“Let us in!” They hammered on the door of Correus’s house in the vicus.
Septima gave a little screech at the ragged, burned men in the doorway, and Tullius appeared behind her with a menacing expression.
Correus pushed past Septima. She recognized him and screeched again while Tullius helped the others in. “Quit squawking and go get some water and bandages.” Tullius pulled the cloak away from Eumenes’s shoulder and peered at it professionally.
Septima gave Correus a look of nervous apology. “You did give me a turn, sir.” She hurried out.
The atrium was gray with the dawn light, and Correus could still hear yelling in the distance. “I think we lost them, but we’d better get out of sight.” He herded the rest through the back of the house into the kitchen and gave Eumenes’s shoulder a worried look. “Is that going to need a surgeon?”
“No, you got lucky.” Tullius was a time-expired legionary, and, among other things, he had been a surgeon’s orderly. “It looks nastier than it is.” Septima brought him the bandages, and he cleaned the gash and tied a clean bandage around it while Eumenes grimaced.
Flavius was inspecting his burned arm in the pale light from the kitchen window. “Go and find me some salve for this.” Septima scurried out again, looking scared.
Lucius Paulinus perched himself on a kitchen table, and Tullius gave his master a long look of disapproval. “What in Typhon’s name have you been doing? And is that you they’re chasing out there?”
Lucius nodded wearily. “I doubt they’ll come here. No one saw our faces.”
No one who’s still alive, Correus thought. He leaned against the scrubbed wooden table and looked at the other man. “You’re clear, Lucius.”
Paulinus’s face flushed. “I’m ashamed,” he said in a low voice, “that you had to take that risk.”
“Don’t be,” Flavius said. “Not for that. We owed him an evil ourselves. But you can be ashamed you ever began this, Lucius, and there’s a price on tonight. You are to make your peace with Domitian.”
Lucius nodded. “Yes, I expect I owe you that.”
Flavius made a satisfied noise and began smearing salve on his arm, gritting his teeth.
“That’s Flavius’s price,” Correus said. “Mine is that you make my sister make her peace with my wife.”
Lucius gave a ragged chuckle. “That may be harder.”
“I expect you’ll manage,” Correus said. “Don’t think I’m not grateful to Julia, and to you, because I am. But it’s my fault, not Ygerna’s, that Julia got to thinking Felix was hers. Felix has settled down very well, and I won’t have it all started up again.” He braced himself against the table. “I think I could sleep for a week.”
“You’d better,” Tullius said. “You look like a fresh corpse.” He glared at Paulinus. “I won’t tell you what I’ve been thinking since I found out you was gone. Put your head in a noose it won’t come out of one of these days, I expect.”
“You may continue to keep your thoughts to yourself,” Lucius said. He turned back to Correus. “He’s right about sleep, though. Can you lie low here for a day?”
Correus shook his head. “We told a large tale about a hunting trip to get us here, and it wasn’t very plausible then. If we don’t get back fast to Castra Mattiacorum, it’ll smell like old fish. We need horses. Beasts that can’t be tied to this house.”
Tullius considered this necessity. “There’s a nice little livery stable down by the ferry,” he said finally. “Be a bit quieterlike, crossing on the ferry.”
“And the stableman to say where we went,” Eumenes said sarcastically. “And identify the three of us.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Tullius said. “I’ll meet you there. Give me a quarter hour’s start.” He departed purposefully, and Eumenes raised his eyebrows. The gap between slave and free, master and servant, had been bridged in that burning house. “What’s he going to do?”
Paulinus chuckled, this time in genuine amusement. “Don’t ask. I never do.”
Correus knotted the reins around the dun horse’s saddle horns and gave it a smack on the rump. It began to trot wearily back the way they had come. It might even get back before the stableman woke up in his feed bin and shouted for someone to come and untie him. He picked up Antaeus’s reins and leaned wearily against the gold neck for a moment. They would make it. If they didn’t pass out on the trail back. Flavius and Eumenes looked ready to drop.
Julius gave them an appraising look. “You might just get away with it. There’s the grandmother of all rows going on up at the fort. The ghosts of Carthage and all their elephants could’ve come through there and I doubt anyone would’ve stopped arguing to notice ’em.” He hopped up into the saddle. He was riding Ygerna’s mare. “Give me a bit of a start. It won’t do to come in together. There’s a deer under a pile of rocks to keep the wolves off, by that big twisty pine west of the town. Not much of a deer, but I wasn’t after one that could fight back.”
