B007IIXYQY EBOK (61 page)

“You look warm and alive to me,” he said softly, smiling, laying her back down and bending over her. He gazed wonderingly on her body, from her smoothly muscled, hunting-cat’s legs to the fine-skinned dove-softness of her white breasts, those mysteries so long concealed. It amazed him that a creature could be so taut and lean and still be so vulnerable in places, and it brought out an unfamiliar protectiveness in him.

“Poor, starved child,” he said, grinning now. “You should have come to me sooner!”

She took up a small stone and playfully tossed it at him.

Then she pulled the leather thong that secured his tunic. He kissed her closed eyes, her neck, her shoulders, savoring each as if it were a rare dish at a banquet, getting in her way as she struggled to pull his tunic over his head.

Decius felt agile horse lips on the back of his neck. He threw the newly freed tunic at Berinhard. “Go away, horse. Find yourself a willing mare.”

Berinhard snorted and shook his head, rippling the mane along his neck, but moved only one step away.

“That beast is staring at us. I don’t like it.”

“He’s protecting me from the Roman scourge.”

“He’ll have to learn some manners. Away, beast. Go graze somewhere.”

Decius pulled the wool coverlet over them to conceal them. Auriane ran an unsure exploring hand down his naked back, relishing its smooth, muscular feel, worried for a moment that he judged her now as he did when they practiced at swordfighting, and she imagined taunting echoes of his criticisms:
“Clumsily
done! Don’t tell anyone I taught you this. Now try it once more, my patience is at an end. No. Hold it like this!”

But to her relief in the next moments the last of his mocking manner dissolved away. It was a changed Decius, one she did not know, who caressed and kissed her breasts, her stomach, with passionate reverence as though her body were laid across a god’s altar. She felt one last bolt of fear and a struggling up of resistance, but it was settled again by his steady onslaught of tenderness.

They accustomed themselves to each other for a long time, touching, talking, encouraging. When the fast-falling spring night brought the calling of owls, they finally joined together in love.

She felt sharp pleasure akin to pain as she was thoroughly invaded by that warmth; it seemed they feverishly consumed each other. There was something baffling in the reality of this moment: She had wanted him for so long this seemed but one more waking dream; then all the dreams of him crowded in, getting in the way as she clung to him, eyes intent on the wheel of stars, her body intent on knowing.

And then there was a time when he seemed to fall away from her; she whispered his name, and once he cried hers, but as he grew more intent upon pleasure, she felt a shift, and once more he kept a distance between them, as always. She could not have said how it was done, except that now his enjoyment shut her out, as if he feared to share it, and a stone door closed in her face, quietly and with finality, protecting some inner chamber she would never be allowed to enter.
“You must always be the teacher,”
she had said to him once. Teacher and pupil do not look out of one pair of eyes. As he was suddenly weak with pleasure, she held to him more tightly, as if the closer she held him the more she would know what he knew then. But at the last she felt she groped hard in the dark and did not find what she sought.

Then she lay still with a sense of pleasant, exhilarated frustration, half waiting for a round of criticism.

He turned her face to his in the firelight. “Well?” he asked, smiling.

“You are better at this than I am. I fear I did it all wrong.”

“No. You did it all right.”

“I thought I would have to truss you up and hold a dagger at your throat to ever hear you say words such as those!” She kissed him, then looked away. The bright gauzy dream was growing fainter; remorse was falling like night.
Unholy woman!
—a cracked, dry voice in her mind cried out. Now your body is polluted by a foreigner.

But she concealed these thoughts from him, not wanting to lose this sense of close companionship. She took his hand and held it on her breast. In the growing silence her thoughts begged to be expressed.

“You know, it is both less and more than I expected.”

“You know how to make a man feel like a king!” he said good-humoredly. “How was it less?”

“I expected to be…borne off to the lands of the gods, to feel…possessed by the Sprite. You know how it is that people talk of such things. I was transported halfway there, perhaps. But I remained myself, and you remained you. The hard ground did not go away, nor did the ants. Love is pleasant, yes, but much overpraised.”

