The Eagle and the Raven (73 page)

“And I suppose you own the other half, my uncle!” she retorted, and Pudens laughed.

“No,” he said. “The emperor owns the rest. I am on my way to Rome to hire a new steward.”

“Rome is that way,” she pointed, grinning. “Hire yourself a scout while you are about it. You have a terrible sense of direction.”

True, he thought. Suddenly I do not know where I am going. I thought I did, but you sit there with your braids bouncing against your supple back, the sun in your eyes and your toes dusty, and you have hidden my chosen path from me. She dug her heels into her mount and streaked away, Llyn after her, and he watched her go, wishing that the afternoon would laze on forever.

He did not go to Rome the next day. Somehow plans were made that he wanted to share, and he spent another two nights in the quietness of Plautius’s one remaining guest room, lying sleepless and restless, thinking of her lying somewhere under the same roof, deep in her dreams. He rose early on the third day, and leaving a message of thanks with one of Plautius’s servants he slipped out of the house, picked up his horse and his slaves, and swung onto the road to the city while the sun shimmered red and new on his left. With a sense of depression and frustration, he knew that he was in love with this girl who was little more than a child. He did not want to be in love. He had made a good career that fulfilled him, and he had carefully planned its course. He had a mistress on his estates in Umbria and another in Ostia where he went when he could in order to see to his ships. His family often urged him to marry, but he could imagine the buzz of outrage there would be among his sisters if he were to wed a barbarian, and a half-child at that. Ridiculous, he thought to himself. She would never have me anyway. She is less than half my age. Yet he could not prevent his thoughts from diving around her like fleet swallows.

Caradoc and the others returned to Rome a month after Pudens had gone, and Claudius immediately called for Gladys. She had made the journey regularly from the estate to the palace in spite of Caradoc’s anger, and though she tried to talk to the emperor he either behaved as though the words had never left her mouth or he refused the subject as soon as she broached it. She did not know what to do. She felt trapped. A measure of security came to her as the visits went on and nothing happened, but Caradoc grew more and more uneasy until at last he told her that she must either tell Claudius that she would come no more, or he himself would do it. She promised, flying into an uncharacteristic rage which betrayed her heightening nervousness, but she returned from the palace white-faced and exhausted.

“Did you tell him?” her father demanded, and she nodded.

“Yes, I did. I said no pretty words. But he just looked at me, and smiled, and patted my hand. He gave me no answer, he never answers me, and soon he will send for me again.”

Caradoc looked at the tight shoulders and shaking fingers. “He will answer me,” he said roughly. “I am tired of this game, Gladys. He is using you, taking his wife’s attentions from himself and fixing them on you, and it is time to tell him that he may not trifle with your life as though it were a trinket. Agrippina will not warn me again, and her patience must be running out.”

“I do not believe that he has no affection for me.”

“Of course he loves you, but in his own selfish, oldman’s way. The next time you are sent for, I will go.”

“He will lose patience with you. He imagines slights and insults where there are none, and he has slain because of a glance his way.”

“Then for once I will give him a real fear.”

“Father!”

He rounded on her savagely. “Would you rather I cowered at home until your body is found floating on the Tiber? Honor demands . . .”

“Judgment,” she choked, her mouth quivering. “And sacrifices, and retribution. I know. All useless, father! Sometimes I think that we are all marked for a violent death. Before long, someone will put a knife in Llyn when he is drunk, because he will not curb his tongue. Nero or Agrippina or even Claudius himself will shorten my years. Eurgain must eventually be arrested because of those mad followers of The Way, and she will die in some monstrous fashion. You believe that it was hard to be ricon of Camulodunon, and harder still to put on the yoke of arviragus, but, oh Camulos! It is a daily torment for us to be your children here in Rome!” She made as if to run from the room but his arm shot out and pulled her back. He thrust his ravaged face close to her own, restraining her gently but firmly.

“Tell me this, Gladys, and tell me in truth,” he whispered. “Has the time to choose death already come? Shall I take a knife to you all and then to myself? Would that be enough to retrieve your honor, and mine, Llyn’s and Eurgain’s and your mother’s?”

