Faustus returned to Isca to find Eirian chattily entertaining Centurion Galerius of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix, a lanky frame occupying a chair by the brazier and dripping on the tile; it was raining again, had started midway into the journey home.
Galerius unfolded himself when he saw Faustus and clapped an arm across his shoulders. “Your wife invited me to dinner. Have you taught Paullus how to cook yet?”
“Minimally,” Faustus said. “We rise in the world and have a housekeeper who can actually cook.”
“Where did you acquire such a treasure? And will you sell her?”
“She’s not a slave. You met her when you were here last. Gwladus. She lost her man in the north and of course they weren’t properly married so they wouldn’t even give her his back pay.”
“Miserable rule,” Galerius said, “not allowing them to marry. Doesn’t apply to officers, of course.” He looked sideways at Silvia sitting uncomfortably beside Eirian.
“Galerius has come to confer with your legate,” Eirian said, squelching that conversational direction. “And cadge dinner invitations. Paullus came home with a jar of oysters.”
Galerius was Faustus’s oldest friend in the legions and Eirian had been prepared from the beginning to like him if only for that. Now she treated him like a sibling. “My brothers were pigs,” she had said on adopting him. “I’ll take this one.”
“Where did Paullus get oysters?” Faustus asked.
Eirian said, “Reissued. I hope he didn’t mean it literally, since it’s oysters.” Reissued generally meant don’t ask where it came from. “I’m afraid they may be from the legate’s cold house.” Caecilius was notable for possessing an expensive cook and an extensive larder.
Galerius grinned. “Oysters don’t keep, anyway. Someone would have poisoned himself if they weren’t eaten soon. Paullus is a treasure.”
“What are we having besides oysters?” Faustus asked.
“Lamb. If the dog hasn’t snatched it,” Silvia said. “Gwladus chased him three times around the kitchen for it earlier and now he’s tied up or should be. I expect there’s a tooth mark or so on it, but she’s going to roast it.”
“We’ll pretend we don’t know that,” Galerius said solemnly and Silvia smiled. She actually liked Galerius. His only fault lay in being in the army. And possibly being too much like her brother. He was tall with a pleasant bony face and a shock of dun-colored hair. He wore a silvered parade cuirass, no doubt in honor of his visit with the legate; his helmet, adorned with a primus pilus’s crest of feathers, sat on a chair.
“Is there news from Deva?” Faustus asked. With Vitruvius Arvina, the Twentieth’s legate, in Eburacum with half the legion, Galerius and the legion’s broad-stripe tribune were the de facto commanders.
“Nothing solid,” Galerius said. “Tribune Terentius has acquired an extra air of authority in Arvina’s absence. There are rumors of overtures being made by the Silures to the Ordovices. Cadal is denying any such thing, and it may be true. Or they may have done so, and he told them to jump in the Styx. The old hatred between the Silures and the Ordovices is only occasionally overcome by hating us more.”
“Or Cadal may be sitting in Bryn Epona thinking up ways to put a spear up Rome’s ass on a permanent basis,” Faustus said. “What do the scouts say?”
“They can’t find anything solid, either. They don’t think the grain and iron Caecilius is worried about is coming through Ordovice territory. Aurelius Rotri wanted to go feral and nose about and Terentius squashed that on the grounds that if he’s known to the northern tribes it’s not safe to assume he won’t be recognized by the southern ones, which I doubt. Terentius just thinks Rotri lacks discipline and wants him shaven and brought up to standard.”
“Nor is Rotri ever going to be happy in a uniform,” Eirian said. Rotri had been one of the border wolves with whom she had fled her islands. That venture had nearly gotten them all killed and as it was they had lost Rotri’s partner. Eirian felt oddly maternal about Rotri, now restlessly posted back to his home legion.
“Rotri serves Rome,” Galerius said.
She nodded. That was what Faustus said about orders he didn’t like. Liking didn’t matter.
In the morning, both men brought their reports to Caecilius, Galerius giving his opinion at the end of his that the Ordovices were waiting to see which way the wind blew.
