Island of Ghosts (13 page)

Priscus was riding a solid and rather sleepy-looking gray at the head of the century—the legionaries, of course, marched on foot. Arshak and Gatalas and their liaison officers were already on his right when Comittus and I cantered up, and Facilis rode slightly behind them, keeping out of their way. Aurelia Bodica was on her husband’s left, sitting in her flimsy painted chariot again, with both the white stallion and another white horse to pull it. (I’d noticed her covered carriage with the baggage train, drawn by a less exalted horse.) She was even lovelier than I remembered, and she smiled at us very brightly.

“Greetings, cousin! Greetings, Lord Ariantes!” she called. “Isn’t it lucky the rain’s stopped?”

“Just in time for the journey,” agreed Comittus, falling in beside her.

She gave me a look of sweet concern. “Though I gather that you had very wet weather to travel in over the last month, Lord Ariantes. My husband”—she glanced toward him—“has been telling me that your troops have had such a difficult journey so far that you all have a number of men lying in the wagons with the baggage, too ill to ride. I hope we can recover them.”

I felt ashamed of my distrust of her. “I trust they will recover, Lady Aurelia Bodica,” I replied, “given better food and supplies.” I was glad she’d given me the chance to call the legate’s attention to the question of supplies again.

Priscus snorted.

“Well, I’ll be glad to help if I can,” declared Bodica earnestly. She glanced over at Arshak and Gatalas as well, and raised her voice so that they, too, could hear her offer, “As my husband can tell you, Princes, my family and my friends own a great deal of land and cattle in northern Britain, and I’d be glad to use whatever wealth or influence I have to help your people settle in happily.”

The legate smiled, and leaned out of the saddle to pat her hand. “You needn’t worry, my dear,” he told her. “I’m sure we can settle them without digging into our private fortunes. But thank you.”

Bodica gave him a lingering smile back. I bowed my head and thanked her for her kindness in making the offer; Arshak and Gatalas did the same. I gathered from their manner that they’d been introduced to her before I joined them, and that they found her impressive.

“Oh, and Lord Ariantes,” Bodica went on, “I believe I never actually thanked you for catching my horse the other day. Please excuse me! I was so surprised to find one of your people actually in Britain, it went right out of my head. But really, I’m very grateful. I do love this horse, and who knows what might have happened to him if you hadn’t caught him?”

“I am glad to have been of service to you, Lady,” I replied.

Arshak turned his mount, cantered behind the chariot, and pulled in beside me. “What is this?” he asked me, speaking Latin in courtesy to the company. “You had the good fortune to be of service to the lady?”

Bodica laughed. “Didn’t he even tell you, Lord Arshak?” (I noticed, with some surprise, that she said his name correctly, with the
sh
sound most Romans can’t pronounce.) “Was that modesty, Lord Ariantes, or didn’t you find the adventure worth repeating to your friends?”

I was taken aback: I hadn’t considered being knocked down by a horse an adventure.

“Ariantes is not given to boasting,” replied Arshak, giving me an affectionate look. “I think otherwise any service to a lady such as . . . your wife, my lord Julius Priscus” (the pause before he tactfully brought the legate into the conversation was only just noticeable) “is a tale he would gladly have told us.”

Bodica gave him a look that said, “That is very pretty flattery, sir!” Priscus, however, was frowning anxiously. “How did the horse get loose?” he asked. “You hadn’t mentioned that, my dear. You just said you’d met one of our Sarmatians in the marketplace. Blizzard didn’t . . . that is, the beast didn’t cause any trouble for you, did it?”

Bodica explained. Priscus gave Comittus a scowl, which the tribune received with a nervous, appeasing smile. “You were in charge of the escort, weren’t you, Tribune?” demanded the legate. “What were you thinking of, to let the beast slip its tether like that? Blizzard is a very valuable animal, shipped all the way from Iberia! You should have seen to it that he was tied securely.”

“I don’t know how it happened, sir,” replied Comittus. “I thought he
was
tied up securely.”

Priscus snorted again. “Don’t think. Check! That horse is not just a valuable animal, it’s a powerful one: it might injure Bodica if it got loose at the wrong time.” He glanced anxiously at his wife. “Really, my dear, I wish you’d use the gelding instead.”

