Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion (36 page)

Unless I was off my trolley again, I was convinced she could be royalty of some kind.

I stepped around the fire and walked up to her, guessing that she was the leader somehow.  I looked her up and down like a piece meat, sizing her up rather than checking her out, letting on like I wasn’t impressed and wasn’t someone to be trifled with.

Which I damn well wasn’t.

“Who are you?”  I demanded.

“We come not to harm,”
was all the woman said, her accent making her sound like she was speaking Klingon with a mouth full of marbles – and like a Klingon, I wondered if the only thing this gargantuan woman would understand from me was a show of force.

“We have been watching you
for some time,” she continued, “and have waited patiently for a suitable opportunity to meet you.”

“Don’t li
sten to her,” Santino said from across the fire.  “That’s what they always say in the movies before they stab you in the back.”

I ignored him but not his advice.

He was right.

“Why?”  I asked
her.

“
I have been sent to aid you on your quest, Cernunnos.”

Santino
wasn’t often right about things, but he was now.  Warning lights were going off in the back of my head like a Christmas tree, but I was rarely able to rein in my curiosity.

I na
rrowed my eyes and crossed my arms.  “What did you call me?”

She looked to the sky and held her arms over her head. 
“In a vision I was shown an image of the god Cernunnos floating above a Roman symbol swathed in brilliant red light.”

“In a vision?”  I asked skeptically, my right eyebrow rising instinctively.

Vincent stepped up beside me.  “She’s talking about the battle two days ago.”

I nodded and took a second to think before deciding this whole story was getting far too ridiculous.  I waved
a hand in her direction in a shooing gesture.

“You’re lucky I don’t crucify you for attacking us
,” I said angrily, “but I’m feeling magnanimous tonight, so leave before I change my mind.  What you saw wasn’t a vision, it really happened, and I’ve got enough superstitious people tagging along as it is.”

Her
expression didn’t change as I turned to leave.  Vincent looked at me with his mouth open wide, but I didn’t care.  If these people were a part of the shadow force that had been tailing us since Camulodunum, I wasn’t concerned.  If they wanted a fight they were more than welcome to one.  I would be more than happy to oblige them and send them to their premature deaths right here and now if they pushed me.

But before I could take another step, the fiery redhead pushed past Vincent and put a hand on my shoulder.  With even more strength than I expected, she twirled me around to face her.

“The vision came before the battle, Cernunnos, not after.  That is why I ordered my horde back to keep them from slaughtering you.”

“Uh-huh,” I replied, “sure you did.”

Surprisingly, Wang stepped beside me timidly, looking particularly spooked and frightened.  “Hunter, I think you should listen to her.”

I looked down at him
at the same moment as the powerful woman before me did, and I noticed her look him up and down just as I had her earlier.  Only, her expression indicated she was doing exactly what I hadn’t, namely, checking him out instead of sizing him up as a possible adversary.  She towered over him, and Wang never risked a look at her so he never saw how she looked at him, which did not seem platonic in the slightest.

I smacked him
on the shoulder, and he jerked in surprise, but managed to look up at me.

“Wh
at the hell is your problem, Wang?”  I demanded.

He responded by shaking his head like a person with severe mental deficiencies.

“Why should I listen to her?”  I asked, trying another route

“Because of you
r name!” He spat out finally, his eyes wide with unfocused fear.  “Your name, Hunter!”

“What about it?”  I asked, legitimately concerned my old friend was
falling off his own trolley.

How odd it
would be if I wasn’t actually the first…

Wang looked back at the ground and mumbled his next words.  “Your name.  Hunter.  Cernunnos.  Fucking Welsh mythology and fairy tales class in high school.  Wh
o knew I’d actually use it.  I can’t believe it.  I…”

“Wang!”  I said sharply, gripping the man by the shoulder.  “Snap out of it.  What about my name is so important?”

He looked shaken but met my eyes.  “Cernunnos is an old Celtic god that is sometimes referred to as The Lord of the Hunt, Hunter. 
Hunt
! 
Hunter
! 
Hunt
! 
Hunter
!  That can’t be a coincidence.  It just can’t!”

I looked
away from him, no longer thinking him insane.  There did seem something odd going on here that was beyond my control, beyond anyone’s control.  Wang was totally right.  There was no way such a word association could have been a coincidence.  My head shifted nervously back to the woman who had no way of knowing me, but somehow did.

“
Who are you?”   I asked nervously.

She smiled proudly and pumped out her chest. 
“I am Boudicca, Cernunnos.  Sworn wife to Prasutagus, king of the Iceni people, defender of all Celtic lands.”

***

There was an audible gasp from behind
me, one I knew had to have come from Helena, who now stood face to face with one of the very heroes she’d learned about in university.  I looked over my shoulder to see her with a hand covering her mouth, her eyes wide in surprise. 

I turned back to the young redhead.
  “Say again?”

“My name is
Boudicca, Cernunnos.  Sworn wife to…”

“Yeah, yeah, I got
all that,” I said with an upraised hand, extraordinarily amused at this particular woman’s presence, mostly because I was not at all surprised that she was here.