“Have you ever encountered this thing?” Caecilius asked him. For the time being the cat-faced god resided in the Principia where it made the junior officers nervous. Caecilius too probably but he refused to acknowledge it.
Galerius studied the whiskered face and half torso that emerged from the stone as if still in the process of unearthing itself. “Not as such. There are local gods all over the place but nothing like this one that I’ve heard of. A god with no people? Then who in Jupiter’s name thought him up?”
Caecilius listened to the rain now sheeting off the Principia roof. “This damn island thought him up. Or he thought it up.”
That struck Faustus as possible. The genius loci of a place was more the place itself than an inhabitant.
“Very well. Find it a spot near where we unearthed it and make it an altar,” Caecilius told Faustus. “Let the Silures know we respect it.”
“Yes, sir. Brick? And should there be an inscription?”
“The Legate Aulus Caecilius placed this altar here to scare the shit out of his legion,” Galerius suggested.
“Dedicated to Cath Mawr,” Caecilius said, “however you spell that, Aulus Caecilius of the Second Augusta set this up.” He nodded at the scribe who had been busily taking notes. The scribe handed the tablet to Faustus. “Brick, with a stone top and the plaque on the front.”
“Yes, sir.” Faustus saluted. Galerius began to follow him out.
“Don’t go just yet, Centurion,” Caecilius said to Galerius. “We are going to practice diplomacy. Formal recognition of this new king is required for both manners and intimidation. I expect you to remain at Isca while we do so to let the Silures understand that we still have a presence in their neighbors’ territory.”
“Indeed, sir.” Galerius saluted.
The legate’s plans for diplomacy were elaborate.
“He’s ordered up a state banquet,” Galerius informed Faustus while Faustus supervised the building of a brick pillar for Cath Mawr under a dripping awning. “The Silures will instantly become tractable in the face of an empire that can produce a swan baked inside a peacock.”
“He just wants a good look at Loarn. And for Loarn to have a good look at us. Where would he get a peacock?” Faustus eyed the squat brick pillar in progress. “That’s out of true. Drop a line and you’ll see.”
“And a pastry boat,” Galerius said as the crew pulled off the top level, scraping away the wet mortar. “I left out the boat.”
“He sent the invitation around this morning,” Faustus said. “More of a command, actually. All cohort officers, with a few presentable juniors and auxiliary prefects. I am to bring my wife and sister.”
Galerius crouched under the awning. “It appears that Loarn has gone back to Porth Cerrig. A courier took the invitation there, for him and such of his lords as he chooses to bring. There isn’t a queen, I understand. What will he do with the swan if Loarn tells the courier to stick his invitation in his ass?”
“He won’t,” Faustus said. “Anyone who can deal with the Demetae and Cadal, who all hate him, can make use of a state dinner with us.” He eyed the brickwork. “Much better. One more layer and then leave it to cure. If it ever does.” He looked disapprovingly at the drizzling sky. “This thing has to be up by the legate’s big show, so you’d better put a tent over it. This isn’t enough cover if it really rains.”
“Is that cat thing still in the Principia, sir?” the crew leader asked.
“Yes, and I imagine the legate wants it not to be there, so that’s another reason to get on with it. I’m told it doesn’t like to be under a roof.”
The legionary opened his mouth to ask him who had told him that before the answer appeared to come to him. There were rumors about the primus pilus and the little hill people, some of them wild enough to be obviously false to anyone with a brain, but some of them possibly true. What was known was that he didn’t take kindly to discussion of them.
“When you’ve got it under wraps, get into your marching kit,” Faustus told him. “The legate intends to parade the legion to impress the king of the Silures and we’re going to drill this afternoon so that if anyone falls over his pilum in front of the reviewing stand, it won’t be my cohort.”
The rest of the week was occupied with practice drill for the entire legion, polishing of parade kit and weapons, and uncovering their scarlet shields to touch up the winged lightning and Capricorn badge of the Second Augusta. Galerius, who had no responsibilities other than to sit on the reviewing stand with the legate and the new king, occupied himself with playing latrunculi with Lucius.
