The Rhenus looked peaceful enough: fat fields checkered and sleeping under the August sun, and here and there the lean shape of a patrol galley slipping by along the river. Fields on the eastern bank had been taken under the plow as well, Forst saw, and much of the timber cleared. This was the Agri Decumates, the triangle of land between the upper reaches of the Rhenus and the Danuvius that the Romans had moved into ten years ago, and the lands nearest the river had become as Roman as the old colonies on the western bank. But there was a dark forest smell to the air all the same, which Forst could feel almost like a cloud blowing out of the wild lands beyond the neat fields.
They passed Argentoratum under the shadow of its gray stone walls. Forst’s hands began to shake on the reins, and his horse jibbed and fidgeted under him. Argentoratum had been timber built twelve years ago, and when Forst had seen it then, it had been burning. One of the last desperate defenders in that fort had slashed a short sword into Forst’s thigh so that he had fallen and his horse’s hoof had come down on him just above the ear. When he woke up he had been tied to a stake in the ground, and an irritable-looking man with what Forst thought now must have been the staff of Aesculapius, the Romans’ healer god, on his belt buckle, had been pouring wine into the wound. The ragtag camp of the beleaguered Romans hadn’t been far from the Rhenus, but for Forst the Free Lands across the river had suddenly become as distant as Valhalla above the rainbow bridge.
Now there was Argentoratum Bridge, stretching solidly across the shining sweep of the river, broad enough to carry three hundred horses and one bad conscience. It would be so easy to turn them and cross over into the Free Lands. Forst was a warrior, or he had been one, and like most of his kind he had never thought overmuch about his honor. Honor was there, it was part of a man, like his head. He did not go against it, ever. There was not much more to it than that. But now the question had got tangled. There was his honor as a man of the Semnones, a debt to Nyall’s ghost, maybe. And there was the honor that he had sworn to Appius Julianus to take his horses to the Roman emperor.
They rode past Argentoratum Bridge while Forst thought it out with very little conclusion except that there would be more bridges before Moguntiacum.
Beyond Argentoratum and the city that circled the fortress, the road grew bare of civilian traffic. A farmer in a field by the road was hurriedly cutting hay, in the manner of a man who shutters up a house before a storm, as if he knew that war was coming and wanted his hay in before it was ridden over. He watched them with nervous eyes as they passed. It was the first sign that Forst had seen of the frightened scurrying that a war casts over the villages in its path. The stableboys seemed not to notice. They had been born in Rome, where wars did not come. But Forst could feel it, the way an animal in the field feels a hawk overhead. The horses’ shoes made a harsh rumble on the road like moving thunder.
But they weren’t at war here, that was the odd thing. The west bank of the Rhenus was well into the Roman zone, with the river and the new forts of the Agri Decumates for a buffer. He was still puzzling over that when the farmer threw himself flat in his hay like a rabbit. A stableboy screamed a warning that ended in a choke of terror.
Forst’s first thought was: Where did they come from? Then he saw the old grove of oaks with the thick woodland on either side that ran nearly down to the river. Oaks were sacred to the Mother. They would have left them alone when the land was cleared. The wood was no more than two acres, but it was older than the Roman-kind, thick virgin forest deep enough to have hidden the thirty men who now seemed to rise up out of the earth at his horse’s feet.
They had been waiting for him. He thought furiously: Why didn’t they give us an escort at Argentoratum? He had his sword out now, hacking desperately at the spear points rushing at him. Because he hadn’t stopped at Argentoratum to ask for an escort. Because he had had it in his mind to take the horses over the next bridge to whoever ruled now in Nyall’s place. Forst’s sword knocked a spear shaft to splinters, and the man rushed in, pulling his own sword. His tunic and breeches were gray-green like the oak grove.
Forst slashed his sword into the other man’s ribs, and he twisted and yelped. It was the first sound they had made, and it ended in a choke as Forst drew his sword back and stabbed with it, through the throat. The man’s head flew back openmouthed, and Forst saw with a furious recognition that the pale hair was knotted on one side of his head. But the man was young, and the face behind the beard was not one that he knew. The smell of death was in the air, fear and sweat and his own anger, but there was something wrong with this strange, silent fight. Germans went loudly into battle, shouting curses at the enemy. And they should have cut him down by now. There were more than enough to do it. He swung his sword, breaking another spear, and risked a look around.
