Hadrian's wall (23 page)

But only when she had the spirit to go. Only when she'd learned enough. It still felt good to be in this isolated refuge, her choices simple, her life placid.

Arden came at sunset, the sky a soft rose against the enclosing hills and the lake molten glass. He was triumphant at having killed two ducks with his arrows. "I shot them on the wing, breast and neck. The second one was a lucky hit. Here's wild carrots and bread from Tiranen, as well. And wine, stolen from Rome."

So, her stomach growling, they prepared the simple meal together. While he cleaned the birds, she built up the fire and put on water for the carrots. Then she began roasting the fowl on a spit, their fat spattering to erupt in little spouts of flame. Arden stood close to help. He was like another wall, enclosing her.

As evening came, she lit a candle.

Her captor, or caretaker-she was no longer sure which-had brought his wine in a leather bag and showed how she could jet a stream into her mouth. Her laughter at the trick made the liquid splash her chin. The domesticity was so typical of the lower classes that her mother would be shocked, yet it left Valeria strangely content. They were alone in the wild and yet not alone, because they had each other. She had to remind herself not to trust him too much. He was still a barbarian. But he was also becoming a kind of friend, like Brisa.

She could hear and feel the silk whispering against her body and knew he could see its borders peeking from beneath her Gallic coat. He didn't mention it, however, and she was too shy to thank him.

"You can walk," he commented instead.

"I can hobble."

"Savia suspects me of torturing you. Tomorrow I'll bring my horse, and you can ride behind me back to Tiranen. There's a meeting of the clans I've got to go to, and you're strong enough now to finish your recovery there."

She was surprised at her own disappointment. She liked the quiet of the crannog. She liked being alone with Arden outside the crowded and noisy hill fort. But certainly her place was back where she could be found and rescued, wasn't it? "Planning another abduction?"

He didn't rise to her provocation. "There's rumor of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"None that concerns you, yet."

"You haven't heard from my husband?" She was annoyed he wouldn't confide in her and couldn't resist asking it.

"I told you he won't move against us."

"Marcus isn't afraid of you." She insisted on it without knowing why.

"But he's afraid for you, Valeria, and because of that he's afraid for himself. As long as you stay alive, he retains his office. If you die, his future is in peril. By capturing you, we've captured him."

The thought depressed her. "You pick on a woman to defeat a man?"

"What kind of man is so easily defeated?"

She had nothing to say to that.

"Is it really so bad, my clan and my crannog?" he persisted.

"It's not my home."

"What if it was?"

Here was his weakness, and it gave her an opportunity to sting him. "You know I could never belong here. Never belong to you." There. She'd said it.

"Celtic women belong to no man. And yet you do belong here, among the free. It relaxes you, I can see it. I know we don't have your fine things, but we do have great spirit. We have each other."

"So do Romans."

"I admire your loyalty, but you have to be realistic. Your husband might worry for you, be embarrassed by your capture, even miss your company. But he won't risk his career when he doesn't love you."

"You don't know my husband's heart!"

"I know the emptiness of yours. He's not in love with you because you aren't with him."

"The presumption of you!"

"Why are you always upset by simple truth? I didn't abduct you, I rescued you, from an arranged marriage and Roman ambition."

"Now I should thank you?" She was flushing.

"You enjoy this crannog. I can see it on your face."

She turned away. "This is dinner, not a lifetime."

"Sometimes a dinner is all a lifetime allows." He stood close, lightly touching her arms. She trembled. "Come, you know I've treated you well. Let's eat, not argue, and let the Wall take care of itself for an evening."

The simple food was good, her body ravenous. How could such a meal taste better than an elaborate banquet? How could a rude hut seem as comfortable as a Roman mansion? They chatted for a while of simpler things, of the hunt and horses and history of his clan, and let the wine numb their frustration and desire.

At length they pushed themselves back from the food. He was watching her more lazily now, seemingly content to drink in her features in the candlelight. It both flattered her and made her nervous. She still looked like a bruised pear and wished she was prettier, and yet also wished he wouldn't look at her at all. She'd promised her fidelity to Marcus! Yet she wanted Arden to want her, if for no other reason than to turn him down.

