her city and her husband. He looked around the tent, at the unused bed covered with a sheepskin, the wicker stand that held a basin and a jug of water, none of which she had used, then back to Claudia, still in her woollen cloak, her sitting pose rigid.
‘You are comfortable?’
‘I am a prisoner.’
The haughty pose she struck then clearly amused him. ‘I have been a prisoner in my time, lady, and it was not like this. When you fear to sleep lest the rats eat your toes you will know what being a prisoner means.’
‘My husband?’
‘Is alive and still in command of his army.’ Brennos sighed then, before adding, with a toss of the head, ‘Those fools behave as if we won a great victory. They are telling each other how brave they are.’ His face held a strange expression, which Claudia thought, at first, was despair, but closer examination showed it to be frustration. ‘Your husband is a good soldier.’
‘The very best that Rome has,’ Claudia replied, pompously.
Brennos smiled then, for the first time. ‘Then I can be sure that once I’ve beaten him, I have nothing to fear.’
‘You won’t beat Aulus, and even if you did, another army would arrive next year.’
‘And another the year after,’ he replied, in a voice that showed no trace of fear at the prospect. ‘That is always assuming I stay here and wait to be attacked. Instead of putting them to all the trouble of marching to Spain I’ll meet them outside the gates of Rome.’
Claudia had to stop herself laughing then. His words, calmly delivered as they were, still sounded like madness to her. ‘You think yourself greater than Hannibal.’
‘Not me, lady,’ Brennos said, taking the gold eagle charm between his fingers, an act which drew it once more to Claudia’s attention. It flashed in the torchlight as he moved it, seeming to have come alive, as if the bird was actually flying. ‘But the race to which I belong. Your husband was lucky today, so we will meet again. He has to be lucky once more, indeed every time he fights the Celtic tribes. They only need to be lucky once.’
As he spoke he strode towards a jug and basin, undoing his sword belt and peeling off his smock. With a start Claudia realised that this tent was his own, obvious really since she was his personal prisoner. She tried to avert her gaze as he picked up the water jug and emptied half the contents over his head, but the image of the muscles moving in that broad, tanned back stayed with her. The flap opened again to admit two girls, one of whom had fresh clothes for Brennos, while the other carried a tray of food, which she laid on the sheepskin bedcover. Neither said a word, yet Claudia observed interest in the way they gazed at him, looks that made her wonder at his own domestic arrangements. Was there a wife or a series of concubines ready to satisfy his needs? Why was she curious?
‘Eat,’ he commanded.
She was hungry, ravenous in fact, but she also had her pride. ‘I have no desire to take anything from you.’
That look of frustration crossed his face again. ‘Please don’t be foolish. I have sent a message to your husband, saying if he wants you back he and his legions must quit Spain.’
‘He will never agree to that.’
‘No, he won’t. I doubt your being my prisoner will affect a single act of his as a soldier.’
‘Then you might as well kill me now.’
Claudia knew she had struck a pose as she said that, her head turned away, eyes raised in an attempt to imbue her words with a degree of nobility. She stayed like that as he approached her, very aware of his proximity as he stood by her chair. His hand reached out to touch her chin and pull her head round, the contact sending a shiver through her whole body.
‘You would face death, I think, with that same look.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Roman pride.’
‘Roman spirit.’
His hand dropped to the edge of her cloak, opening it slightly to reveal her naked flesh. A single finger was brushed across her skin, and all the time those blue eyes held hers, in a locked gaze she could not break. She felt her body react to his touch, a tingling that went down her arms to her fingertips, a feeling halfway between an ache and pleasure that forced her to clench the muscles of her stomach. Two things Claudia knew: that she should not feel like this, it was wrong and wicked; it was also a sensation she had never before experienced, and one that she did not want to stop.
‘I would want that Roman spirit maintained, which means you must eat. We brought the wagon with your possessions back from the battlefield. You should wash and dress as well.’
Both physical and eye contact were broken simultaneously. Brennos picked up his huge sword, with its heavy curved blade, broad at the base and narrow near the handle, then the torch.
‘And you should sleep. We leave here at first light.’
Claudia tried, only to find her efforts punctuated by screams and wailing, leaving her unsure if what she was hearing came from her dreams or reality. When Brennos came back his clean smock was coated with blood so fresh and copious that it glistened in the torchlight. Through one narrowed eye she watched him as he stripped again, unable to properly hear the soft incantations that sounded like prayer. With his head back, eyes closed, the eagle talisman at his neck held in one hand, he looked very much like a man asking for forgiveness.
Brennos kept Claudia close to him, wherever he went. The Celt-Iberians moved camp often, rarely staying in one spot for more than the three days it took to strip the country around them of surplus food. Most of the time her world was bound by deep wooded valleys and rocky escarpments, with only an occasional glimpse of the coastal plain controlled by her own people, the one constant being a blazing sun punctuated every few days by tremendous rain-storms full of thunder and lightning. When they pitched their tents she was assigned to his; when they rode, her horse was rarely more than a few feet from him and since he treated her with respect it was impossible not to respond, just as it was impossible, even for someone who could not speak a word of the language, to pick up the hint of the problems that Brennos laboured under.
As they rode out of that first camp the bodies of the slaughtered, men, women and children, were still lying where they had fallen. Over the following days she learnt that these were tribal chiefs and their families, men who thought one battle with Rome quite sufficient and who had wanted to return to their own lands with what they had managed to acquire. She could see the way that those tribal leaders still with him looked at Brennos; there was no love in their attentiveness, more a caution born of a desire to survive. Yet he held them together as a fighting force by some unnamed power, their forays to find Romans to harry always resulting in a return to the camp with booty in abundance. Each sortie would be followed by celebration and the recounting of long heroic tales to follow the feasting and drinking, all watched and heard by a leader who could not keep out of his eye a slight look of scorn. For all that they did as he asked.
Brennos had a quality of command that Claudia had seen in her husband, but he had something else as well: an elemental ascendancy over those with whom he dealt. As the days and weeks went by, she began to realise that a portion of that same power had taken a hold of her. Proximity tempered both her resolve and her pride. It was impossible to be with someone like Brennos and maintain a stiff Roman neck, hopeless to try and avoid conversation with a man so curious about Rome and its ways, who so entranced her with tales of his own past. So Claudia learnt of the land of mists and rain from which he had come, far to the north surrounded by angry water where gold and tin were mined and the people painted their faces blue. She heard of the ordeals undertaken by those like him who wished to serve as Druid priests, scourged by fire, earth and water, during the latter bound to a rock while the great western sea lashed at his naked body; of the vow each took to forsake the company of women for life.
Brennos could recount the history of his race, with stories harking back to beyond the mists of time; tell of battles won and heroes made; invoke the intercession of the Great God Dagda and his companion, the Earth Mother, Morrigan. He was a man who could describe, in detail, the potions that healed, as well as those which killed, reel off the entire canon of Celtic law, which he had been empowered to interpret. Less and less she thought of Aulus; her husband seemed to recede from her considerations, to become like a distant memory, her thoughts taken up instead with imagined conversations with Brennos, and Claudia, though still only eighteen, was old enough
