Black Ships (34 page)

“Only the gods do,” I said.

T
HAT NIGHT
we burned the dead beneath the bright stars of autumn. The next night, on a night of rain, we celebrated the marriage of a king.

Outside the rain drummed down, but inside the great hall of Latium there was a warm fire, and our shadows leaped on the walls, ours and the people of Latium alike. I looked round at their faces. There were a few men and youths, all the men of Latium, but it was mostly women, I thought, women who had expected rape and pillage, to be carried away from their lands and kin, their children massacred or taken as slaves. Instead, they celebrated a wedding.

I stood beside Xandros while Latinus put Lavinia’s hand in Neas’. Neas wore a tunic of scarlet wool bound about with a golden belt, and his fair hair was combed and glinted in the light. He towered above Lavinia. She wore her white dress, and a saffron veil covered her face and hair, golden as a cloud.

Her father held their hands together for a moment, then let go. With one hand he gently lifted the veil from his daughter’s eyes. Her face was pale and still, carved from marble. Neas bent and kissed her lips. She did not move, though her eyes closed and then opened again.

Our men began to cheer.

I looked at her father. He was stern but not displeased. This new son-in-law had done all that he might ask. His people were safe. That is, after all, the first duty of a king, and it must come before all else, even before one’s own child.

“I thank the gods...” Xandros said.

I looked up at him, leaned back against his warm arm. “What?”

“That I am not a prince.”

I smiled and rested my head against his. “So do I.”

At the feast I stopped to talk with Kos. It took a lot of wine to make the man drunk, and while half the celebrants were already beyond sense, Kos was still on his feet. I sat beside him at one of the long tables drawn up in the hall, and we watched some men from
Pearl
dancing on the table. Kos was looking somewhere beyond. I followed his gaze.

At the hearth the women were serving out the last of the food, platters of roasted fish that had been cooking in the ashes. I knew which one he watched. Now and again she glanced up at him, a cautious glance, but not without interest. She had curling brown hair and a broad forehead, a sharp nose and two little boys that followed her about, one three or so and one perhaps five. A widow, I thought. Twenty-five or so, with children at her skirts.

“Will you marry her?” I asked.

Kos looked into his cup. “Probably. If she’ll have me.” He met my gaze. “We’ve done a thing that could not be done. We’ve crossed land and sea to the ends of the earth to a place like we left. And they’re glad to see us. I’d have carried off a woman if I had to, but I’d rather court one willing, and know what I’m getting.”

“And you’ll not kill those little boys of hers,” I said. I knew what the women of Latium were gaining from the agreement.

“Gods, no!” Kos said. “They’re likely boys. It seems that I’m the shipwright after all, and I must have some boys to train up.”

“And some of your own to follow,” I said.

Kos nodded. “If She wills. But I’d do no harm to my own children’s brothers, new children or not. You know that.”

“I do,” I said. “But it’s much more than anyone here could expect, taken in war.” I had been born a captive; I knew.

Kos took a long pull at his wine cup. “I couldn’t see how you meant to do it,” he said. “You and Neas. Have some people welcome us, some place where we’d slide home like the sword to the sheath. But here everyone gains. We get a city ready built with people who want us, women who are ready for marrying, good walls, and good land. They get men who can defend what they have, and who won’t loot them out or take them as slaves. You’ve traded us a life. And I have no idea how you’ve done that.”

“She willed it,” I said simply.

But it was never that simple, of course.

Across the room I watched Neas bend his head to speak with his bride. He was trying, I thought. And his Shardan was getting better.

Xandros and I did not follow the bawdy crowd that followed them to the bedchamber door. Instead, we slipped away into the rain, running across the streaming dirt streets to the portico of the temple. We stood there under the roof, gasping. The rain was cold. It glittered on his eyelashes.

“My dear, dear friend,” he said. We were chilled, but his eyes were warm.

I laughed. My feet were covered in mud, and my hair was soaked. I was nothing beautiful or fine, but he kissed me anyway.

We clung together under the portico, the rain beating down, droplets bouncing where they hit the ground into a fine haze. After a few minutes we moved inside to the little room in the back where my things were. I drew him down beside me in the dark.

“Can it be real?” he whispered.

I touched his lips with my fingers, tracing the line of his lips, the curve of his chin. “We’re home, Xandros. Home at last.”

He kissed my fingers, warm lips on chilled white hands.

