The Dog and the Wolf (16 page)

“Will your city be grand like Ys?”

Verania sensed the wrenching within the man. “Nothing can every be so beautiful again, can it?” she said. “But what you make, sir, it will be
yours.”

Somehow Gratillonius could chuckle. “Well, I expect the architects will have more to say about it than this old soldier. If we can ever afford them, that is. Confluentes won’t become any Rome or Athens in my lifetime. I’ll be satisfied if we get it beyond these cob and log shacks we’re throwing up at first.”

Verania shook her head. “Confluentes. Couldn’t you find a prettier name?”

“It’s fine,” Salomon retorted. “It means what it is.”—the juncture of the rivers.

“Serviceable, anyhow, same as we want the town itself to be,” Gratillonius said. There had never been any formal decision about a name. It had simply grown from the mouths of soldiers and workmen.

The walk from Aquilo was short. Having crossed the bridge, the three found themselves looking at an expanse of open ground about a mile on a side, cut by a brook. The streams hemmed it in on the south and west, the woods on the north and east. Much of it was now mud churned by rain, boots, wheels, hoofs. Log pathways were crowded with traffic. Hammers banged, saws grided, frames lifted raw against heaven. The former tenant farms sheltered workers and their tools. Toward the northwest angle, beyond the fortification, the manor house of the Apuleii remained untouched. Dwindled by distance, its white walls and red roof, outbuildings, garden, orchard had a loneliness about them, like that of an old man who watches turmoil among strangers.

“We’ll go around,” Gratillonius said. “No sense in mucking up our feet.” He led the way to the south end of the eastern earthworks and thence north.

Peaceful was the meadow outside the ditch, before the forest rose green and white. When he stopped and was about to describe the function of the barriers, he noticed Verania gazing yonder. Her lips moved. He barely heard:
“Now leaf the woodlands, now is the year at its fairest.”

It stirred a vague memory. “What’s that?” he asked. She gave him a fawn’s startled glance. “What you were reciting. Poetry, hm?”

She colored and nodded. “A line from the third Eclogue of Vergilius, sir. He w-would have loved this landscape.”

He attempted humor. “Kind of cold and damp for an Italian, I should think.”

“Oh, but—the cornel blossoming. That’s what we ought to call your city,” she exclaimed. “The Meeting of Rivers Where the Dogwood Grows.”

Confluentes Cornuales, he rendered it in his mind. Not bad. He’d try using it and see if it caught on. The second part, at least, might well fit this entire country. Cornel was more than bonny. It supplied excellent wood for charcoal, skewers, handles, spokes, spearshafts: the needs of men.

Watch that! he reminded himself. You’re not in a real country any more. Ys is gone. You’re in a province of the Empire.

1

That was a chilly year, but toward midsummer a spell of heat set in and lasted a while. It brooded heavy on the day when Evirion met Nemeta. Forest leaves might have been cut out of sea-greened sheet copper. They roofed off
the hard blue sky, save where beams struck through from the west to glance off boles and speckle shadows. No breeze moved, no animal scampered, no bird chirred. Silence stretched like a drumhead waiting for a storm to beat thunder from it.

A spring trickled to keep filled a pool. Insects hovered above its dark stillness. Sedge and osier choked the banks, held off only by the lichenous mass of a boulder. Nearby loomed a giant of a beech. Moss and fungus grew on its trunk and on boughs fallen to earth. Lightning had long ago blasted it, with fire hollowing a cavern higher than a man.

There stood the girl. The charred wood obscured her thin, drably clad body; face and mane sprang forth, snow and flame. She carried a stick as long as herself, around the top of which she had bound the coiling mummy of a snake.

Brush crackled. Evirion pushed his way through, saw her, stopped and wiped from his brow the sweat that stained his tunic and surrounded him with its reek. “At last!” he growled. “I thought I’d never find you. Why’d you pick this, of all meeting places?”

“Because no one else would be nigh,” Nemeta answered. “They shun it, the fools. Power indwells here yet.”

Evirion frowned. A hand dropped to the shortsword at his belt. “What do you mean? How do you know?”

Her eyes glowed cat-green. “When the Celts first came hither,” she said low, “they piled the heads of slain foe-men around this tree as an offering to their Gods. Long afterward, the Romans trapped seven fleeing druids beneath it, murdered them, and took the skulls away. Taranis killed it as you see. But spirits linger. I have felt them touch me and heard them whisper.”

