The Greener Shore (37 page)

I almost dropped the torch.

chapter
XXV

O
N RARE OCCASIONS SURPRISE CAN TRANSCEND SHOCK, AND SO
it was with me. When I discovered a male Roman where I expected to find my beautifully remembered daughter my brain did not freeze, it raced, offering me a dozen fantastic explanations. None of them remotely feasible.

“Who are you?” I demanded in Latin.

Briga was shouting at me, shouting at him, frantic with distress. “Where’s Maia, what’s he done with her? What have you done with her! I want my daughter!” Her sublime serenity was a thing of the past.

The Roman gaped at us.

Labraid was struggling to his feet. “We don’t have her, Ainvar.”

I lost control of my own emotions then. “You went to get her, didn’t you?” I yelled at him. “What happened? Where is she? Who’s this Roman maggot and what’s he done with her? Tell me!” I grabbed Labraid by the shoulders; he winced for the second time.

From Cormiac’s bed a faint voice said, “Don’t blame them, Ainvar. It couldn’t be helped. We never found Maia.”

Briga began to cry. Little silent sobs, with her hands over her mouth.

“All right.” I made myself take a slow, deep breath. “All right. Tell us everything. Not you, Labraid. Cormiac.”

Before the Red Wolf could summon breath to speak, Briga lowered her hands. Her voice was shaky but resolute. “Not now, Ainvar. We’re exhausted and these lads are ill. What matters now is that they’ve come back to us; explanations can wait. I’ll do what I can to make them more comfortable and then we should let them sleep.”

It was a brave and a compassionate decision on her part. Briga has always been both.

The old couple who were caring for the three injured men offered us their hospitality as well, which was fortunate because there was no room left in the chieftain’s lodge. The old woman was as thin as her shadow. Her husband was so deaf he did not speak, he shouted. Neither seemed to mind having more mouths to feed. We were given a generous meal of gray mullet, bass, and a boiled seaweed called “bladderwrack.” When we finished eating I lay down on a pallet made of rushes piled with blankets and invited my wife into my arms. Tired as we were, neither of us slept much. Briga was making preparations for tomorrow in her head, while in mine I was puzzling over a new mystery.

When he first saw us, Rígan had looked relieved even before we identified ourselves. Which meant we were not what he was expecting.

What had he been expecting?

And what had made that fearful cry?

At some time I must have fallen asleep, because I awoke in the morning so stiff I could hardly move. My body was a log with no give in it. I ached in places I never knew existed. Getting to my feet was prolonged torture, with new discoveries of pain every time I moved.

If anyone needed Briga’s ministrations at that moment, I did. She, however, was totally occupied with caring for the invalids. I saw her bending over Cormiac’s bed. Moving like a thousand-year-old man, I creaked across the lodge to her side. “How are they this morning?”

“Better, now that you’re here,” the Red Wolf replied with his eyes fixed on my senior wife. His voice was minimally stronger, and as deep as ever. He was still lying down, though both Labraid and the Roman were up. They sat on either side of the hearth, eating a fish stew redolent of the sea.

Daylight streaming through the doorway gave me a clearer view of the Roman. In my time I had seen far too many of his race; to me they were simply The Enemy; faceless, shapeless, characterless. Repellent.

But on his own, the Roman became an individual. I guessed him to be about ten years younger than my true age. More or less. All Romans looked alike to me so I could not be sure.

Naturally bony, but far less thin than our young men, he appeared quite fit. His sleeveless tunic revealed overdeveloped musculature in his shoulders and arms—especially the right one, the sword arm. A jagged white scar on his forehead and a crooked jaw that had been broken some time in the past confirmed my suspicion that he was a warrior.

When our eyes met he said, in the language of Latium, “I am Probus Seggo, son of Justinius, magistrate of Genova.” In spite of his battered appearance the Latin he spoke was clear and precise, unlike the slurred gutturals of ordinary Roman foot soldiers.

