The Golden Slave (22 page)

“Well, as you wish. If she is indeed learned, she can tutor the younger children of palace officials.” Mithradates grinned. “Meanwhile, you and the Alan have certain needs. I take it you both prefer women?” He beckoned his secretary and gave orders.

Morning was not far off when Eodan and Tjorr entered their room, none too steadily. A maidservant accompanying them woke Phryne, who came from her chamber wrapped in a mantle. Her eyes were dark in the lamp-glow. “What has happened?” she asked.

“Much,” said Eodan. “It is well for us. But now you shall have a private room, and a servant of your own.”

“Why―” Phryne’s look turned forlorn. It fell on a couch in the corner and on the two who sat there. Long gowns and demure veils did not hide what they were.

She grew white. She stamped her foot and cried out, “You could have let your wife grow cold in death before this!”

Eodan, weary, startled by her rage, snapped back: “What good would it be for her ghost if I remained less than a man, just because you are less than a woman?”

Phryne drew her mantle over her face and departed.

Eodan stared after her, tasting his own words poisonous on his tongue. But it was too late now―was it not? The slave girl came over to him, knelt and pressed his hand to her forehead. He saw through the thin silk that she was young and fair of shape.

He said in an ashen tone, “the King is kind.”

“Da,”
muttered Tjorr. “But I know not, I know not. All this we gained when my hammer was elsewhere. I wonder how much luck is in such gifts.”

 
XVI

Summer had burned hot on the Asiatic uplands, but winter would be very cold. The day after he left the city Ancyra, Eodan felt the wind search through clothes and flesh toward his bones. Overhead the sky was leaden, with a dirty wrack flying beneath it. Dust smoked off harvested fields. There were not many of these; the rest was wild brown pasture, cut by tiny streams and bare hills. He was on the edge of the Axylon, the vast treeless plateau running south to Lycaonia, with little more sign of man than some sheep and goat herds.

He wrapped his cloak more tightly about him and thought of autumn gold and scarlet in Jutland, where forests roared on long ridges. Why had three Gallic tribes left such a country, nearly two hundred years ago, and wandered hither?

But so they had, conquering Cappadocians and Phrygians until a new nation stood forth around the Halys. They let the natives farm and trade as ever, save for taxes and a share in the crop. The invaders rooted their three tribes in separate parts of the country, each divided into four cantons with a chief and a judge above it; a great council imagined it guided the entirety. Mithradates had remarked once it was no mean feat to combine so carefully the worst features of a monarchy and a republic. The Gauls shunned cities, holding to fortified villages clustered around the castles of chiefs. There they practiced the skills of war, heard their bards and Druids, remained in fact―under all the proud trumpets―a wistful fragment of the North.

“Maybe the Powers were not so unkind after all,” said Eodan. “It might have been worse for the Cimbri had they overcome Rome.”

Tjorr shook his head, puzzled. “You are a strange one,
disa,”
he said. “Half of what you speak these days I do not understand at all.”

They trotted on southward, into the wind off the high plains. Some miles ahead lay the Pontine army, where Mithradates was getting ready to march home. The lancers who jingled after Eodan and Tjorr were a detachment sent to fetch certain hostages, who would assure the behavior of Ancyra’s Phrygians as well as of the Tectosagic overlords. Eodan had recognized the commission, small though it was, as a mark of royal favor. For himself, he was chiefly pleased that the Greek he had been studying as chance offered was now good enough to serve him. He could not live in Asia without learning its universal second language.

Tjorr glanced complacently at his own outfit. Like the Cimbrian, he wore the garb of a Persian cavalry officer, though he had added thereto a treasure of golden bracelets. “This has been a good war,” he said. “We have seen new lands and new folk, done some lively fighting―ha, do you remember how we attacked them at the river, drove them into its waters and fought them there? And those castles we won were stuffed with plunder!”

“I saw them,” replied Eodan shortly.

