The Barbarian's Mistress (22 page)

‘Not much further. Keep going my sweetling. You’ve done well. Not much further…’

Her legs seemed to grow stronger at his words, and he was able to loosen his hold. In truth, their rooming house was in the next block. It wasn’t much further.

By the time they turned in to the little garden entrance of their accommodation, and had begun to climb the outside stairs to the second floor, they were both gasping for air in the suffocating heat. They pushed through the unlocked outer door. Their room was just inside. A lamp illuminated the dark hall for them. Vali shoved their door open and guided Lara inside, closing and barricading the door firmly behind them.

Lara was crying, in gasping sobs, as she collapsed onto their bed.

‘Are you hurt?’ Vali demanded, throwing aside the bag and sword belt so he could kneel at her side. He tried to get a look at her face, but her head was down and her unbound hair was forming a wet curtain in front of it.

‘Lara, answer me,’ he said again, more forcefully this time. ‘Did that bastard hurt you?’

He tried to tip her face up to him, but the blood on his hand smeared her chin. Disgusted, he pulled it back and tried to wipe it away on his tunic. There was already more than enough blood there. A little more didn’t count.

His fingers again closed on her chin and lifted it so he could see her face more clearly in the lamp light.

‘I… I stabbed a man,’ Lara said in a keening voice. She sobbed a little harder, trying to pull away from him.

‘You… oh, that was why he let you go so suddenly. By the gods, Lara, if you hadn’t he would have killed you. By acting as you did you saved yourself, and kept me from possibly harming you when I attacked…’

‘I stabbed a man!’ she yelled at him, turning to stare up at him with stark, horrified eyes.

He knew that look. That was the face of a man who’d made his first kill. It was a terrible, harrowed look.

Vali dragged her struggling body into his arms, and held her to him tightly. ‘You didn’t kill him, sweetling. You didn’t kill him. I did that. You only wounded him enough so he let you go. You didn’t kill him.’

As he kept repeating the words, over and over, the tension in her body began to ease. But the sobbing didn’t. She cried and cried, like she had the night she found out her father was dead. It was so heart-wrenching, Vali didn’t know what else to do but hold on to her. Helpless to ease her grief and pain, he soothed her with soft words and stroked her still wet hair.

There would be blood in her hair, and on her skin, after this. But holding her was more important. Finally, when the tears began to subside, he drew back from her. Very gently he removed the bloodstained tunic she wore, and then his own. Then he went to the urn of water that stood on the windowsill and soaked a clean section of his tunic in the lukewarm water. He began to wipe her face, arms, feet and hands of blood. It was hard to tell if there was blood in her hair, wet as it was, so he left it.

Then he started to wash the blood from himself. All the while she sat like a broken doll on the edge of the bed. When they were both clean and naked, he hid the bloodstained items under the bed. Even his sword, which he should have cleaned of blood so it didn’t rust, he just pushed under the bed.

‘It’s over now, sweetling. It’s over. You’re safe now. You’re safe.’ He lay with her head on his shoulder, and her body curled up against his side. She was shivering in shock.

‘I thought you were going to die,’ Lara said, after a few moments. ‘There were so many of them. I couldn’t believe you could take them all. I thought you were going to die!’

She began to cry again, more softly this time, but just as heart-wrenchingly.

‘They weren’t fighters. They were a pack of weak dogs who used their numbers to take down prey. But they tried to take down the wrong prey this time. The only time I was at risk was when that last one had you. I might have been hurt taking him down if you hadn’t been so brave…’

‘I do…don’t even remember doing it. I…’ she gulped several times to try to speak more clearly. ‘I had the dagger in my my… hand and… and then it was in his thigh, right up to my fist and I could feel the hot blood spurting out onto my hand and my arm. I could smell it. Oh, my gods, I could almost taste it…’

He shifted around so he could meet her gaze. Repugnance twisted her beautiful face into an ugly mask. With gentle fingers he stroked her cheek, trying to sooth away that look.

‘Don’t think about it, sweetling. You did what you had to do. You helped me save us. They would have left us both dead in that alley, if not for what we did. You know that, don’t you?’

Her pupils were so large they made her irises look black. Her breathing was erratic, almost panting. Those doe-shaped eyes stared at him as if trying to make sense of his words. In shock, she was in shock. He’d seen it before. Experienced it before. He’d sat for hours on the bench of the longship, shaking like he was freezing, unable to think, unable to do anything but hold back the vomit.  After his first and only battle.

He’d killed many that day. But he’d always remember the face of the first man. That simple farmer had faced him with only a hoe in his hands. His face had been twisted with fury and fear. For young Vali, it had been just like Lara described it. He remembered clenching his sword, and then in the next instant, seeing it sticking out of the man’s gut, blood spraying everywhere. But he couldn’t remember making the thrust. The others that followed, he remembered. But not that first killing thrust.

There’d been madness to that raid for him. A red haze had coated his vision. Toward the end, there was a girl, not much older than he was then, struggling to get away from him. Someone was laughing, telling him to take what was his due. Be a man. But by then the red haze was lifting, and he stared at the terrified girl as if seeing her for the first time. She had the biggest blue eyes he’d ever seen. Her long hair was white-gold like his own. Like his mother’s.

And he let her go. Though his body was aroused, he let her go. The laughter of his uncles shamed him. But he let her go.

There had only been one such raid for him. It was when they were carrying their plunder back to their home that the pirates had come upon them. Those motley bandits stole what they had taken, and took the lives of all the men. Only the boys and the new slaves were left alive. Only they weren’t worth killing.

He shuddered. It had been a long time since he’d thought about that first raid. And it was a long time ago. So much had happened since then. But now he remembered it as if it were yesterday. That man coming at him with the hoe. The sword sticking out of his gut. The look on his face as he realised he was dying. Shocked, saddened, concerned for his loved ones. Then nothing. The life gone from his eyes.

