The doomed warrior with the linen-wrapped bundle—had he been some battle apparition?
Auriane dared not unlatch the cedar chest, for fear of drawing the attention of the four grim-visaged cavalrymen posted by the back of the reda. A man had died to give that to her, whatever it was—surely his ghost watched her, to make certain she kept it safe. She imagined a netherworld light softly emanating from the trunk, by which she could warm herself against the bitter cold. Brico still lay curled against it, sleeping soundly. Auriane pulled a coverlet over her, not wanting to disturb her, knowing Brico desperately needed the brief succor brought by sleep.
When Brico finally sat up, wan and shivering, she nodded her head in solemn assent when Auriane asked her if she, too, had seen the warrior with the gift.
Auriane was left in shackles now, and she assumed they would keep her so. They’d even removed her wheelform brooch—evidently they didn’t trust her in possession of anything sharp. Her unsecured woolen cloak kept slipping from one shoulder, and Brico would dutifully pull it back up.
At midday the medicus came, sent, doubtless, on Firmius Speratus’s order—an impatient young Greek with a neatly trimmed black beard and the prideful manners of a cat. He examined Auriane with the brisk, competent indifference he might have shown an injured mule. With delicate distaste, he removed the dirty bandage Brico had applied to Auriane’s head wound. After determining that her broken rib had not punctured a lung, he pressed a sponge soaked in vinegar and centaury wine to the abrasions at her temple. Then he gave to both women cups of warm red wine fortified with henbane and juice of the poppy. This worked so well to quell Brico’s nervous affliction that afterward, Auriane sent her from the reda to offer aid where it might be needed—and learn what she could of Avenahar and Witgern.
While Auriane was alone she listened to the soldiers’ mutterings as they worked near her in full armor, systematically stripping the bodies of her tribesmen of anything that might be of value—necklets of amber, fur cloaks, inlaid belts, bone daggers. They tormented her by saying nothing of the fates of Witgern’s men; they spoke only of the treachery of Sigibert, whom all thought loyal to Rome, and of the deviousness inherent in the barbarian mind.
Brico returned after many hours, her cheeks smoldering with rouge, her ivory hairpin lost, her tumbled-down hair rumpled as a bed after a night’s carouse, and—Auriane squinted—was her tunica on inside out?
“From the look of you, you spent your time in a tent,” Auriane said as Brico bounded into the carriage with the durable buoyancy of youth. “You look like a happy stray cat! Who gave you the rouge?”
“Scylla, one of the camp girls. She’s the only one who’s kind.”
“It’s a fool’s risk, Brico.”
“What else was I to do? It was all they wanted of me. No babe will come of my wanderings; no one’s wilier with the herbs than I am.”
“That’s not all you must worry over. Who was he?”
“A loose-lipped Adonis called Mago, of the Eighth Augusta.”
How worldly the child’s become, just since the march began. “Leave the men of the ranks alone—especially the Eighth; all say they couple with goats. Only the officers.”
“Only the officers.”
“You’ve learned something, your eyes are full of it.”
“Yes. But nothing of Avenahar.” Brico dropped her voice as she settled herself into the carriage. “Which is good. Sirona be thanked, it seems nobody even saw her.”
“And no one found . . . the body of a maid, among all the dead?”
“I think they would have spoken of it. And Witgern got free. He lost . . . my man said they counted seventy-six—or did he say sixty-seven?—I mix up numbers. But you know how they exaggerate, to burnish their glory.”
Auriane winced, and turned away. “Every blow my people ever struck, we’ve paid much more dearly than they.”
“They despise Witgern even more now, because he was so very clever,” Brico went on. “When the cavalry chased him into the woods, his men beat their spears against their shields to terrify the horses. Back in the forest he’d had a trench dug—he’d planted upright spears in it, and had the trench covered over with brushwood. Cavalrymen fell in and several died that way. Everyone in camp’s in a stew of wrath about it.”
“That doesn’t sound like Witgern,” Auriane said, more to herself. It sounds . . . gods below, it sounds like Decius. I could almost believe Decius was at Witgern’s side, doling out battle counsel. . . .