She was surprised at how hard he began laughing.

“The barbarian philosopher’s judgment on Eros! Perhaps in coming days you will learn to like it better. It is common for a maid not to like it at first—”

“You’re quite sure
you
did it right,” she said, fighting back a smile.

“Better than you’ll get anywhere else.”

On the next day they traveled east, into the mixed forest of oak, fir, and beech that lay just south of Athelinda’s farthermost fields. Here Decius had built a lean-to of interlaced willow branches that did little more than keep out the rain. It was positioned away from the well-traveled tribal pathways, but they did not need to walk far to overlook two systems of fields of rye and einkorn wheat that were worked by Romilda’s provisions-women. Auriane’s presence here was not secret; the field thralls saw Berinhard grazing in the common meadow and the smoke of her fires. It was Decius who must be kept hidden, for Sigwulf doubtless believed the Roman thrall had tricked him in the matter of his stolen son. They were situated so that she felt herself among her people still, but Decius could escape if necessary by galloping off on his black gelding into the uninhabited hill country.

Auriane traveled every day to the Lightning Oak to entreat Wodan for vengeance, chanting the ancient charms her grandmother had taught her before the tortured form of the sky-burnt tree. Need of vengeance was a life-giving draught, all that kept her from sinking into a miasma of mourning. Would her soul join those other damned ones imprisoned in that corpse of a tree? She hoped fervently her mother had heard by now of Odberht’s part in Baldemar’s death—for knowing that vengeance was possible would give her strength.

Gradually she was aware that Athelinda’s house thralls watched her from a distance while she prayed; once she recognized Mudrin’s ill-fitting red plaid dress.

She knew she had somehow to seize the sword of Baldemar—for with it lay her best chance of stalking and slaying Odberht; the very weapon itself, she believed, must thirst for his blood. But she dared not venture so close to Baldemar’s hall. She wondered if Athelinda knew Baldemar had charged her with the sword’s care, and decided she must. Baldemar kept nothing from her; surely he had not failed to tell Athelinda something as gravely important as this. Would her mother move to prevent her from taking it up? This, too, was impossible to imagine, even given her curse—surely she would count Baldemar’s last wishes sacred.

Auriane and Decius survived by fishing in the brook that ran alongside Romilda’s fields; Decius had encountered an abandoned homestead on his return and recovered from it, among other useful things, a fisherman’s net and several hooks and lines. They hunted pheasants, squirrels and rabbits. They were aided as well by the Rule of Three: Ancient law, Auriane explained to Decius, declared that “three are free”—any wayfarer could take three fruits from a householder’s tree or three fish from a farmer’s pond. Thrusnelda had told Auriane this custom was honored in memory of the remote times of peace and wandering, when the folk were arrayed in ornaments of bright gold, and iron had not yet broken the body of mother earth, and all the fruits of the field were owned in common. It did not, Auriane warned Decius, apply to animals that were bred and daily fed; that would be theft.

A moon had waxed and waned since Baldemar’s death. Sunia learned through the provisions-women that Auriane haunted the Lightning Oak, and the maid followed Auriane back to the camp one day. After discovering their lair, Sunia came often with bread, mead and news.

The Companions’ lives had become pitiable, Sunia told them. Witgern and Thorgild withdrew into their halls and took scarcely enough food to stay alive.

Apparently, Auriane realized, the tale of Odberht’s treachery had
not
reached them, for they lived without hope. She could not have Sunia tell them; she was not sure the maid would be believed, and Sunia would be punished if her mother guessed she sought Auriane out. Sigwulf alone, Sunia related, seemed ready to bury the past without ceremony; he had already begun to form his own smaller group of Companions. That did not surprise Auriane—of all the Companions, Sigwulf, though utterly loyal while Baldemar lived, seemed to have the least sentiment about his chieftain.