Most of the attackers were fanning out, catching loose horses to ride. It was the horses they wanted. The stableboys were a panicked huddle at the center of the herd.
At least the question of honor had been answered for him. To forswear his word to Appius and take the horses across the river might have been something he could do. To let them be taken from him with an ambush for an excuse to hide behind was not. He kicked his heels hard into his horse’s flanks and dropped the reins long enough to put two fingers in his mouth and whistle.
The horses threw up their heads in confusion. The whistle mimicked the notes of the cavalry Advance, but they were riderless. The smell of blood began to spread fear inward through the herd like a ripple. They bucked and snorted. Forst whistled again, and they panicked. They galloped back and forth along the road and into the wood and the plowed fields. A few plunged into the shallows of the river. Forst rode for the nearest of the attackers and caught him from behind as he swung himself onto a rearing horse. The horse screamed and trampled the man under him, slipping in the blood on the paved road.
Ten or twelve others had caught horses, but they were bridleless and would be hard to control. Forst managed to get one more German before there were too many of them mounted and riding for him to fight. He pulled his horse around and ran for Argentoratum.
Four of the boys were ahead of him, one of them bleeding from a gashed leg. And one was back in the road with a spear through his back. Forst had recognized him: the plump, puppy-faced boy who had whistled the cavalry canter song.
There was chaos at the gate. A troop of cavalry were coming through, and the boys were still huddled together while the cavalry commander snapped questions at them. The cavalry troopers saw Forst’s hair and nearly rode him down before he shouted at them.
“And why in the name of Mithras’s holy bull weren’t you riding with an escort?” the cavalry commander snapped when they had sorted themselves out and the troopers and a decurion had gone off down the road after the Germans.
“No one said I’d be needing one,” Forst snarled. “We rode right under your damned walls. Don’t your sentries have enough sense to say ‘Look out’ unless someone asks them first?”
The cavalry commander slapped his riding crop into the palm of his hand. “Don’t you have enough sense not to ride through a war zone dangling a whole great herd of horseflesh out for bait?”
“And no one was mentioning it was a war zone,” Forst said. “You Romans have been squatting like toads on this bank of the Rhenus for years.”
“And who in Hades’s name are you?” The cavalry commander said. “And if it comes to that, where’d you get the horses?”
Forst shoved his pass under the man’s nose, and they stood and glared at each other. “Well, the emperor’s going to be pissed,” the cavalry man said finally, when he had read it. “We need those horses.”
“Oh, I can get the horses back,” Forst said. “If your troopers haven’t scattered them clear to Hel’s domain.”
“All my troopers’ll scatter are your thieving countrymen,” the cavalry commander said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t wear my hair that way. This province is jumpy enough to put a pilum in you first and ask for your pass afterward.”
Forst snorted. “Pax Romana. Three hundred head of horses in broad daylight. Are you that undermanned?”
“If you’d gone with a patrol they mightn’t have tried it. That’s the idea – tie up the civilian traffic till no one can move, and give the locals something to complain about. The emperor’s talking peace with the Semnones in Colonia and building up an army in Moguntiacum to chase the Chatti with, and meanwhile they’re jumping out of trees like trolls in this neck of the woods. The frontier scouts say it isn’t Chatti tribesmen, and the chieftain of the Semnones says it isn’t his men, perish the thought, but someone’s been cutting bridges and setting fires and picking on the civilians and any patrols that don’t keep their heads swiveling around like owls. And any time a civilian gets killed or gets his shipments stolen, someone comes crying to us for not protecting his precious ass for him.”
“Then I’ll be taking a patrol,” Forst said, “the rest of the way. The one that’s off chasing your will-o’-the-wisps will do. After I’ve whistled up the horses. And buried the boy.” He turned to the rest of the stableboys. “Go and get him,” he said gently. “The Germans will be gone now.”
