After Rome (35 page)

Privately Meradoc thought Tintagel was an exceedingly strange place. The wind eddying and shrieking among the ruins sounded like a chorus of ghosts.

*   *   *

The first night that Dinas spent in possession of Tintagel he did not expect to be able to sleep, though as always he brought the stallion to stand by his blanket. At his command the dark horse lay down and stretched out his neck to pillow Dinas's head.

“We're here,” the man said softly.

The horse responded with a gentle snort through silken nostrils.

Dinas laced his fingers over his chest and looked up at the stars. “We're here, Saba. You should have come with me.”

Then he dropped into a slumber so deep it was as if the darkness opened up and swallowed him.

He was not the only man to think about women—or a woman—that night.

*   *   *

Wrapped in his blankets with his head pillowed on a mossy rock, Pelemos was thinking of Ithill. She had begun tiptoeing back into his mind whenever he let his guard down. He was not ready yet—he tried to tell her he was not ready—but that was just like the woman.

Plump and pretty Ithill with the stars in her eyes.

He had hated her. How long ago that seemed, the first time he realized he hated her. For making him so vulnerable. In his youth he had believed he was invulnerable; neither cold nor hunger nor anything else could hurt him.

Ithill could hurt him. With a single careless remark she could make him suffer for days.

There had been times during their life together when he hated her so much he wanted to kill her—which would have given her the ultimate victory. Because he knew that if she died, when she died (and in their early years he was certain she would die before him, in childbirth, with her narrow hips, because she did not know the secret all Roman women knew of preventing conception and he could not teach her, did not know the secret) when she died it would cause him more pain than anything else could. More pain than he could bear. And she knew that.

She knew it when she smiled at him with her eyes but not her lips. Her lips that could smile at any man and it meant nothing. Only her eyes smiled at him. Her lips folded themselves so sweetly around his penis. The sensation was incomparable. Nothing in his imagination had prepared him for it. And he hated her because she could give him such incomparable pleasure and then take it away again.

If she died. When she died.

And then, she did.

Ithill. Ithill!

*   *   *

Tostig was dreaming of a girl called Angharad from his home village. She had never called him “Otter,” and on summer days she sometimes came to the quarry to watch him at work. When no one was looking she let him put his hand between her legs.

In the morning, Tostig promised himself, I shall ask Dinas about those women we're going to have with us. Perhaps he'll let me suggest a few.

*   *   *

Bryn the Healer also had women on his mind. There had been so many of them in his life—young and old and in between, healthy and dying and in between there too. Women who came to him seeking help—on their knees, some of them—and a few, a very few, who helped him. I should have kept one of them when I had the chance, Bryn told himself. Sleeping close to a warm woman on a cold night would be good medicine for an old man. Why did I not foresee the day when I would need that kind of medicine? The nostrums I concoct don't take the ache out of my bones or improve my eyesight. What is the secret for capturing youth? Could I steal a bit of it from a young warm body? Where am I going to find a young woman now? Even if I did find her, one of this lot would take her away from me.

Cold nights. For the rest of my life.

The healer shivered under his blanket.

*   *   *

Meradoc was not thinking of women at all. Early in his motherless, sisterless life—so early he did not even remember it—he had come to the conclusion that women occupied a different sphere from his own. The comforting virtues they embodied—or he thought they embodied—were not for someone like him. He was, he had concluded, a crumb picker. Allowed to gather the crumbs from beneath other people's tables. He was fortunate that the possessors of well-supplied tables were willing to feed him and let him sleep in a shed with the goat.

Meradoc had told himself these things and thought he believed them. Until he saw the stallion Dinas rode. The living symbol of a wild free life, and of beauty beyond his dreams.

For Meradoc it was enough to know the dark horse and to live in his realm.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“What am I going to do with her?” Cadogan, at wit's end after his most recent confrontation with Quartilla, was seeking advice from Regina.

“What do you want to do with her?” the woman replied. “Strangle her? I would be happy to provide the cords.”