“You’re beating me half the time now,” he said approvingly.
“Uncle Faustus plays with me,” Lucius said. “And Septimus, and some of the men. Uncle says never play with the frontier scouts,” he added.
“Uncle is quite right,” Galerius said. He slid a sideways glance at Silvia. “Don’t throw dice with them either. That’s even more important.”
“Lucius is not throwing dice with anyone,” Silvia said firmly. “Particularly not the soldiers. Please don’t encourage his following them about.”
“I won’t if you’ll stop acting as if we all have fleas,” Galerius said.
“Silvia,” Eirian said before she could snap at him, “show me how to drape my gown the way you said the empress does. It keeps getting twisted somehow.”
“Come in your room then,” Silvia said agreeably. “It’s very pretty when you get it pinned. Of course, the fashion may have changed by now, and I was never actually at court, but this is what my husband’s cousins showed me.”
Eirian pulled off her plain gown and slipped the seawater blue folds of the new one over her head. “When I try it, it always looks like something’s nesting in it.”
“This is how it’s done,” Silvia said, deftly pleating the cloth between her fingers. She pushed the pin home. “And don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”
“Well, I really did want to know,” Eirian said, unrepentant. “I’ve never been to a banquet like this before, just the legate’s dinners. And I’ve felt out of place enough at those.”
“Do you still?” A few of the other wives had been cool, whispering audibly about unwise marriages.
“Not as much now. I watched you and did what you did. Also, Faustus outranks most of their husbands. When I realized that, it helped. Some of them are nice.”
“Those are the wives who actually want to be here,” Silvia said. “The ones who thrive on following the legion. The snooty ones are the ones like me, I’m afraid.”
“Who don’t want to be here,” Eirian said. “But you’ve always been nice to me.”
“I’m not sure I was at first,” Silvia said. “I wasn’t being nice to anyone, to be fair.”
“You could start being nice to Galerius.”
“I am nice to him,” Silvia said indignantly. “But I’m not going to marry him, if that’s what you mean by nice.”
“Show me how to do my hair, then. I want to make Faustus proud.”
Silvia took a comb and studied Eirian’s hair. “From now on, I am not going to do something just because the paterfamilias tells me to,” she muttered. “And I learned that from you.” She pulled the pale knot out of its pins. “Let’s try a double band and curls. I have some blue silk ribbon that will set that off.”
After a reasonably successful experiment with the curling tongs, Silvia brought out her box of face paint. Eirian had resisted paint until now, but Silvia showed her how to use a touch on cheeks, lips, and eyelids: “Just enough to be fashionable but not tasteless.”
“It looks lovely on you, but I keep thinking of that tribune’s wife who visited last year,” Eirian said, examining herself in the mirror. “Faustus would go into a decline if he saw me like that. He said she looked like a theater mask.”
“That is how you don’t do it.”
“What do you think kept her hair up?” The tribune’s wife had worn the beehive of curls made popular by the empress.
“Glue,” Silvia said. “That was a wig. Didn’t you wonder where she got red hair?”
They pooled their jewelry, trading dress pins and eardrops, and felt pleased with the results. Despite the uncertainty of the political situation, the parade drill and the banquet promised more entertainment than anything since they had come to Isca.
“What do you think the Silure women will wear?” Silvia asked Eirian.
“A lot of gold,” Eirian said. “They all will. And bright colors.” Bright dye was expensive, another way to show wealth. “If any women are coming. I don’t know that they will. The king isn’t married. One of his captains is a woman though. Tribune Marcellinus told me. I don’t think he approved.”
“I hope she comes,” Silvia said. “I would like to see a woman who can make Tribune Marcellinus pay attention to her. He treats me like Faustus’s pet.”
“Perhaps I should mention the difference between Tribune Marcellinus and Centurion Galerius,” Eirian said.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t.”
The parade drill and banquet were held in Venta Silurum. Caecilius had no intention of inviting the Silures into Isca Fortress to take note of its defenses. Nor would the Silure king have allowed himself to be trapped behind its walls.
