B007IIXYQY EBOK (31 page)

She moved closer, not at all certain what she was doing, blindly following sharp curiosity, the pull of that dangerous warmth in the loins. Once she was brought up short by terror and the stark memory of pain. But she defied it and came still closer. What would lying with him be like, were she free of the trappings of family and tribe, of shame?

“No,” he said finally, backing away. “I don’t want my hide to end up as a tent for one of your father’s men. I know where not to tread.”

“If I were a woman of your people, you would want me.”

“That is silly, Auriane. I would want you no matter whose people you belonged to.” He turned away. “It is difficult enough alone out here with you, day after day. Do not make it impossible.”

Then came the day before the dawn of the Wolf. As she took leave of him on this last day, without warning he drew her close and kissed her, a sad, desperate kiss. For long moments she was lulled into acquiescence, drowsy with pleasure. Then with a jerk like a sleeper awakened, she broke away. Her eyes welled with tears.

“Careful, lest you betray your divine husband,” he said, smiling, taking her chin in his hand.

Her smile was shy and young. “My divine husband betrays me every year at the rites of spring.”

They looked at each other wordlessly for a moment, and then she was off. Immediately afterward, Decius heard scuffling and the sound of running feet above him on the outcropping of rock. Someone had spied on them and, doubtless, witnessed the embrace.

He scrambled quickly up the steep path, grasping at roots to pull himself up, heart pounding. He reached the rock roof of his shelter just in time to see a fleeing figure in a tunic of woad-dyed blue become enveloped in the forest. He knew of the savage punishments her people sometimes meted out to women who lay with men outside the tribe. Would a tale of this be taken to that priest who despised her? Who might then order some barbarous death for her? Nemesis, he thought miserably. Have I slain her with a kiss?

Marcus Arrius Julianus, Military Governor of Upper Germania, looked up restlessly from his array of field maps and out into the fast-falling night. From the columned porch of his study in the commander’s quarters of the fortress of Mogontiacum, he had a broad view of camp and countryside.

The wind carried the scent of pine fires. A lustrous moon one day from full was strangely unsettling—its bald eye seemed to follow his movements with the bright, sharp interest of a predator. The moon had a different character here in the northern wastes; it was not the calm, complacent beauty it was at home, but a soul-devouring Fury, its color not silver but deathly white—a cloud-shrouded thing that summoned ghosts to walk and wolves to howl. He took comfort in the sight of the orderly rows of soldiers’ barracks, the austere columns of the camp hospital, and behind it, the parade ground; this fortress was a small, brave island of reason and light, its shores battered by the wild gloom of the barbarian sea. Past the fortress’s wall crept the sluggish Rhine. It was sky-colored in the waning light, and comfortably wide, crowded with the swift, oared liburnians of the Roman navy and the more ponderous merchant vessels carrying grain, horses and supplies to the Roman forts downriver. His gaze paused with contempt at the equestrian statue of Nero just within the arched stone gate of the Fortress.
There is the cause of my trials.
Because of his obscene spectacles that drained the treasury dry, leaving nothing for the defense of the frontier, I am forced to depend on the whims of a mountebank like Wido to secure a vital piece of land, necessary for shortening the whole northern line of defense. The madness of these times.

His Egyptian steward announced his senior Tribune, a man called Junius Secundus.

“My lord, I fear I’ve more foul news,” Secundus began after a brisk polite greeting. Julianus found Secundus irritatingly typical of aristocratic young men bound for the Senate: All seemed to have the same lilting way of modulating their words as they expressed feelings ranging from boredom to mild interest, the same aloof stance that fell just short of arrogance. “A new
petition was brought in from Wido’s war camp—”

“Damn him to Hades,
now
what does he want?”

“Fifty Arabian archers.”

“That is preposterous. He has no need of them. And that’s half the number we have in camp.”

“And he wants them not for the battle itself, but to shoot game, of all things. His men have developed a superstitious fear of the maid, Baldemar’s daughter—they think she can assume at will the form of a hind or a raven or any other beast, and enter the camp to work evil magic. He wants all wild creatures shot dead that stray too near his camp.”

“He is making fools of us. I’ve indulged him overmuch already. If my archers are destroyed, the Palace will send no more. Wido should know it—with his tantrums and his games, he is in grave danger of becoming useless to me.”

“But he promises this time on his own blood to provoke Baldemar to attack as soon as the archers arrive.”

“Does he? Well then, we shall hold him to that. Give him his archers. Tell him I expect to get them all back, alive. And have him told that if he does not attack Baldemar in three days, I shall withdraw all military support from him and leave him naked amidst his enemies.”

“Done. And he also wants to know—what is he supposed to do with Baldemar when he captures him?”

Julianus shifted a wooden marker on the map, restlessly repositioning a signal tower one mile to the north, then moving it back; there was uncertainty in his eyes now.

“He’s not to harm him—he is to secure him and send him to me,” he replied at last. “And the maid as well. If she lives, they will rally around her as they do around him, that’s clear enough, and she’s of no use to us if she cannot marry one of Wido’s sons. I’ve thought much on this, Secundus, and my decision grieves me, for here is a noble enemy, but
there must be no more Baldemars.
He has cost us too much. He—and the maid—must be executed by Rome so the natives understand our authority. A public execution would be most effective, with perhaps a few of their elders made to watch. Do you…find that harsh?”

“Begging your pardon, but it is a thing only you—so
famous for your clemency—would even ask.”

But the governor hardly heard these words; perversely, he saw the reproachful eyes of Marcus, his son. How vile you would think those executions, Julianus thought. You would count them noble creatures of the wild, not enemies, I know it well. You must kill Endymion in you, Marcus, and all that generous fellow-feeling for the lowly, if you would ever have authority over men.