“Your family means nothing to me,” I said. “What are you doing with Cormiac and Labraid?”

Careful not to twist his upper body, Probus set his bowl to one side. “I grew up in Genova, and—”

I raised one hand to stop him. “I don’t want your personal history. Just an answer to my question.”

“But Genova is part of the answer. The city is a seaport on the Mediterranean”—he gave the Mid-Earth Sea its Latin name—“and—”

“I’m familiar with the place,” I snapped, and stopped there. You should never tell the enemy more than he needs to know.

When Caesar’s campaign in Gaul was just getting under way I had traveled through Latium with Vercingetorix. Disguised as merchants, we had crossed the land of the Ligurians and ventured southward along the coast toward Rome. Our intention had been to assess the forces arrayed against us. How long ago that seemed!

And how woefully we had underestimated the intentions of the abominable Caesar.

To Cormiac I said, “It’s hard to believe you two went all the way to Genova.”

“We didn’t. On our own, we got only as far as the channel between Albion and Gaul.”

“Where did you get a boat?”

Labraid answered; indicating, with an airy wave of his hand, the precincts of Dubh Linn. “Oh, that was easy, Ainvar. With my skills of persuasion we acquired a seaworthy fishing vessel and several experienced boatmen so we didn’t have to do all the work ourselves.”

“That’s not what happened,” Cormiac interjected.

“Ssssh,” said Briga. “Lie still while I clean your wounds.”

“And close your mouth to keep your teeth warm,” Labraid added. The old animosity had surfaced between them, then; I was hardly surprised. Many days spent together in close quarters will make lifelong friends or lifelong enemies.

“Then you’d best tell me what did happen, Labraid.”

My firm tone dampened his bravado. Slightly. “Well, Ainvar, we didn’t exactly get our boat here. Rígan’s people offered us hospitality when we arrived, but they claimed they had no boats to spare.”

“Because you demanded one instead of requesting it,” said the voice from the bed.

Labraid ignored him. “Anyway, we crossed the Liffey at the Ford of the Hurdles and—”

“Ford of the Hurdles?”

“The locals have made a sort of causeway to provide safe footing for their sheep when they drive them across the Liffey. It’s made of layers of woven panels they call ‘hurdles.’ It works well; we went from one bank to the other without getting wet. The tribe on the north side of the Liffey were far more generous than Rígan’s.”

“Generous after we paid them,” the Red Wolf commented.

“Keep still,” said Briga. “Or must I tie you down?”

“You can put him out in the cold for all I care,” Labraid said. “That’ll quiet him down.”

I ignored the remark. “Tell me how you paid for the boat, Labraid.”

He rolled his eyes in my senior wife’s direction. “We, ah, took a few valuables with us when we left the clanhold.”

“Not we; you,” said the voice from the bed. “He took your bowls.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Briga. “My enameled bowls!”

“It was none of my doing,” Cormiac assured her. “Labraid insisted on doing all the negotiating. I didn’t know we had the bowls with us until he pulled them out of his pack to display.”

“I’d cleverly held them back,” said Labraid, “to use as a final bargaining tool. It worked too, just as I thought it would. The tribe on the north bank of the Liffey had never seen anything like those bowls. They thought they were beautiful.”

“They
were
beautiful,” mourned Briga. “How could you steal them from me?”

“I didn’t think you’d give them to me if I asked for them,” he replied, unabashed.

It was time to move the conversation on. “So, Labraid, you traded my wife’s bowls for a boat and crew?”

“The bowls, and some other things. You know.” Another vague wave of the hand.

This was not the time to ask what else he had stolen, or from whom. The matter would be dealt with later and restitution made. I could not condone dishonorable behavior; we were Slea Leathan.

“Go on, Labraid. You acquired a boat. What happened next?”

“We set sail for the east.”

“Did you make landfall on Albion?”