Sunia said too that men crept by night onto Athelinda’s land, searching and digging in likely places, desperate to find Baldemar’s sword. Athelinda dared not loose the hounds on them because she suspected that among them were men of Baldemar’s Companions.

But the most alarming news Sunia had to tell was that Gundobad was pressing relentlessly for Athelinda’s hand. Gundobad’s men were counted little more than a band of rogues by the people at large, and he craved acceptance and prestige; the one sure way to obtain it was have Athelinda as wife. The reverence in which they held her had not been diminished by Baldemar’s unavenged death, for she had always been counted a keeper of the tribe’s central mysteries, a preserver of ways who hoarded the magic of her own maternal bloodline—a well from which Baldemar himself had drawn power.

One day Auriane found one of Athelinda’s silver rings at the base of the Lightning Oak; it was wrapped in wolf’s hair. The sight stopped her heart. For long moments she could not touch it. She took it up swiftly, as though fearful it were not real.

One of Athelinda’s beekeepers had followed her today. She guessed the old thrall had put it here just before her arrival and probably waited in concealment to make certain she saw it.

She hurried back to Decius, her excitement causing her to forget her prayers for vengeance, her mind in ferment as she struggled to interpret this sign.

“Why wolf’s hair?” Decius asked.

“Wolf’s hair signifies a spy or intruder is in the house. But who?
Gundobad maybe, or a man of his? And why would she want me to know? She must be in grave danger—there’s no doubt that this is a plea for help.” Auriane was silent a moment, her anxiety gathering. “Decius, I fear Gundobad plans to marry my mother by force. And I can do nothing.”

“What of Baldemar’s Companions? Why do they not protect her?”

“I’m told only Sigwulf has any spirit left in him, and Sunia said he’s ridden south to drive back the Hermundures—they’re encroaching on our salt springs again. Mother is alone.”

“Have Witgern and the rest no shame? Why do they not help her?”

“Decius, you do not understand us, and I think you never will. Witgern and Thorgild and the others are behaving in the normal way of those who have lost honor. They know that if they fight, they will fail. Their battle-luck is gone and their life-luck has fled. They would harm her more than help her. It is Sigwulf’s behavior that is unaccountable—he lives as though the past never were.”

“He sounds like the only man of sense to me.”

“That is because everything you think is inside out, because you are Roman.”

“My thanks to you for clarifying that.”

Auriane began secretly watching Baldemar’s hall, feeling like a ghost peering back on her earthly life. And she saw much that was alarming.

Men of Gundobad’s retinue had taken up residence in the yard, almost in the shadow of the hall. She could see the thralls were frightened of his men and stayed well away from them. She saw too that delegations of warriors’ retinues, village elders and priests came daily though the Cat-Skull Gate. From their demeanor Auriane guessed that some came for Athelinda’s counsel in myriad matters; Sunia had told her that these unsettled times had served to burnish Athelinda’s holiness in the sight of the people; many saw her as the one hearth still steadily burning while the hearths about her were blown out by winds of chaos. As Athelinda’s mother Gandrida had been called the Wise in Counsel, so now was Athelinda. But Auriane guessed others came on behalf of chieftains who wished to bind themselves to Athelinda in marriage—or trick out of her the location of the sword of Baldemar.

On the days when no petitioners came, her mother was a stark and dreadful figure in hooded cloak, haunting the edge of the flax field, a specter clothed in flesh. Even from a distance Auriane recognized the wild, desperate, roaming look in her mother’s eyes—the suffering of one slowly poisoned by an unavenged death. At other times Auriane saw her mother staggering with milk-pails, frenziedly pulling weeds from the gardens, or cutting fodder for the cattle. Again Sunia had spoken truly—Athelinda’s desolation drove her to feverishly busy herself with thralls’ tasks.

The next day when Auriane traveled to the Lightning Oak, she found another token. This one was a length of bone—from the thigh of a dog, she guessed. Tied beneath it was a crude carving of a sword, small enough to fit in her palm.