B007IIXYQY EBOK (93 page)

“Not so. You
are
a living shield. I tell you your spirit is not the same since your time on Ramis’ isle…. Godly light burns through your eyes. Do you not see how it heartens the troubled, if it does not literally preserve the flesh?”

They heard the moan of a woman in labor. Auriane thought of the sleek, wet form soon to emerge, a fresh creation to be devoured by this savage world.

Avenahar! Have you been consumed already? And I thought I would see you by last summer’s end. I will see you never again in this life.

“No, I do not see it. Sometimes, though, when I stare into the holy fire, I
know
in the beat of my blood that this is just the part of life that shows—that if we saw all of it, we would understand.”

There was a forlorn stretch of silence broken only by the chuffing of a nightjar.

“Auriane…” Athelinda ventured forward like someone testing a plank over a chasm. Auriane stiffened, alerted to danger. “I cannot let myself be taken captive tomorrow and dragged into thralldom. Tell me you understand. At dawn I mean to ask Thrusnelda for a draught of poison.”

“Mother, no! Do not leave me!”

“Daughter, you cannot fool me into believing we’ve any chance of victory.”

“I would not try. But I won’t act as the Fates. Let the gods say it!” She pressed her mother’s hand to her cheek. “I beg you! All I have loved are gone!”

Athelinda sighed heavily. “For
you,
then, dear child, I’ll live on a little longer. But just a
little.
I’ll wait until they’re pouring over the walls before I take my poison.”

Athelinda drew Auriane’s hand tightly to her chest, stroking her hair. In that position they fell into fitful sleep. Auriane dreamed of trolls’ halls, quaking earth, dancing walls reflecting fire, and groaning voices underground begging help.

When Auriane awakened, all still lay in predawn darkness. She disengaged herself from her mother without disturbing her and lit a torch from the central hearthfire. Working swiftly, quietly, she began drawing water from the well, meaning to soak the front gate so it would not burn. Witgern and Sigwulf were roused soon after and without speech began working alongside her. Gradually others rose in dozens, men of Sigwulf’s Companions and her own. While they labored, magpies and jays started their raucous music as if this dawn heralded a day like any other, to be filled with hunting, feasting or ploughing.

Auriane directed the aged, the children and the women who could not fight to the sheds along the north wall of the fort, where the approach was too steep for an army to attempt entry. Among them she saw Sunia, huddled in the gloom of the sunken floor of one of the huts, round eyes watching her mournfully. Auriane strode toward her and took Sunia’s hands in her own.

“Sunia, you have been a great and good friend.”

Sunia gave Auriane one of her cautious smiles. “Can I have a piece of your cloak?”

Auriane hesitated a moment, then took her dagger, pierced her cloak near the hem, and tore off a strip.

“And wet it with your spittle?” The spittle was said to carry the essence of the soul. Auriane complied. If this pitiful charm made Sunia feel safer, where was the harm?

“We’ll not be seated near each other in the Sky Hall,” Sunia said, eyes downcast. “I’ll be by the thralls, and you, next to Baldemar. So farewell for all time.”

“Sunia!”
Auriane moved toward her. Sunia clasped thin arms around her.

A sentry’s cry shocked all to stillness—
“Look ahead!
They’ve readied themselves!”

Auriane left Sunia and quickly made her way to the palisade.

Through the rolling ground mist and gauzy dawn light she saw a legion assembled on the gently sloped plain—a dark sinister square of men at a distance of three arrow shots, protected by a gleaming carapace of massive, interlocking shields. Their javelins formed a bed of spikes, all in neat rows. They were a single weapon trained on the fort, one monstrous machine with the power of gods. Cavalry was arrayed on their flanks, and in back of them a second force waited in reserve, almost concealed in the purple-black shadows of the mountain ash trees.

Panic stopped some hearts and caused others to race. Men went for their weapons, some moving with noble calm, some breaking into a frenzied run, stumbling over empty cookpots, loose timbers and picked-clean bones. Children wailed. A number of warriors, expecting to die and caring for nothing, broke into the last of the rations and consumed them all—they at least would not die hungry. Most, though, could not have swallowed the smallest bite of gruel and cared little that their share had been taken from them.

Athelinda gave Auriane some dried millet bread. She took it so Athelinda would think she ate it, but hid it in her cloak.

Auriane then saw that quantities of water and pitch were boiled so they could be relayed to the walls when needed and cast down on the enemy. At the same time Sigwulf ordered the camp’s hoard of spears brought out. Then she directed the women who were not war-trained to collect stones of various sizes, which they arranged in piles alongside the palisade. Those stones look like cairns for the dead, Auriane thought. All the while she kept an anxious eye on the sentries, who were to sound a horn if the Romans moved.

She found Sigwulf, and together they selected the men of their Companions who were best with a spear and stationed them on the palisade. The boiling pitch was brought, and she readied the lifts. The main body of the warriors—but four thousand and more, all showing the skeleton through the skin and hung with rags—were formed up on the casting ground to act as reserves for the men on the palisade.

Then Auriane mounted Berinhard and rode the circuit of the walls, looking carefully for places where they might be breached. She felt spasms of hollow anguish alternating with strengthening bursts of rage. From time to time all about dissolved into dreams; surely this was all no more than a hearthfire tale. Was that truly a legion out there or some phantom shape conjured up by a mind overwrought by tragedy?

The palisade was thick with men standing shoulder to shoulder, brown cloaks fluttering solemnly in the first stirrings of breeze. Bowmen stood between the spear bearers, their pitch-smeared arrows ready.

As she rode between the two crumbling wells near the east wall, she was approached by a man she had never before encountered in the camp. He was a musician—under one arm was a well-polished harp carved with interlaced serpents and vines. The man grasped Berinhard’s rein and regarded her with bold reverence. He would have possessed the angular beauty of some young hero were that face not so elongated and gaunt. His eyes were light and luminous like an owl’s, seeming to gaze inward and outward at once.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” she asked sharply.

