Ancient Ties (31 page)

Janney pressed her lips together and broke eye contact. This was the hard part. “I’ve been dreaming about something that happened in England this summer, except it didn’t really happen, I just dreamed it. But the dreams won’t stop.”

“Do you want them to stop?” Dora’s questions were calm and quiet, almost off-hand.

“Yes.” Janney leaned forward putting her head in her hands, elbows resting on her knees. She wanted to talk about the voice but it was too soon. She needed to work her way into that bit of nuttiness. “No.”

“Tell me about the dreams. Are they the same every night?”

“It’s like a story in my head, it just goes on and on continuously.” Janney peeked at Dora.

“Who else is in them?”

Whoops, here it comes
. She broke eye contact again. “Maybe, I’m just sex starved. It had been a long time since I had sex with my husband before we finally broke up. Then I went away to relax, I guess, and let my imagination run away with me.”

“Do you have sex with someone in the dream?”

Blushing furiously red, Janney shyly answered, “Ah, yes.

But that’s not all,” she said defensively. “We talked. He took me to Stonehenge. He had a sword fight and…well, we made love.

Pretty fantastic love,” Janney waved her hand as if she wanted to get past that description. “He was going to go off to war, but I left first.” She blinked back tears. “He was going to leave me.”

“Um hm. You felt abandoned?”

Janney couldn’t go down that road. She wanted to tell Dora but just couldn’t talk about that yet.

Aquae Sulis

Bone weary, Marek dragged his body out of the camp gates to the waiting sedan chair. He knew he would meet Eligius at Gaius and Augusta’s villa. Gods, did he need time in the caldarium and a good rubdown. The fighting had been brutal, this particular Celtic tribe not willing to lose a foot of ground.

The moment he awakened that morning two months ago from an unusually deep sleep, he knew everything was wrong.

Janney was not beside him. Her side of the bed felt cool to the touch indicating that she’d been gone a while. Marek knew in his heart that she was not coming back.

Mars. Mars took her.

Mars drugged Marek into a deep sleep and took Janney from him. He almost changed his mind about retiring after Janney left him. His pride and strong sense of duty were what kept him going during the campaign and afterward on the long ride home. He had acquitted himself well in the fighting, thank Jupiter, so he had nothing there to be ashamed of.

Janney.
His heart squeezed. His gut ached. She’d been so hurt that he had to go. He was a warrior. It was his duty.

Janney didn’t trust in him to come back? She couldn’t wait two weeks, four at the most for him to return? Yes, it took longer but she could have waited.

“Well, she can go to Hades!” he grumbled. But she hadn’t.

She went back to her own time. Without him. A shiver rode over him so violently that even the sedan carriers had to juggle their burden to keep him upright. He didn’t know how he was going to walk in that villa knowing that she wasn’t there. Of all the battles he’d had to fight, this one might be the hardest.

The servant boy at the door of the villa welcomed Marek home, and before he even rounded the disgustingly cheerful fountain, Augusta bustled into the atrium from the peristyle. The only other woman to embrace him in years threw her arms around his shoulders and squeezed.

“Augusta.” Marek was completely taken aback. The woman usually greeted him this effusively but something felt different.

His heart jolted.
Janney is here.

“Welcome back, Marek,” Augusta said, the words tripping out in a rush. “You’ll never believe who is here!”

Marek could only stare at her, his heart thundering in his chest.

Janney.

He reached up and grasped Augusta’s wrists, pulling them from his shoulders. She beamed from ear to ear.

It has to be Janney.
As gently as he could under the circumstances, Marek moved her aside and headed for the doorway to the peristyle.

“Marek, it’s Leonidas.”

Marek barely heard her. So sure that Janney was back, he charged into the garden. Leonidas! Too late, he realized what Augusta said. His facial expression changed from one of joy to surprise then to complete blankness in the space of a heartbeat.

Leonidas Benin Verus had traveled all the way from Rome on a troop ship. The Gods had forsaken that ship. He’d been sick the entire way. He was no sailor. So glad to be on dry land again, he almost dropped to his knees and kissed the ground. Almost.