Suddenly she considered anew the wild horse that had disrupted the camp. That stratagem, for certain, bears the print of Decius’s hand. When she’d known the Decius of old, he’d even proposed such a thing once, as they’d laid plans for a raid on a Roman camp.
Decius is aligned with Witgern—I’d lay down my life it’s so.
Perhaps, Avenahar, you did know whose golden fibula you wore.
Trapped in the eddies of these thoughts, Auriane was only half aware that Brico was speaking on.
“And all in camp fear they’ll be pushed too hard on the march, to make up for the lost time. But Witgern is safe. Avenahar lives. You have done it.” With a jester’s smile she grasped Auriane’s shoulders. “You rescued your rescuers.”
Then her mobile face sobered with the quickness of a mime, and she sank back against the side of the reda. “But who, now, is going to rescue you?”
“No one, it seems,” Auriane said wearily, looking off toward the forest. And no more deliverers will come. She remembered Gunora’s dream. What were the elderwoman’s words?—“I saw nine fires. For this year, there was no fire. On this year, you either die, or return to us.” It’s no great feat now to guess which.
Avenahar . . . carry on for me. Drive the Cheruscans off our land. Arria, know my ghost watches over you, always.
She felt herself an empty vessel filling up rapidly with all the needless griefs of the world. She’d taken a short crawl through a span that began and ended in mud and blood, its flashes of light in between so fleeting, she found it impossible to believe the gods counted their human children of greater nobility than flies buzzing about a midden. My gods don’t want me—that was proved when that great-hearted rescue try failed. Even Ramis would drive me off now—I polluted myself with death-dealing iron. Marcus’s people do want me, but only to kill me. I thought I could satisfy all sides. I end satisfying none.
Marcus, then, seemed the only balm; he had that deft ability to see sense where she saw only senselessness. His voice shielded her from the mist-ridden void. She mourned for his nurturant silences. Her life at the villa had shrunk off until it was distant, mythic as the Sky Hall.
“I suppose it was not to be,” Auriane said while collecting up Brico’s padded hand, struggling to hold fast to a blurred mind-picture of a mud-smeared Avenahar, and all the strength and promise in that face.
THROUGHOUT THE AFTERNOON, arrangements were made for the dead. The bodies of the men of rank were readied to be sent back to their home forts, so they could be given burials appropriate to their station. For the common soldiers, pyres were built by the bank of the river. At dusk, Auriane watched as a line of torches wended its way through the camp, and knew some sort of collective funeral procession was in progress. The sweetly exotic tang of incense wafted toward her. Thin strands of flute-song twined about one another in a wan lament, lost on the wind, then found again. By nightfall five pyres blazed, a frightful sight; the heat was as though Mother Sun had drifted too close to earth.
That night a double guard was set about the carriage. Auriane and Brico were brought spelt and fennel porridge, and the ever-present hard-meal biscuits. The men were given a generous ration of wine, and soon, she and Brico began to hear drunken voices chanting, “Punish the woman”—growing ever more bold. A half dozen of them ringed round their carriage, brandishing torches. One hurled a stone that rocked the reda as it struck.
After a harrowing length of time Auriane heard the voice of Firmius Speratus rising over
the soldiers’ chant, taking the men to task. This was a prisoner on her way to be tried in a higher court than theirs, she heard him admonishing them. How dare they usurp the Emperor’s divine role as judge? They challenged the authority of the man to whom they’d sworn a sacred oath, and they should be ashamed. Any man who did her harm would be subject to that punishment in which a man was struck with cudgels by members of his own century. The naming of this brutal punishment sobered them.
Auriane and Brico listened in grateful amazement.
Auriane waited until the night was half spent before she dared open the cedar chest. Most of the camp slept fitfully—each tent housed at least one man who wailed with nightmares. But near dawn, all became so quiet she could hear the cavalry horses’ hooves suctioning in wet ground as their sentries made rounds about the encampment. Of her own guards, one stared at the pyres as if in a trance, while two were intent on a dice game, heads together as they mumbled like lovers.
