The Eagle and the Raven (37 page)

Venutius’s bard stopped her at the doorskin, his arm reaching from post to post, and he asked her sharply what her business was. “I am Eurgain,” she explained patiently.

“I was once a friend to your ricon. I want only to enquire of your chieftain how she is doing. Please ask him if he will see me.” She lifted the cloak, spreading her arms wide. “I come unarmed. I bear no sword or knife.” He bent his head under the lintel and she waited, back to the door, eyes on the star-strung heavens held in silver veils of wisping cloud. The moon rode serene, the air was mild and still. She breathed deeply as Bran had taught her to do, opening her mind and heart to the peace of the night, imagining the fears and uncertainties of her life flowing from her on her outward breath, then she turned and entered the hut while the bard held the skins back for her.

Venutius rose from his stool beside the dead hearth. He had removed his weaponry and was clad in a short green tunic, and his legs and arms were bare. He had unbound and brushed his hair, and it lay on his shoulders like a soft, gleaming hood, the red waves imprisoning the lamp’s faint light. Eurgain allowed herself a second of vision, Aricia in his arms, her black hair tangling with his red, mistress and slave, enchantress and victim, locked in passion. Then she removed her cloak and smiled. “I am sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but I wanted to talk with you quietly. Aricia and I knew each other well, long ago. How is she?”

A shadow passed behind his eyes. He smiled back, waving her to the chair, and she thought for the first time how handsome he was. He poured beer for her from the jug, pushed it toward her, and sat back on the stool. He remembered her, of course. The silent one with the perceptive eyes, the thinker, the visionary with the streak of mulish common sense. He remembered the other one too, older, dark, also silent but with an edge of tension to her, a danger. Strange, he mused, watching the long, clean fingers curve about the cup, how much I do remember of those fleeting days. The last days of my happiness. Perhaps that is why. So few memories from the years between are ones I wish to dwell on. “Tell me, Eurgain,” he said, twirling the bronze cup slowly in his hand, “did your husband send you to me?”

She laughed, startled. “Yes, he did. I must not lie to you. But I think I would have come in any case. We have had so little news of Aricia since you took her away from Camulodunon.”

“And most of the news has been bad,” he finished for her brutally. “You need not spare my feelings, Lady. I have very few left to be spared. She has killed them all.”

“Aricia always loved her comfort,” Eurgain said awkwardly, trying to maintain a polite composure, “yet there was great affection between all of us at Cunobelin’s town, and the closeness of family. It was a shock to her, Venutius, when she had to leave.”

“All that was eleven years ago. I do not wish to talk about the past. What is the use? She came, she hated us, she used us, and we, like our own stupid sheep, stumbled after her. At first it was wine and trinkets. Where is the harm, she said, in using our surplus hides to bring wine to the chiefs? We obeyed her because we had oathed to her and she was the daughter of our dead lord, and where indeed was the harm?” He drank a little and then gazed morosely into the cup. “I married her. She was sixteen. She wore white flowers in her hair and my wedding gift to her around her neck. ‘You and I, Venutius,’ she said, ‘You and I. Together we can raise Brigantia higher than the Catuvellauni!’ I did not understand then what she really meant. How she must have laughed at me! Oh Sataida, Lady of Grief, I did not marry a woman, I married a demon!”

Eurgain sat very still while the man before her struggled in the grip of a torrent of bitterness. Her calm assurance and her friendly silences often welcomed confidences, that she knew. She had been useful to Caradoc in the past because of it, but she had not invited this bloody self-inflicted agony and she was aghast. You would be like this, my husband, she thought, if you had married her instead of proud Venutius. Did you see it? Did you know?

“You say you were her friend,” he went on more evenly, “but she was not yours, Eurgain. You know that, don’t you?” Their eyes met, tentatively held, acknowledged the thing they had in common, and she nodded once, the light sliding up her smooth blonde braids.

“Yes, I know. I know it all, Venutius.”

“Yet I love her still,” he went on softly, a wondering tenderness in his voice. “When she calls for me, I run to her. I know her for what she is and I can come here seeking her downfall. But in the midst of my hate, I love.”

They sat in silence, bound by a shared sorrow that went beyond convention and beyond words, then Eurgain changed the subject. She felt herself trembling with emotional weariness, her nerves, beneath the impassive face, screaming for flight. “Is Rome building within your borders?”

He gulped his beer, folded his arms, and answered her easily. The moment had gone. Once more he was the half-wild, fierce son of the hills she had met all those years ago. “Not yet. A fort is nearly completed to the southeast of us, just within the Coritani border, and the soldiers and officers come and go freely to my ricon’s house, but as yet no roads have been laid across us. Where would they go? Plautius is not ready to face the far northerners—or you! He will use us as his friendly wall, with my ricon’s glad consent. He has sent her rich gifts. He will not take her lordship from her, that he has promised, as long as she cooperates, and of course she does so, eagerly.”