How mixed-up she felt.

"You pretend to know a lot about love," she said finally.

His smile was wistful. "That's because I've been in love and know how terrible it can be, this thing that all young women long for."

Suddenly she saw it. There'd been a romance. "When?"

"Before, when I was in the Roman army." His gaze was lost in memory.

"Please tell me what happened."

He shook his head. "I don't tell it to anyone. It's bitter, not sweet."

"But you must to me."

"Why?"

"You must trust me."

He was amused. "Why must I trust you?"

"Because I must trust you, the two of us alone, a thousand miles from Rome." Each the other's prisoner, Kalin had said.

He knew what she meant: the price of friendship, or something deeper. He considered, then shrugged. "Her name was Alesia."

"A pretty name."

"Just why I first noticed her I can't truly say. By the time I saw her, I'd marched past a thousand women, or ten times a thousand women. She was pretty, almost as pretty as you, and had a kind look, and yet that doesn't fully explain it. I'd seen other women equally pretty, and equally kind. There was simply a peculiar radiance to that moment, a trick of light that made me feel directed by the gods. Have you ever experienced it?"

"No."

"The setting sun had backlit clouds beyond the Danube, turning them black, and the Roman shore was golden. Alesia was fetching water, her back straight and neck erect, the jar balanced on her head, and the light turned her shift white and translucent. I remember her steps, small and careful, the slim silhouette of her form, and her manner, graceful and chaste. I walked past without stopping, on an errand to buy some wine for my comrades, but something made me look back."

"You fell in love." She was envious.

"We hadn't said a word, and yet I lost my heart. I wanted not just to possess her but to know her, to protect her, to besiege her heart."

Valeria swallowed.

"She glanced back at me," he continued, "and with that our fates were sealed."

Where was this woman? She couldn't ask that yet. "Why were you in the army?"

"My family was rich and had come to partial accommodation with the Romans. We had lands south of the Wall. We tried your civilization, but it trapped us in debt. When my father couldn't pay the Bite, he was arrested, and our lands were confiscated. When he went to Rome for justice, he was ignored and died of illness. My mother died of grief. I was left with revenge. So I joined the legions." "You joined the empire you hated?"

"Not hate, not at first. I was young enough to think that perhaps it had been my father's fault, because he wasn't Roman enough. I Latinized my name to Ardentius and marched where the army told me. At first, everything Roman seemed grand. I heard the roar of the mob at the Coliseum. I guarded generals who dined at the villas of Italian millionaires. I prowled the wharves of Ostia, where all the wealth of the world comes and goes. My first impression was yours. Rome was universal and eternal and necessary."

He made it seem false. "It's brought order to the world." "And slavery, poverty, and hollowness. Cities so great they can't feed themselves. Taxes no one can afford to pay. Army life was callous, and the Romans I met were a soft, spoiled people, ignorant of who they ruled and unwilling to fight. They got tribute from places they couldn't name."

"Yet you took their pay and wore their clothes and slept in their barracks."

"For a while. When I knew enough to beat you, I wanted out." "With an Alesia, after your twenty-year enlistment?" "No, I wanted Alesia then, when I saw her on the grassy bank of the Danube. Not that part between a woman's thighs, which can be bought by soldiers for a coin, but her, to end the loneliness of the legions. I found her owner, Criton the leather maker, and began bargaining for her freedom. I trailed her to the market and to the river, finding excuses to talk and help carry her things. She was frightened of disappointment but alive with hope. I told her about life here, how the sun in summer seems to linger half the night and stars in winter are thick as snow. I told her we'd never be treated as equals within the empire-I an alien and she a slave-but that here we could make a free and happy life." "She believed this?"

"Her eyes, Valeria! How they ignited with the promise of it!" The woman said nothing. Was she herself some kind of replacement for this slave woman? Had she been captured to replace a memory?