In the bright bedchamber of the palace Neas and Lavinia were in their marriage bed, a brazier to warm them and hanging lamps to light them, scarlet blanket folded at the bottom of the bed, white linens stretched clean and waiting. I hoped Neas did as I had advised. I hoped Lavinia was what I thought she was.

“You’re thinking again,” Xandros said. He kissed my throat. “You should stop.”

“You’re right,” I said. I pulled him against me and we made love while the thunder cracked above us, while the rain thumped against the tiles overhead. At last we curled into blankets and lay silent. It was dark and warm and quiet, all sounds outside muffled by the rain.

“This is enough,” Xandros said sleepily, his face against my shoulder, and I knew that he had finally answered the question he had asked so many months ago.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.” I kissed his brow and twined my hands in his long, soft hair.

There was one
MORE THING
to do.

It was winter before I found the cave. It was in the hills a morning’s walk from Latium, up the little river where it cut through a shallow gorge. Wolves had used it once, from the chewed and cracked bones littering the floor, but they were gone.

The entrance was low enough that I had to stoop, but the ceiling was high enough farther in. A passage led down and farther back. It grew too small to get through before long, but there were several side chambers, most of them too small for a man to stand. It was not ideal. Too small, and too distant from Latium to be convenient. And there was no water closer than the river.

But there was something about it, some thrum of power. I stood in the front chamber, a pile of gnawed bones before me, raised my arms and felt it.
This is the place,
She whispered.
This is where you have brought Me.
I stretched my arms high, feeling Her flex within me.
Here,
She whispered.
Here.

And I let Her go, let Her flow out of me like water, into the stone, into the air.

I knelt on the cold floor, my hands against the stone. “Lady,” I said, “I have done as You asked. Are You gone from me?” I should feel that loss like a parent, like a lover, all at once.

No. I am always with you,
She whispered.
I am in you.

“How shall I know?” I asked. “How shall I know what You want of me if everything is different?”

You will know,
she said.
As you have always known. As I have always given you what you need. Everything is always different. The world ends, and then begins again.

“I used to have nothing to pray for,” I said. “And now I have too much. Markai and Xandros, Neas and Wilos, Tia and Bai and Kianna and Kos. Neas’ child bride. Lide and Aren and Hry and the people of Wilusa, the people of Latium. All of them. I am not apart. I am not Death.”

I felt Her presence wash over me and it was love. Death and life and memory. Babies breathing their first air and blood on the trampled grass. Anchises on his bier, and Markai shifting in the womb, the grain golden in the sun and the Nile alight with lamps for Isis.

“Dear Lady,” I said, and bent my head, my tears falling like libation in the dust.

You are My handmaiden,
She said.
I will call you when I need you. Go and love.

SEVEN HILLS

O
n his third birthday, Markai went to his father. Ceremoniously, we carried his bedding and clothes out the back door of the temple, down the street and around the corner, and to the second house. Markai carried his precious carved horse that Kos had made for him, and strutted along a little uncertainly while Xandros and I kept up a conversation about what a big boy he was now and how proud of him we were, and how a big boy like that needed to go out from the women and do big boy things all day, not baby things. From the threshold of the house Xandros had built we could see the roof of the temple.

There was a main room, with two sleeping cubicles behind. We arranged Markai’s things in one of them, his bedding and his blankets, the soft deerskin swaddling that had been his when he was a baby. He had been here before, but not slept under his father’s roof.

Xandros sat down cross-legged beside the bed. After a moment, Markai crawled into his lap. “Why does Kianna get to stay at the temple with the baby?”

“Because Kianna is a girl, and your mother’s acolyte,” Xandros said. “And the baby gets to stay because he’s a baby. He’s only four months old. When he’s a big boy three years old he’ll come here and you’ll share this room with him.”

There was a new baby by then, Karas, born in the springtime. He was Markai in miniature—the same round brown eyes, shaggy black hair, smooth olive skin, broad shoulders, and barrel chest. They both looked exactly like Xandros, I thought.

Markai looked around the room. “Where will he sleep?” he asked.

Xandros pointed to the other side. “We’ll put a bed for him right there. And you and your brother will share this room, and you’ll both come fishing with me.”

“Can I come fish tomorrow?”

Xandros looked at me. I shook my head. He looked down at the top of Markai’s head and grinned. “Of course.”

“Xandros, are you...”

