B007IIXYQY EBOK (56 page)

He was betrayed. Some enemy learned the secret of the grove.

She shot into a birch forest and was devoured by night. Glittering eyes appeared, then flashed away; all about were the fast furtive rustlings of beasts not accustomed to being disturbed.

Still she could hear the driving pulse of the Eastre drums, pounding, pounding, and now they seemed to throb fearfully like a racing heart, hurrying her on; she held fast to that steady, insistent beat to keep from falling into madness. Then she did not know it from the hammering in her temples. The mare’s back pitched steeply as she clambered up the last barren stretch of slope; her horse’s coat was sleek as an otter and Auriane clutched the silky mane, fighting to stay on that broad back.

Suddenly the mare shied, scenting the presence of other horses in this place where there should be no horses. Ahead she saw the fires of many torches, appearing, disappearing through the trees. She slid off the mare’s back, then tied her mount in a hawthorn thicket. She approached the altar stone at a stealthy run, bent low, spears pressed close to her chest.

As she came near the stone of sacrifice and the ring of firs, she stepped on a broken horn—the one blown once to signal a raid? Then the waning light revealed, where the firs petered out to rock, a ghostly line of horsemen, and she sensed the presence of many more. She edged closer, careful to stay concealed.

Now she could see much of the hallowed place. It was a scene of desecration difficult to comprehend at once: Her father’s private sanctum teemed with hostile life. It was like flinging open the door to the stores on which life depended and finding them alive with worms. Everywhere horsemen were carrying out some infernal task in orderly fashion, fearsomely uniform with their segmented armor, the gleaming metal of their polished helmets, the iron bindings of their shields, appearing to her like so many hominid beetles animated by a single blind, nonhuman mind.

The heads of their javelins were silhouetted against the deep violet sky. Torchlight moved evilly along the blades of drawn swords. From the tall oval shields they carried, she knew these were not native auxiliaries but regular Roman legionary cavalrymen from the fortress of Mogontiacum. With the nonchalance of swineherds they prodded the priestesses into prisoners’ carts, where they were then bound hand and foot. Auriane looked swiftly about for Baldemar, but at first he was nowhere to be seen.

She looked toward the lichen-covered altar stone. Rainwater pooled in its bowl; there was just light enough to see the water was bloody and dark. She realized the shadowed shape draped over the side was the twisted body of one of the Holy Ones, her cloak fanned out like some broken wing.

A moment later she saw the solitary silhouette of a man with a noble, bearded head, seated on a horse. His shoulders were drawn forward unnaturally as though his hands were bound before him. The horse’s reins were in the hands of one of the cavalrymen. She stifled a cry.

The captive was Baldemar.

Her whole mind burst into flame. How dared they subject him to this indignity. She became a maddened Fury, too numbed with anguish to care if she gave away her presence. With all her strength she hurled a spear at the featureless face of the cavalryman who held the reins of Baldemar’s mount.

It glanced harmlessly off a skillfully maneuvered shield. A second cavalryman wheeled his horse in her direction and kicked his mount with his heels.

But a ringing voice ordered him back. A lone assailant might mean a deliberate provocation, a means of luring men into a trap. To Auriane’s surprise, the order was obeyed.

Their soldiers are closer to hounds than men, so alert they are to their master’s command, she thought as she moved sideways about the circle of the natural temple. Finally she came up behind Baldemar.

She sprang into the torchlight amid a volley of curses and shouts, and hurled a second spear at the cavalryman who secured Baldemar’s horse. But the soldier’s mount reared up sharply as she threw; her spear struck the horse, not the man. The beast lumbered to its knees, throwing the cavalryman to the ground.

Baldemar turned then and saw her.

She saw—
No! Not you!
in his eyes, followed by a look of swift resignation.

Then they looked at one another for what seemed the span of a night, and all the days of a lifetime were in that ardent farewell—the harsh, tearing regrets they shared, his pride in her victories, the fierce love. There was as well in his look a last stern command that she accept what she could not stop.

