Ygerna took one look at the commotion in the streets, barred the door, and sat down beside it with the silver-handled knife that Julius Frontinus had given her.
“It’s mostly our own men,” Flavius said, lifting a shutter and looking out at the foot soldiers milling outside. “The Germans will be a mile down the road by now with the cavalry on their tails.” He had come in search of Correus, who was wanted to interpret the emperor’s midday ultimatum, and found him already gone to the fort.
“It’s your men I don’t trust,” Ygerna said. “Not in this mood. They are jumpy with these raids, and they have left off thinking. This is a German house. They may not care which Germans they chase.”
As she spoke there was a flurry of angry Roman voices almost under the window, and someone shouted, “There! There’s one of them! Get the heathen devil!” Flavius saw a junior officer of the Claudia lying propped against a hedge with a gash in his leg. Angry voices chorused around him, and he shouted an order that no one listened to. They were nearly out of control, and as he ordered them furiously to hold, the soldiers saw a man from Ranvig’s delegation in the distance and began to move that way up the street, picking up their pace.
“Mithras god! Fiorgyn!” Flavius hurled himself at the door and wrenched the bolt back. “Bar it behind me!” he shouted, and ran.
The junior officer of the Claudia was trying to stand up. He saw Flavius and fell back against the hedge, white-faced. “I couldn’t hold them,” he said. “If you don’t stop them, they’ll tear that place apart!”
Flavius swore at him and ran on without breaking stride. He turned the corner into a street of thatch-roofed houses and saw them battering at the front of the hall where Ranvig’s people had been lodged. The man they had chased had been pulled inside by his fellows, but they hadn’t been able to get the door barred in time, and the fighting was halfway into the house, the German warriors being pressed back by sheer weight of numbers. The street was full of bales and boxes, broken open and trampled in the mud, and one of the thralls was lying among them, dead.
“Burn the bastards out!” A legionary at the rear of the press looked around him for fire.
Flavius grabbed him by the neck and pulled him backward into the street. He flung him down in the mud, and the man began to come up sword in hand. His eyes widened when he saw Flavius.
“Stop it!” Flavius shouted. “Hold! Fall back!” They didn’t hear him, and a pilum sailed past his ear, aimed by a German who had caught it and sent it back again. The soft shaft at the head was bent, and it didn’t fly well, but the range was short and Flavius was wearing only a light parade cuirass. He dived into the cover of the legionaries jamming the front of the house and began to fight his way through them. “Hold, damn you! Back off!” They didn’t hear him over the shouting, or they didn’t care. He fought frantically to the doorway and braced his back against one of the posts. He had his sword out and blocked part of the doorway with it as they surged around him. In the hall beyond, he could see the Germans backed into another doorway behind a bristle of spears, with three or four dead at their feet and Ranvig in the middle. He had a sword in one hand and a spear in the other, and his crooked face was set in a blaze of fury. Ten or twelve more were fighting in the hall itself. In the room beyond, someone was screaming. Flavius saw with horror that there were women among the fighters in the hall.
“Hold! In the emperor’s name!” He threw himself completely across the doorway, and the onslaught slowed as they began to recognize him. “Hold! That is an order!” He turned quickly to see what was going on behind him. The fighting in the hall had not stopped. There was a flash of blue cloth, and he saw Fiorgyn with a knife in her hand, fighting furiously as two soldiers pulled her away from the rest. Flavius swung his sword and caught one of the soldiers across the helmet with the flat of it. The man spun around, hesitating as he saw Flavius. The soldiers at the door had halted, and with a snarl the Germans began to close in on them.
“Friend!” Flavius shouted in German. “Friend! Ranvig, call them off!”
Ranvig’s eyes met his over the scuffling men in the hall. “Damn you! What about my dead?”
“There’ll be more dead if you don’t call them off!” Flavius shouted. “I can’t keep them back if you don’t!” The men outside the door had begun to press forward again, still angry, still ready to put a pilum in any German they could catch. Flavius pulled the second soldier away from Fiorgyn and flung him against the men in the doorway. His lorica crashed against their raised shields, and they staggered back a step. The other men in the hall had begun to fall back as the Germans came after them. “Get out!” Flavius shouted at them. “Get out while you can. You know the punishment for mutiny.” They looked at him warily and backed away. “Ranvig, call your men to heel!”
Ranvig gave an order in German, and his warriors halted, spears leveled, glaring at Flavius and the Romans behind him. Flavius let his breath out.
“Is this the way the emperor of Rome makes a treaty?” Ranvig said sarcastically. There were dead and wounded on the floor. Lady Morgian came out from the back room with the priest and began to look at them. Two Roman bodies were among them, and Flavius called four of the legionnaires back.
“Take them to the surgeon,” he said wearily.
