PART TWO
XXIV
The barbarians had taken the riderless Roman horses, and so, just a mile from the spring, Valeria and Savia were freed of their gags and seated on their own mounts to enable better speed. Their wrists were tied to the saddle horns, and the reins attached by rope to other riders. The dead soldiers' horses and Clodius's steed followed in train behind, the Celt who had died draped across one saddle. There were eight surviving warriors, Valeria counted, seven of them raffish-looking men and the eighth, shockingly, a woman. Her waist-long hair was braided and tucked into her baldric to tame it in the night wind, while a yew bow and quiver of feathered arrows was slung across her back. The female had the same arrogant ease as the men, riding with confident expertise.
It was frightening, this perversion of nature. But fascinating, too.
Their chieftain commanded with a quiet surety different from the stiff formality of Marcus or the sternness of Galba. The barbarian didn't demand obedience so much as expect respect, and his ragged warriors gave it to him, even while joking about his choice of route or his eye for pretty hostages. They followed no obvious course, trotting along a track here and leaving it there, cutting across moonlit field and moor and woodland with casual certainty, all of Caledonia the color of bleached bone. Savia was mute with fear and clinging miserably to her jouncing saddle, while Valeria grieved silently for poor Clodius and desperately tried to puzzle out what had happened. What was this chieftain doing at the sacred spring?
Why had poor Rufus ridden up, only to be killed? Above all, where were they going, and what would they do with her when they got there?
They descended at dawn into the dimness of a wooded hollow to rest and water the horses. A tether tied the captive women to a tree. The barbarians looked curiously at their prisoners in the light as the Romans looked at them. The one called Luca was a compact, strongly muscled man with long hair and mustache in the Celtic manner, wearing nothing but trousers and cloak and seemingly as impervious to weather as a greased legionary tent. The barbarian's chest was bare, his face and arms smeared with charcoal to help hide him in the night. The woman wore similar trousers but also chain mail over a leather jerkin, her breasts slight and bound flat and her limbs long and sinewy, like the toughness of young willow. Despite the mannishness of her garb, she was blond and rather pretty, but the men treated her with wary distance.
'Brisa, give them some food and water,' their leader commanded in their native tongue.
The woman nodded and went to the stream. The decision that their female member would tend the captives, not a male, seemed somewhat reassuring.
Savia wrinkled her nose as she ate some of the sharp cheese offered, but Valeria refused, her appetite gone. Both women did drink from the offered skin of water. Then they waited, apprehensive and desperate for some opportunity to escape. The warriors made no move to molest or help or even watch them; their initial curiosity satisfied, they now paid no more attention to their captives than to dogs.
The barbarian leader squatted alone by the stream, carefully washing his face and arms and apparently lost in thought. Valeria viewed him speculatively. She'd escaped from him once and was determined to do so again. Arden, the men had called him. He wore a sleeveless tunic that left free the powerful arms that had gripped Valeria, yet he too seemed oblivious to the dawn chill. It was interesting that he cleaned himself, contradicting her image of the northern barbarians as little more than unkempt cattle thieves. Maybe he was trying to wash his blood from his hands. No doubt he felt satisfaction at killing Clodius and capturing Valeria after his earlier failure. But how had he known she'd be at the spring? How did he know Galba?
Eventually the leader stood and strode to his prisoners with the stride of a man accustomed to covering many miles, then dropped into a squat before them. The water's transformation of his appearance was surprising. Washed clean of dirt and paint, the barbarian was actually rather handsome: unexpectedly so, like a hero among jackals. He was beardless in the Roman manner, though stubbled this morning. His long hair was tied behind him, his nose straight, his expression firm, his eyes that bright, disconcerting blue, his gaze bold, his manner calm.
Valeria hated him.
'We're going to sleep here a few hours before moving on,' he told them in Latin.
'Good,' she replied with more confidence than she really felt. 'It will give time for the Petriana to catch you, and flog you, and hang you from that tree.'
Her abductor looked up mildly at the limbs. 'There'll be no alarm yet, lady. We'll be on our way again before the Petriana is much out of bed.'
So he was overconfident. 'You've condemned yourself by seizing a commander's wife and senator's daughter,' she insisted. 'The entire Sixth Victrix will come looking for me. They'll burn Caledonia to ashes before they give up.'
He pretended to consider this. 'Then maybe I should chop off your pretty head now, send it in a basket, and save them the trouble.'
Savia moaned, but there was nothing in his manner to make Valeria take this threat seriously. If he wanted to kill them, they'd already be dead. 'I have influence,' she tried. 'Let us go now, and I'll stop the pursuit so you can get away.'
He laughed and put a hand to his ear in mockery. 'This pursuit you keep talking about? I don't hear it!' He bent close. 'You're my guarantee there'll be no pursuit, daughter of Rome, because if there is one, it will be your death warrant, not mine. You're hostage for our safety, and if the cavalry finds us, then you and your slave here will be the first to die. Understand? Pray that your new husband forgets about you.'
Valeria looked at him, trying to mask her disquiet with an expression of contempt. She didn't believe for a moment that no rescue would come. And she didn't believe he'd kill her when it did. He wanted something from her, or he wouldn't have come again. For just that reason she had to get away.
'Do you understand what I'm saying?' he persisted.
'You murdered my friend, Clodius.'
'I killed a Roman soldier in fair combat that he didn't have to seek. He was a fool the first time I met him, and had his throat marked in warning. Men who are fools with me a second time don't live to regret it.'
She had no answer for that.
'We can't sleep on the dirt!' Savia protested instead.
Arden looked at her with interest. 'Now here's a practical objection. And where would you sleep, slave?'
'This is a Roman lady! In a proper bed! Under a proper roof!'
'Why? Grass is as fine a bed as there is, in summer, and the sky the best roof. Rest easy. We'll not disturb you.'
'It's too chilly to sleep!'
He grinned. 'Cold enough to keep down the insects and the snakes.'
'Savia, be quiet,' Valeria muttered. 'We'll cuddle together with our cloaks in the mud where his kind prefers to live.'
'What do you mean to do with us?' Savia persisted.
The barbarian considered them solemnly. Then he smiled, his teeth as bright and clean as his scrubbed skin. He didn't display any of the ignorant squalor Valeria expected, and in fact had a rather annoying sense of self- satisfaction and apparent pride. Perhaps he was vain. Primitive people often were, she'd heard.
'For the lady here, I intend to take her home and teach her to ride, in the Celtic manner.'
His meaning was unclear. 'If you touch me, my ransom will be less.'
'As for you,' he said to Savia, 'I intend to free you.'
'Free me?'
'I don't like slaves, Roman or Celt. They're unhappy, and I don't like unhappy people. They're unnatural, because all other creatures run free. So when you're in my hills you'll be a slave no longer, woman.'
Savia sidled closer to Valeria. 'I'll not leave my mistress.'
'Perhaps not. But it will be your choice, not hers.'
The slave couldn't help asking it. 'When?'