The rain obligingly stopped, and Sol gave them one of those pure, clear autumn days when everything seemed just a little brighter, a little sharper, a little more imminent, something important waiting to happen. A flock of crows, aware that marching soldiers often meant corpses, gathered at a distance to watch from the yellow branches of an ash tree. “You’re going to be disappointed,” Faustus told them.
The drill field was marked out by stakes alongside the red and gold vexilla of the Second Augusta. Both Tribune Marcellinus and Centurion Galerius were in attendance, seated on the reviewing stand with the legate. Loarn, new king of the Silures, sat beside his sister Iorwen, who was high priestess of her tribe or something close to that, the human habitation of the Goddess on earth. Five of the king’s captains accompanied them, including the woman. They wore brightly checkered breeches and fine leather boots, throats and arms encircled – as Eirian had predicted – with gold. Their heavy cloaks were lined with fox fur or sheep’s wool. The Roman officers’ wives, allotted seats at the edges of the platform, peered around each other to stare at them.
Faustus was resplendent in a silvered cuirass strung with all his medals, including the new gilded version of the grass crown earned in the north. The sun reflected from the legion arrayed behind him as they saluted the reviewing stand, rank upon rank of polished steel and scarlet parade crests.
Faustus lifted a hand, his cornicen put the trumpet to his mouth, and the square melted seamlessly into an arc. At each call, they changed formation. Six ranks and then nine, opening down the center to surround an invisible enemy, drawing together in a pig’s head wedge to drive through the same unseen ranks; each maneuver flawless, shields locked or overhead, pila upright or leveled. To Eirian it always looked as if they would tangle themselves, lose count, the formation collapsing in on itself, but they never did. It was for this precision that Faustus drilled his cohort in all weather, the discipline that had kept his desperate auxiliaries together in the north and held off five times their number. He had lost two-thirds of them in doing it. That was where the grass crown had come from, and she knew that he nearly wept every time he looked at it.
At the end of their drill the cohorts reformed into parade ranks and presented themselves to the legate with a crashing salute, four thousand fists to plated chests. Then they spread out to ring the parade ground while the cavalry took their place.
Two hundred and fifty riders – there should have been three hundred – were adorned in the elaborate sports armor brought out only for cavalry games. Their helmets, crested with bright feathers, bore molded curls or horns and silvered human faces that allowed only small slits for vision, and they carried shields painted with scenes from famous battles. Their troop horses, two hands taller than native ponies, wore bridles fitted with gilded eye guards, and gleaming coats of scale that covered breast and flanks. Lucius, sitting with his mother, transferred his allegiance immediately to the cavalry.
Two teams with wooden spears wove through each other’s lines in close formation, tapping shields with the light lances, wheeling, coming about again in a different pattern, long red and blue standards streaming behind them. They crossed and re-crossed, splitting down the middle, forming again, each hoofbeat precisely placed, riders with no peripheral vision trusting completely to their mounts and the drill. It was another gaudy imitation of war, but it said plainly what the men and horses executing those maneuvers were capable of in earnest, what meal they could leave for the carrion crows if they wished.
The legate’s banquet was laid in the Venta basilica, arranged in Roman fashion amid the red sandstone columns of its great hall. Couches wide enough for two people and each were set on the geometric mosaic of the floor, their heads facing a long table on which Caecilius’s slaves, and others borrowed from his officers, placed and removed dishes as they were sampled, and filled silver cups from pitchers of wine and water to each diner’s preference. There was no peacock, but a roasted goose sailed majestically on a pastry boat in an ocean of custard at the center of the table, and servers passed trays with balls of spiced lamb and dormice in lettuce leaves.
Caecilius’s cook, in a burst of ambition, had proposed a temple to Jupiter made of fish paste and cheese but it had been decided against when Faustus suggested as tactfully as possible that the Britons usually liked their food to look like food. What they made of the goose on its custard sea he wasn’t certain, but the slaves expertly dismembered it and offered slices and dollops of custard to each diner; the legate had provided spoons at each place in case guests did not bring their own.