“Like enough in the next province,” the cavalry commander said disgustedly. “Or down whatever hole they popped out of.”
“Are they Chatti after all, then?” Forst asked.
The cavalry man made a noise through his nose. “What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing,” Forst said. The men he had seen were Semnones. He thought the cavalry commander knew it.
They buried the boy among the civilian graves that lined the road southward from Argentoratum, and Forst said a prayer for him to the Roman gods, and then to the gods of the Semnones because it had been Semnones who had killed him.
They got the horses to Moguntiacum with no further incident. As Forst had told the cavalry commander, the horses came to his whistle. All the stock from the farm did that; it was a useful measure of proof if one was stolen. They only lost sixteen, counting the ones the German raiders had ridden off with, and the cavalry commander looked suitably impressed after that.
At Moguntiacum he gave them into the charge of the horsemaster there and stood by while the emperor’s general, Velius Rufus, inspected them personally. Velius Rufus was a frog-faced little man with an improbably thick shock of hair brushed down over his forehead. Rumor said it was a wig. When he was drunk, which he usually was when he wasn’t fighting, he let people pull on it to prove that it wasn’t. He stalked through the herd, prodding and shoving, with his optios edging nervously behind him, and came out on the other side looking pleased.
“They’ll do,” he said to Forst, flicking horse hair off the white and gold fringes of his harness tunic. “They’re overpriced, but we’ll pay it. Tell Julianus I said he’s still a thief.”
“Yes, sir,” Forst said. He towered over the general, but Rufus didn’t seem to mind. He gave a barking laugh.
“You look like you might. I hear you had to fight the wood elves for them.”
“They were large for elves,” Forst said.
Rufus barked again. “That’s army slang, son. Means the local scavengers. Not quite accurate here, I don’t expect, but we don’t want to frighten the civilians. Go and pick up a chit for the horses from my office. You don’t want to be carrying gold over the Alps. You can cash it in Rome if the emperor’s cronies have left anything in the treasury while his back’s been turned.”
The horsemaster and the stableboys took the horses off to the cavalry barns to have the army brand put on them, and Forst was left standing in an empty parade field. He followed the general’s retreating back past the great cenotaph of Drusus, stepson of the Deified Augustus and conqueror of Germany, through the gates of the camp proper. Moguntiacum was newly built in stone after the rebellion that had followed the civil wars, and now it was full to bursting. Domitian’s army was gathering here, detachments from all the British legions and the legions of Upper Germany, and the camp was full of the noise of war. A steady thunk-thunk-thunk came from somewhere that must be the armorer’s shed, and carts rumbled past, laden with dismantled catapults and bundles of new spears. An army courier trotted past on a sweating horse, and men laying tile were clambering over the roof of a new barracks building.
Headquarters was a monstrous stone-built Principia, with a portico and balustrade carved with German captives chained in pairs. One of Rufus’s optios had hung back to wait for him, and he pointed to it proudly.
“That’s a wood carving from Drusus’s day, done over in stone. Moguntiacum’s always been Drusus’s camp. Some of the locals even pray to him, though they’re not supposed to. They salvaged some of the old carvings after the fire, and the general found ’em in a storage shed and ordered ’em done new in stone and put up, for luck.”
Inside the Principia Forst collected his chit from the purser’s office, a cubbyhole stuck away at the far end of a vast antechamber, and wandered out again, this time unescorted. The antechamber and the portico were full of men from all the army’s services and civilians come for payment for the grain and meat the army was buying. The stableboys had come back and were waiting for him in a corner of the portico. Forst handed one of them the purser’s chit.
“Be careful of this on the road. It’s in the master’s name so no one will try to steal it from you, but just see you don’t lose it.”
The boy looked startled. “Aren’t you going to take it?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
Forst gave him a pouch. “This is the rest of the travel money. It’ll get you back to Rome safely enough. I’m… going to stay a little. I – tell my wife I will write to her and explain.” He went away quickly, through the throng of soldiers and supply wagons.
