The Eagle and the Raven (84 page)

“Disarm them,” Aricia ordered again, and sword belts and knives were efficiently removed and flung to the ground. She peered more closely at Venutius’s cousin, then she suddenly laughed. “So! It is little Manaw. You should have stuck to snaring rabbits, boy, and left the snaring of men to those with the stomach for it.” She would have taunted him further, but something in his eyes, a fatalism, a mature and sorrowless acceptance of his fate, made her swing back to Sine. “Where is Venutius?” she spat, and behind her Andocretus finally swayed to his feet and came to her side.

“He will not come until he is assured that you are not deceiving him,” he said with difficulty, his hands still against his side. “His kinsmen must bring him word that your message is truthful.”

She rounded on him savagely. “Then you failed! I should have known better than to trust such a matter to a mere boy!”

Pretty boy, he thought dully, angrily, beautiful boy, little bird. Pain was spreading up under his arm and the blood still slipped warmly down his thigh. For once in his life he spoke recklessly. “You call me other names when I am between your sheets, Lady!” he snapped. “I did not fail. Your husband would have come but his chieftains talked him out of it. Think carefully of what you do with them, for that one,” he curtly indicated Sine, “is the wife of one of the rebel leaders, a powerful man. I am going to get salve for my hurt.” He stepped past her, rapped an order, and the gate opened to let him pass through. Aricia looked after him for a moment, with narrowed eyes, then she swung back to Sine. Color flamed like red poppies in her cheeks, and insolently, happily, Sine grinned at her. “He will not come,” she said. “He has found a larger love, Brigantian whore.” With the speed of a striking snake Aricia’s jet-ringed hand flew up, and blood trickled down Sine’s cheek where the sharp stones raked her.

“Put them under guard,” Aricia said, her voice shaking, her body shaking, the mist of a mad urge to tear and trample before her eyes. “Chain them to the wall, neck, arms, and feet. Take their torcs away from them.”

She whirled away, marching into her house, and the door slammed shut behind her. Standing in the dark, silent room where nothing moved but the flames of her fire and her own heaving chest, she found herself still clutching the wolf mask. She looked it over carefully. The front, though highly polished, was buckled and dented, and she allowed her fingers to wander over the rise and fall of old sword marks, hills and valleys of pride and honor, the smooth bronze shine of a lifetime of dreams pathed in danger, furrowed in courage. Some fierce western man missed this woman. Somewhere his thoughts turned to her in longing and anxiety. Aricia reversed the mask. The underside was blackened with breath and sweat. On an impulse she fitted it to her own face. Immediately, her room seemed to lengthen. Details sprang at her out of the gloom—the sharp ridges of her table, a painful glitter of firelight on jewels, the curve and coil of Brigantia’s face and hair, the late evening light forming a gray square around the shutters of her window. Strong odors filled her nostrils, odors she had been unaware of before. The sweet scent of woodsmoke, a cloying stench of tanned sheephides, the warm, familiar drift of sleep and pleasure from her blankets, even a hot, sparkling whiff of crystal and gold from her treasures. Startled, she put a hand to her bronze forehead. Then another smell wafted to her, faint but growing stronger, the sickly clinging stink of freshly spilled blood, and with it was mingled another odor, the odor of decay, the odor of her dream, rising in invisible fogs around her. She coughed, then suddenly could not breathe. She fought frantically to draw air into her mouth but the mask seemed to be pinching her nostrils and lips closed, and all the time that other insidious presence, blood and rot, caught in her throat and choked her. With fingers of panic she picked off the mask and flung it from her, and it clattered to the floor and lay sneering at her. The room snapped back to its proper dimensions. Her gagging mouth drew in lungfuls of warm, unscented air and she ran to the door, wrenching it open and screaming for wine. When it was brought to her, and her lamps had been lit, she sat drinking, pondering her next move. She thought of the three who hung chained to her prison walls, of her husband, slipping away from her, and of the kind of love that had never been hers. Her eyes were on the mask by her feet, and she tried to wash away with wine the jealousy and hurt she had felt when she looked into Sine’s calm face, but she could not. The mask mocked her. Her own longing for something unnamed mocked her. The devotion of some chief she had never seen for his foolhardy wife, now in her hands, mocked her. She was alone.