It was nearly dusk when they found the deer as promised, pulled it out from under the cairn of rocks, and tied it on the back of Eumenes’s horse. It looked as bedraggled as they did, Correus thought.
They trotted through the dirty streets of the vicus to leave the deer at a butcher’s stall to be dressed, and rode smack into Julius Frontinus striding purposefully in the other direction.
“Julianus.” He gave Correus a suspicious eye, which then roved over Flavius and Eumenes as well. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Correus laughed. “Don’t tell me you lost money on that race, too! If I’d known it would cause such a stink, I wouldn’t have entered. But poor Quintus – someone doped his horses, you know,” he added helpfully.
“Hmmm.” Frontinus did not look impressed. “Where have you been?”
“Hunting.” Correus pointed a finger at the deer.
Frontinus inspected it. “It looks like you beat it to death with clubs. It looks worse than you do. What happened to that man’s shoulder?”
“It turned and tried to gore me, sir,” Eumenes said. He pulled his cloak over the bandage.
“A courageous beast,” Frontinus said. The deer’s horns were three inches long. “What about you?” He directed his gaze at Flavius’s forearm. A twist of bandage showed under his shirtsleeve.
“Burned it in the campfire,” Flavius said shortly.
“I see.” Frontinus considered. “Well, I came to tell you that your commander’s under house arrest,” he said grimly to Correus. “So you’d better get to that legion before they riot. They’re shaky enough. You won’t be hunting again for a while.”
“The town patrol was putting out the fire when I got there, sir.” The guard pulled himself to attention before the emperor and fought off the desire to curl up and sleep on the floor. He had ridden to Moguntiacum and back at full gallop, commandeering a fresh horse from each fort on the road.
“And his household staff?” Domitian’s voice was level, but his face was splotched with furious color. Julius Frontinus picked up his sheaf of plans and eyed the emperor warily.
“There were four bodies in the mess, sir,” the guard said. “They were too far burned to say much more than that.”
Domitian’s fist clenched. “He should have been better watched. I’ll decide later who’s to blame for that. Dismissed.”
The guard departed in haste, and Domitian swung around to confront Frontinus. “I made a mistake with Vettius,” he said levelly. “I do not wish anyone else to be telling me that. I trust that’s clear.”
“Certainly, sir,” Frontinus said. Domitian did not like his mistakes to be remarked upon, a natural enough preference for an emperor.
“What do you think, Frontinus?” Domitian said suddenly. “Did Vettius have that fire set?”
Frontinus paused. “I think he’s capable of it, sir, certainly,” he said cautiously. “And capable of having his staff’s throats slit to shut their mouths, too. Unless we catch the, uh, man who did it, I don’t expect it will be proven.”
“The man who did it is fifty miles from Moguntiacum by now!” Domitian said.
“Uh, yes. I rather think he is,” Julius Frontinus said. He thought about the men who would likely have been ruined by Marius Vettius’s secrets and decided to keep any further thoughts to himself.
“I want that legion got into shape now,” Domitian said. “Marius Vettius is relieved of his command. See to that for me, will you?”
Julius Frontinus saluted.
“And make a list of his creditors,” Domitian went on. “He’s in over his head, and I want his estates sold to pay it. You may put my name at the top of the list.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll have your staff begin immediately. To what figure is he in debt to you?”
“I will have to check the accounts,” Domitian said. “You may leave that unspecified for the moment.”
Frontinus’s mouth twitched. The emperor would see that the most influential of Vettius’s creditors were paid off, and then he’d claim the rest. He expected Vettius owed it to him at that. “Flavius Julianus is one, sir,” he ventured. “He bet on his brother in the race.”
Domitian gave a sudden sharp bark of laughter. “Yes, see that he gets paid. That will be my penance for not listening to his advice. He can buy back his father-in-law’s land with it. Maybe the old fool will stay clear of shark waters in the future.”
“Yes, sir. Will there be anything else?”
“Yes. Tribune Petreius is also relieved of his rank. Boot him back to Rome.”
“And Marius Vettius?”
Domitian gave the chief of Engineers a wintry smile. “Vettius is also free to go. If he can get out fast enough.”
