Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Athelinda’s laughter stopped Avenahar in place; it was surprisingly abandoned and kind. “How many maids of your tender years can say they’re hunted by not one, but two armies? How celebrated you are,” Athelinda went on musically; then her voice became sharp. “. . . And not yet old enough to kiss the bridal sword.” You’ve proven yourself to the world, perhaps, but not to me.

  “I’m . . . celebrated only among outcasts, Grandmother,” Avenahar managed uncomfortably. “My deeds are paltry beside those of your husband.”

  “Modest, too. And you don’t shrink from carnage. But how generous and bold are you, through the soul? Today will tell. Are you hungry, Avenahar? You certainly appear to be!”

  Today will tell? Avenahar disliked the sound of that. The great lady gestured toward a settled old thrall woman who blended with the straw—a familiar spirit, Avenahar guessed, with whom the old widow had lived for a long time. Afflicted with some illness of the humors that thickened the limbs, the woman eased slowly from the secret shadows behind Athelinda’s warp-weight loom. “The smokehouse is full,” Athelinda was saying. “We slaughtered yesterday and offered a pig to the Lady. Mudrin’s just made a porridge.” The thrall called Mudrin set a bowl of thick barley porridge on the bench beside Avenahar. “Eat,” the lady said. “If you were any thinner we could use you as a boundary post.”

  It was a command. Avenahar dutifully spooned gruel into her mouth.

  “I’ve called you here because I’ve an important task for you,” Athelinda went on. “There’s a man hiding in my root cellar who can, possibly, be of extraordinary help to us all. He’s hunted everywhere, so he’d best stay down there. He’s lately escaped from Chariomer’s camp, at fearful risk to himself—”

  No, Avenahar thought, it can’t be . . .

  “—and as he had that Cheruscan bandit’s trust, he has close knowledge of Chariomer’s war plans. He knows much; he claims he can even name the days when the Cheruscans will strike again. He can’t go abroad himself; our folk would recognize him, and, let us just say, wouldn’t treat him gently. So we depend upon you, Avenahar, to carry what he knows back to Witgern’s band.”

  “Grandmother, who is this man?”

  “His name is Decius.”

  Avenahar disgraced herself and spewed out a mouthful of barley porridge. A jumble of questions arose—but she dared ask none of them. Whose plan was this, yours or his?—loomed chief among them. And, “Do you not know Decius is my natural father?” She must. She can’t have accepted that same bit of holy nonsense Ragnhild believes; she’s too deep in knowledge to be fooled about such fundamental truths concerning her family.

  Gods below, she’s conspired with him.

  But why?

  “Grandmother. I’m not certain I’m best for this task. Surely there are others who could—”

  “Modesty’s a vice, worn too heavily,” Athelinda interrupted with a nip in her voice. “You carry our family’s luck in abundance. You are greatly trusted by Witgern. You alone among his men can write, and so, can commit what this Decius says to parchment, to aid memory”—she’s got a voice that tightens about you like wet ropes, Avenahar thought “—and because you lived outside our country for so long, your hatreds haven’t festered—you can meet this man without rancor. You know, child—”

  Without rancor? Was this some perverse jest?

  “—that Chariomer, if he’s not stopped, will have this farmstead next. Do you want Cheruscan carrion engaging in a filthy carouse around this very hearthfire where Baldemar gave heart to his men? Don’t be nettlesome. I’ll hear no griping from you on this matter, child.”

  THE WILLOW-WITHY LADDER swayed precariously as Avenahar lowered herself into the root cellar while striving to stave off murderous thoughts of Athelinda. Wattlework hurdles covered over with brushwood concealed this earthen pit from casual glances, for the root cellar had always served as the family’s place of refuge during tribal raids. She found it not so cold as she might have expected, perhaps because down here, she was that much closer to the Earth Mother’s heart. The place smelled of mold and apples.