“What of your people?”

“They obey her in silence. They believe that it is too late to do anything other than bow to the inevitable. Some chiefs and their freemen grumble in secret. They blame me, and with cause, for the loss of their honor, but as yet they do not see that they have also lost their freedom. I want the Silurian spies to convince them of that. As for me…” He spread his hands, and jet glinted wickedly up at her from the stubbed, scarred fingers. “I am twice a slave, yet I will do what I can.”

She rose then, ashamed of herself for coming in cold blood in an attempt to deceive him, ashamed of Caradoc’s necessity. “I am sorry, Venutius,” she said softly. “The times are evil, and I have only made them more so by coming to you tonight.”

He stepped to her side and kissed her cold hand. “No, not you, Eurgain. In you Caradoc has his greatest treasure.”

She smiled. “Go in safety, walk in peace.”

“You also, Lady.”

She withdrew her hand and left him, walking quickly to her own hut with her cloak slung over her arm. Her face burned in the cool night breeze and the scent of blossom newly born wafted around her. Somewhere close by a nightingale trilled and warbled a song of heartbreaking, unintelligible loveliness, but her thoughts were turned inward. She entered the hut, flung the cloak on the chair by the door, pulled off her tunic, and undid her hair. Caradoc watched the sharp, angry gestures from the shadow of the bed.

“Well?” he said finally, and she ripped off her breeches, not looking at him.

“He is a good man, and honest, but do not trust him until he has been proven. He is torn.”

“That is all?”

She strode to the bed, her nostrils flared, her eyes huge and gray. “That is all. I don’t want to talk about it any more, ever. And don’t touch me, Caradoc. I feel sullied enough tonight.”

Venutius and his chiefs went home, slipping away from the valley one pearly red dawn, and two days later the Silurians celebrated Beltine. The trees opened suddenly to a full, shining green glory. White blossom drifted from the apple trees and snowed scented petals through the forest halls, which echoed all day with bird song, and the dry gray bones of the cattle slaughtered last Samain were piled into two huge bonfires. The breeding stock, the new young calves, were driven protesting between them, rolling their eyes and bellowing in fear as the smoke enveloped them. In the evening the people of the town danced with their hair and necklaces flying. Their eyes sparked in the leaping orange glow of the fires, and they sang the old songs as the beer barrels emptied. All night the festivities went on. Children shrieked and played in the shadows of the huts, running in and out like demented candles. The chiefs shed their tunics and wrestled in the grass, sweat gleaming on their muscled bodies, bronze and golden torcs licked by the light from the bone fires. In the end they slept, some going to their huts, but most curling in their cloaks and lying contentedly in the grass, lulled by the rustle of the wind in the trees by the river.

Late in the morning Fearachar packed Caradoc’s and Llyn’s gear and the chiefs set out again, this time going west to Council with the Demetae. Their ricon’s curiosity had been piqued by rumors of the foreign chieftain who had already many of the stubborn Silurian warriors eating out of his hand, and his emissaries had come to Madoc with the melting of the snow in the high passes. Eurgain had begged to go, too, this time, longing to summer among the rugged freedom of the peaks whose teeth ripped at the sky and whose winds blew steadily day and night, unscented and unsoftened by wood or grass. But Caradoc had refused.

“The Demetae are an unstable, suspicious people,” he had said. “No friendly Silurian Druid has been among them, preparing the way for us. When I go to the Ordovices next summer you can come.” She argued and pleaded in vain. He simply set his lips in a thin, uncompromising line and shook his head. She kissed him goodbye, hugged Llyn, who suffered himself to be embraced with barely concealed irritation, then stood and watched them all disappear over the breast of the hill, blue, scarlet, and yellow cloaks billowing together like the fanned plumage of some huge, exotic bird.

He did not come back until the first snows of winter fell, and when he did she was appalled at the change in him. His flesh had shrunk to his bones so that nothing remained but the iron-hard muscles. He was gaunt, restless, unable to eat, unable to sleep until dawn came pale and cold under the doorskins of their hut. He spoke little to anyone during the day but when he did sleep he muttered continually, tossing to and fro, and she lay beside him rigid with worry, seeing the growing obsession of his vision gnaw away his spirit. He thought and spoke of nothing but Rome and the coming confrontation, and he fretted continually at the western tribes’ petty quarreling. Unity was his invisible standard and its weight had lain along his spine as he struggled over the mountains and flogged himself and his men from village to village. Eurgain went to Cinnamus with her anxiety. She found him in his hut stretched out on the bed, his helm, shield, and sword on the floor beside him in a welter of polishing cloths. He sat up when she entered. His own face was thinned by days of privation, and the glossy crystal shine of the green eyes was ringed in new lines. She sat on his stool. Vida’s tunics lay piled by the fire but she was not there.