Marius Vettius watched Frontinus’s square form stalk away into the dusk. It had begun to rain, and he pulled the door closed with a shiver. The room was strewn with the wreckage of overturned trunks and broken furniture. He hadn’t bothered to set it to rights since the guards had pushed him in when they were through with it and posted one of their number outside the door. The woman Gwenhwyfar hadn’t seemed to care, either. She had tipped a couch back upright and curled herself on its split cushions to watch him pace. Now he slumped against the doorpost.
“Where will you go?” Gwenhwyfar said.
He knew, as clearly as he knew that he had lost and it was over, that Domitian would never let it rest that easily. “I wouldn’t get far.” Maybe not even as far as the Rhenus before the emperor’s messenger caught him.
“I see.” Her voice was low, with an odd excitement in it. The wide blue eyes glittered, like polished stones. “What will you do?”
He looked at her bleakly. “Take you with me, maybe.” He took a step toward her, and she got up and backed away. “Julius Frontinus was right. I should have kept you out of my bed. I might have seen this coming.”
There was another knock at the door, and a guard came in without waiting for an answer. He gave Vettius a wax tablet and a thin thing wrapped in a cloth. “You have an hour,” he said, his face expressionless, and went out again. Vettius opened the door after him and looked out. The guard was standing beside it looking the other way. Vettius unwrapped the cloth and turned the dagger over in his hand. He looked at the woman again as she crouched behind the couch.
“I don’t think you’re worth it,” he said. “Let some other man have you.” He gave a dull laugh. “My gift to Castra Mattiacorum. I wish I could think it would be Domitian.”
She stood up and moved lazily to the couch again, knowing that he wouldn’t kill her now. “If I could have had the emperor, I would never have taken you.”
“No.” He turned a chair upright and sat down in it, holding the knife.
She ran her tongue over her lips and watched him intently. “What are you going to do?”
“Die like a gentleman. It is preferable to having my head cut off.”
“I will stay with you.”
He looked into the blue eyes fixed hungrily on his. “No,” he said thickly. “Get out. Get out, or I’ll put the knife in you.”
She went reluctantly and stood outside the door while the guard stared stiffly ahead under his helmet crest. After a minute or two she went back in. Marius Vettius was slumped forward in the chair with the knife between his hands, driven into the breast. The sleek, fair hair looked grayer than before in the dim light, and there was blood under the knife and at the corner of his mouth. She stood looking at him for a moment with an odd look, almost of satisfaction, on her face. Then she began to pick out her clothes and jewelry from the wreckage of the room.
“There will be a new legate as soon as may be,” Correus said. He stood, irritably tapping his vine staff against his left greave, before the assembled Fourteenth Legion Gemina. “It will not be too soon for me, but in the meantime, I am not willing to hand you over as you are.” He glared at them implacably. “You appall me. There will be an extra hour’s parade every morning until you can drill without putting a pilum into the man in front of you by mistake.” They stirred and muttered at that, and Correus hefted the vine staff and pointed it at them accusingly. “Before we march, this legion is going to be fit for it, if I have to put every man in it on report between now and then. And if it’s not – my recommendation to the emperor is going to be that he break this legion. I don’t think you will care for the freedom, if he does it.”
The legionaries looked surly at that, but Correus was gratified to see that the cohort centurions and their juniors wore a uniform expression of earnestness. Yes, sir! The cohort commanders, paraded before him, snapped a salute. A soldier from a disbanded legion might get another posting, but he would never, not in all his life, get another promotion.
Correus nodded grimly and spoke to the officers. “We understand each other. I am aware of where the fault lies, but you are the ones who will have to correct it. The world is most unfair.” He raised his voice again and addressed the legion as a whole. “You have two hours to make sacrifice for the shade of Marius Vettius. Then we are going to march until you look like a legion of the Eagles again. When you do, your Eagle will be given back to you.”
He nodded to the standard-bearer beside him, and the standard-bearer lowered his staff until Correus could reach the gilded Eagle at the top. There was a gasp from officers as well as men as he reached out and unpinned the standard from its staff. “You aren’t worth an Eagle just now,” he said. He stalked off the parade ground, cradling the golden form and silvered wings in the crook of one arm, leaving the standard-bearer behind him, looking miserably out from under his lionskin hood, under an empty staff.
It rained that afternoon, but Correus took them out anyway, first onto the parade ground and then out on the road that ran between Castra Mattiacorum and the Nicer Valley. When they had realized that each new complaint got them another mile on the march (and, of course, another mile back) they ceased to grumble and merely trudged along through the mud, footsore and eyes front. He turned them back finally and sent them to their dinner, too late to bathe and too tired to make trouble. The next morning they did it again, and by the end of the third day they had become nearly as attentive as proper soldiers should be and with a grudging admiration for the primus pilus who had made every single march with them.