Leonidas did not intend for his shipmates to see him any weaker than he’d been hanging over the rail the entire trip.

His father. He was going to his father. The man who had abandoned him at birth. He knew that many men in the army were gone from their homes for years but his own father seemed to make an art of it.

Although Leonidas had no intention of being a soldier himself, he’d fantasized constantly about the imagined exploits of his father. Marek Benin Verus, the Primus Pilus. He dogged the heels of the storytellers in the plazas of Rome aching to hear of the military exploits that would bring him in closer contact with his father. Leonidas knew that his adopted mother, Solita, cared for him but something had always been missing in his life. His real mother and his absent father.

At fifteen years of age, Leonidas now had three options.

Marry, go into the army, or seek out his father. Solita and his absentee father would, probably already had, contract a bride for him. He had always felt so alone, separate from other people; the thought of a wife seemed satisfying. His own woman to be with every night. A wife to take away the loneliness. Then children. A family of his own.

Leonidas knew that it was unusual for men of his class to want to personally care for their children but when a person is raised with few bonds, he yearns for someone to love him.

Someone to need him.

He would never go into the army. He did not want to fight.

Oh, he knew how to. Trained in wrestling and boxing to protect

himself, Leonidas preferred reading and writing long, rambling sagas about Gods and heroes.

That brought him to his third option. Seek his father. When the idea first occurred to him two years before, the rightness of it gave him peace and confidence. Since that moment, he’d planned everything out, scouting out what kinds of ships sailed to Britannia. If he’d known he would have been so seasick, he would have investigated land routes. They would have taken longer but he probably wouldn’t have been hanging over the side of the horse with his insides spewing out or, what was worse, the retching out of nothing.

Here he was at the villa of his father’s friends, Augusta and Gaius Paullinus, in Aquae Sulis in the Roman province of Britannia. Waiting for his father to return from battle. Praying to the Gods that Marek would accept him and be happy that he’d come.

Would his father know him? Would he recognize him? The last time they’d been together, Leonidas had been ten years of age. He remembered his father as a giant. A big man, broad in the shoulders and chest. Leonidas had been a short, skinny boy then. The years from ten to fifteen made a huge difference in his physique. Now, miraculously, he was tall. Tall as a grown man.

Which he was, by Jupiter! He’d filled out because of the physical training Solita had insisted on. She thought it was fine to be a scholar but she also wanted him to fulfill the promise of his father’s strong body, the body type that he had inherited.

This day, he was ensconced in the peristyle with Augusta.

He held a wax tablet and a stylus in his hands as he attempted to write a poetic saga about his ocean voyage. What words rhyme with ‘retch’ and ‘heave your insides’? Not many.

The boy from the front door suddenly appeared next to Augusta. Across the garden, Leonidas could feel the excitement and energy in whatever news it was. Augusta rose immediately, and her sandaled feet rattled over the loose gravel on the pathways. She disappeared from view into the atrium.

Leonidas rose, sensing that something important was happening. He felt the presence, the aura, of power. The aura of family. His hands shook a little as he carefully placed his writing tools down on the bench and drew to his full height.

All sorts of emotions rolled through him. Happiness at seeing his father again. Fear that he wouldn’t be welcome after all. A sudden spurt of anger. Anger at being left alone for so many years. He understood, but he didn’t. He was his father’s son. The only son—that he knew of anyway. Leonidas renewed his vow never to leave his own son for fifteen years.

Sweat popped out on his upper lip and in his armpits.

Damn it all to Hades! He’s the one who left me. He has the
explaining to do.

“Marek, it’s Leonidas.” He heard Augusta say.

To keep his hands from shaking any more than they already were, Leonidas braced them on his hips and widened his stance.

The position also opened his chest and helped him take a deep breath. He felt as if he’d been holding it for months.

Leonidas gazed upon his father’s face. He looked the same.

