The Songs of Slaves (50 page)

             
“I am alone now, am I not?”
Lucia
said.

             
“No, you are not,” Connor replied.
Lucia
said nothing.

             
“My God is here, too, in these mountains,” Connor said. “He is always with me. There have been times when I did not believe that, but now I know it is true.”

             
“Do not speak to me of your god,”
Lucia
retorted. “I know all about your god. Where was your god when my mother died?
Or my father, or my brother?
Where was he when all these problems started? When the Rhine froze and the delicate balance was broken? I do not see your god. I see chaos wherever he is said to reign.”

             
“I have felt the same. But I know that he was there with you, as he has always been with me. He suffers with us.”

             
Lucia
snickered theatrically, but offered no rebuttal.

“Well, I need not be alone anyway,”
Lucia
said after a brief pause. “I would need other
priestesses,
and priests as well, to perform the rites of the Goddess. You were wrong when you said that this was no place for mortals. People have lived and lived well in these mountains for centuries. We haven’t seen them because most live on the more hospitable slopes and valleys, and all have the sense to shun the passes used by bands of brigands.”

Connor nodded, wondering what sort of hard men could thrive in mountains such as these, where even goats seemed to have trouble finding purchase. This thought was quickly replaced by wondering what role priests might play in an exotic eastern fertility cult.
Lucia
’s words cut into his inflammatory musings.

“Why are you with these thugs, anyway?”

Connor was about to defend his friends – for friends is what many of them had become. They had showed him respect. They had kept their word to him, and given him the benefit of the doubt more than once. Still none had pressed him to reveal his origins or history. They accepted Connor as a man; respecting him not because of birth or status as the Romans would,
but because of what he offered to the group. As they had shared dangers together over the road that bond was strengthening. They had backed him against Arastan; Valia had not turned him over to Sarus; and they had fought side by side against the
bacaudae,
relying on each other and overcoming their enemies as a team. Connor had been forced to trust these men with his life and so far they had not let him down. But how could he say this to
Lucia
, who had seen these same men loot her house as her father’s blood cooled in the courtyard?

“I would have left them long ago,” Connor said. “But I cannot. Because I am taking you to your uncle in Asisium; and then I need to find money to buy a kinswoman – a girl no older than yourself – out of cruel slavery in Ma
ssilia. When these things have taken place
I will cover the ground and the ocean waves as I race for my home far, far away. But not until.”

“You still claim that you did not bring them to my home? That you did not bring them to our gates seeking revenge?”

“You know well that the mysteries of the divine hand are easy to trace but difficult to understand,”
Connor said. “As I have said before, we were brought together on the road. Their course was set by forces larger than any I could manipulate. All I have done here has been for you, and to keep my oath to your father.”

Lucia
hung her head for a moment and then looked back out to the mountains.

“I hear that you were something of a hero today,” she said at last.

“I did my part,” Connor said. “We were lucky, and God looked out for me.”

“Everyone was talking about it. How you and those three found the trap, but you scouted it out and then kept it from Sarus; then you and the others laid the stratagem and you killed the chieftain of the outlaws. I could hear the screaming as the rest of us crossed through the ravine. I could smell the smoke. I kept looking up to the top of the walls, expecting evil men to attack us; but you kept them away.”

“We kept them away,” Connor corrected, trying not to smile though he felt a surge of pride at her words. “I would have been killed without the others’ help. We
never would have made it. So many things nearly went wrong.”

“Many of the women ask about you. They ask me where you are from, and what sort of man you are.”

“And you tell them that I am just an old slave of yours and no one of consequence,” Connor said, half-joking.

“I tell them very little of what they want to hear,”
Lucia
smiled. “But I tell them that you are a good man.”

“I am trying to be.”

XXIII

             
Suddenly – when they last thought it would
–
the valley opened up before them. It was the middle of December – near the end of the Pagan Saturnalia and just before Christ’s Mass – and the fertile fields were now brown and dusted with snow, the old trees gnarled and bald,
ice forming around the banks of
the streams. But to the column that trod down the steep foothills it looked like the valleys of Elysium. The snow covered Alps were behind them, as were ten days of scarcity and cold, and eleven nights of fear and shivering in the dark. How many hours had they spent wondering if they would even make it – most not really knowing how much farther it may be through the dangers of unseen
bacaudae,
precipitous falls, avalanches, or simply being blocked by a strong snow storm and left to starve in the barren lands? How many times had they looked out at the mountains, the forbidden world of the spirits and the gods, not knowing if they would ever be able to enter back into the world of men? But then just a few days ago the descent had begun, almost imperceptibly at first – the cold and ice gradually diminished and it slowly became easier to breath. Soon the tallest peaks were all to the west, and the slopes
began to dive down. Although then – as if in mockery to their hope – the way became even more treacherous, with horse an
d man sliding on the unsteady
grades, and carts being caught in the rocky passes. Undaunted, Valia’s followers pushed on. None had died, and though many were sick now and a few injured in battle with the
bacaudae
or from accidents on the road they were not going to let anything stop them. Then that morning they had finally entered into the Alpine foothills of Liguria. Men, women, and children alike entered in awe and silence, like wanderers entering into the Garden of Eden. They had crossed the Alps. They were in Italia.