“What happened this summer, Cin?” she asked him peremptorily, and he flexed his stiff limbs and swung from the bed, going to the fire and tossing new wood on it, standing before it.

“The Demetae nearly drove him mad,” Cinnamus replied. “Mother, that a tuath! It would have been better if Bran had been with us but as it was we had to sit for hours in Council while they strutted about, flaunting all the raids they had ever taken against the Silurian chiefs, doing their best to make us all lose our tempers. The walls of their Council hut are festooned with Silurian and Ordovician heads. I have never seen so many trophies. But their jewels are beautiful and their women fierce, and if Caradoc can win them the Romans will have to look to their precious laurels. He fought three of them, Eurgain, killing one and badly wounding the others.”

“What?”

Cinnamus grinned engagingly at her. “They listened to him because their chief had wanted to hear him, but they wanted to see how great a warrior he was before they settled down to seriously consider his words. They judge no man on words, Eurgain, only on deeds. Oh Mother! What fights they were! I do not think that Caradoc intended to kill the chief but he lost his temper. He was tired with all the stupid boasting and talking. The Demetae unstopped their ears after that, I can tell you! They have promised to attend a joint Council, but not before Madoc agreed to cease raiding them. He did agree, but he had a lot to say about the Silurians’ own losses to them.”

Eurgain sat quietly for a moment, her head bent. Then she said “What is the matter with him, Cin? He takes no joy in anything. He will not allow himself to relax. I see him changing every day and I fear for him.”

Cinnamus sobered. He came to her, squatting before her loosely, and he took her hands in his own. She raised her eyes to the well-known hard mouth, the beaked nose, the spring-green eyes that could melt with love and laughter or turn to stone, and she felt something within her crack like frozen water. She was tired of tension and worry, tired of lonely days and empty nights, and she put a hand to the cascade of waving blond hair before her, wanting gentleness, warmth. He slowly gathered her into his arms and held her strongly and she sighed.

“He has cut himself off from all of us except Llyn,” he said. “And only one thing keeps him going—the dream of one day becoming the west’s arviragus with the tribes united under him and thousands of warriors moving as one to drive Rome into the sea. He believes himself to be Albion’s last hope, Eurgain, and I believe it too. So do Madoc and Bran and the Silurians. And he is homesick. He hates the mountains. He longs for the gentle Catuvellaunian lowlands. We are in danger every day as we journey—from hunger, the weather, wild chiefs and wilder animals, from the winds of the passes as we crouch against the rocks. For myself I do not care. I have fought most of these things all my life and have never had a great position to lose or overmuch cattle to fill my belly. But my lord has lost a kingdom and found a deadly vision, and he struggles to accept, to adjust. He knows, we all know, that we can only go forward. There is no going back.” He kissed her forehead, intending the gesture to be a signal of finality, but somehow he found his lips straying into her hair and he felt her arms move slowly to encircle his neck. He knew he ought to pull away, and indeed he thought he had begun to do so, but instead his hands grasped her shoulders and his mouth slid across her temple and along the curve of her cheek to fit itself softly against her own. She did not start, though for a moment the lips beneath his own quivered, then slowly opened and she sank toward him, leaving the stool to topple and roll away. Her hands cradled the back of his head as he released her shoulders and lowered her to the skins, keeping his mouth pressed against her own, but when he raised her tunic she let him go and her arms fell to her sides, feeling his mouth move to her neck. Strange kisses, she thought, yet not so strange. Hands with a touch my body does not recognize though I have known them since my youth. Ah Cinnamus, love me! Let your body tell me that I am still who I think I am! He entered her tenderly and her flesh, still wondering at this unknown other flesh that nevertheless had the warmness of familiarity, did not recoil. The rhythme of another life, she thought again, lapped in his gentleness, feeling the hard knots of anxiety and misery slowly untie within her. Tell me, Cinnamus my dearest friend, tell me! Heal the wounds! She rose with him on the tide of his own passion, lying under him, enfolded by his unspoken response to her loneliness, giving to him her need and her thanks. When he had ceased to move against her he did not release her immediately. He propped himself up on his elbows and smiled down at her, kissing her with that same careful gentleness, and only when he had coaxed an answering smile did he rise and help her to her feet.