“No!” she spat back at him. “That moment passed forever when Claudius pardoned you! Now there is a new battle. We fight to live, we fight with everything we have for as long as we can, for this city is still the enemy, and we are still the warriors of the mountains.” She tore away from him and walked quickly away, calling for Caelte, and he stood shaken, unable any longer to recognize himself, or her.

Rufus Pudens called the next afternoon. He was shown into Caradoc’s reception room, and together they sat facing the atrium, watching sunlight glint on the water of the pool and lie somnolent upon the red tiling. They talked easily, but Pudens sensed that behind Caradoc’s polite comments the mind was far away, pursuing some other train of thought. The house was quiet. The slaves could be heard upstairs, their soft voices echoing faintly down the central hall, and birds perched on the guttering above the pool and fluttered and chirped, watching the fish below, but the pillared rooms sat silent and empty. Conversation began to lapse, and then Pudens said bluntly, “Lord, I am not certain of the customs of your people and so I may offend you. If I do so, forgive me. I would like to address myself to your daughter Gladys.”

Caradoc dragged his gaze away from the water and looked at him blankly. “I do not understand. You are quite free to address yourself to any of us when it pleases you.”

“I did not mean like that.” Pudens searched the other’s face, feeling as he did so the weight of dignity and alien experience that separated them. The man sitting loosely beside him, dark hair resting on scarlet shoulders, an elbow on the arm of his chair and fingers curling around the cleft chin, was no more than four years older than he was himself, yet Pudens knew he could never approach Caradoc as an equal. He was rich, influential, well-educated, but could not match the agelessness of the eyes that suddenly became alert and probed him. Caradoc smiled.

“Ah. I think I understand you now. Do you have a wife, Pudens?”

“No.”

“Then the matter is none of my business. I ask only that you treat with her in honesty, and that you do not forget a young girl’s freshness and innocence may seem charming to an older man, but only for a while.”

“I believe that your women fought and died before they reached Gladys’s age,” Pudens rejoined gently. “How old is she?”

“You must discover that for yourself.” Caradoc stirred. The fingers moved to run over his face in a gesture of weariness. “Sometimes I think she is older than I.”

“May I visit her often?”

“As often as you like, but I ought to warn you that before long you may not want to be seen in this house.” The smile came and went but it was not warm. It held only grimness, and Pudens raised his eyebrows. “I think I am about to make the emperor very angry,” Caradoc explained. “If you are concerned with the imperial favor, leave us alone. Gladys will have finished her studies by now. Go and look for her in the garden.”

The man bowed and left, and Caradoc watched him cross the atrium, a tall, black-haired soldier with an easy stride, his toga billowing white from his straight back. When he was out of sight Caradoc rose and went to the foot of the stairs, raising his eyes to the landing, squinting in the sun. “Eurgain,” he called. “Come down.” Presently she appeared and glided to him, and he beckoned and led her around the pool and through the cloister. Before them the terrace opened out, and then the steps and the long green sweep of the lawns. Together they stood watching as Pudens went in under the shade of a tree whose branches overhung the wall and sheltered Gladys. They saw him greet her where she sat, with her embroidery frame before her. Eurgain looked at Caradoc enquiringly.

“I am not sure,” he said slowly, “but I think that you are looking at the man who will deliver Gladys from the empress’s spite.”

She understood at once and he studied her face as she scanned the bright garden, then she turned to him abruptly. “Only if she loved him, and it is too much to hope that her affections may go to a man over twice her age.”

“Then you would hope for this?”

“She will never see Albion again,” Eurgain answered bitterly. “None of us will. There are no young chiefs to court her. I can only hope that he will love her as Aulus has loved your sister.”

“Do you still love me, Eurgain?”

She stepped back startled. “That question comes from you as though we were already looking back upon a lifetime gone,” she said, wondering why his self-sufficiency was suddenly shaken. “Why do you need my reassurances? Have I not always been beside you when you needed me?”