It was the end of a long day and he had recently returned from a long ride. The westering sun was shooting spears of reddish gold through the trees. Cadogan ached; ached in every bone and muscle. He longed only for a meal and his bed. Instead he had just endured another verbal duel with Quartilla that served no purpose and resolved no issues. When she flounced out of the house he had turned to Regina. Seeking sanity.

As always at this time of day, she was visiting the tiny shrine he had set up in one corner of the house. Domitia's silver cross, cleaned and polished to a fine luster, hung on the wall. Two curving lines that intersected to form the outline of a fish, the symbol for Christ, had been deeply inscribed into the earthen floor below the cross.

Because Regina was finding it hard to kneel on the bare floor, Cadogan had made a cushion for her. The result of his handiwork was lumpy and shapeless, so he had made the mistake of asking Quartilla to sew a better one. With predictable results. Hence the most recent altercation between them.

As he held out his hand to help the Regina to her feet, Cadogan said ruefully, “I'd like to strangle Quartilla, believe me I would. At least that would solve one problem. We have eight houses completed now—nine if you count this one—and more underway. Would you not think that at least one of the men who has no wife would be willing to take Quartilla off my hands? She's strong, she's still young enough to bear children, she can even cook. What's wrong with her?”

“What's right with her?” Regina countered. The creaking of her knee joints as she stood up embarrassed her.

“Ah. Yes. It's hard to pin down her virtues, I suppose. She doesn't … I mean she hasn't…”

“Exactly. And the more time a man spends around her the more obvious her faults become. What we need is a stranger who is only passing through on his way to some distant place. Unfortunately we are so well tucked into the hills that random travelers do not come our way.”

“Your description fits my cousin perfectly,” said Cadogan. “But as he's the one who unloaded her on me in the first place, I'm sure he would never take her back. Besides, I don't know where Dinas is or even if he's alive. I don't expect to see him again; not with things as they are in Britannia.”

“Things as they are,” Regina echoed.

The gray sound of defeat in her voice—her suddenly old voice—set alarm bells ringing for Cadogan. Regina couldn't be old! How had the years crept on her without his noticing? He only realized how much he relied on her when he heard the whisper of mortality.

“They aren't so bad here,” he said briskly, trying to bring back the woman she always had been. “They're better than last year. And last year was better than the one before. Now we have two healthy new infants in the group and another on the…”

“What do those children have to look forward to?” Regina eased herself onto a stool and gazed up at him. Her eyes, he discovered to his distress, were faded and rheumy. The whites had turned the yellow of old ivory. “What, really, are their expectations, Cadogan? When I was a child growing up in Viroconium I could look forward to a pleasant life among comfortable surroundings and cultured, congenial people of my own station. What do we have to offer these children?”

“They can have a good life here, even if they have to work hard,” Cadogan asserted, “and we're not uncomfortable. We've even become a real community—you commented on that yourself only the other day.”

“A community of rusticans living hand-to-mouth in the wilderness,” she said, with unexpected contempt. “The children may not know how much we've lost, but I do. God help me, I do. Deep inside, I always believed this hiatus was temporary, an adventure, if you will, and in the end we would go home.”

“
This
is home now,” Cadogan insisted. “Remember what you told Pamilia three years ago? I've never forgotten it. ‘We have a new life and we must learn how to live it,' you said. I was impressed by your words, Regina; I thought you understood the situation better than anyone else. Was I wrong?”

She lowered her eyes and would not look at him. “It is easy to be resilient in a temporary situation. But a permanent change of such magnitude…” Lifting her head, she gazed toward the open doorway and the rosy sunset light. “I am forced to accept that I shall be buried here. Among these hills, in a place that was never my choice. When my husband was entombed on our property in Viroconium, I expected to lie beside Lentullus for eternity.
That
was my choice.”

“I'll take you there when the time comes,” Cadogan promised, eager to lift her mood.