Auriane thought she’d made no sound as she unlatched the cedar chest, but Brico snapped awake like a startled squirrel, watching her with eyes that were limpid and shining.
Together, they lifted the bundle out. Brico helped her unwind the long strip of linen.
Bright blood sprang to Brico’s finger as she nicked it on a steel blade.
“What is this?” Auriane whispered, though already, she knew.
It was the sword that had once been her own. And before that, her father, Baldemar’s—with it, he had kept Rome at bay for a generation.
She lifted it out, still half bound in linen. Snakes of light wriggled up and down the length of a long, pattern-welded blade, so that it seemed to ripple with life. Dark-bright gemstones inset about the pommel and hilt glinted like falcons’ eyes. The sword of Baldemar had been forged over a hundred years ago by a smith some tribes now honored as a god. She closed her hand round the grip, and its familiar weight brought an upsurge of tumultuous memories—of days of home and freedom, of months spent starving in a war camp, ending in fire. It was of no use to remind herself this sword opened the door to all she turned from: the separation of the world into things holy and unholy. Blind bondage to the age-old, unending oaths of vengeance—and all those passions so loathed as ignorant and unknowing, by Ramis.
Finally, she felt simple comfort, for her father’s spirit was in the blade. She wouldn’t be alone, in death.
“I never expected to see this again, in this life,” Auriane whispered. “What’s their purpose, Brico? The man who gave it to me—he must have seen the rescue was failing. I can’t protect it from these men who hold me. The guards will find it—if not in the next days, then, surely, after my death. Witgern went to great trouble to rescue it from that fort—and now, all he’s done is ensure it falls back into Roman hands again.”
“Perhaps,” Brico offered, “they thought you might work a spell with it and save yourself? Your folk must think there’s powerful magic in reuniting you with it.” She looked at Auriane, her eyes ardent. “They are not mad. They must have had a purpose.”
“How trusting Witgern is of the goodness of the gods.”
“Maybe it’s the work of your father’s ghost. I know many true stories of ghosts meddling in human affairs.”
Auriane saw that two gemstones had been prised from the pommel, doubtless lost to grasping hands somewhere along the way to a Roman auction block. The empty sockets made her think of a man with his eyes gouged out. Baldemar’s sightless eyes.
I am your living eyes, she spoke in silence to her long-dead father. Your mind rests in mine. You have a last task for me. You want me to take this up, don’t you? And rid your home of the Cheruscan marauders. But I’m a bound captive. I suppose ghosts don’t consider that a thing might be simply impossible.
Auriane wound the linen round the blade and returned it to the chest, concealing it beneath the neatly folded garments and clay jars of unguents before she closed the chest and latched it again.
“Brico, we’ve got to get rid of this before we’ve travelled too far from my lands.”
“How can you! It’s family treasure.”
“I have it—at the river crossing that’s coming up, you must toss it in. Rivers are full of spirits. Maybe it will find its way back to my father that way.”
Brico slowly shook her head. “It’s fearsome, I won’t touch it. Please don’t make me—”
“What’s all this noise?” A man’s voice cut in, rough as a saw blade.
One of their cavalry guards pressed his face to the opening at the back of the reda. Wine-soured breath quickly filled the enclosed place.
His gaze flashed to the cedar chest.
“What is in that trunk?”
Auriane cursed silently. Brico had been staring at it as if it were a snake—a sure way to draw someone’s attention to it.
“What’s in the trunk?” he repeated, rapping the boss of his shield against the backboard for emphasis. “Open it.”
“Of course . . .” Auriane managed when she’d half mastered her fright. Obediently she crawled toward the trunk, and started fumbling, slowly, with the latch. Then she paused, and turned to meet his gaze. “But I must warn you, you’re intruding upon women’s matters.”
He eased back with faint distaste.
“She’s at her moon time,” Auriane continued, nodding toward Brico, “and we put the rags in here so they wouldn’t be left about before the slaves could take them away. I’ll show you, if you wish—”
He grunted with displeasure and made a dismissive gesture.