Killing would probably have come easily to him, had he been allowed to continue raiding. He might have even raped female victims, as was their way when their blood was up. But his life had taken a different path. And he realised with a shock, that the men in the alley tonight were the first  he’d killed since that long ago day.

It had been easier to kill when he couldn’t see their faces. It was easier having someone to fight for. But it wasn’t easy.

And he was glad of that, though it probably marked him as a coward.

His body shuddered again, this time with more intensity. He forced his mind from the blood and pain -- past and long past; forced his mind from images of his own cowardice, of images of what might have happened to Lara if he’d failed.

He began to shake in earnest.

Not good to think about… one step in front of the other… allow no thoughts beyond your next step…

Lara lay on Vali’s damp chest listening to his steady heartbeat. It was all that was keeping her sane in that moment. She had to keep those memories at bay. She had to focus on what was important, what was now. Vali. Always Vali. He was her lode stone. He was what kept the darkness and fear at bay. His steady heartbeat brought her own under control, so their hearts beat in unison.

She had almost lost him. It still seemed impossible that one man could cause such devastation. Up until that moment
, she had thought of her Vali as a gentle man with a surplus of anger in his heart. But the controlled fury that flowed out of him as he took on those men told her he was much more than she could truly comprehend. How did a laughing youth, who wielded a stylus in her father’s office, get to wield a sword with such murderous precision?

Val came from a world where raiding and killing were part of life. He was raised to it. And he’d just spent half a year learning more about the art of death in the ludus for gladiators. If he’d stayed longer he would have had to fight in the arena, maybe even killing for other’s entertainment. That was what he was bred for, what he was trained for. Not the life of a manager. Not the life of a bed slave. Killing.

Through the numbing haze, she had watched him clean the blood from them both. He’d done it as dispassionately as he would have cleaned dirt from them. But it wasn’t dirt, it was life’s blood. And there had been so much of it. Even though it no longer covered her, she could smell it. Her nose wrinkled as she tried to drive the stench away.

Vali had killed at least three men tonight, maybe more, and now he lay with her in his arms, as if it was any other night. His heart was beating steadily. Not yet asleep, but relaxed. Too relaxed for what had happened.

Then she felt it, the tremor that ran through him, like the first earth quake at Pompeii. No more than a mild shudder. But then there was another. And another. Until his body shook like the ground around Vesuvius.

He tried to draw her gently away, but she wouldn’t let him.

‘Let me up, sweetling. I… I need to move…’ His voice cracked on the last word so he couldn’t go on.

‘What’s wrong?’ She clung to him, frightened anew. Were there more threats she didn’t know about?

‘I… it’s just my body reacting to what just happened. It’s normal. I… haven’t killed for a long time. It’s just a reaction. I’ll be fine… Let me get up and move around. It’ll help.’

Suddenly all her preconceived ideas about how he felt about killing were turned on their head. Vali wasn’t all right about it. He was shocked by it, just as she was. Trained and blooded he might have been, before tonight, but it was still not something he felt good about.

‘You don’t like what you did, do you?’ she said, letting go of him so he could get up. It felt like losing her lifeline when she was drowning. But she did what he asked of her. For him.

‘They would have raped and murdered you!’ His voice cracked again, as he rose quickly and began to pace their small room in agitated steps, his arms moving in an odd, disjointed fashion. Nothing like the graceful, purposeful strides he normally took, nothing like the elegant, deadly sweep of his sword as it severed a head.

‘But you didn’t like what you did.’ Not a question now. This time she said it with conviction.

He slammed to a halt and jerked his head up to meet her gaze. ‘No. I didn’t
like
killing them. But I’d do it again in an instant if it meant saving you. Don’t you get it? Don’t you realise how close you came to… what happened to Ninia? But worse, much worse! I was fucking terrified for you. I came close to panicking, like some coward. Only knowing I was all that stood between you and that fate kept me strong.’

Dropping to the side of the bed, he wrapped his arms around his head and began to rock, backwards and forwards. Shocked by his outburst, shocked by his physical reactions, Lara didn’t know what to say or do to make it right. How to sooth him as he had soothed her. Only moments ago, she’d condemned him in her own mind for being so accepting of death. Now she was overwhelmed by his emotions to it all. Her lifeline drifted further away, and she was left to keep herself afloat.

From somewhere deep inside, she drew up what strength she had. Vali needed her. He’d fought for her, against impossible odds, and now he was suffering for it. She’d come close to losing him forever. If she could help him now, she would.

With tentative fingers she began to stroke down the full length of his back, much as she had seen him do with their tired, edgy horses in the marsh so long ago. He didn’t pull away, but neither did he react to her touch. He continued to rock as she matched her gentle strokes to his movements.

Finally, the rocking stilled, and he lifted his head. Turning like a dog to receive her touch, he nudged her hand up to his head. It was such a heartbreaking gesture, but she did as he required. She stroked his hair and his neck and his shoulders. Long, gentle strokes. Calming strokes. After a time, he turned his head and kissed the soft skin of her inner arm as it continued to move in its now hypnotic rhythm.

Slowly, Lara leaned in and kissed his temple. Slowly, his head came up so she would kiss his cheek this time. She did just that, letting her lips linger on the smooth, hollowed planes. With infinite slowness he swivelled around so that he could comfortably place his mouth in alignment with hers. Asking for a kiss without words. No demands. He was asking for her love, some sign of her affection.

Lara moved her lips over his, tasting him with the tip of her tongue. He didn’t respond. It was as if he was waiting, wanting more but unable to ask for it. She deepened the kiss as he always did, sucking in his plump, bottom lip and then releasing it. Then she took his top lip gently between her own so that slick skin slid across slick skin.