B007IIXYQY EBOK (20 page)

In the end Auriane got no solace from her mother’s reply; Hertha’s words clung like river mud. Auriane could never feel a tremor of happiness without it being darkened by a sense of evil worming in, spoiling what was fresh, bringing the murky memories, the smell of rot, the shadow of a coming crime greater than Wido’s.

Decius tossed another potful of river water over the thatch of his hut. He was fireproofing it. Last year two thralls had burned to death when a band of raiders bearing the boar standard of Wido threw firebrands at the thatched huts of the thralls who worked Hertha’s lands, and he did not plan to fall victim to this latest war between the clans, the blurred details of which reached him through the gossip of the field thralls. The milder climate of the months of
Julius
and
Augustus
seemed especially to incite their savagery—but what were names of months in this god-cursed place? Here there was only heat or cold, dry grass or snow.

He could not guess when this latest spasm of violence would end and he looked for no cause. Barbarians were more of nature than of man; they stormed and were calm in elemental rhythm. As a legionary soldier at the fortress at Mogontiacum he had learned to view them as vermin infesting the frontier whose numbers needed periodically to be thinned. “Take no prisoners” was the order given before every campaign. “They’re too savage a breed; they make poor slaves. Spare neither the females nor the young—or in a generation’s time they’ll replenish themselves and our labor will be undone.”

But after two years of enslavement by them his view of them had softened somewhat. Now he saw them as a lower order of man, a child-people capable of a surprising amount of human feeling, brigands and borrowers who nibbled at the edges of civilization, seeming half eager to be let in. Some of their traits amazed him, such as their laws of guest-friendship, which declared that a wayfarer who sought shelter under your roof must be protected even if he were a fleeing murderer. Or their profound—and to his mind faintly absurd—reverence for their mothers: The most celebrated and bloody-minded warrior often would not act in war or in peace without first seeking her counsel. Their relationship with their gods was so intimate it called up lost longings in him. Unlike Roman deities, who were the remote partners of emperors, the spirits of the Chattians haunted the humblest hearth fire and hovered over every ripe field; the stalks shivered with their breath. Every act of their daily lives was homage to a deity; even as they harvested their crops, they imagined they relieved their earth goddess of the heavy fruit of her womb. Their minds seemed innocent of impiety; it would never occur to them to cheat their gods in the way his own people often did.

And they were exceedingly faithful; often he mused what excellent soldiers they might make if that willingness to die in battle for their chief could be transferred to a legionary commander. His final judgment of them was that with patient care and perhaps a generation’s time, they might be brought to accept some of the benefits of Roman civilization.

It was a task far too large for himself, however. He wanted only to quit this prison of trees and set eyes on a marketplace again, to hear running water issuing from a fountain, not from untamed earth. The rigorous, sensible routines of the army seemed a sort of ritual prayer torn from his life forever, leaving him adrift in a formless place. He ached to hear the sound of true human speech, not the barbarian barkings that ravaged his nerves every day. He felt shame when he looked at his hands—once they had borne a soldier’s calluses; now they were the burnt, roughened hands of a field slave. Most of all he missed the sense of moving
forward
in
life, of bettering things. In the army, as in all life, there was always some circumstance to change or improve—whether it was the draining of a swamp to create a healthier climate, the returning of a shipment of poorly made catapult bolts that did not fire straight, or the conditioning of fresh recruits into units that fought as one man. In the old life his restless need for change was always gratified. Barbarians, like all lower creatures, knew nothing of this need; they moved not in a straight line with eyes upon a goal but in endless, unknowing circles, prodded by the revolving seasons, blindfolded by their traditions. They never expected conditions to worsen or improve; they feasted, fornicated, farmed and fought without wondering why, and their lives were as fixed as the stars. It deeply mystified him.

Decius’ life until his capture had been a succession of minor successes interspersed with moments of amazing good fortune. His first post was as a common legionary soldier in the remote province of Britannia. He came with carpenters’ skills and a more sophisticated education that was given most shopkeepers’ children in the small Etrurian village of his birth, because a celebrated naturalist had happened to settle there and found a school that took in boys of modest means. Decius’ first month of provincial service fell in the year of the great revolt of the Britons. He had scarcely completed his training when some nameless superior decided men with carpenters’ skills were needed on the Rhine frontier. An order for his transfer came, and he set sail just one day before the rebels of Queen Boudicca burned his fort, massacred the inhabitants of a neighboring veterans’ settlement and slaughtered every man of his cohort. From that day forth every night before he retired he poured a libation to Fortuna and swore to do so until the end of his life.

He was sent then to the great fortress of Mogontiacum and put into a century of the Fourteenth Legion composed mostly of illiterate farmers from lesser villages of Gaul. The ceaseless violence of the Rhine frontier aided his rapid advancement, as it presented many opportunities for acts of reckless courage. After one ambush he was awarded the
corona civica
for saving the life of a fellow soldier. As he was as well the only man of his century who could read, he rose quickly to the rank of Centurion. Though he was a lowly one, his promotion incited comment because he was but twenty-three years old.

Decius was little impressed by this; it seemed but a collection of lucky chances. The accomplishment that most filled him with pride was that he was known throughout the fortress as the only man of his cohort who never paid for love. He had no need to fall back upon the tepid embraces of the camp followers with their tick-ridden blankets and battered tin cups rattling with coins; he had his pick of the shy, doe-eyed maiden daughters of the
canabae,
those settlements of native craftsmen that always sprang up in the vicinity of a legionary fortress. He took them in the open fields where the brisk northern wind burned the skin, and often as not they declared their great love for him and followed him back to camp. That, he maintained, was success in life, but the army stubbornly refused to give decorations for it.