He really looked the same as he had five years ago. Leonidas watched his father’s expression of joy turn to surprise, then become blank. He squeezed his fists tighter on his hips and fought the disappointment.

I am a grown man, too. I don’t need his approval. I don’t need
his…his interest.

Interest. That was all Leonidas would accept from his father. He knew he would not get love or caring.

Hades! I should have known.

Facing his father for the first time in five years, sick at the rejection he saw in the man’s eyes, Leonidas did the only thing he could think to do in the face of this crushing disappointment.

He turned on his heel and stalked out of the peristyle. Not knowing where he was going, Leonidas just knew he had to get away. Marek, his father, wasn’t worth it.

Leonidas barely noticed the startled expressions on the faces of the kitchen servants as he barreled through and out the back

door of the villa. He dimly heard the loud, raucous cries of street vendors, the itinerant scribes calling out for customers to write letters for. He pushed through people, past carts, and strode right down the center of the bricked street, happy that there had been no rain for days. Otherwise, the street would be flowing water and refuse.

Leonidas didn’t stop until he reached a plaza where he gratefully threw himself down on a stone bench. Hands fisted on his knees, he struggled to calm his breathing. Forced his limbs to stop quivering.

It hit him hard.
I ran. I ran away like a child.

Blinking furiously to keep the burning tears from embarrassing him, Leonidas bowed his head, chin to his chest, and swore silently. Using every curse word he’d ever heard, and a few he made up, he muttered to himself until he could calm down and think rationally.

Some minutes later, it could have been hours, Leonidas had lost all track of the time, a shadow hovered over him. His head still down, a pair of dusty, hob-nailed soldiers’ boots with a set of large feet inside filled the space in front of him.

Well, he’s here.

Leonidas slowly raised his head to his father’s knees. If Marek had that blank or disappointed expression on his face, Leonidas swore he would get up and leave. Again. He did not need the man. He’d never acted the father.

“Leonidas.”

His first spoken word in five years. His father’s voice sounded deep and rough. Gravelly. Leonidas wouldn’t look up.

He couldn’t. He watched his father’s feet shuffle in the dust of the plaza.

“May I sit with you?”

Leonidas heard the strain, the tentativeness and almost felt sorry for the man.

“I don’t care,” Leonidas replied, not caring anymore if he sounded sullen and uncooperative. He despised himself for wanting too much.

Marek sat, leaving a space between them. He leaned forward, elbows on spread knees, hands clasped and dangling down. Leonidas watched out of the corner of his eye. He tried to settle himself. Blood pounded through his head, and he wasn’t sure he could hear right.

Marek sighed.

Leonidas sat.

Both gazed at the paving stones beneath their feet.

A sweet seller approached them, and Marek waved him away before he turned to Leonidas. “Do you want something?”

Leonidas made brief eye contact, looked back down, and mumbled, “No.”

Marek nodded and gazed out over the plaza. Leonidas was supremely aware of every move his father made. He held the older man in a combination of hero worship and fear, and hated that Marek so strongly affected him.

“You arrived sooner than I expected,” Marek finally spoke.

Leonidas glanced sharply at his father. “How could you have expected me?” He’d specifically asked Solita not to send word ahead. “Did Solita warn you?”

Marek’s brow furrowed. “No. I sent for you. Didn’t you get my message?”

“You sent for me?”

They both spoke at once. Exchanged a darted glance.

“Did Solita come with you?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Yes, but that was before…”

“Before what?” Leonidas was curious in spite of himself.

Hardly a word for years, then finally an invitation. Marek didn’t offer any explanations.

Street musicians had set up in the center of the plaza and the sounds of singers, stringed instruments, and people clapping pushed their way into Leonidas’ consciousness. He watched them for a while needing the mindless distraction they offered.

“Why did you send for me?”

“Why did you come?”

Again, they spoke at the same time. It was beginning to be a habit.

Leonidas’ heart skipped a beat. This was never going to work. He didn’t want to go back to Rome. Somehow, he knew his life was no longer in Rome. Was it here? This just was not going to work. He and his father had absolutely nothing to say to each other.