The Romans allowed him, and he came back carrying a bundle wrapped in black. He set it down on the floor in front of Arshak and unrolled the cloth: a set of divining rods tumbled onto the floor. Moving with sharp, angry jerks, Siyavak counted them out, and I saw that they were tied together in sequence by a red cord. They were all black; none of the chalked ones were included. “They promise death and destruction,” whispered Siyavak. “He had them read before us. And on the final rod..” He sorted through and picked one up. “This.”
There was a pattern of scratches on the blackened surface of the rod, little lines parallel to one another or at angles. It was nothing like Latin writing, but it looked as though it might have a meaning. “What is it?” I asked, taking the thing, still bound to the others by the blood-colored cord. The whole bundle was one of the most frightening things I had ever seen: it seemed to vibrate with a menace of supernatural disaster beyond anything the mind could conceive. There would have been some white in any normal reading.
“Gatalas said that the messenger who brought the bundle gave him the name of a man here who could interpret it,” Siyavak told us, still in the low voice, “and he said he had shown it to the man, and the man read the marks as though they were writing. ‘Beware,’ it says, ‘the Romans have lost patience. You will be arrested and replaced by Victor.’ ”
I looked at the tribune, who was now standing over the rods and staring in confusion, aware that something had been disclosed but having no idea what.
“Have you seen these before?” I asked the tribune, in Latin.
He shook his head. “They’re some of the divining rods you use to know the will of the gods,” he said. “Why do they matter?”
I explained, and showed him the stick with the markings. Something shut suddenly behind his face. “Jupiter Optimus Maximus!” he whispered.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The writing’s… British,” he replied. “I can’t read it.”
And he didn’t want to look at it. But he had understood something about it that we had not.
“Someone from one of the Pictish tribes must have sent it,” he went on, “trying to provoke the mutiny, to distract our troops so that they could raid our lands.”
“Didn’t Gatalas show these to the Romans?” I asked Siyavak.
He sat back on his heels, looking at Victor intently.
“He did not show them this,” he said, in Latin now, and to Victor, not me. “No. He went to you, though, he asked what you would do about the command of the dragon.”
“I didn’t understand,” said Victor. “I thought he was trying to find something else to quarrel about.”
“You said that you had once planned to be commander in his place.”
“I only said that because I thought he knew! I told him the plan had been abandoned!”
“How could anyone believe you, with things as they were?” Siyavak turned back to Arshak. “We thought this was from you, Lord Arshak, that you’d heard something in Eburacum.”
“No,” said Arshak. He took the rod and slipped it out of its loop of cord, then turned it in his hands, looking frightened. “No, they can vouch for me at Eburacum. I’ve had no chance to send anything. And it wasn’t true.”
“Who was the messenger who brought it?” I asked. “Who interpreted the markings?”
“I don’t know,” replied Siyavak. “My lord Gatalas didn’t say.” He looked at me bleakly. “So he died for nothing then?”
“No,” I answered. “He died for a lie.”
“We will revenge him,” said Siyavak, his eyes beginning to smoulder. “Marha! Whoever sent him this murdered him, as surely as if they’d sent him poison! We will revenge him!”
“You will have to work with the Romans to do that,” I said.
He looked at Victor again; all of them looked at Victor. “Very well,” Siyavak said, angrily. “We can do that.”
When I left next morning they’d agreed to a joint command by Siyavak and Victor and were planning a funeral service for the dead. The air was still poisonous, but no longer sullen; the hatred was balanced by a sense of purpose. I had hopes that when they got away from Condercum they might yet find a way to be happy.
Victor remained at Condercum to supervise the fourth dragon. He offered us some Roman cavalry as escort, but Arshak declined the protection of men who detested us, and I agreed with him. Arshak and I set out back to Corstopitum on our own. It had turned colder, and there were a few flakes of snow drifting from a slate-colored sky. I was tired-I hadn’t slept much in the stone barracks block-and the world of camps and war seemed more confining and oppressive than ever. I didn’t want to put my armor on that morning; the weight and the sound of it set my teeth on edge. I packed it behind my saddle. No need to get it wet, I told myself, and my coat and hat were warmer. Arshak, who’d armed for the journey despite the snow, eyed me contemptuously.
We rode off in silence along a road that was almost entirely empty. We had not spoken to each other since his reference to Tirgatao, and now he sat on his horse with his head bent, eyes fixed on the animal’s mane in a hot manic glare. We’d ridden the better part of ten miles along the military way, and had passed the fort of Vindovala, when Arshak suddenly sat up straight and turned the glare on me.
“You struck me in the face at Corstopitum,” he said.
“I did,” I told him. I’d had time to calm myself again, and I knew how to answer him. “I ask your pardon for the blow. But you mentioned a thing that’s like a hot iron in my heart, and you can’t be surprised that I was angry.”
A little of the glare faded. “Do we have to be enemies?” he asked, almost pleadingly.
“We’re not-are we?” I returned.
“You’ve taken the side of the Romans.”
“We both swore at Aquincum that that was our side.”
“It isn’t! It never was! It can’t be!”
“Then whose side is our side? The side of the people who sent that message to murder Gatalas?”
He drew in his breath with a hiss and looked away. What were they doing to us? he’d asked. Gatalas dead, me Romanizing, and himself.. He hadn’t said. He’d known, though, that what was happening to himself was terrible. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, in a frozen, unnatural voice.
I was afraid that if I said anything more, I would have to fight him, and that would be disaster however it ended. So I said nothing.
We rode on for another mile, and were nearing the turn down to the old road and Corstopitum when we heard a jingle of harness ahead of us and Bodica’s chariot turned onto the military way in front of us.
She was alone. The blue cloak she wore was pulled over her head against the cold, and she held the reins under it: for a moment the white stallion trotted toward us driven by a shapeless, faceless shadow. Then it stopped, the horse shivering under the yoke, and waited while we rode on toward it.
Just before we reached it, Bodica loosened the hood and turned into a lovely woman again. “There you are!” she announced, smiling prettily. “I thought I would take the horse out for some exercise, and perhaps meet you on your way back from Condercum. I wanted to talk with you.”
Arshak said nothing. He dismounted, strode up to the chariot, and handed her the divining rod with the marks on it.
Her smile vanished. She turned the rod in her fingers, then shook her head and handed it back to Arshak, saying something I couldn’t quite hear. “Can we stop and talk?” she asked, more loudly, looking at me earnestly with those vivid blue eyes. “I’ve brought some hot wine against the cold.”
“Lady Aurelia, greetings,” I said. “I thank you, no.”
She looked at Arshak. “We need to talk,” she told him. “We all do. Didn’t you speak to him?”
He nodded. “Ariantes, stop with us a minute.”
I looked down at them both and gathered the reins. The sudden openness about the fact of their conspiracy frightened me. I wished I’d put on my armor after all. But there was an obvious question to ask, and I had to ask it.
“Lady Aurelia,” I said, “was it you who sent Gatalas that rod?”
She simply stared at me, neither nodding nor shaking her head, neither smiling nor frowning. “I’ve come here to speak to you,” she said. “I would have spoken before, but you avoided me.” Then, deliberately, she turned away and took a flask wrapped in a blanket out from under the bench seat. “I hope that I’m speaking to a friend. Let me
