Maire (7 page)

Rowan exchanged a glance with his mother. He hesitated, a considering look on his face, and then he nodded. “Have it your way, little queen.”

A fight won too easily was not necessarily over, Maire thought, wary as Rowan reached for her hand and lifted it to his lips.

“I will council with my people and then gather my things.” With an exaggerated sweep of his arm, he bowed. “My house is yours, little queen. Mother, I leave her to your hospitality.”

“God’s will be done.” So saying, she adapted, despite her earlier distress, to the role of hostess with the quiet grace it demanded. “You may call me Lady Delwyn, Queen Maire. May we serve you food and drink? Or would you prefer a bath first?”

“A bath?” Maire echoed in surprise.

After assigning the task of gathering the first portion of the tribute to Eochan and Declan, Maire had searched for Rowan inside the curious lodge, expecting to find the woman pleading with him to change his mind. While that had been his mother’s
first reaction, she’d apparently acquiesced to his will, or the will of their god. Her noble serenity bespoke a quiet strength and courage equal to that of any warrior. Lady Delwyn was, after all, losing her son as a hostage to an enemy. Even as she stood there, Maire had seen the struggle between dismay and acceptance wage war on her hostess’s face; the latter emerging victorious at the mention of her god’s will.

Had this god spoken to the woman just then? Maire had heard nothing. Odd that a god would instruct his people so, rather than having learned scholars such as Brude interpret his will for them. Perhaps he was more of a commoner’s god—although this family was far from common. Everything about them was refined, from habitat to manner.

“The bath is an old one, but my husband had artisans from Rome restore it, as he did with the rest of the house. Have you ever seen such beautiful wall paintings?”

“We have our own talented artisans,” Maire informed her, determined to let her companion know the Scotti were not totally without talent and taste. Still, she had seen nothing to compare with the elegance of this strange house. “But I would see the other rooms,” she added, striking her tone with authority to remind the woman that she—the
painted heathen,
as the woman had called her earlier—was in charge at the moment.

Instead of living in separate huts within the compound, the members of Rowan’s family and their servants lived in apartments joined together in a large square around a garden. However, this was not a garden cultivated for food. Beauty was its only purpose. In its center was a fountain with a statue of a comely maiden pouring water from an urn into its base. These people had managed to bring the colors of a spring meadow and the babble of a brook into their home.

A pillared and covered colonnade that connected surrounding rooms or apartments formed the perimeter. In place of familiar packed dirt floors covered with fresh straw, there were tiled ones of slate and mosaic laid in beautiful designs. In one
apartment, the Chi-Rho of Rowan’s amulet was inlaid in the floor with blues, reds, yellows, and greens.

While the villa’s hall and dining room were the most elaborately decorated of the rooms, the others were grander than any Gleannmara boasted. Their furnishings were rich—engraved trunks, folding stools, and tables of intricate mechanical design on brass legs—all were fascinating to a girl who’d never been beyond the great eastern sea before. Surely, not even the Sidhe of the other world enjoyed finer surroundings.

Rowan reappeared as Lady Delwyn was showing Maire the master bedroom. In his arms, cradled like a babe, was a frail man of large frame. No doubt the elder had been a sizeable warrior in his own day, before the forces of time had worn and withered what had once been a well-formed torso. Now, like an ancient ruin, fleshy remains clung to the once sturdy frame that had supported it.

As Lady Delwyn’s son deposited the elder man on the bed, she flew to the invalid’s side and kissed him tenderly upon the forehead.

“God works among us in strange ways, beloved. Would that I understood them better.”

“All that is necessary is faith.”

“A seizure left my father unable to move his legs,” Rowan explained, causing Maire to break her gaze away from the couple. Instead she studied the vibrant blues and pinks of the room’s painted panels, which were artfully displayed over a stippled dado base of the same colors.

The renegade skim of emotion that had touched her when watching mother and son resurfaced at the sight of the devotion between husband and wife. Maire vaguely recalled the same between her parents and envied that still evident between her foster parents. Would she ever know such love? A discreet glance at the somber Rowan ap Emrys was not encouraging.

The man on the finely dressed bed studied Maire as his wife tucked a pillow behind his balding head to raise him. Like his
son, his jaw was scraped clean of hair. A thin white line on one sunken cheek proclaimed the survival of one near brush with death’s blade. No doubt there were other such banners of valor, shrinking away with his age.