For all his size and strength, the young man must fight down unease. “We could have been quite alone in a mort of spots easier to reach.”

“’Twas you asked for a secret talk about an enterprise you have in mind. It put me to some trouble, slipping away without rousing questions. I had a right to set my terms.”

He considered her. Quiet but intense, she revealed
nothing of the hoyden—mostly sullen and short-spoken, sometimes shrill in futile fury—that they knew at Aquilo and Confluentes. “There is more in you than I supposed,” he murmured after a moment, “and already I understood you were the one whose help I should seek.” He looked around him. The depths of the wood might have concealed anything. “Aye, you may well hope you can call on—whatever you call on—for a blessing or an omen or—what, Nemeta?”

“Say what you want of me.”

“Come, shall we sit down?” he proposed. “I’ve brought wine.” He gestured at a leather flask opposite his sword and lowered himself to the ground. Fallen stuff crackled faintly.

She shook her head. “We’ll not water it from this spring. It too was once holy.” Nevertheless she joined him, though hunkering and at a slight distance, as if prepared to bound away should he make a wrong move.

Evirion drank without dilution, passed a hand over his clean-shaven chin, and smiled. It livened his rugged good looks. “You are an astonishing lass. Fifteen years, is that your age? But then, you’re the daughter of Forsquilis—” he turned somber—“and she was the last of the great witch-Queens in Ys.”

“I’ll never know what she knew.” The girl’s tone was stoic. “But I did learn a little from her ere the whelming. And others, like Tera—Give me the freedom to seek, and I may win back a small part of what went down with Ys.” Abruptly she colored. The big eyes lowered before him. “That is my dream.”

He seized the opening. “And what chance have you to make it real? What are you now, princess of Ys, but a scullion?”

“That’s … unfair. Everybody must do whatever they’re able. My father—we’re his housekeepers, Julia and I. Not menials. He has no wife: any more—”

“Did his Queens go to market, cook, scrub, mend, weave, hold back in the presence of men, look forward to marrying a rustic lout and farrowing for him?” Evirion gibed. “How glad are you these days, Nemeta?”

“What of you?” she counterattacked.

“Why, I am wretched,” he said without hesitation. “I, a Suffete born of the Baltisi, I who owned my ship and was her master on ventures from the Outer Isles to far Thule—since Ys drowned I’ve been a laborer. Oh, one who has some skill; I shape wood, rather than grub dirt or carry it in a hod; but I take my orders and swill my ration and at night lie on a clay floor in a wattle-and-daub hovel.” Rage broke free. “I’ve been flogged! Like a common, mutinous cockroach of a sailor, I was flogged.”

“I heard about that,” Nemeta said carefully, “but ’twas in snippets mixed together, and I’m not supposed to ask.”

“Aye, you’re among Romans and Christians, who keep their women meek. Hear the tale. Cadoc Himilco—you know him, surely, the dog who comes sniffing around the skirts of your sister—”

“He and Julia … like each other.”

“Well they might.
They’re
not ill content, I imagine. A sanctimonious pair like that should fit well into the new order.” Evirion tried to check his temper. “He and I were on the same task of building. He made a stupid botch. I reproved him. He struck me. Naturally I struck back, taught him a lesson. ’Twas three days till he was fit for work. And Grallon had me triced up and given three lashes. For defending myself!”

Nemeta tensed. “My father is, is a just man. Mostly. I heard Cadoc got one lash after he was well. You two shouldn’t have fought when there’s so much to do. Why did he hit you? ’Tisn’t like him.”

“I—ah, I do have a quick tongue. I called him a son of a pig.”

“With his own father newly dead. And you disabled him for three days. I wonder how stupid his mistake truly was.”

Evirion swallowed. Silence thickened. At last he said, “You defend your father more than I awaited.”

“We—oh—we quarrel, everybody knows we do, and of course when the Nine broke with him because of Dahut—” The stick wavered which Nemeta gripped. She rallied and challenged: “Say forth what you came to say, or go.”

“I’ve half a mind to do that, and leave you to your insolence and misery.”

Her tone softened. “Nay, please, abide. Let’s start afresh.”

His anger subsided. Eagerness rose in its place. “Hark, then. We’ve few skills that are of use any more, we who stood high in Ys. The commoners with us, they can doubtless lose themselves and their names in the ruck. Must folk like you and me? How shall we escape the trap? Wealth would free us, but we’ve lost everything that was ours.”

