, unkempt, but very much alive Hagbard, hair hanging in a clumped, dirty mane, tunic fluttering from a skeletal frame as he disappeared with fragile steps round a bend in the path.
Ragnhild stopped in mid-word, mouth locked open. “He is walking about?”
“But you said moving about is good for strengthening the blood, once the worst danger has—”
“Peregrina,” Ragnhild said, clamping one strong claw about Avenahar’s shoulder. “Stop shrinking off, I’m not angry—I’m closer to a faint of amazement. What did you do for him?”
“I . . . I don’t remember.”
“You will sit there until you tell me.”
“I bathed him in thyme water, as Roman physicians do. For cleansing the wound I think I made a centaury compound, from Celsus I guess it was, and to make him sleep I used a formula I got from a book of Soranus, who—”
“These were your teachers, where you came from?”
“Well, not exactly . . . at home I had lots of volumes on the medical arts.”
“Volumes? Written things? These are dead medicine women who have written their secrets? I have heard of that.”
“Yes, Ragnhild, except—”
“What else?”
“Well, I also used my mother’s charm songs, and—”
“The wound in his side, that bared the bone of the rib—how did you close it?”
“I stitched it with my hair.”
“Gods below. This is extraordinary. Avenahar, let me see your hands.”
“Shh—you used my name!”
“Don’t worry, there’s no one about.” S
he took Avenahar’s unwilling hands and pried them open. After studying them with care, she announced, “You have the Lady in your hands. It is the power of your line.”
“That’s well, then. Did you find the bear’s-fat ointment?”
“Avenahar! This is a great god-gift!”
“A gift’s not so great if it isn’t the one you want.”
Ragnhild regarded Avenahar as though she had tossed a sack of silver onto a midden.
Avenahar stubbornly met Ragnhild’s gaze. Then she looked down, mumbling, “These are avenging hands, not healing hands.”
After a time, Ragnhild gave a shrug, and sadness swept across her face as she rose to her feet to go.
As the tale of Hagbard’s recovery was related throughout the Wolf band, Avenahar found the men’s praise of her medical skills increasingly irritating. The best part of it was that Hagbard became a strong ally, and this caused many in the band to treat her less like a stray dog. But better still was Hagbard’s gift: In thankfulness for his recovery, he told her to select whatever she might want from his possessions.
Avenahar chose a wooden sword.
Hagbard had two, which he kept for practice sparring. They were carved of ashwood by a skilled woodcrafter, made of two pieces joined together between blade and hilt, and they were carefully balanced and weighted to feel, in the hand, like a sword of iron.
After a cycle of the moon, when the survivors were strong enough to journey, and those who’d died of wounds had been given over to local priestesses to be burned, all decamped for the familiar grove of mountain ash, which was one of Witgern’s wintering places. Avenahar found the home grove little changed, except the nights were sharply colder, the sun was shy and remote, and naked branches bristled against a dead gray sky. Avenahar felt bleak as that sky; while camping in the southern places, she’d held out a strong hope she would get news of her mother. They had scarce been in the winter camp for a day when the war chief called Sigibert rode into their midst.
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