"What I hadn't anticipated was the jealousy of Lucullus, the centurion who commanded my unit. He hated happiness because he was incapable of it himself. The man was piggish, with that kind of animal cunning that thrives in the army. He'd tried a particularly insidious form of the Bite, demanding that his soldiers give him a portion of their pay to be granted any leave. Their families, crops, and financial affairs were hostage to his greed. This went too far, and the others persuaded me to speak for them to the cohort commander. Lucullus was reprimanded, his pay fined, and his power curbed. I was a hero for a day. Then my comrades forgot. Lucullus didn't."

"You're an idealist!" Arden was the kind of man her politician father had always disparaged. The senator said empires were sustained by accommodation and that self-righteous men caused grief. Valeria had secretly disagreed. She thought people should believe in something, but her father would have called her foolish.

"I see things clearly," Arden went on, "which is a curse. Anyway, word of my intentions toward Alesia came to Lucullus, as it must. Nothing is secret in the army. Reports that Ardentius the troublemaker was about to spend all his savings to buy a slave's freedom caused my commander much amusement, and then much thought. He went to Criton and bribed him to tell when and how I was going to buy the girl. Then he came to a grove of poplar where Alesia waited, arriving before I did. He seized her, embraced her, whipped her, raped her, and burned her-all to get back at me." "Oh, Arden…"

"She hanged herself for shame. I'd come with a wedding present and found a corpse." His voice was hollow. "What present?"

He swallowed, looking away from her eyes. "That silk you're wearing."

She blushed, suddenly alarmed at the gift. Horrified. Flattered. Confused. It felt as if it were on fire.

"I won it for a deed in battle. I've had no one else worthy of it until now."

"Arden…"

"I didn't have an instant's doubt who killed her," he cut her off.

He was like that probatio who she'd watched training in the courtyard, letting his shield drift and exposing his heart. "So you killed him."

"No man had ever beaten Lucullus in a fight, fair or foul. But I found him that night, knocked away the dagger he kept at the small of his back, and strangled him with my own hands. I killed Criton, too, and took both the money I'd paid for Alesia and the bribe Lucullus had left and threw it to the beggars. I dumped my Roman armor into the river and swam for Germania. Eventually I made my way back here."

"To drag others into revenge."

"To warn others of Rome. It took my father. My mother. The woman I loved. So I took you."

"To get back at the empire," she whispered.

"That was my motive, at first."

She looked away. She must not fall under his spell. "But you can't mean to sweep all of Rome away from Britannia for-" She gestured around the hut. "This."

"This is all I need."

"Except for that wine you brought. I, too, am a product of the empire you despise. If Rome is so worthless, why do barbarians try to plunder it? And if you plunder too much, where will your sons and daughters get their goods?"

"And if you Romans conquer too much, who will you ever learn from but yourselves? Why does one nation need to own the entire world?"

"The world is that nation now!"

"Not my world. Not my life."

I realize, when Savia is brought before me again, that our relationship has subtly changed. I had her moved to better quarters and quietly inquired about her purchase price. It was low, as expected. Some word of my interest must have filtered back to her. She sits before me with new confidence.

Certainly we seem not so much master and slave, or interrogator and witness, as tentative allies trying to understand what happened at Hadrian's Wall. I don't find this assumption of equality entirely disturbing because I realize that I look forward to her company. This is the woman closest to the heart of Valeria, and thus most vital to my own understanding. I also find some strange comfort in her presence, as if we know each other better than we do. She's a little thinner than when I saw her last, but not disagreeably so, and in fact has an attractiveness that I didn't entirely recognize before. It is the serene beauty of the good mother or the longtime companion. It occurs to me that the beauty of another person increases with affection. Is it possible that I feel something for this woman? What does that say about my habit of solitude? I have roamed the Roman world and met thousands of people. Who, in the end, do I really feel close to? This is a question that seemed trivial in my youth. It is of increasing importance as I age.

She sits before me less anxious this time, knowing there's some unspoken understanding between us. Perhaps she thinks the story I'm piecing together has subtly affected me. Certainly I have become more at home in this tale of Britannia, less the skeptical sophisticate sent by Rome. My imagination has smelled the acrid smoke of the burning grove and the rank musk of a dead boar. What seems inexplicable at long range sometimes seems inevitable when explained in context. We share a history now, she by experience and I by understanding, and are bound to each other by what happened and what must happen next.