  She dropped to the hard-packed dirt floor. A man wrapped in marten furs stood quietly watching her in the speckled light filtering through hazel-wood branches. That was the first surprise—he was just a man. Not tall. Not particularly wicked-looking—he looked more like someone waiting for slow-witted companions to catch onto a joke. His thick, curling hair was dark and glossy like hers where it wasn’t salted with white. That seamed face was pleasantly boyish but for the sobering effect of the acerbic glimmer in his eyes. When young, he might have played an appealing Silenus in one of those dreadful comic dramas she’d seen on the town stage. It certainly wasn’t the face of a man capable of great treachery or bloody deeds. She just stared for a moment, baffled to silence.

  This is Decius.

  He grinned—the smile of a trickster grown weary.

  “Minerva’s eyes! Behold, as fair a creature as ever stalked a battlefield—and she’s every whit as beauteous as her clamorous mother! . . . Though perhaps, not as tidy. What’s that mess all over your tunic?”

  She quickly put a hand over the porridge stain.

  “My apologies for being fourteen years late in meeting you,” he went on. “But please understand, I was unavoidably detained.” A slight huskiness came to his voice. “Avenahar. I’ve waited much, much too long for this day.”

  “You are my Roman father,” she whispered, rather stupidly, she thought, as she stood stiffly, alternately battling a painful seizure of self-awareness, and fresh surges of anger at having been shoved into this snare. Just when she almost forgot she’d spoken, he answered.

  “Well, yes . . . but you say ‘Roman’ as if all who bore that name were some mix of Circus procurer, professional poisoner and troll beneath a bridge.” Cautiously he moved one step closer, and reached out his hands to her. “I hope I’m a bit better than that.”

  She took a step away. Moist earth pressed against her back.

  “Ah, and is that my gift you’re wearing?”

  “Gift? What gift?”

  “The golden fibula. It’s bright as your eyes. It looks well there.”

  She put her hand to the golden brooch she had loved. “This was from you?”

  “None other. Didn’t your mother tell you where it came from? What are you doing? Don’t take it off. You need a pin to fasten that thing.”

  “How dare you give me a gift,” she managed hoarsely, flinging the brooch off as if it burned. It struck the dirt by his foot. It had tricked her into reverence. Her cloak slid from one shoulder, exposing the rough nettle-fiber shift beneath. She jerked it closed, while saying with exaggerated disdain, “I wore it only because I thought it a holy thing, from a woodwife or . . . or a god.”

  “I’ve been called many flattering things, mind you—but never a god. Unless you mean to slay me with that look, then deify me.”

  “You laid a trap for me. That was treacherous and base.”

  “Touchy as her mother, too. Sorry! ‘Treacherous’ and ‘base’ are two words that leave barely a scratch. From overuse, I suppose.” He took another step toward her. “Avenahar—”

  “Stay where you are.” Her voice quavered. “Please.”

  “Be reasonable. Can you blame a father who wants to see his only child just once before he’s packed off to Hades?”

  “You desecrated my mother. Don’t call yourself my father.”

  “Well, in this matter, it took two to desecrate.”

  “How dare you insult her!” Avenahar turned sharply away and stared hard at the earthen wall. But inwardly, she was surprised at herself. She’d always thought this moment, if it ever came, would be heroically simple—spit on him and walk away, leaving him to simmer in his own wretchedness. But she was finding she needed to work a bellows on the flames of her wrath. It was not just that this amiable, nimble-tongued rogue scarce seemed to breathe the same air as the Decius of her imaginings. It was also that he carried
a strong imprint of her mother on him. Auriane’s childhood was alive in this man’s eyes. After seven months of standing alone against the world, Avenahar found she longed to keep close anything Auriane had touched or loved.

  “That’s a fine fit of pride!” Decius said to her back. “Gods, you’re so like her, you’ll bring me to maudlin tears—and the last time I cried was ten years ago when the last of the palatable wine ran out. Avenahar, you’re not being fair.”

  “You deserted her when she was carrying me.”

  “Of course I did! I had half the Chattian tribe sprinting after me with axes in their hands!”

  “You were the trained pet hound of Chariomer—”

  “You sound as though you speak another’s words. Speak your own.”

  “—and you helped him slaughter us, for years. All say so.”

  “Utter nonsense!” He shouted the words; his vehemence stopped her in place. “And I think I don’t need an education in right conduct from a head-strong maid of fourteen who ran away from her noble parents, leaving them heartbroken, then galloped off to join a brawling band of wolf-men. Show some respect for your elders. Right now, maybe I don’t want to claim fathering you. Sit down, be silent, and listen.”

