B007IIXYQY EBOK (110 page)

Nightmare-ridden sleep took her. After a stretch of time that might have been one day or three, her hunger-sharpened sense of smell detected the rich, sweet odor of boiled fruit. She opened her eyes and saw in the murky light that a wooden bowl, still steaming, had been placed within the bars.

She struggled against a powerful impulse to seize it and gulp it down like a beast. Something was wrong. Why would Corax amend his order and have food brought?

Several paces off a rat reared up, long body erect, its eyes glowing beads as it watched her warily. Auriane pushed the bowl closer to the bold creature and feigned sleep. It scuttled forward, then stopped, pausing to clean its face with a swift
rotating motion of fleshy paws. Silently she cursed. After what seemed half a day it started forward again and seized a boiled fig.

With chilling swiftness its agony began. The little body writhed and jerked while Auriane watched in numb fright, imagining how its vitals burned.

This is the work of some unknown enemy. The Emperor would not deign to murder me in secret. And Corax, for some reason, wants me alive. The trainers, after that day in the yard, must have talked of what passed, and my name has reached the ears of someone who wishes me dead.

But who?

CHAPTER XXXVI

W
HEN
A
URIANE WAS RELEASED, THE DAYS
had a numbing sameness. The sandy yard, the cramped passages and the cavernous room off the kitchens were her country. This is how the plow-ox must feel, she surmised, walking the same path day upon day, looking on the same scraps of the world. At first light the two hundred novices were jarred from sleep by the guards striking iron rods against the bars. The hours of practice, the miserable meals and the doubtful escape of sleep were the spokes of a wheel, marking the turning of the days. She found a strange good came out of it—the very monotony brought her a startling clarity of mind, the sense that her spirit-flame somehow gathered strength, as though she performed ceaselessly the Ritual of Fire. Was it this—or was it the return of the
aurr
—that made the ways of her country begin to look like a thing apart
from her, not inseparable from her soul? She remembered Ramis often isolated apprentices and assigned them repetitive tasks. Was her purpose to create this odd sense of belonging not merely to one’s clan, but to the preserving sun, the ocean of night sky, and all sentient beings?

Have I in some way in this foreign place become an apprentice of Ramis after all? Athelinda, in spite of your efforts, the sorceress claims me at the last. But she will never have me completely—not while I seek to avenge.

The mornings in the yard were passed in maneuvers designed to build the novices’ endurance, alertness and speed, as well as the strength of leg so vital in swordfighting. Corax liked to have them run the circuit of the sandy yard with lead weights attached to their ankles while he stationed the assistants in the yard’s center, armed with wooden staves. The assistants would hurl the staves without warning, forcing the novices to dodge them. They did not kill when they struck, but they grievously wounded. In the afternoon the novices were given the same staves as weapons and taught to thrust at stout posts, then at straw men. Soon they were sparring with partners.

Using the staves, Corax demonstrated the elementary steps of the advance and retreat. “Surprise is all,” he would bellow as he strode among them. “Vary your retreats. If you crave long life, never let your man detect a pattern.” Auriane heard these words so often they resonated in her mind at night as she dropped into sleep.

As they practiced, Greek physicians watched them with emotionless eyes, to see that muscles developed properly and were not overstrained. Sometimes they ordered massage; at others they adjusted the amount of barley in the novices’ diet or prescribed the swallowing of ashes, a regimen thought to aid in building strength. At first her muscles were painfully sore, but gradually they awakened, strengthened and remembered—and she found herself exulting in the feeling of returning skill and power. The clumsy stave was a weapon, if a feeble one, against this loathsome dependency.

