Island of Ghosts (23 page)

“Neither large nor small,” she said matter-of-factly. “Two hundred sheep, a dozen cattle, three horses, twelve acres of arable land, and an apple orchard. I have three families to help me with it. Elen and her two children live here, and the others are in their own houses nearby.”

“You said you were a widow.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

I stopped stirring the porridge and sampled it. It wasn’t actually unpleasant, so I ate another spoonful. “How long have you had the horse?”

She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, low and soft. “You are tactful not to ask directly when my husband died. Autumn before last—a few months after buying the horse. I suppose I should have done more with the animal. He’ll tolerate me, and I could show Cluim how to manage him, too. But it takes time.”

“Yes,” I said. “They learn fear quickly, but trust takes longer.” And I thought of my men, and Gatalas’.

“I don’t have the time to teach the horse trust. I’d sell him if I could, but he has a bad reputation in the area now, and no one would buy him.”

“I would.”

She smiled. “Now, should I take advantage of that? Friend, you don’t have to buy my horse because I saved your life.”

“That is nothing to do with it.”

“I forgot—you can handle him, and you want a big stallion to breed to your mare. Well, perhaps . . .” She smiled crookedly again. “Talk to me about it in a few days, when you’ve recovered from the shock of finding yourself alive again. I confess, I’d like to sell him to a kind owner. He gulps food and is good for nothing—but I haven’t felt able to dispose of him to the few who’d take him, given how much he’s suffered already.”

“Why could you not use him for stud? You have land here.”

She shook her head. “We have land—but nobody on it is skilled with horses. Cluim’s the only one who can ride at all, and he can’t ride well. I can drive a cart, but that’s it. My husband should never have bought the horse—but he was full of enthusiasms and ambitious projects”—the crooked smile—“mostly misguided ones.” She waved a hand at the room around us. “This was another project. A fine Roman dining room, and an extra wing to the house. And the painting, another great bargain—hideous, isn’t it? We couldn’t afford that either. But I shouldn’t complain. He was a good man; I pray the earth is light on him. And I was another one of his misguided enthusiasms. I’m a soldier’s daughter whose father had been posted to the Danube, and I lost him all the dowry I never had, so everyone said he was a fool to marry me. Now you know all about me.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. Soldiers of Rome below the rank of centurion, in the infantry, and decurion, in the cavalry, are not legally allowed to marry. Most of them do anyway, but the army does not recognize the marriages, and if a soldier is posted far away, his family will be left behind impoverished unless he can scrape together enough money for their passage. I finished the porridge. “My wife died last spring,” I replied at last, a confidence in exchange for a confidence.

Her look of amusement vanished. “The one you were calling for.”

I nodded. “You have children?”

“No.” After a moment she smiled a nervous acknowledgment of the curiosity that I could not quite conceal, and went on. “My mother was another soldier’s daughter, and lived in the fort village at Hunnum: she made a living by weaving and selling vegetables after my father left. She died when I was fifteen. My sister died in childbirth three years ago, and my brother is also with the army on the Danube. I am entirely on my own, and quite independent. You?”

“I have two sisters who live in my own country, whom I can never see again. I had a little son, who died with my wife.”

“I’m sorry.” She paused, then asked, “Where are you from?”

“The Romans call the land Sarmatia.”

“Oh! Oh, Deae Matres!
You’re
one of the notorious Sarmatians?”

“Notorious?” I asked, amused.

She smiled back, with an air of surprise, but her reply was serious. “In the marketplace in Corstopitum they say you drink blood out of skulls and wear cloaks of human skin. People who used to go to Condercum or Cilurnum to trade started coming to Corstopitum instead. They were just thinking of going back again when there was that mutiny, and the battle against the Picts. We were glad, very glad, that the Selgovae and Votadini didn’t have the chance to steal our cattle and carry us off as slaves—but we were frightened, too, to hear how completely they’d been crushed. And when the Sarmatians at Condercum mutinied, just thirty killed over a hundred . . .” She stopped. I could see the awful possibility running through her mind, that I was a mutineer who had escaped and was fleeing justice. “You’re not from Condercum, are you?” she asked anxiously.

“No,” I replied, “Cilurnum.”