He did not know why his mood should be so gray. It had indeed been a fine campaign, and he had learned more about war and leadership than he could reckon up―much of it simply from watching Mithradates, who was a noble chief to follow and often a good mirthful restless-minded friend to converse with. The battles had gone well―one could forget the unforgotten during a few clangorous hours of charge and fight and pursuit―until the Tectosages yielded the terms and indemnities demanded. He, Eodan, had been granted enough booty to pay the expenses of Sinope’s court; now his own star could follow that of Mithradates until both, perhaps, lit all the Orient sky.

Nevertheless, winter lay in his soul, and he rode to his King without gladness.

Tjorr went on, eagerly: “The best of it is, we’ve not to garrison here in winter. Back to Sinope! Or Trapezus? There’s a city! Do you remember how we stopped there?” It had been politic to march eastward first, entering Galatia through the country of the Trocmi, who had already been subdued; for Rome watched jealously the stump of independent Paphlagonia that lay between Sinope and Ancyra.

Eodan smiled one-sidedly. “I remember how you hired a bawdyhouse just for yourself.”

“Oh, invited my friends, of course. pity the King wished to talk geography or astronomy or whatever it was with you that night. Still, we’ve picked up some nice wenches here and there, not so?” Tjorr sighed in reminiscence. “Ah, Satalu! She was as sweet and bouncy as a stack of new-mown clover. Not that say anything against my concubine in Sinope, though may buy another one or two for variety.” He rubbed the hammer at his side. “There’s luck in this old maul, tell you. Maybe even something of the lightning.”

Eodan’s thoughts drifted pastward. Perhaps his forebodings were no more than a recollection―now, when he was not too hurried to consider it―of how the captured Galatians had stumbled in clanking lines, north to the slave markets of Pontus.

Or it might be a certain aloneness. Phryne had not understood―maybe no woman could understand―how a man was driven to one after another, by the ruthless force of the Bull, merely so that he could sleep afterward … when the only one he truly wanted had dwindled to a small burning star on a windy sea. Wherefore Phryne had coldly avoided him. In the bustle of an army that made ready to go, he had found no chance to seek her out and gain back a friendship he missed; there was little privacy in an Eastern palace. He contented himself with making certain she would have an honorable, paid position in the household.

Could I write, he thought, my words would have reached her during these months. But since I lack that great witchcraft, I was only able to make sacrifices, hoping the gods would bring her a dream of me.

He had offered to many powerful gods: Cimberland’s Bull, who was also in some way Moon and Sun, and Hertha the Earth Mother, whom they called Cybele down here; even Jupiter and the fork-tongued thunder-snake that Tjorr invoked. He would have given Mithras precedence, that being the favored god of Pontus, but the king explained it was forbidden to call on him unless one had been initiated into his mysteries. And thereafter: “But you can be instructed this winter, when we have come home, and I myself will stand as your sponsor. For our hearts are much alike, Eodan.”

The Cimbrian was ready enough to go under the banner of Mithras, who was not only strong but consoling. He had been born of a virgin through the grace of Ahura-Mazda the Good, that all his followers might live in heaven after death―which seemed a better fate than that granted the puzzled quiet shades of the Greeks. Perhaps Mithras could even call Hwicca back from the night wind, though Eodan dared not hope it. The god’s midwinter birthday was a cheerful occasion, where men feasted and exchanged gifts. One day, when evil Ahriman rose up for a last onslaught, all those warriors whom Mithras had been guesting in heaven would ride with him to battle.

Eodan thought sometimes that the North might welcome such a god, more humanly brave than the dark, nearly formless wild Powers of earth and sky. But it seemed unsure that he would ever again see the North.

“There, now! Shall we enter in the horseman’s manner?”

Eodan looked up, blinking to awareness. The camp was in view, not very far ahead. “Indeed,” he said, wondering where the time had gone. It was mid-afternoon. He signaled his trumpeter, and the call rang out, cold and brassy in the gray cold light; the wind made it ragged. But the troopers raised their lances and smote with their spurs. As one, they came a-gallop under streaming flags, through the tents and a burned village to the castle walls.

Eodan jumped to the ground and flung his reins at a groom. The captain of the watch saluted him before the gates. “Let it be known,” said Eodan, “that the Cimbrian has returned from Ancyra as ordered and will see the king when the king pleases. May the king live forever!”