“I am Demetrius, Queen Maire, but you needn’t feel sadness for me. God has seen fit to turn my sickness into a blessing. He has seen fit to send an able and loving son to do what I cannot. And I have faith that Rowan’s leaving, too, shall lead to good. You seem a maid with a heart as tender as her sword is skilled.”

For all his failings, the man had eyes like a hawk’s, Maire thought grudgingly. No one ever saw her cry. No one! Not since she’d been told of her mother’s death.

“Your mother Maeve would be proud.”

“You know of Maeve?” Now here indeed was a surprise.

“Your bard’s voice carried to the chapel room when the shouting hushed at the climax of the contest. My son says you were a worthy opponent.”

“I bested him.” How could it occur to the old man that she was anything but? She shifted uncomfortably, recalling that, but for the shock of her proposal, the Welshman had gained the upper hand. Regardless, when all was said and done, she was triumphant.

Maire wiped her cheek against her arm, smearing the blueing. It only made her more aware of the contrast of her filthy state to that of the villa and its inhabitants. By now, it had formed a paste with sweat, dirt, and dried blood—the fisherman’s at the village, hers, and that of Rowan ap Emrys. The skirt of her saffron tunic was stained dark from her final blow against him. Part of her wanted to wear the leine as a badge of hard-earned victory, while another longed to accept Lady Delwyn’s offer of a bath to be rid of it. She wondered how Maeve had dealt with the plague of such womanly notions.

“Our men have gone to collect the choicest of our herds while the servants pack my trunk. Is there anything you see in the house that you would have as a bride’s gift?”

Rowan’s question snatched her from her whimsy. The house. That’s what Maire wanted to answer, but that was impossible. What a palace it was!

Her gaze flickered over the luxurious bed with its thick mattress and exquisite coverlets. Claw feet of bronze supported it, curving up on each corner to support the head of a lion. No, she couldn’t bring herself to oust an invalid from it. Not when there was one just as royal in another apartment, one so long and wide that she could easily stretch out with arms over her head, or to her side, and not touch the edge of the plush mattress. It was a far cry from the narrow carved bed box she used with its cushion of leaves and needles.

“The bed in the westernmost apartment and all its trappings,” she decided, giving in to her fancy. She’d earned it, well enough, and woe be to the man who dared taunt her over the frivolous nature of her choice.

“Take it as our gift to our son’s bride,” the man on the bed told her.

“I gratefully accept, sir.”

Maire could hear her brothers’ protests now—their ship was barely large enough to hold a few prize livestock and the clan’s plunder—but she’d silence them quick enough. She’d come as a sister in arms, but she returned as their queen.

“An excellent choice,” Rowan seconded his father with enthusiasm. “It was made to accommodate my height, but there’s room for us both.”

Maire swallowed a startled gasp. She wondered if the battle paint had worn away enough to reveal the scarlet tide she felt burning her scalp. Crom take the man, he was a veritable mockingbird of thinly veiled affront to her, his conqueror and the queen of Gleannmara!

“Aye, that it would—” she rallied, adding with a slashing look—“should I decide to share it with you.”

He let the challenge slide with a goading smile of satisfaction. One would think
he’d
won the day, not she. The daftness
that led him to give away the battle was his weakness, not hers.

“Meanwhile, in the time it takes for our men to round up your tribute, I intend to rid myself of this battle grime and change into something suited to the voyage ahead. Would you care to join me, little queen?”

“And give you the chance to drown me? I think not.” What an absurd idea. The man was crazy as a swineherd to think she’d wallow in the same water as he.

“Never let it be said that I was ungallant to my future bride. I would willingly leave the heated bath for you and use the
frigidarium
instead.”

“No.” Maire gave no hint that she had no idea what a frigidarium was.

“Ah, I should have guessed your kind had an aversion to cleanliness. Do you know what a bath is?”

Maire’s temper bristled.
Her kind?
Her clansmen might be more barbaric than his farmers, but by the gods, they were not unclean, not as long as the gods provided nature’s own bathing pools. Some were even heated and blessed with healing powers, which was more than this man-made bath could boast.