The Silure delegation reclined somewhat uncomfortably on their couches, that not being a British habit. Except for one, they spoke Latin in varying degrees of fluency and attempted polite conversation over the meal with the Romans opposite them. The exception confined himself to eating and looking as if he wished to be elsewhere.
The king mark, newly tattooed on Loarn’s forehead, stood out from skin that was still slightly reddened from the marking. He shared his couch with his sister Iorwen, with Llamrei and the other captains to either side of them. Caecilius and Tribune Marcellinus were opposite with Faustus and Eirian on their left, then Silvia and Galerius. Silvia’s annoyance at sharing a couch with Galerius was tempered by the chance to get a good look at the Silures. Loarn was worth looking at, Faustus admitted. Under the red-gold crown his hair fell over his shoulders, cut at the length that his captains wore theirs, a reminder that he had been one of them until Aedden’s death. His shirt was checkered blue and green wool, and his hands heavy with gold rings. Below the king mark were the older patterns of the Silure royal house. His sister wore a heavy gold collar and a thin gold fillet in dark hair that fell to her waist. A petal-shaped line of blue tattooing showed above the neck of a gown dyed sunset yellow and trimmed with bright stitching. The Silures stood out like a flock of multicolored birds against a sea of Roman military scarlet.
“I hope your ride from Porth Cerrig was pleasant,” Caecilius said as the wine cups were filled. “The weather is fair for a change, no doubt in your honor. A welcome from Jupiter himself.”
“Possibly,” Loarn said. “Or from the stone god whose altar we saw as we rode past your fort.”
“Perhaps so,” Caecilius admitted. “I wondered whether you had seen him.”
“We saw him. Where did you come by so ancient a thing?”
“He came to us. He unearthed himself with the last tremor.”
“And you built him an altar?”
“We knew him to be yours, king,” Caecilius said. “And thus gave him honor.”
“He is,” Iorwen said. “And he is not. Cath Mawr is the land’s. I would be careful of him if I were you.”
“Ah. It was Centurion Valerianus who found him.” Caecilius nodded at Faustus. “I wondered if it was because he is kin to your people.”
Loarn raised dark eyebrows. “Kin to us?”
Caecilius rarely said anything he hadn’t thought through first. But why he had decided to tell them this, Faustus wasn’t sure. It was possible he was just digging, to see what happened. “My mother was Silure,” he said, because an answer seemed required. “She was taken captive when Claudius Caesar was emperor. My father bought her to keep house.”
“And married her?” Llamrei asked.
“Yes,” Faustus told her. “I wouldn’t be eligible for the army, else.”
“Is she still living?” Loarn asked.
“She died over a dozen years ago.” Paullus came by with a tray of the little fattened dormice that were considered a delicacy. Faustus took one, thinking about what he should or shouldn’t tell Loarn.
Llamrei cocked her head, studying him. She looked unnervingly like a raven when she did that. A raven in a deep green gown. She had put on women’s clothing for the banquet. “Do you resemble her?”
“Not so much as my sister does.” Faustus glanced at Silvia who gave Llamrei and the king each a respectful nod.
“You are very alike,” Loarn said, studying Silvia. “And you are kin to us? What was your mother called?”
“Gaia,” Silvia told him.
“Our father named her that,” Faustus said. It had irritated him when he was old enough to think about it. Silvius Valerianus might as well have called her Woman. Gaia was the default name for any female. Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia was the marriage vow. It meant all men, all women.
“And her true name?” Iorwen asked him.
“Guennola,” Faustus said. It wouldn’t matter with her long dead, but she deserved that at least.
There was a small silence, he thought. Llamrei said, “We are glad to know her fate,” so quickly that it was hard to tell.
“How came you to follow your brother to Britain?” Loarn asked Silvia.
Silvia set down the ball of lamb she had been nibbling. “I was widowed,” she said, “and my husband left me nothing but my son. So we are come to be a burden to my brother.”
“Certainly not a burden,” Faustus said. “You know that I am glad to have you both.”