             
But as they continued their march, Connor could see that this was – or at least no longer was – an Eden. There was no safety here, no peace. They were far from the cities of the greatest land in the world, the heart of the
Imperium,
the
Pax Romana,
but even in the foothills there were some small villages, villas, and homesteads to be seen. They all told the same story. Many of the structures that were not burned stood abandoned – their occupants fled or perhaps killed. The palisades around some of the villages that still were inhabited shut their gates at the sight of
Valia’s men. Frightened plebes
and
not Roman garrisons quickly rushed to defensive positions on the walls. Though the Visigoths were badly in need of fresh supplies, Valia ignored them. Approaching the towns in their state of alarm could only lead to a standoff that none of them could afford. They kept marching, past the villas with grapes shriveled on the vine, past fields with wheat dried brown and weighed down by frost, past cottages where only stray dogs came out to watch them pass. As the winter sun climbed high and the column stopped to eat some of the last of their rations, reality began to set in. They were here. They had survived. But now what?

             
“When one is presented with multiple explanations, the simplest one is usually the truth.”

             
“What?” Connor asked, snapped back into the present. His mind had drifted as he looked at the burned remains of an isolated cottage.

             
“You heard me,” Rufus, the Visigoth
’
s priest
,
said. Over fifty, but still with sandy-colored,
untonsured
hair and a straggly beard, Rufus did not fit even Connor’s picture of a priest. His eyebrows were bushy and silver, and they seemed to dart and move improbably above the gaunt face of dried leather. Rufus
was missing half his teeth – seemingly from being knocked out rather than through decay, if his other teeth were any indication – and he spit whenever he got to talking animatedly. As he did so he would gesticulate wildly, his bent, wiry frame swaying like a tree in a thunderstorm beneath his dirty woolen robes. He carried no cross-pieced staff or other ornament marking him besides a wooden cross around his long neck. At his side, dangling from his ancient belt hung an old, worn
gladius
– the short, broad-bladed sword that was once the weapon of choice for legions expecting close combat.   

             
Connor said nothing, knowing that the exuberant little priest would not be able to resist explaining himself. He looked back down the column to where
Lucia
walked with some o
f the other women. Montevarius’
daughter was looking straight ahead, obviously deep in thought.
Connor whished that he were walking beside her now.
She was still very reserved with him but had at least started to talk again – never about the past and seldom about anything of substance, but she was at least no longer completely shunning him. The freezing Alpine nights had necessitated that they huddle together for warmth, and
so
Lucia
had become used to his presence. Whether there was anything more to it than that he did not know. Sighing, Connor looked ahead. He could not walk beside
Lucia
now because his place was either to scout or to be in the front of the line with the warriors, and evidently the priest. Connor had made the mistake of engaging Rufus in a theological discussion. He did not realize that in so doing he had kicked over a hive of bees. He caught the sidelong glances of his
comilites
–
his brothers in arms
.
These men had proven they were willing to fight to the death by his side, but no one was going to help him out of this one.

             
“What is simple is more likely to be true,” Rufus continued. “W
hat is
more simple
? That
God is
one or that one is
three different things at the same time? Let me ask you this – is God everywhere?”

             
Connor considered his answer, knowing this was a semantic trap of some kind. Most of the Visigoths were Christians, bu
t they were of the Arian creed. This
creed
was
rejected by the official Church, but still the most widespread heterodoxy in the
Imperium
. Titus
Vestius
had been a specialist at finding and debating anything the Church considered heretical;
but the importance of the Arian distinction had never struck Connor as being as crucial as it evidently seemed to others, and he had learned the refutations half-heartedly. He had only broached the subject with Rufus to pass the time and get his mind off of his under-filled belly and aching feet. At this stage in his life he had no intentions of changing anyone’s mind.  But now he was paying for his lack of preparation.

             
“Of course God is everywhere,” Connor said, an edge of exasperation in his voice.

             
“If he is everywhere, then why would he be everywhere in three different aspects?”
Rufus pounced.
“At the same time?
That is dizzying, and –
with all due respect, sir – ridiculous. And the Romans and Greeks pride themselves on the logic! How is that logical?”

             
“The Gospel of John says ‘
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word w
as with God and the Word was God,
’
” Connor said. “Later in the book Christ says
‘I and the Father are one.’
”

             
“He also says
‘I am returning to my Father who is greater than I’
and dozens of times he is called a
begotten son or even liked to call himself the ‘Son of Man,’” Rufus rebutted. “That’s all in the same book.”

             
Connor did not like to lose, but it had been an hour of this. In addition to his empty stomach and sore feet he would soon get a hoarse voice for his troubles.

             
“I guess one of the reasons why this never seemed like a problem to us – I mean to my people in my country – was that we were already used to the idea of gods and forces having a triune nature,” Connor said, trying to drop any hint of an attacking tone.