In the morning she had Manaw’s wife brought before her. “You will go back into the west,” she said clearly, carefully, “and you will tell Venutius that if he does not come to me I will kill his nephew and the woman. I will not give them to Rome, mark you. I will kill them with my own hands, on my earthwall, within sight of the whole of Brigantia.” The girl paled. Such a milk-and-water chit, Aricia thought derisively. Such a timid nothing of a face, such hesitant eyes, such nauseating sweetness. She did not hide her contempt, and the girl saw it there, in the lovely black eyes. She ignored it.

“Then you may do it,” she answered levelly, though the color continued to recede from the delicate cheeks. “My lord and Sine discussed just such a thing last night. They knew when your guard came for me what you would say to me. And I say this to you, Ricon. If you wish to kill them, do it now, for I will go into the west and deliver your message, but I will not come back, and neither will the arviragus. You mean less than nothing to him now, and what are two more dead tribesmen when weighed against the cause of freedom?” She raised two ragged shoulders. “Send me if you will, but I would prefer to die beside my husband.”

Aricia looked at her, baffled, conscious once again of the wall that had separated her from Venutius himself, and Domnall, and Caradoc, the wall that represented a perspective of life that had always seemed foolish and destructive to her. She turned away, realizing suddenly why it was that this young woman irritated her almost beyond restraint. She reminded her of Eurgain. “Oh, begone!” she snapped. “I have no doubt that you do not need a guide. I give you your life, and if you are clever, the life of your husband also. Bring Venutius to me!” There was no reply. When Aricia turned again, the room was empty.

Two days later, Caesius Nasica faced her angrily across his dining table, his heavy face livid with choler. She had never seen him lose control of himself before and she sat back and watched, bemused, as he stabbed a blunt finger at her. “You have bungled your moves this time, Cartimandua!” he rasped. “I should have you arrested for harboring criminals! You should have handed them over to me so that my men could have twisted the location of their camps out of them. You presume too far on Rome’s good graces!”

She smiled at his anger. “You ought to know by now that they never talk,” she remarked. “They suffer and die without one word.”

He exhaled gustily and sat back. “It is always worth one more try,” he said. “In any case, you should have asked your bard if he could lead us back to their camp.”

“I did. He said that he was blindfolded when led there, and when he left the mist was too dense for him to retain his sense of direction.” She snuggled into her cushions. “You know also how swiftly they move across the mountains, how often they strike their camps and vanish. At least this way I have one more chance at Venutius.”

“He won’t come.”

“We will see. I think that he will. He has refused once, and only I know what that refusal must have cost him. He will not be able to do it again.”

Nasica swung his legs off the floor and settled to his meal. “You overestimate your charm, woman,” he remarked dryly, and she laughed at him, her eyes gleaming.

“It is not my charm that will draw him,” she said. “This time it will be a fervent desire for my death.”

He hid his surprise. “It is hard for me to understand,” he said, dipping his bread in the gravy, “how any man can allow a preoccupation with any woman to interfere with his life. Certainly no woman is worth actually risking one’s life for.”

“I agree.” She grinned maliciously over at him. “And of course your preoccupation with me falls within the realm of business.”

He reddened. “Of course!” he said shortly.

The girl left the town just as the sun was struggling free of the white, wet mists of morning. She took Sine’s and her husband’s horses with her and set off due west across Brigantia, cantering easily over the long, dew-hung grass. All that day she pushed on, stopping only once to steal food from a farmstead whose freemen and women were all on their land. When night came she wriggled into the bracken of a copse, curled up in her cloak, and slept long and deeply like a little animal. For a week she traveled thus, moving quickly and lightly over the barren hills, thinking nothing, blending with country and sky, the horses strung out behind her. She entered the forest, glad for a moment of the shelter it afforded, then once more sank all relief under her quiet vigilance. She was all eyes and ears, and nothing existed for her but each present moment. The direction of the wind stirring faintly on her cheek or hand, the woodland scents rising under her horse’s hoofs, the slight, constant veer her mount wished to make, the angle of the unseen sun, these things were her life, her guide.