“Oh, but I adore big strong fiery stallions, Tiberius, you know that!” Her quick, laughing under-the-lashes glance reinforced the double meaning.

Priscus gave a pleased grunt. “All the same,” he added, “there’s such a thing as too much fire in a horse. You remember that last animal you had nearly killed a groom, and I don’t like to think—”

“Tiberius!” she exclaimed, warningly, though she smiled on it, and he stopped. Her taste for fiery horses was evidently a sore point between them. No wonder Comittus had been anxious when the beast got loose.

“A stallion such as the lady Aurelia’s is no more dangerous than any other horse, if it is well trained and well handled,” I put in, trying to be helpful. What I said was true, though in fact, like most cavalrymen, I’ve always preferred a good quiet mare for any purpose, such as battle, that might frighten or alarm a horse.

Bodica gave me another dazzling smile, but the disquieting look was back in her eyes. Priscus gave me a hard glare. After a moment, Bodica began to ask questions about our mounts and our other horses.

It was an easy day’s riding, as I’d promised my men. We stopped in the middle of the afternoon, only twenty Roman miles from Dubris at a place called Durovernum: it had been decided that an easy journey north would give us time to recover from the hard one we’d had to Bononia. The men were in a good mood, happy at having their weapons back, happy at having reasonable food, happy at riding through the green rolling hills with their dragon leaping before them, the first Sarmatians to have crossed the ocean. They sang as they rode and told stories. I was less cheerful, worrying about the future. They might be happy now, but when they got to Cilurnum they would realize that they were here forever. Then they would miss their wives and families, hate the fellows who shared their wagons, and long for the open plains and the herds and wagons they had left behind. There would inevitably be trouble with drink and women, if there were any nearby, and quarrels over precedence and honor. And up to now they hadn’t spoken enough Latin to quarrel with Romans—but I guessed that they would learn it. When we stopped at Durovernum, I was eager to leave the legate and his party, with whom I’d been obliged to ride, and get back to my own men.

The legate, however, insisted that all the senior officers first come with him to the house at Durovernum where he would be staying—and then the local nobleman who owned the house obliged us to come in and have a drink with him. Arshak and Gatalas seemed pleased, but I did not want to stand about sipping wine and making small talk, leaving my horse untended in her armor and my men unsupervised in their camp, and as soon as I could, I made excuses and left. The local nobleman was some relation of the legate’s wife, and Lady Aurelia Bodica offered to show me where her kinsman’s servants had put my horse.

She picked her way carefully across the stable yard to where Farna was tethered, holding the skirts of her long cloak and gown high out of the mud. She had long straight legs and delicate ankles, and she stepped very proudly, so that it was a pleasure to watch her.

“What a beautiful animal,” she commented when we reached Farna.

I nodded, warming to the woman. Farna was worth all the other horses I’d brought put together, and they were all exceptional. She was seven years old, a golden chestnut with black points; she had a fine head, broad neck, deep, powerful chest and hindquarters, a round barrel, and straight legs. In conformation and in temperament, in strength and in endurance, in patience and in courage, she was altogether without fault. She was of the breed called Parthian or Nisaean, the largest and noblest of all breeds of horse, and she carried her blanket of gilded armor easily. I’d slipped the bit out of her mouth and loosened the saddle girths when I’d dismounted, to make her comfortable, and I slapped her side and began adjusting them again.

“What is he called?” asked Aurelia Bodica, coming over to pat Farna’s neck in the gap above the armor. The horse was so heavily armored she couldn’t tell its sex.

“She is called Farna,” I said.

Bodica smiled and patted Farna again. “What does that mean?”

“ ‘Glory.’ ”

“Glory,” repeated Aurelia Bodica softly. “Glory! Is that what you hoped for when you named her?”

The question, like many of her questions, was perceptive. “It is what I hoped for,” I admitted. “Then.”

“Not anymore?” She was watching me closely, her head a little on one side. I suddenly suspected that she’d shown me to my horse simply to have the opportunity of testing me in private, to see if I were indeed the sort of tool she and her husband were searching for. The warmth I’d started to feel cooled abruptly.

“No,” I said carefully. “I am not so ambitious now.”