During the times of practice Corax kept Coniaric and Thorgild apart from Auriane and Sunia. He sensed the four took too much strength from each other’s presence, and it irritated him. But at meals they stayed close by one another, sometimes eating in silence, at others speaking passionately of home, carefully keeping to memories that brought amusement rather than tears. They would tell tales of Grimelda and her axe, but they never spoke Odberht’s name. Or they would talk of Auriane’s humbling of Gundobad, while leaving Athelinda shrouded in darkness. Almost nightly Coniaric proposed some new plan for escape. It filled Auriane with sadness—none of his stratagems showed real understanding of how far they were from home or of the grim reality that not just the school but the whole country was their prison. She would listen respectfully, accepting it as a thing he must do to preserve his mind.

She spoke of Marcus Julianus to no one, though she felt he accompanied her always, watching with affection and concern. The memory of that night was sometimes transcendent, sometimes a brooding shadow. Why had he sent no sign? She could not believe he had forgotten her—he had risked much for her already. And she could not accept that she might have been mistaken about what she sensed of his spirit. Occasionally she heard his name spoken when she overheard snatches of the trainers’ or physicians’ gossip of affairs at the Palace, and so she knew he lived still. She did not miss the reverence in their tone—she quickly realized that of all their ruling men he was the most beloved of the people.

One day in the equipment room an armory boy who was fastening her leather greaves met her eyes briefly, then furtively looked down. Speaking into the din of daily preparations for practice, he said, “You are Auriane.”

“Yes,” she said, her body tautening, sensing a gate thrown open to peril.

“I have words from the one who gave you that amulet of earth.”

The ground seemed to shift sharply beneath her feet. She felt every sense grow luminously alert.

“Caution’s necessary, I’m to report,” the boy continued, “and delays unavoidable. For safety’s sake, do nothing to bring yourself to the attention of those above. Take heart—soon now he comes for you.” The boy looked up, smiling carelessly as if he engaged in idle banter, showing teeth that were brilliantly white against a rich brown Syrian complexion.

“Praise to sun and moon! Tell me—” she began and stopped, realizing Corax was watching her. The boy, nimble as a monkey, moved on to his next charge, and to her relief Corax’s contemptuous gaze passed on.

She felt raw joy, confusion and wrenching pain.

He lives, and is maddeningly close, but something is wrong, I sense it. I fear I will not see him again in this life.

That night in the dark of the cell she shared with six women captives, she attempted for the first time to tell the whole tale to Sunia while the four others slept soundly in the straw.

“Ah,” Sunia whispered when Auriane had finished. “I knew
something
uncanny passed on that night. It sounds like a tale of Wodan in mortal guise.”

“No, Sunia, there is a great mystery here, for certain, but he seems a master of the powers of day, not of night.”

“Well, if
I
attracted looks of love, it stands for certain you would.”

“You’ve something to tell me, then.”

“There is a net fighter of the Second Hall, strapping, tall, beautiful to look upon…. He gave me a rose wreath.”

“Sunia, no. That means he wants to bed you once. And I doubt he’ll survive until Yule—have you not seen that the net fighters are first killed?”

In the blackness Auriane heard only a rustling of straw and Sunia’s ragged breathing as she fought against sobs. “All of them are killed. We will be killed. What cursed difference does it make?”

“We are going to
live,
Sunia, this is what I am trying to tell you.” But Auriane saw Sunia clung to the comforts of her pessimism like an old woman who will no longer venture from the safety of her house. “Listen to me. The man of whom I spoke is the most powerful of their noblemen. He seems to have cast some spell over the Emperor. I’ve heard it said by many that he is the one man who keeps the Emperor from becoming wholly evil. He’s very close to all these mysteries about us—a fearful thing, yet he seems nobly kind and human enough. Sunia, he’s promised to help us escape this place. I’ve little doubt he will, he seems able to do anything—”

“Us?” Sunia said skeptically. “He does not know me.”

“I’m not leaving without you, he’ll have to understand that.”

“I would be cautious, Auriane. Do you think these people love as we do? I think not—they’re more than half mad. There are way too many of them, crawling all over one another. They scarcely speak to each other. They have no families. They have no hearths. They—”

“Enough of that. Go to sleep. Have you forgotten the throng that raised me up?”