“Just keep silent in there.”
He moved off. Auriane dropped into dreamless sleep, pressed tightly against Brico to ward off the fierce cold.
ON THE THIRD day following the attack, the camp had recovered sufficiently, and the march began anew. A freezing, miserable rain came, which did little to dampen the ire of the men who still watched Auriane with barely-bridled rage. Brico learned one man of the Batavian cavalry was ready to pay whatever bribe was necessary for the privilege of witnessing her execution. It seemed a cavalryman Auriane had injured during the battle had died of wounds, and this man was his brother. Auriane understood this, and did not blame him.
They still followed the course of the Moenus, approaching ever closer to the place where the river arched away from her people’s lands—within a day, they would cross over the Moenus, and her own country would be behind her forever.
At the noon halt, when Speratus came to determine if she was well, Auriane seized the chance to ask him what he knew of Marcus Julianus. If Speratus had had no official reports, perhaps he’d heard speculation or idle talk?
He said he’d heard nothing beyond that Julianus was, for certain, among Trajan’s esteemed high council when the imperial forces left their Dacian base camp and crossed the Danuvius. The absence of news was to be expected—the war had begun. No tales coming from that rough country could be counted reliable. He himself had heard contradictory accounts: One claimed that Rome steadily overwhelmed the Dacian strongholds; Trajan’s advance was so slow and thorough, the legions had halted to plant crops, to be reaped in early summer. Another held that the barbarous Dacian capitol in the mountains had fallen already, and winged dragons had flown from its dungeons. Soon, the muddy water would settle.
When she asked him of Witgern’s fate, Speratus’s manner became guarded. He would say only that a punitive expedition was to be carried out against the Chattians. This, she expected. When a board comes loose, one hammers it down. Among the settlements to be burned would be the little village of Witgern’s birth.
But very soon after she put these questions to Speratus, news of Marcus Julianus did come.
She had only to wait a day. And when it came, it was given not just to her, but to the whole of the world. Marcus Julianus had become one of the heroes and mysteries of the Dacian war.
AS THE SUN sank and the moon’s pale orb appeared in a still-bright sky, two riders from the Imperial Post clattered noisily into camp. They’
d been dispatched from the Dacian war; Trajan’s military advisers sought to determine the speed of this company’s progress. Immediately afterward, the camp was alive with fresh, and more accurate, tales of the war.
As cookfires illumined the dusk, two soldiers strode past Auriane’s reda, debating whether “the noble Julianus could possibly have escaped.” She fought to quell her alarm, thinking they could well be speaking of someone else—the name was not uncommon. Shortly afterward she heard his name again among fragments of talk, as another man declared, “What a magnificent end for a man such as Marcus Arrius Julianus was!”
She felt it as a well-placed punch to the stomach.
Her mind began a slow spiral down a fathomless well.
Battling off numbing anguish, she sent Brico out to learn more. But this time the maidservant got into a scuffle with two of the camp followers—the painted women had grown to resent the fact that Brico was peddling her wares for free in territory they’d staked out as their own. When Brico returned bruised and soaking wet from a brawl that played out its end in a watering trough, she’d little more to add except for the assurance that the men were indeed speaking of Auriane’s own Julianus. Auriane spent the night huddled on the floor of the carriage, feeling herself a brittle, dried, dead thing sucked empty by a spider; and sleep, when it came, pitched her into lurching nightmares.
On the following morn Auriane was unshackled. Two of Firmius Speratus’s bodyguards escorted her down the wide avenue of the camp. She moved through a gauntlet of hard stares as men paused in their morning tasks to watch her with expressions ranging from curiosity to distaste. She felt a burn of shame, knowing she must present a frightful sight with her thin hands clutching at her unpinned cloak, the bloodied linen bandage swaddling one arm, her hair so soiled it was several shades darker than it truly was. She was naked before them—her throat bare of adornment, her hands empty of even so much as a weapon of honor. They could sculpt me to personify my people’s defeat—I’ve seen such miserable stone images, set above their fortress gates.
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