And then came the day that Fortuna abandoned him. He was overseeing a detachment of the Fourteenth engaged in laying logs for the base of a rampart of a fort under construction in the valley of the Wetterau, gateway to the limitless forest northeast of the Rhine. At dusk, when his men were exhausted from heavy labor, a horde of Chattian savages came boiling from the forest; Decius’ unit was a tiny craft swamped in a barbarian flood tide. The men not slain at once were dragged off to be nailed to trees as a sacrifice to Wodan, their blood-loving god. He was never certain why he was spared, but thought it might be because he had a bookroll in his pack. The barbarians northeast of the Rhine seemed to worship the alphabet—or at least, their own distorted form of it which they called runes from their word
runa,
which meant “secret”—and he surmised that his pitiful, stained copy of Martius’
Art of Siege Warfare
caused them to take him for some sort of holy man.

He unrolled that book now, letting the all-too-familiar sentences conjure up comfortable memories of the safe sameness of his days in the army, waiting while his boiled calf’s head broth heated over a small yew fire. After a moment he sensed he was being watched. He looked up.

There she was again, the daughter of their chief, the fierce little vixen who had bitten him. Auriane. He felt a clutch of excitement. Often she came to stare at him, but never had she crept so close as this. She stood motionless before the crumbled place in the stone wall, a sorrowful figure almost wholly concealed in a gray-brown hooded cloak.

He made a show of ignoring her and returned his gaze to his book. Yet he found himself wishing her closer, trying to draw her with his mind. You
are
lonely, he admonished himself, to want the company of one of their women. Bury your wants—she’ll not come any closer.

But when he stole another glance, he saw she had halved the distance between them. He was surprised at the pleasure this brought. This maid was the only one of his captors with whom he felt any kinship whatever, perhaps because she alone exhibited curiosity, a rare quality in a savage. She almost seemed to
study
him in
the manner of a Greek naturalist—a curious reversal of common roles, he reflected once—here, nature studies man, instead of the other way about.

Careful, Decius, he cautioned himself. She’s food to a starving man. Anyway, their women are notoriously chaste.

Normally he thought of this little, for the Germanic women in general did not interest him—if women they could be called, these she-beasts of the north who preferred torturing prisoners to decking themselves in colored silks. They were mostly sturdy beasts of burden on whose broad faces he could not imagine powder or paint. They provoked a powerful uneasiness in him—perhaps it was the lack of womanly compassion in them, or that every one had the taint of sorcery about her, or that their nature truly was as violent as the men’s. Tales abounded of women taking bloody vengeance with a sword when they found their menfolk slow to act. But this maid
might have passed for a woman in fact, if someone would teach her a little grace—she walked like a soldier on a forced march—and coax her to comb the brambles out of her hair.

He heard the snap of a branch. Now she was very close, but still animal-silent, approaching with the timid persistence of the red foxes that often crept up to his campsite. Her head was slightly raised; she seemed to be taking his scent like a beast. Her eyes were bold and hurt. And so, he thought, the savagery of her fellow savages has shaken her a bit and reduced our haughty barbarian princess to a little beggar for scraps of—what? What did she imagine that he, a lowly thrall, could give her?

He felt sharply for her in one moment, but tender words would not come out of Decius; life had never taught him to speak them.

Her long silence began to annoy him. “Greetings!” he called out in her tongue. “Do you speak? No?”

She cocked her head slightly, struggling to pick out the words concealed beneath his Latin accent.

“What schemes, I wonder, drive the daughter of Baldemar to abase herself and have dealings with a thrall? Could it be you’re drawn by the enticing aroma of boiled calf’s head? Or maybe you liked the taste of my flesh so well you’d like to try a bite of my other hand?”

She cast her eyes down, full of hurt-animal wariness.

“I am sorry for the bite,” she said at last. Her voice suited her, he thought. It was milky and low, venturesome and vulnerable at once. “It is the god’s will you stopped me. I could only have done harm, and I could not have helped…anyone.”
Anyone
instead of
my mother.
Decius supposed the unobstructed truth brought too much pain.

Slowly Decius mastered his surprise. He expected anything from her but remorse. Finally he held up his swollen, purplish hand and replied clumsily in her tongue, “Never mind about it, it’s healing well, and all is forgotten.”

She came forward then and held out a silver arm-ring. “I give you this ring in payment for the bite,” she said gravely. “Fria, Wodan, be you witness that I have paid.”

Hastily he got to his feet to accept her gift—to hesitate would give greatest insult. Her gesture was a startling departure from tribal custom. Never in all his time in this country had he seen anyone give a reparation gift for an injury done to a thrall. Thralls were not a part of the human community. This was, he realized after a time, because they were without families, and a person’s measure of humanness in this place increased with the greatness and number of his kin. But for reasons known only to her, she chose to treat him as a man of the tribe.

He quickly mustered the polite response. The Chattian words felt knotted and strange in his mouth. “May your family grow strong as the many-branched Oak. May your cattle increase and your fields be blessed, all your long life.”

He then brought from his hut the length of rough wool that served him as a blanket and spread it on the ground for her before the fire. She hesitated a moment, then set down her burdens: a basket full of some weeds with white trumpet-shaped flowers—thornapple, he guessed, for some witches’ brew—and a mysterious, bulky, linen-wrapped bundle. Then she warily settled herself before his fire.

He took out a leather flask of brownish wine acquired with great difficulty, through barter with a fellow Roman slave who dwelled in the village. Then he settled himself beside her and held it out to her. “For
you,
I bring out the best wine in my cellars! Drink in friendship.”