“I feel old!” he burst out angrily. “There is not a man in Rome who could best me, my body is strong and healthy, but I feel as though I should squat in a corner on a pile of blankets and relinquish my life as my father did. I should have died beside Cin, in the mud, with an arrow between my shoulder blades.”

“Perhaps you did,” she said softly, and the purposeless rage in him brimmed over.

“Did
you
?” he snarled, then his arms went around her and he kissed her. “Forgive me,” he said huskily. “I have wasted your life, Eurgain.”

“No. There is only waste when love dies, and I love you.”

Gladys heard him approach and looked up from her work.

“So it is you,” she said. “If you are looking for my father, he is somewhere in the house.”

Pudens greeted her. “I have already spoken to him,” he replied, and she glanced at him quickly before dropping her gaze. “I did not know that Albion’s warrior women were interested in embroidery. What are you making?”

She sighed. “It is supposed to be a hanging for my emperor, but I don’t know now whether he will want it. I have been learning to embroider but I must confess that I find it very difficult and I think that when I have finished this I will not attempt it again.” She waved at the frame, tucking her needle into the cloth and rising, and he came closer, bending over it, acutely aware of her brown face frown ing inches from his own.

“You have almost completed it.” As he looked at it his interest was aroused. There was an ocean of peacock blue, flanked on one side by a scarlet eagle, beak open and talons hooked, and on the other by a bird without plumage, black as night. The eagle’s claws were tipped in red but the black bird stood on silver—graceful, aloof, somehow above the eagle’s blatant predatory stance. He was about to stand straight when something else caught his attention and he peered again, hearing her laugh quietly beside him. The black bird’s eye was not an eye. There was a woman’s face, contorted into anguish, and her hair flowed out of the socket to mingle with the bird’s shining feathers. “I understand the eagle,” he said at last, “but what is this bird?”

“She is the Raven of Nightmares.” With a slap of her hand, Gladys spun the frame so that the picture was hidden. “She cannot be the Raven of Battle, for all battles are over, nor is she the Raven of Panic, for those days are also gone. Only the nightmares remain.”

He did not know what to say. He went and sat on the wall, looking away from her and out over the haze of the river and the city, and after a moment she folded her arms and spoke calmly. “Britannicus wants to climb onto my back and ride into his father’s affections,” she said, “and Nero wants me on my back for other reasons. What do you want of me, patrician?”

His head came round, and he found himself looking into eyes as full of dark experience and inexplicable knowledge as her father’s. Nothing, he should have said. I want to pass the time of day, that is all. But instead he said quietly, “I think I am in love with you, Gladys. I want nothing from you that might hurt you.”

She expressed no surprise, nor did she simper or laugh. “You can say this after having met me such a short time ago?” she asked him, and he left the wall.

“I am no longer a boy, falling in and out of love for fun, nor do I want to grab at love for the pleasure I can wring from it,” he replied. “I am thirty-four years old, I am set in my habits, and I have a family that will be horror-stricken when I tell them I want to marry a young barbarian. But I can handle these things if you will tell me that I may again sit with you in your garden and make a fool of myself.”

She studied the face, seeing there the pleasant arrogance of his blood, the marks made upon it by his soldiering life—the face of a man used to having his orders obeyed, who knew his own direction. “Roman men marry money, property, a vehicle to carry their children,” she said softly. “I must be more than those things to the man I marry, Rufus. I have been reared very differently from your sisters.”

“I know. You forget that I have had a taste of Albion’s gently reared sword-women! How old are you, Gladys?”

She answered him with a straight face, but humor lurked in her eyes. “I am thirty-four.” He began to smile and she came up to him, “And you are sixteen. Am I right?”

“I think you are indeed.”

“Then let us walk by the fountains, and you can tell me about this snobbish family of yours.”

For an hour they strolled Caradoc’s paved paths and lush, carefully groomed lawns, standing to watch the fountains spew rainbow-colored water that arched and glittered in the late summer sunlight; then Pudens took his leave. “I was actually on my way to the baths,” he said. “Martial will be wondering where I am, for I promised to meet him there.”

“Martial? The poet Martial? He is your friend?”

Pudens smiled at her obvious delight. “Yes. Would you like to meet him?”