She reached over and touched the back of my hand, her eyes still fixed on me intently. “Why not? Glory, surely, is the noblest ambition of free men.”

“I won glory in Pannonia,” I said, telling her the bitter truth. “I and my followers and others like me. And our people have paid for it with war, defeat, and . . . this.”

“You think I’m asking this for my husband, don’t you?” she said, with that unsettling secretive smile I’d disliked before. “He thinks so, too. But I am a noble-woman, and I can speak on my own account. My ancestors were kings. My family was offered the citizenship of Rome many times, but refused it—until my father inherited, a few years ago. I’m no more a Roman than you are. My people used to love glory too, and I can’t believe that it always comes at so high a price. War can bring victory as well as defeat, after all.” Her fingers curled around my own. “Though I am grateful to your defeat for bringing you here. My husband values you above the other two commanders. So do I.”

I turned away from the horse and looked at her in surprise. Her face, turned upward toward mine, was flower-like, disturbingly beautiful, and her hand now clasped my own firmly. “Lady,” I said, far less sure of myself than I had been a moment before, “Arshak is my superior in honor.”

“But not in experience,” she replied. “Nor, I think, in ability. You’ve achieved a great deal more for your men than he has. You might achieve more still.”

“I hope that I will,” I said, uncertainly. I wished I knew whether the way she held my hand was mere courtesy or something more. Roman customs in such matters are very different from those of my own people. “I wish them to have honor among the Romans and be content.”

“And that is all? No glory? No . . . revenge?”

I shook my head.

“Because it brought you war, defeat, and this,” she said, smiling again. “Is ‘this’so terrible, Lord Ariantes?” She touched the side of my face lightly, leaning forward.

I knew that if I matched that movement, she would come directly into my arms and let me kiss that unsettling smile away. A part of me burned to do just that, but I stood as if I had been turned to stone. I didn’t trust the place and the moment, in the stable yard of an unfamiliar house—and I didn’t trust her.

“By ‘this’ I meant servitude to Rome,” I told her harshly.

“So. Then it is terrible. What if someone offered you freedom? Do you
want
to become my husband’s man and Rome’s loyal servant?”

I couldn’t answer. Even if this were a test her husband had suggested to her, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Yes,” and “No” was a road that led only to death.

Bodica laid her palm against my cheek. “You hate Rome,” she observed. “Ariantes, you don’t need to worry about saying so, not to me. My own people have suffered too.”

A door creaked open behind us, and Bodica instantly shifted her hand from me to Farna. “Such a beautiful mare,” she cooed. She glanced round and smiled warmly. “Tiberius, I’m over here! Don’t you think this is a beautiful horse?”

Her husband came out of the house and crossed the stable yard toward us. Arshak and Gatalas were behind him, together with the local nobleman, our host. “I thought Ariantes would be gone by now,” Priscus told his wife. “Have you been discussing horses with him all this time?”

She laughed. “Haven’t you noticed that all the Sarmatians can talk horses for hours? Seriously, Tiberius, don’t you think a foal by my stallion Blizzard out of this mare would be the best horse in the world?”

When I returned to my wagon, I tended my horses and sat by the evening fire in silence, going over the scene in the stable yard again and again and trying to understand it. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even tell whether the way Bodica had touched me was a sign of serious interest or meaningless flirtation, let alone guess what she’d meant by her talk of freedom and glory. I felt as though I were riding in a mist across a battlefield mined with pitfalls and scattered with caltrops that would lame my horse. Everywhere I turned there might be danger, but I could neither stand still nor go back.

The only thing I felt with any certainty was that I wanted nothing more to do with Lady Aurelia Bodica. I was bitterly ashamed of what I’d felt when she touched my cheek. I had not touched any woman since I last said good-bye to Tirgatao, and I was disgusted to find myself stirred by Bodica, however lovely she was and however noble. I had enough to worry about, too, without dangers from feuds between Roman factions or the threat of punishment for adultery with my commander’s wife.

The only other man in the dragon who seemed gloomy was Eukairios. He sat silent by the fire while the rest talked and laughed in a language that he, of course, did not understand. After a while, he asked me where he could sleep, and I took him back into the wagon and cleared a space for him.