The Barbarian's Mistress (6 page)

‘It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, wife. Titus is not a youth any longer, and he has much experience with the power-plays of the court and the senate. You will not best him on this one.’

‘I don’t plan to. I’ll leave that to my sweet daughter. You of all people must see what a gem she is. All she needs is the right setting.’

‘When is this gathering?’

‘On Vulcanus’ Day. There will be a huge bonfire and sacrifices. Someone suggested throwing criminals into the flames, but Titus has vetoed that idea. But there will be enough animal sacrifices to make it an enjoyable spectacle. Not a large celebration, as he is not a god in favour. But reason enough for something a little different.’

‘That’s in two days. I planned to take Anniana with me to Re
ati. Vespasian left me something of value on his estate at Aquae Cutiliae
.
I thought it might be a nice chance for Anniana to get out of Rome for a few days and see a bit of the countryside. We didn’t go away this year.’

‘If you take her with you, make sure she’s back by the evening of Vulcanus’ Day, or I will be most displeased. And you know what happens if you displease me too much,
husband
.’

‘I’ll have her back for your celebration, I assure you. It’s no more than an overnight stop. She’ll feel better for it.’

Salvia studied him for a moment, her golden eyes narrowed. ‘You seem oddly discomforted, husband. Nervous. What troubles you?’

Bibulus threw up his arms and began to stalk toward the door, not having to feign his fury or frustration. ‘Your plans for my daughter’s future trouble me, Salvia, as you well know. And I can’t do a thing about them. I sometimes wish I’d never married you.’

‘If you didn’t marry me then you wouldn’t have your precious daughter. But then, you may not have her much longer anyway. Enjoy your journey, Gaius. It may be the last you have with Annia Minor.’

As Bibulus strode down the columned Atrium, his heart beat like a drum. He had to get his fake daughter out of the house at first light and keep her away for as long as possible. She would become ill while they were away, necessitating a longer absence. It would anger Salvia, but with any luck, she would see it as his last ditch effort to postpone his daughter’s inevitable fate, not as the diversion it actually was.

He hurried on to find Ninia. She would have to dress as her mistress and share the litter with him. If anyone asked where she was, it would seem only natural that the handmaiden had accompanied her mistress on the trip. As long as there were no witnesses who would notice the lack of a handmaiden as they left, they’d be safe.

It would take a week for his lamb to reach Pompeii and complete her marriage. How was he going to keep her absence hidden that long? He should have come up with a better plan. He should have sent them by sea and risked Salvia’s spies telling her where Anniana had gone. Another mistake to add to his long, long list of mistakes.

He couldn’t get it out of his head, the thought of his innocent little lamb being forced to watch her brother rape her beloved handmaiden. How could he have been so blind as to not have seen how far that sly little monster would go? Hadn’t he caught him pulling the wings of a bird when he was only five? That he’d been torturing his lamb all these years, and he hadn’t known of it… horrifying.

With a mother like Salvia
, it made sense that two of his four children would take after her. He’d become aware of her sickness and corruption not long after he got her with her fourth child. Her belly already rounded, he’d walked in on her games with a slave she’d recently bought as her ‘bodyguard’. A big, rough brute of a man, Bibulus couldn’t believe that a refined patrician would ever let someone like him have her body. But he’d seen it for himself. And ignored it.

There had been a steady series of such slaves in Salvia’s bed since. Vali had been the best of them, and he still regretted not standing up to Salvia when she told him she planned to sell him. His finances had never
been the same since. A mistake -- just one of so many.

But he was attempting to right some of those mistakes now. All he could hope for was that the Vali he had known four years ago was still loyal to Anniana. If he had given her over into a monster’s hands, he’d never forgive himself.

Chapter Five

When they left the Albion Hills behind them, they began to move faster through the flat Pontine reclaimed marshlands. To their right, high sand dunes blocked their view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. To their left, some ten miles distant, was the Volscian Mountain Range. There was less road traffic here, as most travellers had opted for a smoother canal ride. The long, straight canal ran parallel to the road on the side closest to the dunes and was dotted with rough canal boats that were being pulled along by donkeys. Lara envied them their comfort.

They pushed on through the late afternoon, watching the fiery sun begin to sink behind the dunes. That was when Vali began to scan the flat land to their left. It was crisscrossed by muddy waterways and dotted with clumps of spirelike pine trees. Eventually, he selected a drier section of the land and drove the horses across it to the shelter of the largest and densest stand of trees in the area. Hidden behind these trees, their campsite would be less obvious to passing travellers on the road or canal.

Lara sighed as the carrus came to a halt, just as the sun finally dropped behind the dunes. It had been the longest day of her life. Every muscle ached, her skin burned hotter than a furnace, and she was so tired it was a strain to even breathe. Her body was filthy, her hair unkempt and sticky from the citron juices Vali had used on it. She smelled bad.

And she was happier than she had ever been in her life.