“Appius, can’t you do anything for Aemelius?” Antonia’s face was worried, and the lines in it showed sharply as she tugged her cushioned wicker chair forward into a pool of sun. “I’m always cold these days. Valeria Lucilla came to see me yesterday, Appius. Poor woman, she never did have much strength, but now—”
“She’s a puddle,” Appius said. He raised his hand as Antonia started to reprove him for this lack of feeling. “I know. I saw her. She’s close to the edge, but hysterical fits aren’t going to help her husband. Aemelius is facing enough trouble.”
“Isn’t there anyone else you can talk to?”
“My dear, I have talked to people until my throat is sore.” The door opened, and a slave brought in a breakfast tray: bread and honey, eggs and olives and wine in a silver service, with roses from the garden in a blue and yellow pot that matched the room’s walls. Appius picked up an egg and stared at it as if it might hatch a dragon. “Has Cook been careful with these?”
“Oh yes, sir. They’re fresh today.”
“Good.” He bit into the egg and waited until the girl had gone. “I’m getting old, my dear. All my influence is with old comrades, and they are old, too. Senile, some of them, I think. We’ve all retired to potter on our farms and let the power go to younger men. Vespasian might have listened to me. Titus would have listened to Flavius. Now not even Domitian’s judges will hear me out.”
“That is ridiculous,” Antonia said crisply. “You have a great deal of influence, Appius. But Domitian has let thieves like Marius Vettius line their purses with enough money to bribe anyone short of the Fates.”
“Perhaps you’re right, but the end result is the same. Influence can very rarely compete successfully with greed. I’ve done everything I can, and so has Lucius, who has enough money to put in a few bribes of his own, but Aemelius is still going to lose that lawsuit. The judges simply won’t admit his freed-man’s testimony. I think Vettius probably has fear on his side as well. He’s too powerful to cross.”
“I wish Flavius had thought of that,” Antonia said. “I’m afraid it’s Flavius that he’s aiming at.”
“Flavius could hardly have known that Titus was going to die. And he’s too smart to let Vettius get his hooks in him. But poor Aemelius—”
“What will they do?”
“There will be enough left to live on,” Appius said. “Carefully. Aemelius is too proud to be anyone’s client.”
“To live like peasants!” Antonia said. “My son’s father-in-law! It’s disgraceful!”
Appius spread honey on his bread and looked thoughtful. “Are you suggesting a divorce?” Aemelius’s endangered lands bordered Appius’s, and the marriage had been arranged to join them.
Antonia sighed. “No. We couldn’t, that would be disgraceful, too.”
“You had best assure Aemelia of that,” Appius said. “Or no, it would be better from Flavius. Has he written to her?”
“Yes, but all he told her was what he told you – that Domitian won’t do anything. I have no patience with Domitian. He is not the man his father was. I am not sure that it is worth letting a dynasty begin, just to have a stable succession.”
“You wouldn’t go back to the wars?”
“Never!” Antonia shuddered. “There wasn’t once that whole year that I wasn’t afraid. But there must be a better way. If Domitian isn’t careful, someone will take it in his own hands, and we will have wars again.”
“Dear gods, I hope not,” Appius said.
They were silent for a moment, then Antonia stood up and wrapped a shawl around her. “This does no good for Aemelius. I am going to go and see his wife and try to make her be practical. And then I am going to see Aemelia. Flavius’s letter was very distant and odd, she said. I am not going to wait for him to remember that he’d best reassure the child that losing her inheritance isn’t going to cost her her husband.”
Appius looked up from his bread and honey. “If I were you, Antonia, I would let Flavius do that. Especially if his letters are odd.”