“I am Eota, songmaker to all the tribes, lately from the hall of King Chariomer, whom you so boldly defeated in battle.”

She scarcely felt the praise. It came too glibly and often from foreign travelers. “You chose a poor time to pay us a visit. This is not an honorable enemy who respects the nobility of musicians. You will be enslaved.”

“Or killed, perhaps. But I had to come here to see your face, so that when I sing of you people will pay close heed.”

This shifted her off balance. Rarely was she presented with such undeniable evidence of the great regard in which she was held among neighboring tribes. Apparently even Sigwulf’s victory foreigners ascribed to
her
battle-luck.

She wanted to say:
Look at the bitter beaten mortal before you. Surely the sight of me is the undoing of all your adulation. I die alone today, wrest from my child, after having failed in all I sought.

He seemed to see only what might have been.

“You do me greater honor than I deserve,” she replied, feeling uncomfortable. Then she added, smiling, “If I’m to live in your songs,
you
must live. Go and hide in the well in back of the midden.”

She rode on, but Eota did not move; she felt that spectral gaze clinging to her back. Finally she turned about and said, “Eota! Beware of reverence, it’s a trick of the mind. And when you sing, do not forget them”—she indicated the pitiful host—“all these who did not run away.”

Eota nodded, still staring. Auriane rode past the wicker cage in which the two surviving hostages were kept, and held out to them the millet bread she could not eat. She watched as they accepted it without any show of gratefulness, divided it, and ate it. She said to them with her eyes,
This is how I treat my enemy.

One met her gaze. He was wrapped in a horse blanket; only his eyes were visible. There was no human understanding in that look; it was the unblinking stare of a lizard. She knew he counted her feeding him not kindness but prudence: She wanted a good report made of her when she was at his people’s mercy.

She then rode before the assembled warriors and dismounted beside Grunig, who had begun the ritual of consecrating the host. After Grunig thrust a ritual spear into a cauldron of horse’s blood, then raised it up to Wodan and traced the sign for victory in the air, Auriane tore open the leather pouch containing the ashes of the white cow and cat she had sacrificed in autumn. Calling on Fria, she cast them onto the air and let the wind disperse them over the armed multitude.

Sigwulf shouted from the palisade, “A horseman comes!”

Auriane mounted the walk. A single cavalryman had broken away from the legion. As he galloped closer, they recognized Siggo, a distant kinsman of Sigwulf’s, captured in a raid four summers ago. Siggo was now part of the auxiliary cavalry of the Eighth Augusta.

Siggo was greeted sulkily by the warriors on the wall as he pulled his horse to a halt below them. She heard Sigwulf mutter loudly about a “strutting cock who traded honor for a richly caparisoned horse.”

Siggo wore a helmet of gold with a long yellow plume and a beautifully worked breastplate buckled over a leather jerkin embroidered with scarlet. His horse was resplendent in parade trappings; saddlecloth and bridle glinted with bronze medallions and pendants of brilliantly colored enamel. His mount’s head was fitted with a bronze parade frontlet with intricate eyepieces. All stared in fascination, for the horse’s armor made the beast appear as much a warrior as its rider.

Siggo removed his helmet, revealing bright yellow-blond hair cropped short and combed forward in the Roman fashion. But the warriors on the wall noticed foremost how healthy and well-fed he was.

“I would speak to the daughter of Baldemar,” Siggo shouted out importantly. Auriane called down in a strong, clear voice, “I am here, Siggo.”

And now Siggo stared, obviously appalled by the condition of his fellow tribespeople—they looked like wild men who never knew the shelter of roof or hearth. Their sullen, threatening mood unnerved him—he had agreed to this meeting only because he was promised a promotion to officer’s rank—and because he believed he would be protected by the power of the kinship bond. But now he was not so certain. Starvation and fear had worn away at the constraints of ancient law and made unholy madmen of them. He wondered if his own brothers would avenge him if these men on the wall struck him down.

“Auriane,” Siggo began, fighting the impulse to wheel his horse about and flee. “It is no use. You must open the gate to them. They found your child.”

Auriane gave a low cry heard only by those near. But she kept her head proudly raised, revealing nothing of her agony to the man below.

“Avenahar,
that is her name, is it not?” Siggo continued. “A black-haired girl aged just over a year?”

The very air scalded her skin. She felt she had been run through by a sword still glowing from the forge.

“The babe will be spared if you release the Roman hostages now, and throw open the gate. If you make them force their way in, they will show no mercy to you. Open the gates and the babe will live.”

“Liar!”
dozens of tribesmen shouted at once.

“Look how pretty Siggo is with his sassy plumes,” Sigwulf taunted.

Another shouted, “Go back to your hot baths, Roman slave.”

“Wine-swilling dog of a dog,” Coniaric cried. “Roll over for us the way you do for them!”

“Siggo eats lying down.”

“And loves standing up!”

“—with tender, half-grown boys in the baths!”

“Silence!” Auriane cried, her voice piercing the din. She wondered if Siggo saw how she trembled. Fastila grasped her arm.

“It could be a lie,” Fastila said in a fevered whisper, trying to will Auriane strength with her eyes, her voice. “Who would dare seize a child in Ramis’ keeping?”

“And it could be true,” Auriane replied. “Our last Veleda was captured alive by them and taken to Rome.” She closed her eyes. “True or no,” she whispered, “there is only one answer to give.”

Once again the gods leave me no choice. Ramis, can they have wrest the child from you? Or perhaps you gave Avenahar up for some dark, obscure purpose of your own? Avenahar! If this be no trick, my next words condemn you to death.