How many historical figures
had we randomly bumped into during our time in Antiquity?  It was like a supreme being had placed us on a path that allowed us to continue meeting these people.  Even Josephus’ father back in Caesarea had seemed almost predestined.  The prominent historian, Josephus himself, had been too young to help us or influence our journey, but his father had been a good substitute, but unlike Josephus, while the very young woman before us was also much younger than the prominent figure history remembered, she seemed fully capable and able to help us, if that was in fact her mission here.  Perhaps with history as fucked up as it was, she was no longer destined for a place in the history books, no longer predetermined to leave a mark on this planet to remember her by.  Maybe, only through her involvement with us – an anomalous outlier in the timeline – could she regain that position of historical significance, and something was driving her toward it.

Hence why she was here.

Maybe.

After everything I’d experienced
recently, I was no longer adamant in my stance that there
wasn’t
some form of divine, supernatural, or just superior presence pushing us along in a specific direction.  It would certainly explain a lot.  It seemed completely possible that fate was doing everything it could to reorient the timeline away from the one that resulted in Artie 2.0’s world.  While it hadn’t succeeded before when the Other Me had died, when Artie 2.0 and company showed up, fate had been given additional variables to play with to make things right.

Or… it was simply an interesting coincidence.

“Cernunnos?”

The voice of the woman claiming to be
Boudicca interrupted my thoughts and I suddenly forgot what it was I had been thinking about.

I
jerked my head and looked at her.  “What?”

“You seemed very far away just now,” she answered.

I shook my head again and tried to understand her presence.  I was still figuring it out when Vincent walked up beside me and eyed the tall woman as he whispered in my ear.

“Maybe you should have everyone stand down, Hunter…”

I kept my eyes on Boudicca suspiciously as I slowly turned to face our gathered force at his suggestion.  Her eyes never left mine but at least they seemed neutral in presentation, nothing treacherous, deceitful, or even lustful present behind them – the latter of which being a pleasant surprise for me when encountering women in antiquity.

“Stand down,” I finally ordered my team
with a wave of my hand.

They
looked at each other nervously, but all of them lowered their weapons and grew more relaxed.  I scanned my eyes across each of their faces, noticing that while their defensive postures were lowered, they didn’t appear very welcoming as they milled about cautiously, their movements suggesting they were taking up better positions to contain Boudicca and her men.

Only
Wang and Vincent remained at my side, but Wang was forced to do everything he could to avoid Boudicca’s roaming gaze.  After a while, he didn’t seem able to take it any longer, so he awkwardly strolled away, but Boudicca never took her eyes off of him.

“Where
does he hail from?”  She asked, having to look over my shoulder now as Wang continued to beat his retreat.

“Who Wang?”  I asked as I hooked a thumb over my shoulder in his direction.  “He’s a local actually.  Born and raised just south of here.”

“You lie, Cernunnos,” she said with a challenging tone, finally returning her attention to me.

She looked at me with an angry look, bu
t I nodded at her reassuringly.  “I don’t actually, but I can’t blame you for not believing me.  He’s single by the way.”

Her eyes squinted briefly in surprise.  “Of course he is just one man, Cernunnos.”

“Never mind,” I said, no longer annoyed that these people couldn’t understand a simply idiom.  “But stop calling me Cernunnos.  I’m not a god.”

Not yet
, came a random thought.

“I know this
,” Boudicca said, “but it is how you were presented to me in my vision.”

“Just call me Hunter,” I said
.

“
Hoont-her
,” she said slowly with her crude accent.  “What does it mean?”

“In my language the word ‘hunt’ means to stalk
and kill prey,” I explained in Latin but using the English term so that she could get the gist, “and a ‘hunter’ is someone who does this.”

“
I see.  A good name then.  I too am a… hunter,” she said, pronouncing it reasonably better than she had most of her Latin words.

I smiled and patted her
arm but quickly yanked it away, freaked out by how hard and beefy it was.  “Great.  Then we should get along just fine.”

The men under her command tensed at the contact but she shooed them away with the flick of her chin.  They obeyed and moved off in silence.

“That is good Hunter, for we have much to accomplish.”

“Why do people always say things like that?”  I mumbled to myself, but held out my hand to lead her
toward our fire.  She understood and stepped forward.  The two of us took a seat upon fallen logs cattycorner to each other, and I couldn’t help but get a pretty impressive show of the muscles on her legs and upper back as she moved and sat.  She cut an impressive figure, and while the rest of us were certainly no slouches, I couldn’t help but make a mental note not to mess with her.

Once
the two of us were comfortable, Vincent, Archer, Gaius, and Marcus came to sit near us as well while everyone else scattered.  Wang was nowhere in sight, and I could see Santino and Artie walk off together toward somewhere, but they were out of sight before I could see where.  To my right, I saw Helena sitting with her back to a tree, only her side profile visible, her hand resting upon her protruding stomach.  Her head was tilted back against the tree and her eyes were cast upwards, looking at God knew what.

I ignored her.

I turned to Vincent who sat nearest me.  “Feel free to jump in whenever you want, Vincent, but make sure you translate for Archer so he can keep up.”

He nodded but didn’t say anything.
  Archer’s Latin had grown… serviceable, but wasn’t nearly good enough to completely follow a conversation.

I turned to
Boudicca, who was already staring back at me and seemed to have something on her mind.

“Curious about something?”  I asked.

She shook her head.  “It’s just that your appearance and weaponry is mystifying.  I did not expect such things from my vision.  Also, there are women with you.  I knew not that Rome employed female warriors.  It is all most confusing…”

“
We’re what you would call unique,” I explained.  “Don’t expect to see anyone else look like us around here.”