The cavalrymen had concluded this was the attack of a lone madwoman. Two sharp blasts on a trumpet called them to order. All stopped in place—three hundred soldiers looked on as she froze in plain sight, armed with a single ash spear. She was aware of the men’s scattered laughter. They regarded her with amazed curiosity, as though some rare wild animal, contrary to all its habits, had dashed confusedly into their midst.

One called out to her with the soft, stern patience he might use with a dumb beast, and she guessed, but was not certain—they used none of the phrases Decius had taught her—they ordered her to lay down her weapon. Another quietly dismounted and approached her from behind, meaning to disarm her by force.

She started to run toward Baldemar, with some half-formed idea of leaping astride the horse with him and making a desperate attempt to escape, not heeding the cavalrymen, who with brisk, unified movements formed about them in a tight ring.

Baldemar vigorously shook his head, stilling her with his eyes. It was as though his gaze had a muscular strength greater than her own. She halted.

The next moment seemed longer than a cycle of the moon, though in was brief as the time it takes to drive a sword into a man’s chest.

Baldemar nodded meaningfully at her once, indicating her spear; that look was a silent command that could not be disobeyed. In his eyee was the maddened ecstasy of the condemned man who sees one last chance to escape.

She resisted knowing his wishes for a fraction of an instant, then collapsed within. They had known one another’s thoughts ahead of speech all their lives; she understood precisely what he ordered her to do.

He commanded her to kill him.

To be taken alive by the Romans would mean a living death, a niding’s end, so shame-ridden and ignoble he would not be admitted to the Sky Hall where one so noble as he naturally belonged. There was no true life outside the ring of kin; in Roman hands he would waste away piteously in barren darkness. But were he to die now, he would preserve the heaped treasure of a lifetime of deeds of valor. His spirit would abide forever with the tribe; on this night he would fly back to his own hall and sit among them, his hand round Athelinda’s.

She lifted the last spear, shivering like a trembling dog, while the Romans watched in a seeming trance, not believing she prepared to do what it seemed she meant to—until it was too late.

The spear felt heavy as a man. Her muscles locked in place. She could not stop the heart that started her own.

How can I fail him in this? How many spears have I thrown? Throw one more. Of what matter is it? Both our lives are done.

He held his gaze firmly, insistently, to hers, willing her strength.
Do it, beloved child.

The Eastre drums throbbed, sounding malignant, unearthly. There was a small trip in their rhythm now so they seemed to say:
You must kill, you must kill…this, this is the sacrifice we want.

Her spear-arm shot forward. Distantly she heard shouts of outrage. Of course!—the thought flashed in her mind. I steal the Roman wolves’ quarry from their trap, right before their eyes.

The spear struck high in Baldemar’s chest, toppling him from the horse.

She sank to her knees, her soul no longer able to support her body, herself a sacrifice, a creature with its still-beating heart torn out.

You are victorious, darkness. Hertha, your will is done. Ramis, you must be rejoicing.

Bear me off to lands below, black dogs of Hel. Why was I cursed to rip the greatest of souls from its earthly housing, to stop my own blood….

Accursed one
,
she heard Hertha screech over the flames that consumed her.
You shall commit a crime so great, there is no punishment for it.

She fell unconscious onto stone.

The soldiers rushed toward Baldemar, then slowed, discipline faltering in the face of the ghastly scene, suddenly uncomfortably aware this land was not theirs, nor were its spirits friendly to them.

Life left Baldemar quickly; soon that slack face was only the soul’s shadow. And then a stern peace settled over it. The Centurion, a man named Licinius Paulinus, rode close and dismounted.

So ends the life of the bane of the border for decades, Paulinus thought, the man who was the fortress of his people.

He then turned Auriane’s body over to get a closer look. She felt like no woman he had ever touched—smoothly muscled, flexible as a limp cat. In the starlight her face was that of Artemis.