“They’re dead, sir!” one of the soldiers said. He took a step toward the Germans.
Flavius raised his fist. “Get them out of here! And get yourselves out before something worse happens to you.” They knew what he meant, and they picked up their dead and went. The punishment for mutiny was death by stoning.
Flavius turned to Ranvig grimly. “This is your fault, Ranvig. Your raids, your ambushes, your tricks did this. Not the emperor.” He turned his back on him and strode across to Fiorgyn. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.
“Yes.” She had put her knife away and was rubbing a bruised wrist.
“Come out of here,” he said in a low voice.
She nodded and began to follow him to the door. Barden was chanting a low, keening song over one of the men who lay with unseeing eyes on the plank floor, and Morgian was tying a strip torn from her gown around the arm of another. Signy was helping her. She had a cut cheek, and tears and blood were running down her face.
“Fiorgyn!”
Fiorgyn turned back to Ranvig. Her hair was coming out of its braids, and there was someone’s blood turning dark on the front of her gown. “I will be back at midday,” she said, and went out after Flavius.
“Let her go,” Signy said unexpectedly, her voice shaking. She held the bandage while Morgian pinned it. “Let her have this morning. It’s the last one, but at least she will have that. I am thinking she is lucky for that.”
Ranvig looked at her curiously and dropped down on one knee beside her. “What is it, child?” He turned her head up to him and wiped away the blood with one of Morgian’s bandages to look at her cheek. “You’ve a cut on your face.”
“At least she has a man who wants her for her!” Signy flung at him. “Not just because she needs a home and can have babies!” She burst into tears.
Ranvig put his arms around her, and she huddled against his chest, sobbing. He looked helplessly at Morgian.
“These men will live, or they will not,” Morgian said. “There is nothing you can do. I will send Barden to put salve on her face when he has finished here.”
Ranvig looked at the sobbing child in his arms and picked her up. He went into the back of the house, holding her.
“There will be no peace,” Flavius said dully.
“Did you think there would be?” Fiorgyn said.
“No.” He sat miserably on the edge of the bed, looking up at her. “But I always told myself there would be a little more time.” The time was gone now. He had taken a room at the only good inn in the vicus because of it. It didn’t matter anymore.
“No,” Fiorgyn said. “No more. Only until midday.” Because Ranvig was going at midday to tell the emperor one last lie. He would send his people out of the vicus before that, in case the emperor should choose not to believe it.
Flavius’s face had grown desperate. “Stay with me,” he said suddenly now. “Stay with me. Go back to Rome with me.”
“No,” she whispered. “Don’t even try.” She backed away from him. “You are the other half of me. I love you. But I can’t go with you. Don’t make me say it for both of us.”
“No. No, I am sorry. I couldn’t take you if you could go.” He stood up and laid a hand along the side of her face, lovingly. “But go somewhere else, somewhere you’ll be safe. Do that for me. If the emperor doesn’t like Ranvig’s answer, he may decide to hold all of you.”
“It wouldn’t do him any good,” Fiorgyn said. “The tribe has Ranvig’s orders not to buy him or any of us back if it comes to that. He made them swear an oath, and he put the chieftain’s curse on the man who breaks it.”
Flavius had been in Germany long enough to know that that was no laughing matter. The chieftain’s curse’ was reputed to kill – always the man who was cursed and sometimes also the chieftain who had set it. Ranvig’s men wouldn’t break that oath. “I will tell the emperor that,” he said, relieved that he could discourage Domitian from hostage-taking with a clear conscience. After this morning, he didn’t care what the emperor did with Ranvig, but Fiorgyn – Fiorgyn was another matter. But there was still going to be a battle, and Ranvig was still going to lose. “Please,” he said desperately, “please go away from here, away from Ranvig and his damned war. They will take prisoners afterward. I don’t know what might happen.”
Fiorgyn put her hand on his. “Flavius, think. If it were the other way – if your soldiers were outnumbered, and the tribes had called up a great war band to fight them, and if I told you not to fight, but to go and sit in a hole somewhere safe – what would you do?”
He looked into her eyes, sky colored, honest, stubborn. “I would like to say that is not the same thing,” he said. “But I suppose it is, really, isn’t it?”
“I matter too much,” she said. “Even if I wanted to go and hide, I cannot. I am Nyall Sigmundson’s widow and Ranvig’s kinswoman. That counts for too much among the tribes. My place is with my own kind. And I am thinking that maybe I owe Nyall that much, now.”
“I know,” Flavius said. And the bitter part of it was that he did. Before Fiorgyn, he had never thought that a woman had more to do than to follow the man chosen for her and to let his loyalties be hers. He had never understood Correus’s German wife, Freita, and her divided heart. Now, miserably, he did. He would never ask a man for whom he had any respect to desert his own kind with a war coming. Now he couldn’t ask Fiorgyn, either. Slowly, trying to make it last, he pulled the silver caps off the ends of her braids and shook the pale hair loose, and she came into his arms for the last time.