His voice dropped. He leaned close.
“It abides, Nemeta.”

She caught her breath.

He nodded. “Aye, in the ruins. Gold, silver, gems, coined money. The sea cannot have washed it all away—thus far—though it will erelong. Unless first we have courage to come reclaim our heritage.”

She shivered and drew signs in the simmering air. “The Gods destroyed Ys. We’re outcasts. ’Twould be death, or worse, to go back.”

“Are you certain?” he pressed. “How do you know? Tell me that, and I’ll let slip my hopes.”

“Why, ’tis—Well, I—” She stared from side to side. The red hair bristled outward.

“You suppose so,” he said. “Like everybody else. I think the dead there would welcome and aid whoever returned; for the aim is to keep alive some part of what they were. My thought is that I’ll leave shortly after harvest. Then nobody will much care or heed that this pair of working hands is gone. Having won the means at Ys, I’ll go on to Gesocribate and buy the best ship to be had. I’ll get as many Ysans for crewmen as possible. We’ll adventure forth again, our own masters again, and hell may have Rome!”

“Wha-what of me?”

“I’m not wholly reckless. I agree we know not what may haunt the desolation. I want a comrade who can sense, warn, do whatever is needful for our safety … amidst things of the Otherworld. This world I can handle myself.”

She made a fending motion. “But I’m a child! I have no such powers.”

“Mayhap you’ve more than you think, Nemeta. I’ve done my watching and my asking—more quietly, more patiently than most folk would believe me able to. You’ve
guessed where lost objects were, and been right. Your reams, such of them as you’ve spoken of, have a way of foreshadowing what happens. Ofttimes small objects fly through the air in houses where you are, though never a human hand cast them. When it seemed a prize cow of Apuleius’s would die in calving, you touched her and muttered and at once the birth went easily. These and more—aye, small happenings, but they’ve already made you talked about, made some people look at you askance. They wonder what you do when you walk solitary in the woods. I wonder too.”

“Naught, naught. I seek for Gods. M-my father lets me, he defends me in spite of—I’ve never really told him—” The girl straightened. “I won’t help any foe of his.”

“Still, you twain are not quite friends, eh? Well, he and I have been at odds, doubtless we shall be in future, but I wish him no ill.”

Her gaze steadied and brooded. “Is that true? I hear you have blamed him for the fall of Ys.”

He flushed. “I’ll leave him alone if he’ll do likewise for me. Let the Gods deal with him however he may deserve. Enough?”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Think of yourself,” he urged. “Think what your share of our gains will mean to your life. Is that not worth any hazard? Afterward—aye, a woman has curbs upon her in this Roman world, but you’ll have me for your friend, counselor, partner if you wish. Or even more, Nemeta.”

She tensed. Her words flew quick, not quite firm, yet underlaid with steeliness. “I am a maiden. No man shall own me, never. If I fare with you, first you must swear to honor that; and I will devise the oath you swear.”

The least bit daunted by her manner, he hesitated an instant, then replied: “So be it. Indeed you are your mother’s daughter. Now let us talk about how we may do this thing.”

2

Work being finished that had needed every hand at the colony, and repairs upon her being completed,
Osprey
could again go fishing. She left Aquilo on the ebb tide, down the Odita to the sea.

For a while the river broadened. Farther on it narrowed and twisted through such a series of bends that the crew, when they first headed upstream, had sometimes wondered if they did not have the wrong part of the waterway and had entered a mere branch. Only on oars could a craft her size or larger keep from going aground. Twice she passed a merchantman at anchor, both waiting for the tide to turn so they could proceed. Boats full of rowers stood by to tow them.

There was scant other occupation in these parts. The banks were high and mostly wooded. Where the terrain sloped more easily one might see cleared land, farm or pasture. Much of this looked new but was not. It had been abandoned and had reverted to wilderness during the evil years, then reclaimed once peace came back. “I wonder how long ’twill last, now Ys and her navy be down,” Maeloch said half aloud.

At the rivermouth a fisher hamlet huddled, and on the very edge of land the ruins of a Roman villa, sacked by pirates. Little of the buildings remained; folk of the neighborhood had quarried them for stone, tile, brick, glass. That was what became of nearly all the shells left behind when civilization receded.