Forst tightened the bags behind his saddle and laid his cloak over them. There was little enough to pack. He had sold the silver arm rings he had been wearing for enough money to buy his meals out of the common pot in the taverns along the Rhenus road. He had spent a month drifting from one to the next and fetched up finally last night in Colonia. The inn he had bought a bed at was not a place where a wise man would leave so much as a spare cloak in his absence. But the new chieftain of the Semnones was in Colonia, meeting with the new emperor of Rome, and Forst knew that his wanderings had ended here because of that. Maybe when he had seen the man who sat in
Nyall’s place, he would know if he was going home again – and where home was. He would find a job at one of the pottery kilns and take time to think and make up his mind. And maybe, he thought desperately, just maybe this new chieftain would make a peace and there wouldn’t be any war. Then Forst wouldn’t have to decide between Rome and Emer or a ghost and a losing fight. He realized that he knew already that it would be a losing fight.
He got on the horse and threaded his way through the traffic in the streets toward the Basilica. Oh, aye, the innkeeper had said, they were meeting today. They met every day, and when they’d spent four hours on such fancy points as who got the bigger chair to sit in, they had another hour to work out their treaty in. Or so said his daughter, whose husband had a little wineshop across from the Basilica.
Forst was in time to see the Germans as they crossed the square, and he searched their faces with a sort of fear, but there were only two he knew: Morgian, Nyall Sigmundson’s mother, and a brown-bearded man in a white robe, whom he decided after a moment’s thought must be Barden. Barden, who was only a year or two older than Forst, had gone to study the healer’s craft in another hold the year of his spear-taking. Now he wore a flat gold collar over his robe and carried a staff with the gold disk of the sun on the top. The other two were a pale woman in a blue gown and a thin man with a cat’s walk and braided hair. He had a strange, crooked face and the heavy gold torque of a chieftain around his neck.
The Roman delegation was coming now, behind the emperor in a gold litter carried by four matched slaves. Forst bent his head and fiddled with the strings that held his bags behind the saddle. He knew the two slim figures walking beside the emperor’s litter, and the sons of Appius Julianus knew him. He should have known that they would also recognize a horse bred from their father’s gray German stallion. The beast had four white boots and a wide blaze like a splash of whitewash down its bay head. Correus had been there when it was foaled, Forst remembered, cursing himself as he heard his name called.
“Forst! I thought you would have been back to Rome by now. Father wrote he was shipping horses, but I thought they were for Moguntiacum.” Correus put a hand on the bay’s white nose and gave it a pat.
Forst straightened up in the saddle, resigned to confrontation, and saw that Flavius was ambling over, also. “They’ve been delivered,” he said. “This is my country, or close to it. I wanted to see it again.”
“Thinking of staying?” Correus said softly.
Forst didn’t answer, and Flavius came up on his other side. Forst began to feel foolish, sitting there on the horse while they looked up at him and seemed to know what he had been doing.
“Father freed you,” Correus said. “I can’t do anything about it. But think before you try to jump back into something that may not be there anymore. Ranvig isn’t Nyall.”
“Is that his name?” Forst said. “He is a Black Forest lord, isn’t he?” His mouth twisted. “Couldn’t they have found one man of the Semnones to lead them?”
“I expect they took what was… left,” Flavius said. “Nyall’s widow spoke for him.”
At that, Correus gave his brother a look that Forst couldn’t quite read.
“I have not said I was staying,” Forst said. “As you say, your father has freed me.”
“Twelve years is a long time to try to find old tracks across,” Flavius said. “We will win – and I don’t want to fight you.”
Forst picked up the reins. “Nor I you. I have no grudge against your house. But this is my land, and you are making a war in it.”
“Not us. We are holding a frontier.”
“It comes to the same thing.”
Flavius gave up. “Let us know what you are going to do, before you do it. I would rather it wasn’t me that put a spear in you.”
Correus put a hand on the rein just in front of Forst’s. “If you stay here, Forst, you will write to Emer and tell her why, and let her divorce you.” The words had teeth in them. “If you don’t, I will find you.”
Forst gave him a level look and took Correus’s hand off the rein. Correus and Emer had been occasional bedmates before Correus had gone to the Centuriate. “I have written to Emer to say that I am staying on a while, only to see the land again.
I will tell her otherwise if I need to. Do not you be doing it for me first.”
He turned the horse’s head away and put his heel to the bay’s flank. Behind him he heard Correus’s voice snapping at his heels: “There are some things the Fates don’t permit, Forst!”