I greet her politely and relate what I have learned from the druid Kalin, who nursed Valeria on that crannog. I ask Savia to think back to her captivity in Caledonia with the clan of Arden Caratacus, prince of the Attacotti. What developed between this Celtic warrior and this Roman woman who had been ripped so quickly from her new marriage?

"I have been told of this boar hunt, for example. It changed things, did it not?"

"It changed Valeria." Savia looks at me now with hope.

"How?" My tone is gentler than the first time we met.

"She was almost killed, and thus never more alive. I saw the huge gorgon she'd killed when it was brought back to Tiranen for feasting, so heavy it had to be suspended between horses instead of men. Yet this Roman girl had slain the boar."

"The Celts were impressed?"

"The Celts thought it a sign. When she rode back from the crannog with Arden and passed between the wooden gate towers of Tiranen, they sang her powers as if she were an Amazon. Hool rode back with them, still bandaged with splints to his leg and torso, but everyone knew she had saved his life, and helped nurse him afterward. He shouted her praises. Cassius, her former bodyguard, gave her the polished tusks to wear on her neck. She had a look of stunned radiance. She'd felt the fire of being a barbarian."

"She liked it."

"She told me later that she'd never felt such fear. Or such exaltation at having survived. That hut on the lake where she'd healed had seduced her as well."

"So she and Arden came together."

"Oh, no. She remained a chaste married woman. You could tell by his longing."

"She felt loyalty to her husband?"

"Loyalty is everything. The question is how much loyalty her husband felt toward her."

"She gave up on the idea of rescue?"

Savia thinks about this for a moment. "She felt the rescuers had given up on her. Both of us felt that way, master. We still waited to hear the bleat of the Celtic warning horn that would signal her husband's approach in his golden armor, determined to wrest her away. This is the way it is in the old stories, like Agamemnon sailing to Troy to win back stolen Helen. Yet day after day went by without even word of negotiations. Then week after week, month after month. We didn't understand what was happening in the Empire, nor how Galba plied Marcus's fears. None of this would be made dear until the winter."

"And so Valeria, despite her chastity, felt doubt."

"We felt abandoned."

Abandoned. And adopted, I think. "What was your life like among the Celts?"

"Simpler. In Rome, everything was strategic: marriage, career, children, assignment, house, neighborhood, entertainment. One measured the progress of one's life by money and station. The barbarians, in contrast, were like animals, or children. It was hard to get them to commit to anything tomorrow, let alone months or years ahead. Time had less meaning. You'd set a meeting, and they might ignore it completely. Or show hours late with no apology. They were wonderful craftsmen who could carve a piece of wood into a song-but would also put off the repair of a leaky roof for weeks."

"Surely they had to pay attention to the seasons."

"That's what the druids were for. The priests would watch the sun and stars and tell them when to plant and reap. They'd also divine the future."

"With blood sacrifice?"

"Of animals. Yet I didn't doubt it might be with Roman captives, too."

"Was it clear that war was coming?"

"The raid on the grove had aroused the tribes, but the Wall was still too strong and the barbarians too divided. Uniting the Picts and Attacotti and Scotti and Saxons into one great army was Arden's goal, but it was an almost impossible one. There was no strategy. Arden understood planning because he'd lived among the Romans, but it was difficult to explain to his people. To them, time was circular and life was brief."

"A rather aimless existence."

"Not aimless. Simply that every deed was aimed at that day, not the next. It's a way of life not entirely unpleasant. They measure happiness by feelings more than achievement. Their homes are cruder than a tenement in Rome, their heat is more spotty, a proper bath is nonexistent, their clothes are rougher to the skin, their cooking is plain, their mud is everywhere, and they are more apt to have a cow in their dining room than an aristocrat. Yet why was there more laughter in Tiranen than at Petrianis, or even the Roman house of Senator Valens? Because they had so little, they worried less about keeping it.

Because they had so little to be proud of, they seemed less poisoned by the sin of pride."