The new person that she was, this Lara the liberti, was a freedwoman, and for all the hardships
, that was how she felt. Free. She was on a journey between her old life and her new, her only companion a childhood friend, a changeable warrior from a distant, unimaginable land. No walls surrounded her, no roof blocked the sky from her view; she was part of the natural world for the first time in her life.

‘Stay there until I get the blanket spread,’ the new Gaius Annius Vali ordered.
Such a Roman name for the barbarian that he was.

‘I
can help,’ she said, ashamed of the weakness in her voice.

‘You’ll fall flat on your face if you try. Stay there!’ He was being harsh with her again. It hurt. She didn’t understand why her once gentle friend spoke to her that way. Or why his eyes scraped over her like she was poison, or trouble, or a nuisance. That wasn’t the way she remembered him.

Obediently, she sat like a mouse in the carrus, as he prepared the blanket. When he came back and swept her into his arms, his touch was gentle and warm. How could he be harsh one moment and gentle the next? It made no sense. In her limited experience, people were either one thing or the other. They were either kind or they were cruel.

Her mother was crue
l in her indifference and scathing in her comments, when she deigned to acknowledge her daughter’s existence. She was never kind.

Her father, even when he was tired or upset, was never anything but kind to her. As was her older brother Gaius. But he had been gone a long time now, serving with the Imperial Army in the wilds of Magna Germania. It was hard to bring his face to mind. Would that happen to her father’s face if she didn’t see him for years? The thought cut deep.

As Vali gently laid her down, his rough hands lingering, she thought of another slave in her life: Ninia, the little handmaiden who’d been more friend than slave. The daughter of their cook, she’d been assigned to Anniana when she was five, to fetch and carry for her. But she’d been a playmate long before that. To her, Ninia was more sister than her own ever could be.

And it was because of her that Ninia had suffered. She pushed the memories away, feeling the tears stinging her eyes. This was no time to remember. Exhaustion and hunger were making her weak. She couldn’t afford to be weak. Not now. Not when Vali already saw her as a burden; already considered her a foolish, frivolous waste of space. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of being right.

The new Lara watched as Vali unhitched the horses and led them to the edge of the muddy water. The horses were tired. Vali was tired. His shoulders sagged, and his movements were slow.

He had too much to do. She wouldn’t behave like a spoiled patrician now. Lara the liberti would never sit around while there was work to be done. Staggering to her feet, she made her way to the curras and began to unload their food. There was the goose to be cooked. That meant they would need a fire. How did one build a fire?

Firewood. They would need firewood. Not neatly chopped logs like they used in the ovens at home, but fallen branches and twigs.

Vali was rubbing down the horses as the evening shadows deepened around them. She needed to move now, or it would soon be too dark to see the wood. Limping on stiff, sore legs, Lara began to scour the undergrowth between the trees, gathering twigs and branches that seemed dry, moving further and further away from the campsite with each load.

When she heard Vali’s frantic call, she turned back. The dark copse, with its night noises and spirits, had tempted her to go too far. Vali’s voice seemed a long distance away.

Tripping and scrambling with her armload of wood, she headed back the way she’d come. When he called again, she knew she’d almost reached him.

When he saw her, he ran to her side, dragged the branches from her arms and flung them away. Then he pulled her into his arms, and held her so tightly against him she could hardly breathe.

‘I thought you’d been taken. In the name of the gods what made you go so far from the campsite?’ His demand was harsh, but his touch was gentle. She drew strength from the latter and tried to ignore the first.

‘I’m sorry. I was gathering firewood.’

‘You’ve gathered enough to feed the fires of an army. Come on, let’s get back.’

He held her to his side, half carrying her so that she could keep up with his long strides. It reminded her of their escape the night before. It felt like a month ago.

In no time
, they were back at the edge of the copse where the horses were tethered not far from the carrus. Vali looked down at her in the gloom; taking in the scratches on her arms from the branches she’d carried. ‘Silly girl, look what you’ve done to yourself. We need to get the dirt out of those cuts or they’ll putrefy. And we can’t use that swamp water the horses are drinking. We’ll need to wash them with our drinking water.’

By the time she’d washed her cuts, Vali had a fire blazing, and was busy skewering the bird with one of the straighter branches she’d discovered. Using two thick ‘y’ shaped branches as supports, he rested the goose across the fire as the flames began to die down.

‘Show me those scratches,’ he said without looking up from the goose. It was a small example of its breed, not much larger than a good size chicken, and its white, naked skin looked obscene in the firelight.

Lara
/Anniana moved closer and extended her arms out to him obediently. He took each one in turn, studying the angry scratches she’d worked hard to clean. From the pile of possessions on the far side of the blanket, Vali produced a small jar, tightly stoppered. With a scrap of material soaked in the liquid from the jar, he began to daub at the scratches. It stung and she had to bite down hard on her bottom lip to stop from crying out.

‘What is that?’

‘Spirits. Fermented barley, I think. You learn in the Ludus to care for injuries, however slight, because it’s them that will kill you just as surely as any sword to the gut.’