  She found herself settling obediently onto the dirt floor. Decius took a place on an overturned pinewood barrel.

  “Avenahar. Chariomer’s battle plans are his own. I was his prisoner. Prisoner? I was his slave, always one jump ahead of death. Your Chattian folk never liked me and I think they invented a story or two, to make me worse. Such expert assistance as I gave him concerned only the building of his hall back in the Hart country. Who knows, but future ages may laud me as the man who brought steam heat to the barbarians. My war counsel was of no use among such backward folk. Tell them to hold men in reserve and they think you’re insulting them, calling some of them cowards. Not to mention that simple discipline and the notion of fighting as one are ideas antithetical to the primitive mind. I can’t force you to believe me. But it’s the truth.”

  His voice became more gentle. “Avenahar, all those years, I wanted more than my freedom, just to look, once, upon your face. You may not be happy with me, but I’m certainly happy with you.”

  He reached out to touch her smoothed-back hair. Avenahar pulled away from him—but not so quickly as before.

  “Poor child,” he said in a voice surprisingly nurturant. “You are all I had hoped. And you’ll be one in whom others place hopes. You are your mother, reborn.”

  She pulled the cloak more tightly about her, an unconscious act of warding. It seemed a fine joke on herself to hear the words she’d so long craved to hear, from him.

  Then Decius leaned closer, and spoke in covered voice as if he feared the stored apples might overhear.

  “Avenahar, I had another reason for coming.” He put a hand beneath her chin, and lifted it. “Perhaps, just perhaps, I can help get your mother back.”

  “Please. Don’t make jests about such things.”

  “No jest, my pretty. I know she goes to her appeal in that soon-to-be new Roman province, and that there will be no stay for her. But she has to cross through a bit of the country before she gets there, doesn’t she?”

  “You speak of . . . of some sort of rescue? Is it possible?”

  “Anything is possible, pet.”

  She battled down a strong upsurge of elation—hope was the cruelest trap.

  “I have close knowledge of the lands along her route—they’ll have to take her along the Moenus, won’t they? To pick up detachments from those forts? I did my second year of service in one of the first forts built along that river. I know that country like I know my father’s house. It was there I got my first decoration. Did your mother tell you I was the youngest man, ever, in my legion, to be given the centurion’s vine-stick? Don’t forget, Avenahar, I know the weak points of a marching camp.”

  “How do I know you can be trusted? What’s this you know of Chariomer? When will he strike?”

  “Mercury’s wings, do you think His Kingliness would divulge such a thing to me? He trusted me less than he trusted his wife.”

  “You tricked Athelinda. You’re a mountebank and a fox.”

  “I own up to tricking a lot of people. But not Athelinda. I do have information about him—just not that. Athelinda was only keeping the truth close; the fewer who know this, the better. Chariomer may have turned a squinty eye toward me. But I listened. And I watched. And learned a thing or two of him.”

  Avenahar met this with a bored expression.

  Decius dropped his voice, speaking scarce above a whisper. “Chariomer is superstitious about certain days. In fact, he counts some days so inauspicious, he’d never launch an attack at those times, and would be all in a muddle, were an enemy to attack him.” He reached behind him and got a sheaf of thin sheets of beech bark bound with a leather thong, on which he’d inscribed Latin words in charcoal. “I’ve marked his bad days, here. You must commit them to memory.”

  Intrigued in spite of herself, Avenahar took the sheets from him and studied them.

  “Avenahar, this is a man so fettered by a load of magical nonsense, if you know what he fears, you have him trussed and bound. For example, he counts the number ‘five’ as unlucky for him. Five days after the moon, five men riding; this terrifies him. When the north wind Boreas blows, he thinks it carries the ghosts of those he’s put to death and he’ll not even venture outside. A crow seen in the western part of the sky, this reduces him to aspic. I’ve seen it. He’s distressed by the color red, or any man with red hair; he even wears red boots, thinking this will somehow reverse the effect—the examples go on and on.”