“Of course I do. And I resent your overblown air of superiority. If you recall, it was I who won this battle, not you or your god.”

She turned to Rowan’s mother, who watched the exchange keenly.

“Aye, I’d have this bath after all, but with one of my clansmen as guard, lest there be any trickery to this.”

“Who knows?” Rowan remarked wryly. “Beneath all that filth, she might not be harsh on the eye at all.”

“Rowan, you go too far,” his mother gasped. She turned to Maire in apology. “Come, child. I’ll fetch the towels and attend you myself.”

“I need no attendant.” Maire’s gaze remained on Emrys’s face. “Stay on that course with me, Emrys, and what you see will be through blackened slits!”

With a decided swagger, she turned to follow Delwyn ap Emrys out of the room. And, lest the man decide to push his luck, she rested her hand on the hilt of her sword.

B
y the time the ship was ready to depart, Maire felt renewed by her surrender to the whim of a bath. And what a bath it had been! It was no large wooden tub in which to hunker down, with knees drawn to the chin so that the water reached one’s shoulders. This had been a small pool lined in beautiful, blue tiles and large enough for Maire to stretch out her full length. She’d done so gladly to wash the lime out of her hair with the pleasantly scented soap Lady Delwyn had left her.

On the walls of the room were paintings of frolicking sea nymphs and dolphins, but most marvelous was the manner in which the room was heated, not by a fire sooting up the beautiful walls and plastered ceiling as it did in her lodge, but by ductwork beneath the floor, which was fired by strange furnaces in another section of the house.

Maire fingered the equally fine material of the dress rolled beneath her arm, as if to remind herself that the experience had been real and not a dream. The garment had been given to her by Delwyn ap Emrys to put on after her bath. Adorned with gold and silver embroidery, it was more beautiful than any Maire had ever seen. But for the possibility of renewed battle on their retreat, she’d have donned it instead of her old clothes and fighting gear. Instead, she washed out the stain of battle from her tunic and wrung it as dry as she could before putting it back on.

Between disputes among their respective tribes and Rowan’s good-byes, there’d been an untold number of delays in their
departure, which allowed time for her leine to dry before they left the villa. At the last moment, Rowan insisted on bidding his god farewell, which made no sense to Maire. Didn’t the Christians believe their god was always with them?

“Do not fear our God,” Rowan’s mother counseled her as Maire waited impatiently at the open door of the chapel. “He will speak to you when you are ready to listen.”

What the lady had mistaken for fear on Maire’s face was but a battle between the young queen’s heart and mind. The golden cross on the altar would fetch a fine price. As would the master’s bed. Yet, Maire was reluctant to take either one from these people, particularly now that they had names and, for the most part, pleasant personalities to go with them.

Then, though she had defeated Rowan ap Emrys in combat and was forcing him to leave parents he obviously loved, Delwyn ap Emrys hugged her in parting and asked the Christian God to bless their voyage home. For all that the gesture made Maire uncomfortable, it warmed her as well. She’d found Lady Delwyn’s command of humility and authority a source of envy and admiration; although Maire knew full well humility had no place in a warrior queen’s disposition, except to the gods.

Now, as they loaded the ship, the moon ventured an intermittent peek through the clouds above, bathing the narrow beach of rock and sand in silvery light. The loading ramp swung away from the shore, where Roman ships had once loaded coal from nearby mines now abandoned. The foredeck was crowded with six head of cattle, fatter and sturdier in build than those that pastured on Gleannmara. The beasts were calmed by the mixture of herbs and hay Brude had fed them. As further precaution for the three-day return to Erin, they were hobbled and secured in a roped off pen.

Next to them was a pair of horses. Unlike Erin’s traditional small and shaggy native breeds, these were of much larger stock. Maire could not peer over the back of either the stallion
or the mare. The matched pair nearly caused another full-fledged battle between Declan and Rowan’s overseer, Dafydd, a little man with the nerve of a giant. Rowan had specified cattle as tribute, but when Declan saw the splendid pair of horses housed in a barn as comfortable as the huts of the people who tended them, the young Scot demanded they be included. The pair was Rowan’s, and—as the last of the clan gathered at the house to await Maire’s command—the argument was settled by his quiet order to fetch them from their stalls.