‘You were a gladiator?’ That explained the hardness in him; the look of a killer in his eyes.

‘For half a year, courtesy of your father. I thought my last mistress had sold me into the arena, but it seems your father wanted me trained to defend you. I only found out yesterday.’

She didn’t know what to say to that. Was being trained as a gladiator better than being the plaything of a rich matron? The life had scarred him; his face was a clear indication of that. But they were outward scars. She thought the wounds inside him from his treatment at the hands of women like her mother might be far worse. If he felt as bad as thirteen year old Ninia had, after what Publius forced on her, then any life would have been better than that.

For months after Publius’ demonstration, Ninia had been a shadow of her old self. The vibrant, cheery girl had been replaced by a silent, distant ghost with dead eyes. Eventually, life returned to those eyes, but the sunny disposition never did come back. And Anniana cowered every time Ninia jumped at any sudden, unexpected movement.

They had stayed friends. Ninia never blamed her for what Publius did to her. But Ninia’s mother, Elaeni, did. From that time on, the cook wouldn’t look at her. She was no longer welcome in the kitchens. And she and her husband Herakles kept their young mistress at a coldly polite distance. Anniana had understood only too well why they had changed toward her.

It was her fault. Publius would never have targeted Ninia if she hadn’t been so important to his sister. They may have even blamed her for standing by and watching it happen. But how could they know that, had she tried to stop it, he would have been even crueller, made Ninia suffer even more. Anniana had learned early that there was nothing she could do to stop her brother. Survival was the only game plan possible. Survival and acquiescence.

‘You don’t talk much,’ Vali said, after turning the goose on the makeshift spit, and batting absently at a mosquito that had landed on his bare arm.

‘I’m not used to talking.’

‘You were always chattering like a magpie with that little slave girl of yours.’

‘Ninia and I didn’t talk much after… after Publius.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. That boy’s pure evil. He would have got around to Ninia, sooner or later. She was weak and in his power. That was all he cared about. How long after I left did it happen?’

‘Not long. A month? I don’t know.’

‘It’s the lot of a slave. At least she had her parents to care for her.’

‘They hated me after. They blamed me.’

‘No they didn’t. All the slaves in that household loved you. But it would have been hard not to see you as one of ‘them’, rather than one of ‘us’, after what happened. There are lines you can’t cross, little…little mistress, they’ll always be there, no matter how you try to forget them. Elaeni and Herakles just got reminded of that. Not your fault.’

Tears stung her dry and scratchy eyes. She fought them back. ‘I didn’t ask to be born into my family.’

‘And we didn’t ask to be enslaved. It is what it is. It will take more than you or I to make the world different. Eat the last of those berries and some bread soaked in olive oil. It will tide you over while we wait for the goose. Are you thirsty? There’s wine or water.’

‘Wine please, if we need to conserve the water.’

She broke off a section of one of the big loaves and handed it t
o him. Then she took a smaller section for herself, dipping it in the shallow bowl Vali had poured oil into. Finally, she took a swallow from the watered down wine Vali had poured for them both.

‘Tell me about this husband of yours.’ Vali dunked his bread into the oil and took a hungry bite. His stomach rumbled.

‘Not my husband yet. Severus is a young man who came to visit us last year. He had just inherited his paterfamilias after his father died. His father was an old man when he finally married. He’d been in the army most of his life, and only took a wife and started a family after he retired. He bought a villa in Campania and was very wealthy. So Severus is very wealthy, although he has no political connections.

‘Normally, he would not have been considered a suitable husband for me. Father would have w
anted a suitor from one of the senatorial families. That’s what happened with Annia Major. But things were not going well for father in the years after you left. I don’t think many influential families wanted to align with him anymore. And when mother dropped her choice for a husband on him, father must have looked around and saw a rich young man in distant Pompeii as the only option.

‘He knew I liked Severus. Father would never have married me to someone I didn’t like.’ She slapped at a mosquito on her neck. There seemed to be more of them, now the sun had set. But the fire smoke kept most of them at bay. She remembered these annoying and painful insects from her holidays in Ostia.

‘But you haven’t answered my question. Tell me about Severus?’

‘Oh, he’s nice. I think he’s about your age. Short. A little shorter than me. He has a nice, smiley face. Kind eyes. Sometimes he stutters a little when he’s nervous, but he soon got over that with me. He’s very interested in his villa and its holdings. He knows exactly how many sheep he owns, what the last yield was of grapes, how that compares to other years. A good, practical, hardworking man.’

‘Sounds a bit dull to me.’ Vali scratched at his arm where a red welt had appeared.

‘Dull? Well, he might not be interested in learned things. He may not have interesting tales to tell of the battles he’s fought or the places he’s visited. But that doesn’t worry me. He’s kind. I need kind. I’m hoping that when I’m settled father might gift Ninia to me. I would like her safely out of that house. I worry for her.’

‘Publius will be in the army for some years to come. Ninia is safe until then. And as long as Gaius is alive, the paterfamilias will go to him on your father’s death.’