She reached up and put her liver-spotted hand on his arm. “It would serve no purpose to take me back, dear friend. I have nothing to go back to. The Saxons broke into the tomb and stole my husband's grave goods, then they desecrated his remains and scattered them about the garden.” Her voice was as dry as dust. “I saw it happen while we were making our escape. The barbarians were too preoccupied with their … sport … to notice me sneaking away with Pamilia and the children. When I returned to what had been our home, there was nothing left but rubble and ashes.”

“Surely some of those ashes are…”

“Lentullus? I think not. As a Christian I believe that the important part of Lentullus has long since gone to be with our Lord, and I cannot see myself crouching in the dirt to scrape up anonymous ashes. No, Cadogan; when the time comes, bury me here. The important part of me will be gone by then, anyway.”

He did not try to comfort her. He realized she was past comforting; Regina had come to terms with life in her own way. Cadogan envied her. Such peace of mind eluded him.

The dream of returning to—and rebuilding—Viroconium was alive inside of him. Growing in him. Becoming an obsession. He could envision a great timber hall rising on the foundations of the old courthouse. Walls curving upward to a vaulted and thatched roof. He could almost smell the cedar beams and the thatch. Would he even need to use cedar? Could he summon a large enough workforce to build the hall entirely from oak? And construct new houses on the sites of the old ones, built in a new style; a British style …

The dream tugged and pulled at Cadogan as his dream of Viola had once tugged and pulled at him. Viola. Almost forgotten now; a wistful presence that occasionally drifted through his thoughts for a moment or two, only to be displaced by something more immediate.

Desire what you can have, he told himself.

As Cadogan went outside to fetch firewood for the night, Pamilia emerged from the edge of the woods. She had lost weight since leaving Viroconium and there were lines in her face that had not been there before. “Is Regina inside?” she called out. “I've come to ask her to take supper with us. Godubnus has slain a fat roe deer and it's been roasting all day.”

“For an ironmaster, your husband has become an uncommonly fine hunter,” Cadogan remarked as she came up to him.

“Godubnus is thorough at everything he does,” said Pamilia. Patting her mounded belly.

“Are you smiling or blushing? I can't tell in this light.”

“Both,” she admitted with a laugh. The formerly timid, diffident woman laughed easily now.

“Your husband is a lucky man.”

“We were lucky that you consented to marry us.”

“Since there is no priest among us, I only did what I thought right.”

“You always do what you think right, Cadogan.” Pamilia paused, then confessed, “Godubnus was not my first choice, you know.”

He chose not to understand. “You could not have done better than Godubnus.”

“I know that now. I have everything I want. Now … about Regina? And perhaps you would have supper with us as well?”

“I usually eat with Vintrex.”

“And Quartilla and Esoros, I know. Oh, forget about them for once, Cadogan, and join us! You will have a much better time; the children are eager to see you again.”

It was not difficult to persuade him.

The path through the woods to the house of Godubnus was familiar to him, though less so to Regina, who rarely visited her former daughter-in-law. In the velvet dark beneath the trees Regina took Cadogan's arm and held on tightly. Pamilia walked beside them, carrying a torch and chattering happily. “Ours is the best house so far,” she told her former mother-in-law. “With every house he designs, Cadogan thinks up new refinements. We have two fire pits, one at either end, to keep us warm in the coldest weather. My children no longer sleep in the bed with us, they have a bedbox behind a timber screen. And there is a cradle waiting for the new baby, too, in a snug little recess. Godubnus is wonderful, he's so anxious for his son!”

The fingers clutching Cadogan's arm tightened almost imperceptibly. It was not easy for Regina to hear praise heaped on the man who had replaced her own son as father to her grandchildren.

Nothing was easy anymore. Every step was difficult. How much harder must it be for poor Vintrex, who could hardly see, much less think? We are too old, Vintrex and I, Regina thought sadly. We should not have lived this long. I could lie down right here in the leaves and wait for the wolves to come.