“You have a son?” Llamrei asked.
“Lucius. He’s only twelve.” Too young for adult banquets. Lucius had been sent back to Isca with Gwladus, under protest, when the rest of the legion returned to quarters.
“Britain bids you welcome,” Loarn told Silvia. “It is a great thing to have our own come home.”
Llamrei and Iorwen both gave him a swift look and then returned their attention to their plates.
“Did you know our mother?” Silvia asked.
“No,” Llamrei said abruptly. “It was a long time ago, that war.”
“And you and she were very young,” Loarn said to Llamrei. “War either erases memory or cements it.” He took a piece of the roast goose on the end of his knife and bit into it.
“And you were not born,” Llamrei said.
Iorwen said to Faustus, “Tell us how you found Cath Mawr. I am thinking it is important that he has come out of the earth just now.”
“I didn’t really find him,” Faustus said. “The stone surfaced after the last tremor where my men had been digging. I doubt he came intentionally to me.”
“I would not be certain,” Iorwen said. “You knew him.”
“Only from my mother,” Faustus said. “Only nursery tales. She called him Old Cat.”
“Still, he has come to the one who would know him. I will ask the Goddess what that means.”
Llamrei said, “When the Goddess on earth has deciphered that message, the king must hear it.” She spoke a little more forcefully than Faustus expected, and he saw that she was not watching Iorwen, but Loarn, who was watching Silvia.
Faustus too noted where the king’s eyes kept landing as the banquet proceeded with a patina of root vegetables from the legate’s personal garden, three roast sucking pigs, hare in sauce, and oysters with lovage and honey.
Eirian held her cup up to be refilled as a slave passed with the pitchers. Her sleeve fell away to show the edges of blue clan marks on pale skin.
Iorwen asked, “Are you British also, lady?”
“Cornovii,” Eirian said. “From the Orcades.”
Iorwen studied her. “The sea people. You are a very long way from home.”
“Home is with my husband’s legion.” Eirian scraped her spoon through the sauce on her plate and waited to see where the conversation was going.
“Your children will be three parts British,” Iorwen said. “The sea people are ours despite all.” She looked at Faustus. “You may wish to rule us, but we will absorb you.”
“We have no children as yet,” Faustus said, refusing to rise to that bait.
“When you do, Centurion, remember what I said.”
The banquet ended with sweet wine cake and stuffed dates. The Britons ate hungrily and drank freely, and mostly appeared to be enjoying themselves. But Faustus doubted that they were swayed to abandon any plans for insurrection by the elegance of the legate’s table. And Loarn kept looking at Silvia.
At the end the legate rose to offer his guests a formal goodnight. “As representative of the emperor Caesar Domitianus Augustus, I tender Rome’s good wishes to you, lord of the Silures, on your accession to the kingship. May the peace and friendship born of the treaty with Aedden ap Culwych continue to benefit both Rome and Britain.”
“Aedden ap Culwych was a man of honor even in death,” Loarn said.
Caecilius’s expression indicated that he found that response lacking, but he said, “May the gods give you safe journey back to Porth Cerrig, King.”
The Silures had been given lodging in Venta’s best inn, with the legate politely housing his own party in less luxurious quarters. The beds were reasonably free of fleas but not of lumps and Silvia rose before the rest, enjoying the sensation of having nothing in particular to do – Lucius was with Gwladus at Isca, and so were her spindle and distaff, along with any urge to wash the bed linens or clean out the oven. The inn had a small garden that let onto a wheel-rutted path that skirted the foggy woods beyond yesterday’s parade ground before it joined the Isca road. She pulled her mantle around her against the early morning chill and set out for a solitary walk.
The sky was just pearling above the tree line and the birds singing the morning up. The crows that had watched the parade drill were gleaning someone’s grain field on the other side of the path, industrious black shapes in the mist busy about the business of being crows. What on earth was she going to do? Manlius dying had upended her life, but somehow she felt less and less that if some god gave her the chance, she would buy him back again – go down into the Underworld like Orpheus to bring him out. Orpheus had looked back and lost his Eurydice, and more and more Silvia suspected that Orpheus had just changed his mind. No doubt she had loved Manlius as she had been instructed to, but less and less did she want him back. What she did want was entirely another question.