“I started at this age,” Xandros said. “My father took me to sea. Besides, it’s not a voyage or something, just a day’s fishing. And he is a big boy now, out from the women.”

I looked at Markai. He seemed so small, yet he was big for his age, strong and loud and a handful for the temple. In eight years he would have a rower’s bench. Less, perhaps, given his broad shoulders. He would be learning his trade before long.

“You must be careful,” I said to Markai. “And do everything your father tells you, if you’re going to be a sailor.”

He grinned. “I’ll catch the biggest fish!”

The next morning I watched him standing in my old place on
Dolphin
’s stern, while Xandros maneuvered the ship away from the docks and down the river, his head held high and his legs planted wide with the ship’s movement. I had not shown him that, nor Xandros. The blood of the Sea People, I thought.

I went back to the temple. Kianna came to me in the mornings only, and she would be there soon.

As I had expected, when the time came that she was weaned, Tia and Bai did not want her to go, so she came to me every other morning from sunrise until noon to begin learning what must be learned, and stayed at night with them. Tia had no other children yet. She had miscarried twice, and I knew she hated to be parted from her only child, so it was an arrangement that satisfied everyone.

Kianna’s seventh birthday came almost on the Feast of the Descent. After the rites proper there was feasting, and Latinus sacrificed a cow, which, roasted, fed almost everyone. Afterward, the wine flowed and the snake dance began, round and round beneath the spring stars.

Kianna had had no part in the rite, but she had held my paints and brushes ready in the black linen bag tied around her waist, as I had done when I was Pythia’s acolyte. I saw her sitting quietly watching the fire, not joining the other children in clamoring for the sweets Lavinia was distributing. Her long red hair lay across her shoulders and her snub nose was sprinkled with freckles, but her eyes were suddenly as dark as night, as dark as the spaces between the stars.

Quietly, I came and knelt beside her. “What do you see?”

For a long time she didn’t answer. The sparks rose in the air where the wind took them. They did not reflect in her eyes.

“I see a funeral pyre,” she said.

I felt Her at my back, Her cool hands.

“The king lies on his funeral pyre,” she said. Her voice was very clear and calm, the voice of a dreaming child. “King Aeneas.” My throat tightened, but she went on. “He’s very old,” Kianna said. “His hair is all white, and his arms are crossed on his chest, and his hands are twisted and old. I’m standing there and trying to keep my veil from blowing into the sparks. I’m singing the Descent. But why aren’t you there? Where are you?” She jerked her head up, and her eyes were gray, a child’s eyes filled with light. “I’m sorry! Was that bad?”

“No, sweetheart,” I said, putting my arm around her. “That was exactly right. I’m not there because then you are Sybil in my stead, because you are there to sing the king to the River. Long years from now, when he is very old and you are a grown woman.”

“A long time from now?”

“Yes,” I said, pointing to Neas across the fire. “See? See how young he is now?”

Kianna nodded.

“It’s good, Kianna. It means you are ready to be my acolyte in truth, that She has chosen you. And you have given me a great gift.”

“By saying you’ll die?” Kianna was confused.

“Of course I’ll die,” I said gently. “Everyone does. But to know that we will have long years of peace, and that you will be Sybil after me is important. And good.” I stood up and drew her after me. “Come and get some almond cakes, sweetheart. There won’t be any left if we wait much longer. Markai will eat them all.”

Latinus died the winter after Kianna was eight. He lived to see his grandson, Silvius, Lavinia’s firstborn. And yet when he died it seemed that little had changed. He had been ill for a year or more, and so when Neas at last became king of both peoples nothing was strange. Instead of standing beside the carved chair in the hall he sat in it. We had grown used to the red wool robe of a king that they expected of him, and they had grown used to him, to his ways and to his mind, to his hand always on the reins. Wilos stood beside the chair on special occasions now, with Lavinia sitting to the other side holding Silvius in her lap, two sons, fair and dark, children of two peoples.

The People hailed them in two languages, and we drank to the king that was, and to the king that from now on should be.

Spring came.

The fields along the river were plowed and planted. The almond orchard was in bloom, and new terraced fields on the hill were thick with three-year-old grapevines spreading their leaves in the sun. The world was warm and kind.

Neas came to me under the eaves of the temple. Karas was three years old, and played in a puddle while I washed out clothes for him and for Kianna.

“My prince?” I said. It was no longer usual for him to come to me, rather than to summon me as a king should.