  “Gods, but that’s useful,” Avenahar whispered. She looked at him. “If it’s true.”

  “Stop this, right now,” he said curtly. “Do you think I would have risked so much to come here, simply to play you for a fool and pass false information on to you? What sort of man does that? Go now, if you think so little of me.”

  That burst of righteous wrath struck a mark within her. “I take those words back,” Avenahar said softly, looking down at the sheets of beech bark. “Half of them, anyway. You are a fox. But you’re not a mountebank.”

  “Ah, sweet words from a loving daughter are like the taste of warm honey cakes by a garden fountain.”

  “Please, Decius. Must you always speak with mockery?”

  It was Decius’s turn to feel knocked from his perch. This earnest young creature who was his daughter, so strong in some ways, so frail in others, turning those guileless eyes on him, expecting him to be simply and only what he was—somehow vaulted over every defensive ditch he’d ever dug about himself. For the first time his mocking words did seem faintly ridiculous, like a mime running out to fight an enemy no one around him could see.

  “All right,” he said. “Agreed. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not the ogre you want to be,” she said then, not knowing what prompted her. “You’re more like the god Hermes as a boy, who was a master of persuasion and tricks. . . . You know how he once stole some cows and made some shoes for them out of bark, which he tied onto their feet with plaited grass, so no one could follow their tracks.” Avenahar frowned. “How did you persuade Athelinda to agree to draw me into this? She’s got trusted messengers who could carry this information to Witgern.”

  “Perhaps she’s wise enough to want us to make peace. Perhaps she thinks you’re no good to us if you go through all your mortal days loathing where you came from. It unbalances the humors. It leads to melancholia. We don’t want that, do we?”

  Avenahar managed a half smile at this, then she cast her gaze down, still numbed somewhat by the swiftness with which all unfolded.

  “Avenahar. If you can abide having anything to do with me—and if Witgern’s game to make a try at snatching your mother back—will you act as messenger?”

  “What’s your reward in this?”

  “The sight of you. That is all.”

&
nbsp; She was trembling. “You think there is a chance.”

  “Always, pet.” He smiled. “Avenahar,” he said then, his expression becoming more grave. “All these years, I’ve wanted to know something.”

  She waited, lulled by the sound of his voice. Surprisingly, there was humility in it.

  “Were you and your mother content, at the villa of her high nobleman? Did Auriane have any good years of peace and happiness? I so wished it for her.”

  This broke Avenahar like a reed. She bent forward and softly cried, covering her face with her hands.

  He put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She didn’t push it off.

  She managed to nod, yes.

  “Avenahar, I thank you. I am most happy, knowing that.”

  He let her cry for a moment, while a new gentleness entered the root cellar. Then he grinned broadly, dispersing it. “Now, your mother listened to me and was the better for it, and as I believe gifts are passed on from mother to child, it’s a good bet you’re capable of the same, and so—”

  “You said you’d stop that.”

  “Sorry, long habit. You still haven’t answered me. Will you bring my instructions to Witgern, so we can, perhaps, cheat your mother’s executioners?”

  “Yes. How can I say no?”

  “Good, then.” He sat up straighter on his seat. “I suppose this is enough for one day. I don’t want to overstrain this tenderly budding familial bond. Go now. Help Athelinda serve the Assembly delegation, or whatever it is she’s doing up there today.”

  As Avenahar got slowly to her feet, Decius retrieved the golden fibula, loudly blew the dirt from it, then held it out to her. “Please. Keep it. It looks good perched on that cloak.”

  She shook her head, no. But she seemed far less certain of herself this time.

  “Am I that much an ogre?”

  “No. But your people are. Most of them, anyway. I don’t know what you are. I don’t know what I am. I’m only half Chattian, that is hard enough to . . . That thing houses evil magic. I can’t wear it, it would work against my fate.”

  “I’ll take that rambling ‘maybe’ as a no. And I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll barter it for a small plot of land. It shall be yours, waiting for you, in some god-blessed future day when Chariomer is driven off and all is settled and safe for farming again. You can go there and live, when you’re wearied of ransacking the earth with a wolf pack. You can take a fine husband. And perhaps . . . your old father could live somewhere near. In a house in back, or something.”