“And the captive brought in today?” Julianus asked then. “Was anything useful learned?”

“The wretch died on us—the questioners took him along too quickly. The man was for certain one of Baldemar’s messengers. All we learned is that the old fox shows no sign of breaking camp.”

Julianus stared blackly at the river. “Baldemar’s forces have been massing on that ridge for two months now. His friends have come to his aid. Why does he not strike? Did that fall knock out his wits?”

“The fellow did speak one bit of odd nonsense…something about a great black wolf that would soon come to Baldemar’s aid.”

Julianus swung round. “Nonsense…? I think not,” he said sharply, beginning to pace. “More tribal reinforcements on their way, some clan under a wolf standard, perhaps?”

“Or a lightheaded fantasy conjured up by the undisciplined barbarian imagination,” Secundus countered.

“You do not understand these people. Their poetic fancies near always have some plain and obvious material reality at their core.” Julianus felt a welling of unease. He would have to go through his natural history texts and field reports, and search out all references to the northern savages’ beliefs concerning wolves. Something was afoot, he was certain of it.

“If that is all,” Julianus waved Secundus off with distracted impatience, “you may go.”

Baldemar cannot slip through my net now. By the girdle of Nemesis, this is a battle I dare not lose.

If he did, he knew for certain he would be recalled. And by winter, he would be ashes. In Rome a fresh round of prosecutions had begun. Nero, it seemed, had seen a comet, visible three nights running, and it was common knowledge that comets heralded the death of great monarchs. But Nero’s astrologer, Balbillus, assured him the dread omen could be diverted onto others’ heads if important members of the nobility were put to death in his stead. Julianus believed he lived on still only because of his great distance from home, and his usefulness in performing a task that brought no glory—a dismal chore no one else was qualified for, or wanted. What was more frightful was that this time Nero was exiling or poisoning his senatorial victims’ children. Julianus had long accepted that his own fate had played itself out. But young Marcus—his difficult, bafflingly brilliant, lost-and-found son, who in the last years had begun to amaze all his tutors—must live and flourish.
Or else his own life’s work would have been in vain.

It was for his son’s sake that he ordered Secundus back just as the chamber’s guard stood crisply aside to let him pass.

“Secundus! An amendment to the order. Give Wido all one hundred of my archers. I want that rascal to have no excuse for defeat.”

CHAPTER VIII

O
N THE NEXT MORNING
W
IDO GOT
his hundred archers. He ordered a boar roasted in celebration and sent a solemn promise to Julianus that on the morrow he would strike at Baldemar.

But it was never to be, for this was the eve of the Wolf.

Midway between dusk and dawn, Baldemar summoned a priest of Wodan to blow the cattle horn and call his forces together. High above a stand of aspen rose an expectant moon, one day from full.

An aurochs was taken from the priests’ herds and sacrificed with great secrecy. As the warriors stood grim and silent before Baldemar, Geisar and Sigreda sprinkled the animal’s blood on the wind over their heads. If they took offense at being left out of the plans until the last, nothing showed in their faces as they droned the victory incantation.

At the ceremony’s end Geisar and Sigreda shared a horn. Baldemar saw to it the mead was strengthened with a draught one of the medicine women prepared for him, a blend of valerian, passionflower and poppy, so they would fall into a heavy sleep. He wanted them kept from mischief until the battle was done.

Then Baldemar came before the assembled warriors to give his encouragement. He could walk now, if painfully, leaning heavily on an oak staff. Only then did he tell them of the coming prodigy in the sky—had they been given knowledge of it sooner he feared a deserter might have found his way into Wido’s camp with the news.

“When you see, do not fear,” he told them. “All the Holy Ones agree, the Wolf comes to aid us. He signifies evil only for the betrayer of his people, and all he shelters in his lair.”

He told them next of the arrangement of the pits and stakes. “Move slowly, follow carefully behind those in the vanguard, and these traps cannot harm you. Roman cleverness is despised of the gods. It shall avail them nothing.”

To better conceal themselves the warriors were draped in the skins of black-coated animals, and they darkened their faces and arms with lampblack; the open circles left about the eyes gave them the look of owl-eyed demons. Baldemar then brought out the standard, and one of these frightful creatures stepped forward, a warrior with proud carriage, slender limbs, and soft, clear voice. It was only by that voice that she could be distinguished as Auriane. Baldemar placed the tribal standard in her left hand, signifying he transferred his own war-luck to her.

This brought subdued calls of “Daughter of the Ash!”
He embraced her in a manner that was outwardly stately and formal; only Auriane knew the fierce hope and love in that embrace.

The warriors descended to the plain in twos, the Companions first, then the common warriors of the Chattians, and last their allies from other tribes. All were armed alike with two native spears and round wicker shields slung over their backs, except for Auriane, for whom the standard served as a shield, and Baldemar’s senior Companions, who also carried longswords. They fanned out in a wide semicircle into the moon-washed sea of sedgegrass about Wido’s fortress, creeping forward on hands and knees through the aromatic grasses, avoiding the northeast side because that was the direction of the night wind. They halted just before the great circle where the grasses had been roughly trimmed by Wido’s men.

Auriane felt she clung to the earth to make herself smaller. For long after, she would remember the clean, grassy fragrance of the sedge mingled with the bitter taste of terror at what was to come. She sensed the standard was potent and alive; cold fire glowed in the bony sockets where once a cat-spirit dwelled.

When the wind was still, they heard laughter drifting out of Wido’s camp. It did not, Auriane knew, signify that they were not alert. The Romans especially were never fools. She guessed they touched neither wine nor mead.

She heard Sigwulf curse nearby and looked over questioningly. Snakebite? Fire ants? She could just make out the outline of his wicker shield. She crawled close, and he quietly signaled that nothing was wrong.