He leaned on the door frame. “Oh, don’t get up. There’s nothing official I need.” Neas shifted in the doorway. “Everything’s going well, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I said carefully, waiting for the problem to be revealed. In truth, I couldn’t think what it was. The spring planting was done, Lavinia and Silvius were both well, Wilos was turning into a young man, the weather was good and the People were at peace.

“I’m going hunting,” he said abruptly.

“You go hunting often,” I said, looking up. “And never have reason to speak to me of it.”

“I want you and Xandros to come,” he said. “Surely Karas is big enough to stay with Tia or someone for a day.”

“He is,” I said. “But why do you want me? Xandros hunts with you often enough.”

“I want you to see something, of course. I want to know what you think.” Neas shifted from foot to foot, less like a king than a boy with a secret.

“Then of course I will come,” I said.

I
T WAS A BRIGHT MORNING
in late spring when we set out. It was more than the three of us. Whatever captains may do, kings do not go on hunting trips with only two people. There was Bai with his bow and five more men, four youths from Latium who were learning to hunt, the king, Xandros, and I. We made our way swiftly for half the morning, angling away from the river, inland and southward. It was very beautiful. Birds called in the flawless sky, and the sun was warm on my face and my skin. Xandros walked beside me, an expression of pleasure on his face. The men faded back and let the three of us walk together.

We were climbing a wooded hill when Neas finally spoke.

“The problem is,” he said, “that I have two sons and one house.”

“I have two sons and one boat,” Xandros said.

Neas laughed. “Yes, but we can build more boats, if both of them are fit to be captains. But I have one kingdom, and what shall I do if I have two sons who are fit?”

“The Latins should rather have Silvius,” I said, “because he is of their blood and their royal line. He is his mother’s son. And yet Wilos is the elder by ten years, and your heir.”

“Just so,” Neas said.

“This isn’t a new problem,” Xandros pointed out. “You’ve known this was coming since the boy was born.”

“I know. But you’ve given me the answer to it, you with your magic for statecraft.”

Xandros raised one eyebrow. “I know nothing of statecraft, and I’ve given you no advice on this. There’s nothing to give.”

Neas laughed. “Yes, you have. Build another boat.”

“Neas?” Xandros asked.

“Another city,” I said. “I told you that you would found a city, and yet we found Latium waiting for us. Two princes, two cities.”

We came to the top of the hill, where the trees gave way to an outcropping of stone and it was open to the sky.

“Here,” Neas said.

I caught my breath. A broader river wound brown and swollen with rain through a lush forested valley. Seven hills rose around it, and here, on the highest hill, the sky stretched forever above. A faint cloud rose from the valley, from wet leaves drying in the spring sun, vapor lifting into the air.

“Here,” Neas said again. “That river is perfect for trade, not far from the sea, and this valley is as fertile and as protected as I’ve ever seen.”

“For Silvius?” I said.

He nodded. “It will take years to get anything going here, and it will take years for him to be ready to rule it. But knowing this is his...”

Will end any scheming against Wilos in Latium,
I thought. I did not know that Lavinia schemed. I thought not. But her relatives would. And who was to say what Silvius himself might do, when he was past infancy and grew tired of his older brother’s shadow?

“It’s beautiful,” Xandros said. He walked closer to the edge of the stone outcropping. It was not such a high place, but the stone made it seem such. His eyes were far away.

“I dreamed this place,” Neas said. “A long time ago. And when I saw it I knew it.”

I nodded. I did not feel what they felt. There was nothing of Her here. This place belonged to the gods of the heights, to the king of the gods, not to the Lady of the Underworld.

“Seven hills,” I said. I thought again of the prow of his ship, as I had seen it in dreams when I was younger than Kianna was now. “Seven stars.”

“Seven sisters,” Xandros said. “It’s fitting.”

Neas nodded. “What do you think?” he asked me.

I spread my hands. “This is statecraft, not prophecy, my king. I think your plan is wise.”

I walked to the edge and looked out across the green valley. There was too much to see. Too much potential, too many paths, and too many roads that might lead me back here to this place. There were too many shadows of the future here, shifting like seaweed in the currents. I could see nothing.

Neas nodded. “Then let it be so.” He opened up his wineskin. “Let us drink, my friends. To a new world.”

Xandros came and took it from his hand. “New worlds, Neas.”

I stood between them, all of our shoulders nearly touching, a tight triangle. “And to friendship,” I said.