“You will kill yourself,” Ygerna said, rubbing the burning muscles of his calves while he lay stretched on a couch by the hearth.
He grunted as a muscle tightened up and cramped. “It won’t work if I’m not with them. The Fourteenth has lost too many commanders. As it is, they’re beginning to come around. They want their Eagle back.” The Eagle was on a post in the Chapel of the Standards, but they were forbidden to touch it. “One of my men caught a man from the Claudia writing ‘Wingless Fourteenth’ on a tent flap with a piece of charcoal, and there was a row and a fight, and they’re both in the guardhouse.”
“That is good?”
“Absolutely. The other legions are going to make their lives a burden to them until they get their Eagle back. It’s improving their frame of mind no end.” He rolled over. “Thank you. I think I will be able to walk tomorrow. Did Julius get on the road this morning?”
“Yes,” Ygerna said, amused. “Grumbling every step of the way, ponies, goat, and all. He wanted to stay.”
“Those are expensive ponies. I can’t keep them on the frontier with a fight coming. I’m lucky I got them out of that race in one piece.”
“Is there a fight coming? A real one, I mean. A battle?”
“Oh, yes.” Correus looked gloomy. “We’ll tie up with Rufus, and I expect Ranvig will go to the Chatti. Then we’ll try to finish them off. That’s why I’m worried about that legion full of summer soldiers that Vettius created.”
Ygerna’s small white face was serious. “Are we going to lose? If your legion doesn’t hold?”
“No. I don’t think so. They’ll hold by the time I get through with them.” He yawned. The fire felt good. He could feel the cold beginning to creep out of his toes. “I hope,” he added. “Want you well back, though.” His eyes began to close.
“Correus, you can’t sleep here.” Ygerna prodded him with one hand. He hadn’t slept for the whole of the night and day spent on that mad ride to burn down Vettius’s house in Moguntiacum, and not much since.
“Mmm.” He turned his face into the crook of one arm. Ygerna prodded him again, but he didn’t move. She got his cloak and pulled its gold and scarlet folds up over him. At least he had taken his armor off.
He woke midway through the night to find Ygerna wrapped in a cloak, poking at the fire. “That is what we have slaves for,” he said sleepily.
“I wasn’t tired. And Eumenes is in worse shape than you are. I wanted to send him to the camp to have the surgeon see to that arm, but he wouldn’t.”
“He can’t. It would draw too much notice. And it’s healing all right. I checked. Otherwise I would have sent him somewhere else to have it done. Typhon, I feel like I’ve been sleeping on bricks.”
“I tried to make you move.”
“Did you? I don’t even remember.”
“You were dreaming again.”
He remembered them: strange, mad, half-lucid conversations in which he argued unendingly over something he couldn’t remember now, with Flavius, with Ranvig, with Forst, with the surly, slovenly ranks of the Fourteenth Legion. Huddled in his cloak, he sat up and put his hands out to the fire. The room was icily cold and dark except for the saffron glow of the fire. It was a German house, and the villages east of the Rhenus had never adopted Roman principles of heating.
“Was it bad?” Ygerna cocked her head to consider his face. Her black hair was unpinned for the night and hung in two long plaits over her shoulders. Her dark winged brows drew together as she looked at him. “You will make yourself sick, Correus. You are trying to put your hand on things that are not your business.”
He smiled. “Did you make a magic in the fire to see that? Or was I talking in my sleep?”
“I do not need a magic to see when you are bone tired. Or when you have been tearing yourself apart because you can’t make other men see things your way. Your brother, Flavius, for instance. Or the chieftain of the Semnones. Or that fool Forst, who is still here on the frontier trying to decide if he is a German or not. You get angry when their good sense is not as good as yours, and then you have dreams. You cannot save the world, Correus. You are not the great god Jupiter.”
He smiled at that, ruefully. “My delusions do not run that high.”
“No? Then why do you fight with Ranvig in your sleep? A man must know what he can change and what is in the gods’ hands or in another man’s Fate. That is what the Druids say.”
“Don’t quote the Druids to me, Ygerna. That is what the Druids say when they don’t want their own concerns meddled with.”