But I remembered now, going to Condercum and starting back with Arshak. At the bottom of my mind the memory of what had happened on the road heaved, like a serpent hidden in the dust. I was silent, the white morning dimmed.

“So you’re a soldier,” Pervica said, after a silence, in a flat voice. “I didn’t realize that. You weren’t armed, except for the dagger. You said you worked with horses—but of course, you’re a cavalryman.” After another silence, she said, “When Cluim went in to Corstopitum yesterday, he told the town authorities, not the military ones. That explains why they’d never heard of you.”

“Lend me a horse and I will ride in myself,” I said, trying to shake off a sense of horror at the shadow of memory. “I remember now, I was at Corstopitum on fort business. I think my friends will still be there. Lend me the stallion Wildfire, if you like; I think I can persuade him to carry me to the gates.”

She looked at me with the crooked smile, but her eyes were sad. “Lend you Wildfire? Oh, he was never broken to the saddle; he’s a carriage horse. And you certainly shouldn’t try to ride all the way to Corstopitum. You were almost dead, night before last. When we brought you into the house, you were gray and cold as ice, and I thought we were carrying a corpse. I’ll take you in in the cart this afternoon.”

“I thank you. My men will be concerned for me.”

Her face changed again, the faint regret shifting to wariness. “Your men? You’re an officer?”

I nodded.

She dropped her eyes. “Oh, I’m a fool!” she exclaimed. She didn’t explain why, and I had no chance to ask her, because she went on immediately, “It seems so strange that you’re a Sarmatian. All my life I’ve seen troops leaving Britain for the Danube. My father went when I was seven, and my elder brother was recruited for the war six years ago. And now your people are being sent here to defend us!”

“Where were your father and brother posted?” I asked.

“My father was with the Second Aelian Cohort, at a place called Cibalae, in Lower Pannonia. We had one letter from him after he left, with some money, and then nothing more. My brother was further west, at Vindobona, with the Second Brittones. Do you know of them?”

I knew the places. Vindobona was well to the west of my own country, and Pervica’s brother probably had to fight Quadi, not Sarmatians. But Cibalae was closer to home. The fort there had been at the western edge of the territory I used to raid, and I had an unpleasant feeling that I’d once scalped one of the Second Aelian Cohort. I struggled to clear the memory, and came up with the image of an auxiliary kneeling to brace his spear as I rode at him, a round-faced man in a long mail shirt. Yes. The scalp was brown, with no white in it, and the man had been about thirty. That had been three years ago—he couldn’t have been Pervica’s father, who would have had to be in his late forties. That was a relief.

“You fought them?” asked Pervica, who was still watching me.

“The Second Aelians, yes,” I admitted, “but not your father.”

“It must be very strange for you, after fighting Romans, to come here as soldiers of Rome.”

That summary of our twisted place in the world was so simple and straightforward I could almost have laughed. “It is,” I agreed. “It is very strange.”

There was a moment of silence, and then she said, “Well, I can send Cluim in to town today, and tell him to go to the military authorities this time. Or, if you like, I can drive you in, in the cart. I need to buy some things in Corstopitum anyway.”

At that moment there was a shriek of terror, shrill and piercing, from outside the house. Pervica leapt to her feet and pelted out the door. I followed her more slowly, still stiff-legged and clumsy.

The scream had come from the front of the house, and I hurried out into a columned courtyard to find the red-haired servant screaming again, Pervica running across the snow, and my own bodyguard, glittering in their scales, milling about the farm gate. In another instant I realized that one of the armored figures was Leimanos, and that he was leaning down from the saddle and clutching Cluim by the arm, shouting at the shepherd and hitting him in the face; and that Comittus was beside him, trying to restrain him.

“Leimanos!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

He spun round in the saddle. “My prince!” he yelled joyfully.

“Ariantes!” shouted Comittus.

And the whole squadron galloped over. Leimanos swept Cluim up over the saddle and took him along, then reined in sharply in front of me and dismounted, leaving the shepherd to slip off dazedly on his own. Pervica, halfway across the yard, turned and began walking slowly back. The horses steamed and glittered, and I noticed Farna, tied behind Leimanos’horse.

“My prince!” said Leimanos, and he dropped to both knees in the snow in front of me and kissed my hand. “Thank the gods you’re alive!”