“It is the maid, his daughter,” Paulinus said softly to the men at large. “How could she do this thing?”

“What’s to be done with her?” inquired the unit’s flag-bearer as he dropped from his horse and crouched beside Paulinus. Both regarded her as a poisonous thing. Paulinus knew the maid must somehow be disposed of, but he was reluctant to have her destroyed here, before his men’s eyes—they would worry over her curse.

Paulinus came to a swift decision. “Let her blood be on the hands of her tribesmen. Bring forward the barbarian, and quickly.”

The barbarian was Odberht, who had served as pathfinder to this remote place. He approached with a majestic swagger, chin lifted in a farcical show of pride, his red-blond hair, greasy with bear’s fat, swept dramatically back from a brutish forehead. He was careful not to move too quickly, lest they think him their lackey instead of what he was—chief over an intertribal retinue of four hundred warriors, a free chieftain who inscribed his own law in blood, who surpassed his father Wido in wealth and deeds. His belt and scabbard glowed with gold; his cloak was secured with the royal raven’s head brooch of the king of the Cheruscans, the Chattians’ ancestral enemies to the north, awarded to him instead of the king’s wastrel son. Odberht expected one day to be named the king’s heir.

Odberht’s smugly triumphant smile died when he saw the corpse of Baldemar. He stood still a moment, stout leather-clad legs planted apart, staring stupidly, as if Baldemar, not living, were a thing that could not be. In uncouthly accented Latin he declared with great affront, “He is dead!”

“Well, good, we see these northern beasts
do
know the living from the dead,” Paulinus retorted.

Odberht took a cautious step closer. “You did not say you would kill him!” He contemplated with dread the implications of a blood-debt with Baldemar. No one must know his hand was in this.

“We’ve no account to give to you,
son of Wido,” Paulinus retorted.

Odberht then saw that Baldemar had been felled with his own spear—yes, there was no mistaking the red-outlined runic marking on the shaft.

Then he saw Auriane, lying as though dead nearby. Slowly he began to comprehend the whole truth.

“Quickly, answer me,” Paulinus said, nodding crisply at Auriane. “What is the meaning of this? She slew him. What will your people do with her?”

“She—she is a murderer of kin,” Odberht said at once, suddenly greatly relieved.
The people will be so unsettled by the horror of what Auriane has done, they will explore the deed no further and never uncover my own role.
“Hand her over to the high priest of Wodan called Geisar—it is his
place to try her. You can be assured the Assembly of the Moon will condemn her to death.”

Paulinus nodded and rose to his feet. Meditatively he asked, “Can you say why she has done this?”

Odberht knew quite well why. But he indicated Auriane with a gesture of dismissal and replied, “At her her birth, the unholy spirits outnumbered the good.”

The Centurion hesitated a moment more, then declared, “Well, then, so it shall be. Odberht, you will remain with us. Detail four of your men to take her to her father’s village. Make them a gift of Baldemar as well, we’ve no use for him now.”

Decius fought gamely to remain conscious. The dawn that followed the night of Baldemar’s death found him bound to an oak within the great open-air temple to Wodan that lay one Roman mile southeast of the Village of the Boar; here Geisar carried out sacrifices. Decius did not know how much longer he could save himself from the rope and the spear. The bodies of eighteen of his fellow thralls hung like bundles of pitiful rags from neighboring trees. They had been slain in the manner of the god when Wodan submitted to nine days of torment while hung from a tree so he might learn the highest wisdom: First they were hanged, then speared in the side. The ground reeked of sacrificial blood. Decius’ wrists were swollen and bleeding; the bonds cut like knives.

The first news of the disaster was brought to the people by Asa, an Ash Priestess who survived the ambush. Geisar retaliated at once by giving the order that all Roman thralls held at the Village of the Boar were to be sacrificed to propitiate Wodan for the Holy Ones slain by the soldiers.