“All the same, they are right about that. You are going against What-Will-Be, and that never works. Lucius, yes. And your legion, yes.” Ygerna looked at him solemnly. “But Flavius will get burned by this woman if he chooses. He doesn’t want you to stop him. Forst will have to find out for himself where his road goes. And you can’t change Ranvig from what he is, any more than you could have changed Nyall Sigmundson.”
“Nyall was different. I see no god’s hand on Ranvig.”
“Even so, you won’t change Ranvig. Content yourself with being a fear to your soldiers. I watched them march. They looked like a centipede that is fighting with itself.”
He banked the fire and made sure that the stone hearth around it was free of kindling in case it spat. “This is a useless conversation. Come to bed.”
She got up and followed him. Too much conscience, she thought. More than she had, or his brother, Flavius, or Lucius Paulinus. Enough to be a burden.
He was up before light in the morning and waited for his legion on the drill field in case they should think that their commander grew tired of the pace he had set. It was clear that morning, but it had rained all through the night, and the roads were sloppy with it. There was already traffic in the vicus streets. Somehow everyone knew without being told that there would be fighting soon. Velius Rufus’s army was camped on the other side of the bridge, with the lands that had once been Marbod of the Chatti’s behind them, dark with blood and burned steadings; and with Marbod caught between Rufus and Domitian. The hangers-on would leave now, the nervous among them, lest the blood should come closer. A carriage splashed by, the mules’ hooves and the iron-rimmed wheels spraying muddy water. The sun was out for the first time in days, and the curtains were only half-drawn. Correus could see Vettius’s woman leaning out, her body curled like a cat on the cushions and her wide blue eyes watching the wet timber buildings of the vicus as they passed. A fat man with dark curling hair rested one pudgy hand on her shoulder as if in possession. Correus remembered where he had seen him before: with Marius Vettius after the race, making claim on a debt that Vettius hadn’t been able to pay. Maybe he was going to Rome, to be there when Vettius’s land was sold.
Roscius Celsus stood on the edge of the crowd and squinted his eyes, trying to see the men gathered around the emperor’s procurator as he called the next lot. His agent had instructions to bid on one of the farms, but Celsus was staying prudently out of the procurator’s sight. He was a wealthy man and had no desire to drive up the price with his presence.
“It is done,” a voice said at his elbow, and Celsus turned to find Faustus Sulla beside him. “Done, and the vultures have come for him.” Sulla nodded his head at Gentilius Paulinus standing a little way off. Others of the men who had been part of the ill-fated plot were scattered through the crowd.
“They have every right,” Celsus said mildly. “You are here yourself.”
“And Domitian is still wearing the purple,” Sulla said blackly under his breath. “If it hadn’t been for Vettius, we might have done it! But to make a profit—”
“At least Vettius is no longer with us, and he was one of our quarrels with the emperor,” Celsus said. “And the better price I get, the less profit the emperor will make.”
“The docks are clear of Vettius’s thugs now, but nothing else has changed.” Sulla’s eyes were darkly angry. “The prisons are still full, and there are more informers than there are toads in the spring. Your friend Suffuscus died, did you know that?”
“Yes, I know,” Celsus said. “This is a most unwise conversation.” Men around them were beginning to look their way. “There is nothing to be done now, not for a long time. You will have to swallow that, or you will make it worse.”
Sulla bit back his retort and pushed his way through the white togas of the crowd. He was a born assassin, Celsus thought, a tyrant hater with too hot a head. Someone would kill Domitian eventually, but if Sulla showed signs of doing it now, they would have to do something about him. Celsus edged his way through the crowd toward Gentilius Paulinus, wondering if he would ever be entirely free again of this brush with murder.
The emperor Caesar Domitianus Augustus sat leaning on his elbows over the map spread out on the tabletop. All this summer’s forts were marked in brown ink, while the campaign of his father, Vespasian, was in black. The projected frontier was a wiggly line of cross-hatchings that followed a path from the Rhenus just above Bonna through Chatti lands and the Taunus Mountains to take in the territory of the Mattiaci (who were still afraid of Marbod and wavering between the Chatti and Rome). After that it crossed the Moenus at Castra Mattiacorum and drove south along the Nicer, then east to end at the current Danuvius frontier, west of Castra Regina. It had the practicality of being more easily defensible than the old lines and the satisfaction of completing a task left unconcluded by his father and ignored by his brother. When it was done, he would add “Germanicus” to his name, Domitian thought, pleased.