Silvia heard footsteps on the path behind her and turned to see, of all people, the Silures’ new king.
“Forgive me if I startled you, lady.” He wore traveling clothes of plain brown wool and heavy wolfskin boots.
“Good morning,” Silvia said. “I don’t know what to call you,” she added.
“Loarn,” he said. “I am Loarn ap Alwyn, but no one calls me that except when they set the crown on my head at Dinas Tomen. And you?”
She realized that no one had told him her name last night. She was Faustus’s sister; that encapsulated her whole identity now that she wasn’t Manlius’s wife. “Silvia.”
“Only Silvia?” Her brother had three names.
“Just Silvia. Roman girls have their father’s name. If I had sisters, they would be Silvia too.” She felt an irritable urge to be something more now.
“That sounds most confusing.” Loarn had looked solemn all last night and now he smiled suddenly. Manlius had been ruddy faced and tall, always clean-shaven, brown hair cropped Roman fashion to less than a finger’s length. The king of the Silures wore his dark hair long about his shoulders, his upper lip adorned with a luxuriant mustache. Beneath the king mark on his brow, older patterns marked his cheeks. He was taller than she but not by much. He fell into step beside her.
“Daughters in the same family are given different cognomina,” she told him. “Or just Silvia Prima and Silvia Secunda.” She had never been given a second name as there had been no need to distinguish her from anyone else.
“What does your brother call you?”
“He used to call me Goat’s Butt when we were small,” she said, and he laughed. “Now he calls me Silvia.”
“I called Iorwen Pig Face,” he said. “Until she became Goddess on earth. Then I thought I had best stop.”
“What is the Goddess on earth?”
“She becomes the vessel for the Goddess, so that the Goddess may speak through her. It is always someone of the royal house and it is for life.”
“That sounds frightening.” A close connection to any god was frightening, let alone allowing one to inhabit you.
“It is,” Loarn said. “But it fell to her because there was no one else. As the kingship fell to me.”
“Did you not want it?” Silvia asked.
“It did not matter. We were the last of the royal house in any line, after… after the ones lost in the wars.”
The mist had lifted as they walked. The sun was beginning to come over the trees and their shadow dappled the path, crossing and recrossing the rutted ghosts of old wagon wheels. The trees’ image flickered across Loarn’s face too so that it was hard to read his expression.
“My father was very angry when my brother asked to join the army,” Silvia said. “He was supposed to run our farm because he was the last boy. Our older brother drowned when we were young, so Faustus was the heir whether he wanted to be or not.”
“But he defied him?” Loarn asked.
“Not until after Father died,” Silvia said. “Faustus was nineteen that year and so restless. I don’t know what he would have done if Father had lived.”
“Was the farm more important than what its children wanted for themselves?”
“Father thought it was,” Silvia said. “And I did, too. Now I don’t know.”
“Would you like to see your mother’s land?” Loarn asked. “The land I was given whether I would or no?”
“We are in it, aren’t we?”
“Not this.” He waved his hand dismissively at the Roman walls and tiled roofs of Venta Silurum, the broad expanse of the forum with the shadow columns of the basilica slanting across it.
“My brother says he will take me to Deva,” Silvia said.
“That is the Ordovices’ country, not hers. You should come to Porth Cerrig.”
“I don’t think my brother would let me.” She was positive he wouldn’t.
“It seems unreasonable that he should see your mother’s land while you cannot.”
“He sees it from the head of a patrol column,” she pointed out.
“Indeed,” Loarn said.
They had come nearly to the where the path joined the Isca road. “We should turn back,” Silvia said. “He will worry.”
She was answered by hoofbeats and the rattle of chariot wheels. Llamrei was behind a pair of black ponies, in breeches again and heavy boots like Loarn’s. “The centurion is looking for his sister!” she snapped.