"Surely Valeria longed for Roman comforts-"

"Their barbarism meant that our own worries receded as well. I'd never noticed as many flowers and as many birds as I did that summer. I enjoyed rain, and the sewing that it meant inside, and then sun because it meant we'd roam the meadows. Valeria rode almost every day on the new mare that had been given her, and Brisa began to teach her the bow and arrow. The archer had taken my lady under her wing, finding a kind of sibling that she'd missed since the deaths of her brothers. As Valeria improved her Celtic, Brisa learned some Latin. We were so dependent on our captors that we developed a strange fondness for them, the natural surrender of child to parent, or slave to master, or legionary to centurion. We still expected rescue and return, of course, so we regarded it all as an interlude. Almost a dream."

"The barbarians were kind to you?"

"The barbarians were people. Some were kind, and some were vulgar. None molested us except Asa, who resented Valeria and would play her little tricks. Once it was a burr under the saddle that caused her new horse to buck her off. The bitch would slip salt into a serving of honey or vinegar into a draught of wine. Petty things and catty gossip. It was annoying, and Valeria's protests did no good."

"Why did Asa resent her so much?"

"Because Asa was in love with Arden, and he'd forgotten the Celtic girl's existence. He'd been blinded by Valeria. She can do that, you know; the pretty minx has known how to manipulate and get her way since she was a young child. She'd flirt with him even while clinging to her married purity, and enjoy his torture without admitting it to herself. He'd warned others to leave her be and so felt he had to do so, too, and feared she'd lose her value as a hostage if despoiled. Yet it tormented him. Despite his professed hatred of Rome, he viewed her as exotic, somehow better than the women in Caledonia. I think he wanted Rome as much as he wanted to destroy it: his hatred and fascination came in part from a conviction of inferiority. The awkwardness was made worse because she was attracted to him. She tried to hide it, but I knew. Everyone did-"

"He was more her own age than her husband was."

"And handsome, daring, and commanding. Every woman felt a tremor when he went by. And yet it was more than that, I believe. The two fit naturally together like the halves of a broken coin. Despite his protestations, he was Roman enough to understand her world, and she wild enough to understand his. Yet they kept apart as if they'd burn if they touched. Both seemed haunted, and it worried the warriors. There were rumblings that he should either couple with the Roman vixen or get rid of her."

"What did you advise? "

"That she remain loyal to Marcus, of course. But when he didn't come and didn't come, I could see the child's doubt. Each evening we'd go to the palisade, and the country to the south would be empty of rescue. She'd never really been married; the man was too remote. Now this barbarian was at her side. My counsel was duty, hut my secret question was, Where did her happiness lie? Finally I went to see Kalin."

"What a meeting that must have been! The Christian and the Celtic mystic!"

"We'd talked before. He feared my god because I didn't fear his. I told him the old gods were dead and that he'd see as much if he tried to attack the Wall; that Rome had the protection of the Jesus it had once crucified. My warning made him wary. For men to sacrifice to the gods, this he understood, but for a god to be sacrificed for men: this, he complained, was almost impossible to believe. How could people follow such nonsense? And yet I'd describe how the Christian martyrs had in turn sacrificed themselves. He was fascinated by a Rome he could scarcely imagine, and I was intrigued by his herbs and roots to ward off sickness and heal wounds."

"So you were friends?"

Savia laughs. "I was determined he not sacrifice me!"

I smile. I'm not the first man Savia has manipulated. "What did he suggest for Arden and Valeria?"

"The new year's feast comes after the leaves fall from the trees. The Celts date their year from the end of harvest and the start of winter, and call it Samhain. They believe the spirits of their dead ancestors wake to walk the earth that night, and that the festival grants strange powers and unusual liberties. There's a fertility rite that involves two Celtic gods, the male Dagda and the female Morrigan. Each year a different man and a different woman are chosen by lot to play the roles. Kalin draws the lots."

"He decided to draw Arden and Valeria."

"He said it is a night of that other world, not this one, and that what happened between them on Samhain would be in the hands of gods, not men."