A footstep touched the floor behind him, and he tensed. He made himself relax and turn slowly.
Flavius held out a stack of thin wooden sheets. “The troop counts you asked for, sir.”
“Thank you. Has Velius Rufus come in yet?”
“Yes, sir. He’s on his way.” Flavius laid the wooden tablets on the table.
“Good.” Domitian tapped them with the air of a man making up his mind. “Send for Julius Frontinus, as well, and make sure someone brings us dinner. Then go and find me the chieftain of the Semnones. He will give his oath to a treaty at midday tomorrow, or we are at war. This has gone on long enough.”
“Yes, sir.” Flavius saluted briskly, but there was a hunted look in his eyes. Midday tomorrow. Only one day left.
The emperor reached for the wooden tally slates, and the stack spilled over. Flavius put a hand out to catch them, and the emperor’s eyes narrowed as the mark of a healing burn showed on the inside of his aide’s arm. He opened his mouth to speak, considered, and closed it again. “Dismissed, Julianus.”
Domitian sat looking thoughtful for a long while after Flavius had gone. Was that burned arm what had had him so nervy lately? And if he had burned it where Domitian thought he had, why? Flavius Julianus was utterly, completely loyal, incapable of being otherwise. If Flavius had covered up treason, he had done it to pull someone else out of danger. And Domitian would never find out who that someone was from Flavius. Domitian decided that he didn’t want to know, not this time. Whatever had been afoot, it was ended for now, buried with Marius Vettius, who had thought he could make himself emperor.
It wasn’t the first time rumors of assassination had surfaced; they were the constant companions of any man who held the purple. For the rest of his life Domitian would tense at the sound of a footstep behind him, but with Flavius Julianus on his staff, he had a better watchdog than most men had. He was not yet foolish enough to trade that security for vengeance for a plot already dead. Domitian carefully turned the map so that his back was no longer to the door and went back to his work.
The sense of urgency in and around Castra Mattiacorum was growing. Forst could feel it hanging in the thin dawn like the portentous stillness before an earthquake or a summer storm. In the wine stall where he had found a cheap lodging, he shook the straw off his cloak and stumbled out in the half-light past the sleeping forms of the shopkeeper and the thin, cowed girl who served the wine and lay with the customers in the storeroom at the back. He ducked under the door flap and stuck his head in the rain barrel outside. The dirty streets and raw timbered buildings shook themselves into activity as the wake-up sounded from the bugler’s post inside the fort.
A supply wagon rumbled past, loaded and on the road already. At the end of the street two sentries from the patrol that kept the peace in the vicus by night were trudging back to camp, quarreling over some long-gone dice game. Behind him, the shopkeeper stirred and kicked the girl awake. Forst shook the water from his hair and went slowly, then faster as the urgency in the street began to catch him, toward the house where Ranvig and his people were lodged. The Germans were awake, too: There were thralls coming and going from the house, and a knot of warriors standing lordlywise in the street and watching them work. Forst knew Ranvig and Fiorgyn by sight now, and Barden and Lady Morgian across the long, sad gulf of years, although he had never let himself get close enough for them to see him for fear that that would make his decision for him then and there. But these men were none that he knew. They stared back at him blankly, an unknown man with his hair in a Semnone knot and a desperate indecision in his face.
“Hai! You!”
Forst spun around. A wiry blond man trotted across the street, and Forst recognized the Macedonian that Correus Julianus had pulled out of the arena.
“This came in with the army post last night,” Eumenes said. “Master turned me out this morning to go and find you.” He held out a wooden tablet with leaves sealed with a blotch of wax. Forst read Correus’s name and then his own in laborious Latin letters across the front. He clutched it and stood staring at it with a cold unease. Emer could write, but she did it badly. He could see her in his mind, scratching those characters across the wood, with a thin reed pen.
“Can you read?” Eumenes asked.
“What? Oh. Yes, I can read. As… as well as she can write.” He still stared at it.
“Well, if I was you then, I’d read it,” Eumenes advised. “It’ll have to be important for the old general to have wangled it into the military post for her.”
Forst looked at the Semnone warriors again, and they looked back at him blankly as at some oddity that had no bearing on their world. He went back to the wineshop and shut himself in the storeroom with the wooden tablet:
You have a child. A girl, if that will make a difference to you. She was born at the end of April. I had thought not to tell you, thinking that you must make up your own mind to come back or not. But now there is another man, and he will marry me if you do not come.