After quartering the hostages, he walked toward his own tent. There was much he did not like in Asia, he reflected, and this crawling before the high, in both words and flesh, was not the least. Mithradates deserved respect, yes, but a man was not a dog. Nor was a woman an animal, to be kept for breeding or pleasure alone. A few months of giggling Eastern wenches had shown Eodan how sheer tedium could drive so many men to catamites. He thought of Phryne, born a slave, less chained in her soul than the High Queen of Pontus. It is better in the North, he thought, overwhelmed by his earliest years. They are still free folk on Jutland’s moors.

“Master!”

Eodan paused before his tent. Tjorr, who had just left him, returned quickly. A slave bent his knee to him. “Master, the great king would see the Cimbrian at once.”

“What?” Eodan looked down at his mail, flowing trousers, spurred boots and flapping red cloak―all dulled with dust. Well, Mithradates was a soldier, too. “I come.”

“What might it be?” asked Tjorr, pacing him as he hurried back under the grassy earth wall. “Has something happened?”

“Surely it has,” said Eodan, “or the king would allow me a rest and a bite to eat first.”

“Maybe a new war has begun somewhere?”

Eodan grinned with a sour humor. “We’re not so important, you and I, that we’re summoned in person to plan the royal strategy. I think this concerns us―me, at least―alone.”

He paused at the castle gate to surrender his longsword. Tjorr scowled unhappily. “I shall wait here,” he said. “Perhaps my hammer will fend off bad luck.”

Eodan said, with the bleakness of wind and treeless uplands taking him, “I think our luck has already passed these doors and is waiting inside.”

He crossed a flagged courtyard, where guardsmen drilled among the lesser buildings. The keep was a gloomy stone hall, sod-roofed and galleried. Beyond its entryroom was a long feasting chamber, where Mithradates had established his court. Fires burning in pits along the rush-strewn dirt floor gave some warmth, though not all their fumes went out the smokeholes. The king had added charcoal braziers and had hung his lamps from captured swords thrust into wooden pillars carved with gods. He sat in the canton chief’s high seat, which was shaped like the lap of stag-horned Cernunnos. A robe of Sarmatian sable and African leopard warmed Mithradates’ huge frame; his golden chaplet caught the unsure light like a looted halo. Around the room gleamed his unmoving hoplites; a few courtiers and some mustached Gauls huddled at one end, where a boy plucked an unheeded lyre.

Eodan put his helmet under his arm, strode to the king and bowed to one knee―a special favor, granted for his blood of Boierik. “What does My Lord wish from his servant?”

“Stand, Cimbrian.” Eodan saw a troubled look on the heavy face. “Today there came an embassy.” Mithradates leaned toward a runner who crouched under the secretary’s feet. “Bring them in.”

Eodan waited. The king said slowly: “You have been welcome at court and camp―not for your knowledge and tales of far places, though they delighted many hours of mine; not for your sword, though it has sung me a gallant song; but for something that is yourself. Whatsoever may happen, Eodan, remember what has been between us. The gods themselves cannot take away the past.”

A door at the far end was flung wide. Two came through it.

One was a man in a
toga; Eodan could not see his countenance by the dim unrestful light. But even through a long, hooded mantle he would know the shape and gait of the other. His blood pulsed with a quick unreasonable gladness; he forgot himself in the king’s presence and ran toward her with his hands outstretched. “Phryne!” he cried. Reaching her, he grasped her by the elbows and looked down into the pale heart-shaped face and said in his lame Greek: “Now I can tell you with your homeland’s speech how I have missed you.”

“Eodan―” She shivered violently, as if winter had come with her all the way down from the north. “Eodan, my only gift to you is woe.”

He raised his eyes, most carefully, and looked upon Gnaeus Valerius Flavius.

Eodan howled. He sprang back, snatching for his sword, but the empty belt mocked him. The Roman lifted an arm.
“Ave,”
he said. His closed-mouth smile creased cheeks grown gaunt; Eodan could see how the bones stood forth in his face.