“We didn’t need to. We took fresh water aboard at Mona,” said the voice from the bed.

Mona!
The name evoked a memory long buried beneath the wreckage of our lives. Menua, my teacher, had trained at the great druidical college on Mona. In my youth I heard him speak of the dark groves of that island, the “sacred gloom” in which extraordinary sacrifices were offered and unparalleled transactions with the Otherworld concluded.

Foolishly, I had never asked Menua the location of the island. I suppose I was too eager to get on with magic of my own. Our lives are shaped by the questions we ask. And even more important, by the questions we fail to ask.

When my clan fled Gaul the sacred island of the druids might have given us refuge, yet by that time I had forgotten about it entirely.

Years of constant anxiety can erode the mind.

“Mona lies to the west of Albion,” Labraid said, “and almost in a direct line from here. It was my idea to go ashore. We obtained enough water to avoid landing on Albion at all. Wasn’t that clever? I’m not just a warrior, Ainvar, I can make plans as well as any—”

I cut across Labraid’s self-congratulatory spate to ask Cormiac if there were still druids on Mona.

Before he could reply, Probus said in Latin, “They are the only permanent inhabitants of the island.”

I was startled to realize the Roman understood my language. “What do you know of Mona?” I asked him in Latin.

“Probus went there to spy on the druids,” intoned the voice from the bed.

My head was concentrating on the ramifications of the Roman’s revelation. If he was familiar with the basic tongue of the Celts I would no longer have to struggle along in my half-forgotten Latin. Using the dialect of the Slea Leathan, I asked, “Can you understand what I’m saying now?”

He nodded assent.

“And were you a spy?”

“I was an officer in the army of Rome,” he replied with dignity, effortlessly switching between languages. His accent was exotic but comprehensible. “Our purpose was to extend the benefits of our civilization to the rest of the world.”

“Pompous ass,” Labraid remarked. He said it with a smile, though, as if this were an old joke between them.

Probus grinned back at him. “Barbarian savage,” he retorted amiably.

Not the least of my surprises that day was the discovery that Labraid had made a friend. Apparently not everyone found him as obnoxious as I did. Of course, the friend was a Roman, and they have no judgment when it comes to a man’s character.

While Briga completed her examination of Cormiac I asked Probus, “How is it that you can speak our language?”

“As I tried to explain before, my father was the magistrate of Genova.”

My head tardily realized that Probus might not be a Roman after all; not a citizen of Rome, that is. But there was no doubt he belonged to the Latin race. As far as I was concerned, they were all Romans and equally guilty. Maggots swarming over the corpse of Gaul.

Probus said, “Growing up in and around a major seaport, I met many foreigners. I had been born with a gift for languages, so by the time I could walk I was chattering away with the barbarian traders. I can understand most of the Gaulish tribes, in fact, though a few sound like stones rattling in my ear.”

This was the second time he had referred to our people as barbarians. Labraid did not seem to mind; in fact, he thought it funny. I was deeply insulted. “Barbarian” is a term the Hellenes apply without prejudice to any who do not speak Greek, but the Romans use the word as a pejorative. I clenched my teeth and remained silent, determined to follow this mystery to its unraveling.

“When I became a man,” Probus continued, “I refused to enter my father’s profession. I was too fond of adventure to sit on a bench all day adjudicating petty quarrels. My father was furious with me, but my mother persuaded him to purchase a commission for me in one of the Roman legions—which conferred automatic Roman citizenship.”

So Probus was a Roman after all.

“I was posted to Gaul,” he said, “where I served under Lieutenant-General Antistius Reginus.”

Sometimes the body reacts before the head. My fingers scrabbled for the knife in my belt. Reginus had led the most brutal of the legions involved in the siege of Alesia.

Probus was indeed a warrior. His sharp eyes observed the gesture before my head was aware of it. “That will not be necessary, Ainvar. I am a deserter from the army of Rome, as your kinsmen will testify.”