At practice Auriane stayed near Sunia, striving to correct her clumsy mistakes before the trainers did so with their whips. Thorgild and Coniaric would give a good account of themselves, she was certain, but she worried continuously that Sunia would never pass to the next stage of training. She would be taken off to be used in the bloody “morning shows” that preceded the exhibitions of gladiators, where criminals were given to the beasts, or put into one of the mass spectacles where the combatants were scarcely prepared and expected only to die.

Days of games came and passed. The school huddled in the Colosseum’s baleful shadow and the clamor of the throng was to Auriane a titanic and bestial war cry that called up images of limitless horror. Surely it was not composed of human voices—it was the primitive roar of the great Wyrm at world’s end as stretched wide its jaws to gulp down whole nations, splintering bones, demanding ever more.

On the last day of the games held in honor of Vespasian’s birthday, the door of the future opened a crack and its horror rushed forth. It happened that two physicians’ assistants were hurrying to the hospital rooms with a fatally wounded man, closely pursued by twenty and more noisy spectators, jostling and crowding. The physicians turned down a wrong passage in their haste and collided with the file of novices going to practice. Auriane saw a linen cloth had been hastily thrown over the dying man. Great dark stains spread from terrible unseen wounds. His helmet had been removed; his head seemed to have been anointed in blood. In his eyes was the wild, roaming look of one betrayed. As Auriane watched, astonished, the crowd swarmed about the stalled litter. The linen cloth was torn away from him and the people, daggers in hand, fell on the man, in spite of the curses and blows of the physicians. Guards rushed in soon after, but too late.

Later the meaning of this ghastly scene was explained to her by a novice named Celadon, a Gaul by birth, and the only man in this place not of her tribe who spoke to her with friendliness. Celadon had lived here most of his life and knew the customs. They wanted a piece of his liver, Celadon explained. A bit of liver from a fallen gladiator cures epilepsy, dropsy and gout.

Though she had lived on battlefields all her life, still Auriane found herself feeling crippled inside with the horror of it, and ashamed for this whole god-cursed race of men.
This,
she thought, is evil beyond measure. War has its reasons, and has existed since the time of peace and wandering, but human creatures were not created by the gods to live and die in a slaughterhouse.

Fall never became winter, though enough days passed. Auriane was amused to hear the trainers grumble of the cold and see them don heavy cloaks when the air was scarcely chilled. The snows did not come. She prayed for snow because its absence was unsettling; if Fria did not throw down her white mantle there could be no merriment of Yule, no warmth of hope, no serene death-sleep so all could be vigorously reborn in spring.

All that changed was that their training passed into the next phase. They were given wooden swords of double the weight of a standard sword, and heavy, round oak shields. Clumsy as this weapon was, it was yet a sword, the first Auriane had held since her capture, and in the moment when she first closed her hand round its grip, memories of freedom flooded in. The high walls seemed less dense and a faint pine scent haunted the air. She imagined stable earth beneath her feet instead of irksome sand. As they repeated the basic cuts, she fought down exultant feelings, for with them came guilt—she knew she felt them alone. Poor Sunia was in greater misery than before. And to Coniaric, Thorgild and the others of her tribesmen, swordfighting had never been more than grim necessity. To them, this was but one terrifying step closer to the ultimate dance of death. She carefully disguised her joy.

Fria, you are a difficult mother. Why this, now? We seek simplicity, and you are only content to send complications and desires out of place.

As they practiced, Corax moved among them with his whip, alert to the turn of a wrist, the placement of a foot, the expression in an eye. “A bout can be lost with a look,” he admonished ceaselessly. “Reveal nothing with your eyes. You there. You looked, then struck. I’d have blocked that with a cross-stroke, then made you into cutlets. Remember, it is the mind’s game as well as the body’s. You must be an actor. If you feel confident, feign confusion. If you’re weakening, make a show of strength. Never let your man know your true mind. You must scarcely know yourself what you will do next, in the attack, the retreat, the stroke.”