“Damned fool,” Flavius said irritably, watching Forst’s tall, broad back ride away.
Correus snorted. “And you,” he said. “I’m not sure you have more brains than he does.”
“What are you going to do about little Emer if the fool does it?” Flavius said, ignoring him. “You can’t take her under your wing.”
“I don’t intend to!” Correus snapped.
“No? You’ve been busy enough about everyone else’s welfare!”
“And you’ve been acting like a damned stallion!” They were squabbling because Flavius had been making love to Nyall Sigmundson’s widow all summer.
They stood and glared at each other until an optio came scouting through the crowd for them. The optio saluted. “They’ve been looking for you.”
“We’re coming.” Correus put a hand on his brother’s shoulder in apology. “It’s just that I hate to see a man stretch himself out on a cross and wait for someone to string him up. You or Forst.”
“I know. But I honestly don’t think I can do anything about it,” Flavius said. “I won’t have much of her, Correus. Let me take what I can.”
“And what happens when you lose her?”
Flavius’s face was set. “I live with it.”
He asked himself the same question at the end of the day, when he found another letter from Aemelia waiting in his quarters. His life seemed to be tangling itself around his feet until the only way clear was to kick it to pieces and start over.
He slumped down on a couch to read the letter. He knew what was going to be in it before he started. Aemelius had lost his lawsuit and retired in prideful, genteel obscurity to the one house left to him. Valeria Lucilla had taken to her bed with an undefined ailment. And Aemelia, left alone in her own big house to fret, was afraid of her shadow. Vettius had become for her a sort of night goblin out of a nursery tale, a dark presence that might turn its malevolence on her next. Flavius must be able to make the emperor do something. Maybe if she wrote to Domitian herself? Flavius was heartless not to have done something before now. He must not love her now that she had lost her inheritance.
The illogic of this last statement was not something he felt up to explaining to her. Flavius put the letter down and flipped over on his back, staring at the pale green plaster on the ceiling. Did he love her? Yes, but Fiorgyn was his heart-mate. And now there was no way he could keep her, even if he had gone momentarily mad enough to think that he might. To leave his wife for love of another woman was something that the world, if not the wife, would not forgive. To leave her now, when the marriage had lost its financial advantage, would gain him a reputation he didn’t want to live with. And it would be crueler than he had the heart to be.
“Run along now.” The emperor patted the little slave on the cheek and put a sweet from the gold bowl beside him into his hand.
Domitian was collecting boys again, Flavius thought with more disgust than he generally permitted himself with regard to the emperor’s affairs. That might be all right out here, but it was going to upset the conservative faction in Rome.
“Ah, Julianus,” Domitian said pleasantly when the slave had trotted off. He waved a hand at the other couch and at the bowl. It was full of some sweet, repellent concoction. “Do relax.”
Flavius sat on the edge of the couch and ignored the bowl.
“Do you have news for me?” Domitian looked inquiring.
“Uh, no. I’m afraid I’ve come to ask you again if there isn’t something that can be done for my father-in-law.”
“The suit went against him.” Domitian didn’t make it a question.
“Yes, sir. I hesitate to cast accusations on anyone, and it may well have been the middle buyer who tampered with the note, but I know my father-in-law. He is much too prudent to borrow an amount like that and squander it. And too honest to lie about it afterward.”
“Well, someone is lying,” Domitian said in pained tones.
“Yes, sir.”
“Now see here, Julianus. I’ve told you that I must leave it for the courts to decide.” He sounded aggrieved. “I simply can’t interfere in matters like this, especially when I have no firsthand knowledge. I have more important matters to consider just now, you know.”
“Yes, sir. It is only that justice—”
“Justice is what I have appointed judges to deal with. I would be very irritated if I found that a member of my staff was taking it upon himself.” Domitian’s voice had grown sharper. “I do hope I’m understood.”
“Yes, sir,” Flavius said stiffly. “I will see that you are not troubled again.”
“Good.” Domitian nodded approvingly. “I’ve always thought that you were a sensible fellow. I wouldn’t like to be disappointed in you.”