It was cold in the room, but they didn’t notice. They lay on the bed and traced their hands across each other, memorizing every line and scar and curve. There was an old scar on Flavius’s cheek, souvenir of a hunting mishap, and she ran the tip of her finger along it as if she would remember even that. He cupped both her breasts in his hands and put his face against her throat and lay there, letting the misery wash over him until finally it ran away, spent, and there was only the woman in his arms. The cold air stung his back, and he pulled the rough blanket up and wrapped his body around hers under it.
She tilted her head back to look at him and shivered as he entered her, a familiar touch now, welcome, need calling to need. He rocked back and forth gently, and the white legs tangled around his own. Her breath began to come faster, but it was his face that she gave her mind to. A sharp-angled face, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, a Roman face. But no longer alien. A beloved face, sure and familiar, a face she could call up in dreams. Don’t let me forget his face. She could bear it, she thought, if no one again could ever touch her body as Flavius did. But not if she forgot his face.
It had begun to rain outside, driven on a wind that came through the shutters like a knife, but neither of them felt it. They could have frozen there, still locked together, and they would not have known. Finally, in the still heaviness of spent passion, he rolled a little away from her, but his hands were still tangled in her rippled hair and he couldn’t bear to move them.
“There is a last time for all things,” he whispered. “I didn’t think until today that that was unfair.”
“We have been lucky to have had this long. Everything must change.” Let me remember his face.
He lifted his hand and touched her cheek. “Then maybe it will change again.” His natural optimism began to creep into his voice. He had always thought that one did better with some hope to hang onto. “Maybe it won’t be forever. Maybe—”
“Maybe,” Fiorgyn said, unwillingly. That was more than she wanted to hope for. It was too easy to break your heart on hope. If they did meet again, he would still be married. And so would she. It would have to come to that now, and there were one or two men in the tribe who would be willing to marry a chieftain’s widow, even if she was carrying another man’s child. For a moment she wanted to tell him, if only to take away the loneliness. But she knew what he would say if he knew, and it would solve nothing and only give them a quarrel to part on.
“We have an hour left,” she whispered. There was no more that her love for Flavius could do to her. She would take the hour, she thought, in payment, and put a whole life’s love into it.
“The chieftain has stalled long enough,” Correus said flatly. The emperor on one side and the chieftain on the other stared across him implacably at each other. The midday sun was dark behind the boiling rain clouds. Water splattered on the roof tiles and fell in a torrent from the eaves.
“The emperor asks too much,” Ranvig said. He glanced at Domitian and spoke directly to Correus. “I cannot accede to that. We are the Free People. Even after the last war we managed to hold our land. I cannot give it to Rome now.”
“I never thought you could,” Correus said. “What do you want me to tell the emperor?”
‘That I will talk one more time with my council. But that I am doubtful.”
“The chieftain says that he is doubtful, but that he will try to persuade his council,” Correus said. “He is lying.”
Domitian nodded. “Tell the chieftain that he is out of time. He has an hour to get out of my fort. And a day to get his people out of the Agri Decumates back where they belong.”
Correus translated, but he knew Ranvig had understood well enough. “The emperor thinks you’re lying. The emperor would keep you for a hostage, but he knows that if he does, your people will fight. He still hopes that that may be avoided. He hopes that you will go home and stay there.”
“Until he has leisure to come and see to us.” Ranvig dismissed all that. “You told him I was lying.”
“I did. What did you expect?”
“No more than that.” Ranvig stood. He raised a hand to the emperor, or maybe to Correus; Correus wasn’t sure. Then he was gone. The two warriors who had come with him stalked out behind him. Their horses were tethered in the rain outside the Principia, and they kicked them into a gallop as they hit the saddle.
The Romans didn’t stop them. Ranvig hadn’t thought they would. He had learned what he wanted to about the new Roman emperor in the months he had sat quibbling over a treaty that would never be written.
At the fortress gate, they swung their horses east through the vicus, toward where the rest would be waiting for them. Beyond the Roman zone was his war host: Arni with the Semnone warriors who had ceased their raiding in the Roman zone and pulled back to meet them; and Steinvar with his borrowed men, sent from Dacia by Decebalus. The Semnones had been chafing for months for a real fight, a battle with more honor in it than the raiding that Ranvig had kept them to, and Arni had been hard put to hold in line the hotheads among them. Arni hadn’t liked it himself. So many factions to quarrel with each other, Ranvig thought. But if he won, the Romans would look no more at Semnone lands. Not for a long while anyway, and that was the most that could ever be said of Romans.