“I thank the gods indeed,” I answered, and pulled him to his feet. The rest of the bodyguard crowded round, shouting, slapping me and each other on the back, thanking the gods. Comittus, grinning and bouncing, pushed through them and shook my hand.

“But what were you doing to this shepherd here?” I asked, when they’d calmed down enough to let me speak. Cluim had picked himself up, and Pervica was wiping his face with a handful of snow. His face was blotched from the blows, his nose was bleeding, and he looked terrified.

“We found him outside the gate, and stopped him to ask the way,” said Leimanos, glaring at Cluim. “Then we saw that he had your dagger. We feared the worst, my lord.”

I shook my head. “I gave him the dagger. He found me lying nearly drowned in the river, and pulled me out. It is to him, and to this lady here whom he serves, that I owe my life.”

Leimanos gave an exclamation of dismay and went over to Cluim. The shepherd backed away hastily, but Leimanos knelt to him. “Forgive me,” he said, in Latin, in which he now had some fluency. “I did not understand. I thought you had killed my prince.”

Cluim still looked terrified. Comittus interpreted for him, and the shepherd nodded, but did not seem inclined to come any nearer. Leimanos took the dagger, which he’d thrust in his own belt, and offered it back. After a nervous glance around, Cluim snatched it hastily.

“My lord gave you that,” said Leimanos, “in gratitude for his life. And for his life, which I value above my own, let me add this.” He laid his own dagger at Cluim’s feet.

“And this,” said Banadaspos, taking the gold pin from his coat and putting it beside the dagger.

And the others in the bodyguard, all thirty of them, copied them, each adding something—a ring, a purse full of money, a gold torque taken from a Pictish chieftain—until poor Cluim was shaking his bruised head in bewilderment. He exclaimed loudly in British and pointed to Pervica.

“He says these should belong to his lady,” Comittus translated, then at once abandoned translation and gratitude together. “Deae Matres! Ariantes, I’ve never been so pleased to see anyone in all my life. As soon as you disappeared we realized you were the last man in Britain we could afford to lose. We’ve been going out of our minds with anxiety, and the men back in Cilurnum are ready to riot. We didn’t dare tell the fourth dragon you were missing, and Siyavak has been asking to see you: we had to tell him you’d gone back to the fort. If you’d died so soon after Gatalas, gods help us all! Priscus wanted to sack Gaius Valerius for letting you and Arshak leave Condercum without an escort, and he was cursing your soul to Hades for deciding to go hunting. Don’t worry, he’ll forgive you anything when he sees you alive. But I felt sorry for that poor miserable magistrate.”

“What magistrate?” I asked.

“The one who told the prefect of the First Thracians yesterday evening that a shepherd had reported finding a man in the river the day before, and was he possibly anything to do with us! We’d been turning the road between here and Condercum upside down all day, looking for you. The magistrate couldn’t remember anything about the report, and Priscus practically had him flogged. Fortunately, his clerk had made a record of it. We all set off at full gallop at first light to find you. The men wanted to set out last night, but we weren’t sure of finding the place in the dark. Thank the gods you’re well! The report said you were too weak to stand and very confused in mind.”

I nodded impatiently; I had just remembered that Leimanos should have been at Cilurnum. “Who is in charge at the fort?” I asked.

“Longus and Facilis,” replied Comittus promptly. “I hope there hasn’t been trouble!”

I groaned. “Leimanos!” I exclaimed, switching back to Sarmatian, “Who did you leave in charge?”

“Kasagos, my lord.”

“Kasagos! You know perfectly well that half the men won’t obey him because he’s Roxalanic! What were you thinking of?”

“I’m sorry,” said Leimanos, wretchedly. “I couldn’t endure waiting there, with you perhaps lying dead or injured in the forest, and neither could anyone else in the bodyguard. Our duty is to defend your life or die beside you. We’d rather die than live in the disgrace of having abandoned our lord.”

“We’ll all be disgraced if the dragon has been killing Asturians in the absence of anyone to control them! Give me my horse!”

I went over to Farna and began tightening the girth on her saddle.

“What are you doing?” asked Pervica, speaking for the first time since my men arrived. She turned anxiously to Comittus. “You don’t mean for him to ride to Corstopitum today?”