Flavius picked up a pen and stared at the papyrus sheet in front of him. He loathed writing letters, but this one had to be managed somehow. Aemelia was carrying his child again. He couldn’t let her go through that thinking he didn’t love her. More important, he had to make sure that she didn’t do anything as unwise as she had hinted at in her own letter. Domitian’s warning had been quite plain.
Flavius dipped the pen in the ink, assured his wife that he loved her, and forbade her to write to the emperor directly. Aemelia had been able to charm Titus, but Domitian was not Titus. And you ought to be able to see that. The pen snagged and splattered ink, and he slammed it down on the table in aggravation.
“I understand about courts,” Fiorgyn said. “Ours are much the same, but it is the chieftain who makes the judgment. Sometimes a chieftain will take bribes. Not often.”
Flavius chuckled. “Almost always a judge will take bribes. Your chieftains are more honest.”
“No, it is only that the council that made a chieftain can unmake him. It has been done. Your emperor rules the judges, and the only way to unmake him is to kill him.”
“That has been done, too,” Flavius said, “but it’s dangerous to remember it.” They were sitting on a bank that ran down to an old dry ditch among the trees, the ancient fortifications of one of Drusus’s marching camps. There were vines growing into it now. He put an arm around her and laid his head against hers and sat looking down into the ditch. Rotten wood poked up through the vines at the bottom. “Lilies” maybe, the little sharp stakes the Romans set into dry moats. The Rhenus had been new territory then. He shouldn’t have told Fiorgyn about the lawsuit, Flavius thought. She saw too many things too clearly, and he was desperately trying to keep what was between them separate from the rest. That way, there would be fewer gut-wrenching memories later. But she was no longer merely a dangerous liaison; she had become a retreat for him. And despite his intentions, a great many griefs and questions that he would have hesitated to tell Correus, and shielded entirely from Aemelia, he had laid in her lap.
A squirrel with something in its mouth wriggled through the vines and up the trunk of a beech tree.
“It will be winter soon,” Fiorgyn said.
Flavius tightened his grip on her. Domitian would go to Moguntiacum soon, with Flavius behind him, no matter what the results of Ranvig’s peace talks. If they were peace talks. Flavius, like his brother, doubted that entirely. But there was an unspoken pact with Fiorgyn not to ask her the things that she couldn’t tell him. She turned her face and kissed him, a kiss with coming separation in it. The dim light of the woods was green under the canopy of the trees, and it gave her pale skin and hair an otherwordly cast. There was a German song about a chieftain’s son who met an elf girl in the wood and vanished away into her world. The chieftain’s son hadn’t had a Roman wife and an army oath and a world of his own that didn’t permit things like that, Flavius thought savagely.
He stood up and tugged her insistently to her feet. Then he caught her against him until he could feel the shape of her through the blue gown and smell her hair in his face.
“How can I give you up?”
“Flavius, don’t. There is no choice for either of us. There never has been a choice.”
He bit back his reply. It wasn’t fair to put the burden of keeping an eye on reality entirely on her. Not when he knew the same things she knew, and knew that he could not have taken her with him or gone with her, if she had been the one to ask.
“I am sorry,” he said into her hair. “And I am ashamed. You are behaving better than I am. I will accept what I can have, and not do that again.” She was shaking in his arms. It was wrong to play at things that were not possible, pretending that they might be. He kissed her hair. “I have paid for a room.”
They went by the path that led past the old ditch, out of the wood into a road that skirted a farmer’s hayfield, cut to stubble now, with the hay standing in neat shocks. In the dusty sunlight her skin and hair were white and gold again, not green and silver like the elfin girl’s. She wore her old gown, but she walked with her head up, as if it were her right to go to an inn with her lover, and no man’s right to question it. She slipped an arm through his, and he forgot his misery in the sharp shock of the desire that the mere thought of her could stir in him.
The shadow of a hawk went by on the ground, and the rustle of something in the stubble of the hay field froze into stillness. Along the Rhenus people had frozen too, tense, silent, waiting for the war that would surely come with spring, praying for the talons to pass them by.