When, one evening, the breeze brought to her briefly a lungful of tart ocean air she reined in, her nostrils wide and lifted, then without sound or pause she turned her mount due south. She did not reason her decision. She had done that days ago, before she turned her back on Aricia’s town. Now was the time of instinct alone, and to mingle it with reason would have been to dilute its power. Like a hound following a scent she flitted from shadow to shadow, and day went after day. She slipped past Deva, a night’s march to the west of her, and hunger now sharpened her faculties and kept her sleep light. Then once again she swung west, into the dense forest on the Ordovician border. Only when the land beneath her horse’s hoofs began to rise and grow rocky did she allow herself to remember that she was human and not wholly a wild beast. Her thoughts became full of her husband and Sine and the evil that hung about Brigantia’s lady, and she wept silently as she rode.

She reached the camp two weeks out of Brigantia, but the site was empty. Only her trained eyes could have picked out the faint hollows of the firepits and the rocks that had been shifted back into their places after holding down the tents, and those eyes picked other signs, down by the stream. She began to track her people and three days later found them, camped nearer to the fort, among the trees. She was challenged and answered softly, then she got down from her horse and walked slowly to the fire where Venutius, Madoc, and Emrys squatted together, drawing something in the dry soil. Her legs shook with hunger and the weight of her news. They saw her coming and rose, and Emrys, with his usual perception, knew what was to come.

Venutius embraced her. “Brennia! Rest and peace! Will you eat and drink before you share?” She nodded. “Forgive me, Lord. If I do not eat I shall faint. They took my weapons and I had nothing to kill with. I stole a little, but it has long since gone.” She sank to the ground, tucking her legs under her, and Emrys himself brought her cheese and meat and clear, cold water. She ate slowly, chewing carefully, and the men sat around her and waited. When color began to flush the smooth cheeks again and her hands had stopped trembling, she spoke.

“My news is bitter for you to hear, Arviragus. Your wife is not sick. She holds my husband and Sine in chains and she sends you this message. If you do not go to her she will kill them both.”

A deep silence descended, and though outside the circle of the fire’s warmth men walked and spoke, the three around it had become blind and deaf to all save the girl’s pinched face. Madoc growled, then sent a stream of spittle flying into the bushes behind him. Emrys sat quite still, always in command of himself, but his eyes slowly closed and his brows drew together. Venutius’s head went down. He seemed to be fighting for breath. The girl sat loosely, her hands in her green lap, and tears slid down her face. “Forgive me again, Lord, for my weakness,” she choked. “I should have laid myself down in the forest so that this word would not come to you. Sine and my husband would have died, but your mind would still be at rest.”

“At rest?” Venutius laughed without warmth. “My mind will be at rest when I am dead.” Yet even as the deep voice rumbled out, he did indeed find a tiny core of peace in his soul, a steady little white flame of dignity and sanity. He lifted his head. With this news had come death, but it was a good death, the death of his doubt. He found that he could think of Aricia without a fog of hesitancy and contradictions, and of his friends without the suspicion that they were deceiving him about her. He saw her now quite clearly as a cancer, a weeping sore, a blight. Somewhere under that putridity was his wife, the woman he loved, and though the death of his love had not come—that was an ogre, a monster that could not be slain—never again would he excuse her to himself.

He leaned over and clumsily wiped the tears from the cheek of his kinswoman. “I am glad of this news,” he said quietly, and she looked at him, astonished. “It is always better, Brennia, to know the truth, even though it may bring pain unto death.” He rose lightly, surely. “Madoc, call in the chieftains. I have something to say to them. Brennia, go to your tent and rest, and then Domnall will find you a new sword.”

When she had gone, Venutius drew Emrys aside. “I would not blame you if you swept my head from my body,” he said. “Emrys, Emrys, for only the sake of my own madness, my selfishness, I have taken from you your life’s treasure. I can say nothing.”

“Lord, if Sine had not gone you would have gone yourself,” Emrys said thickly, fighting to keep his voice level, “and even now you would be waiting for a ship to carry you to Rome. It was your life or hers.”

“No!” Venutius stood straight and shouted. “No, Emrys! It will be Aricia’s life for hers. I have had enough, I can take no more. Because of my weakness, the bitch has reached right into our strongholds and controlled me still, but no longer. I will kill her. I will change the battle plan. She has gone too far this time.”