Forst leaned his head against the cool clay of the storeroom wall and stared miserably at the straggling letters.
I do not love him, but he will be good to us, and I need a man, and the child needs a father.
It was stark, a statement of fact, not as she would have spoken it, but Emer didn’t write well, and it was not a thing she would have been willing to speak to a scribe.
So now you will have to decide. I am sorry, but the man will not wait, and I will not either, anymore. You have had enough time.
It was a bitter, proud letter. He could see her image, superimposed on the straw bins and their wine jars, drawing each awkward character, her face set, her red hair pulled up in a knot on her head and coming loose to curl in fine tendrils around her face. There was a splash of freckles across her nose and cheeks, infinitely dear, and remembered with an aching clarity. He stared at the wine jars as if the image could speak and somehow make all other things clear to him, too. The clamor in the street outside rose to a confusion of screams and angry voices before he heard it. He ran for the storeroom door as the face across the wine jars faded out.
The street was full of Roman soldiers. The girl was huddled under a bench, and the shopkeeper was busy pulling the wine jars that had been set into their slots in the counter for the day’s trade back out again. He stopped long enough to pick up a knife and slap it down on the counter beside him. Everywhere along the street, people were diving into buildings and pulling shut their doors.
Forst saw that the Romans were fighting with a mounted German war band, caught between the foot soldiers who were pouring out of the fort and the cavalry troop that had chased them into the town. The Germans were armed with oval shields and heavy fighting spears, and they had swords slung from their belts as well. Some of the cavalry troopers were wounded, and a few were riding double behind their mates.
The Germans must have ambushed a patrol, he thought, and caught the worst of it until the fighting had swept into the town itself. Forst flattened himself back in the doorway as a German horseman toppled a cavalryman from his mount. The Roman fell and lay still in the mud, with a red hole in the scales of his cuirass. The troop horse screamed and crashed into the unshuttered front of a food stall, upsetting the iron brazier that was burning on the counter. Another cavalryman plunged toward the German, who pulled his own rearing mount up and looked for a way out as the stall’s awning fell and caught fire from the brazier. There were unlit torches in brackets on the wall, and the German pulled one free and stuck it in the flames. He whirled it around his head and into the roof thatch of the next shop as the cavalryman closed in on him and they disappeared again into the melee in the street.
It was then that the odd thing happened, the thing that Forst remembered over all the rest of the skirmish. Someone shouted “Fire!” and suddenly there seemed to be two Roman armies in the street. The foot soldiers’ commander gave an order, and his troops split like two forks in a stream. One pursued the now retreating Germans, while the other became a line that passed buckets of water from the channel that supplied the fort, to pour them on the flames of the shop. For a while the fighting raged around the bucket line, but they only put their shields over their heads and let it pass by them, never stopping the water.
Their commander stood with his optio beside him, and, watching him, something moved into place inside Forst. It felt like a window being flung open, he thought, grasping for the idea that had come to him so quickly and completely in the chaos. Whatever else might be an ill with Rome, the Romans were builders. They would take the land they had conquered and make something of it. In the Black Forest over the last ten years, they already had. Forst had seen that when he had first come back to the Rhenus. His people, if they took the land back, would burn everything in it that was Roman. And that would be wrong now. Forst watched the flames sink under the steady splash of the water and watched the faces of the German shopkeeper and his girl as they stood to one side, out of the soldiers’ way. The towns and the people here were too Roman to go back. That was what it came to in the end. And so was he. There was a dead German warrior in the street, one hand outflung in the mud, his knotted hair pulled from its pins and trampled with it. Forst looked at him sadly, a man he had never seen, a boy come to his sword since Forst had last ridden with a war band.
Wet ashes drifted down around him. Too much gone, he thought. Too much water gone by in the river and too many men dead. These were new men, this new chieftain and his warriors. Forst had a new tie, a new child, and a wife for whom he had fought as hard as he had ever fought for Nyall Sigmundson. And no one stepped in the same river twice, not ever.
Most of the fire was out, and the bucket line moved aside as another cavalry troop splattered past them through the mud. Ranvig was going to lose. One more warrior in his war band wasn’t going to make the difference or bring Nyall back. Forst knew that, and knew that he had lost his belief in lost causes. He would say a last prayer to the German gods that Nyall had found his peace, then he would go back to Emer. And that was a Roman way to think. Somehow Rome had made a Roman of him.