helpless. Those are the customs I wish us to keep, whatever else we may lose. I swear it on fire”-I raised my right hand and stretched it toward the brazier- “that I have asked for your help in a good cause which I believe ought by rights to be your cause, and that I will deal with you justly and without treachery.”
“It is our cause,” said the Brigantian.
“It is not!” said Dark Eyes.
“Christ is our cause,” said the Romanizer. “Him and him alone-but to serve him may mean serving goodness and justice wherever we may find it, as it is written: ‘and they said to him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? and he replied, Amen I tell you, whenever you gave it to the least of these my brothers, you gave it to me.’ ”
“He is not a brother!” exclaimed Dark Eyes angrily. “Least or greatest!”
“He is a neighbor, then,” snapped the Brigantian, “and engaged in a struggle with our enemies, who, by all accounts, have called on the aid of demons to curse him and have tried to murder him in this very city. Should we pass by on the other side, in the vain hope that the brigands won’t actually threaten us?”
“We put our trust in God, come what may,” replied Dark Eyes. “Not in princes.”
“We’ve prayed over this already, and argued it,” said the Romanizer. “I had a strong conviction of our Lord’s guidance in this before, and meeting the man has only reassured me. I’m sorry, brother, that it hasn’t helped you.”
Dark Eyes scowled. “He could have been worse,” he said, after a pause. “So you’re determined to go through with it?”
“For Christ’s sake!” exclaimed the Brigantian. “It’s our own city and our own homes at risk!”
“We have a clear choice between helping a man who is working for peace,” said the Romanizer, “or standing aside and letting the forces of destruction and violence take their course. I am for peace.” He stood and walked over to me, holding out his hand. “You have your alliance.”
XIII
The Christians were helpful as soon as their decision was made, even Dark Eyes, though it was plain he was reluctantly going along with the majority. They provided the name of someone who could write letters for Siyavak, a password and means to contact this person, and promised that any letter he wrote would be passed swiftly and secretly to me. Then the Romanizer produced a set of wax tablets. “We drew this up last night,” he said. “It is a list of people we know to be druids, together with their hiding places, and officials known to be sympathetic or bribable. But before I give it to you, you must swear not to show it to the authorities. Most of these people are innocent of any crime, and many of them abominate the practices of the extreme sects-but any of them would suffer cruelly if their sympathies were known.”
I put my hand over the fire and swore that I would not betray the information to the authorities, but only use it to defend myself and to collect evidence against the plotters, and I was given the tablets. I thanked the Romanizer with some warmth.
“No, we must thank you,” he returned. “You’re the one running the greatest risks in this contest. We will pray for your safety.”
I was contented when I rescued my horse from the goat shed and rode back along the cabbage-scented alleyway. My allies seemed both efficient and reliable. Eukairios was very silent. When we were riding back through the gates of the fortress, however, he gave one of his sudden dry chuckles, and I gave him a questioning look.
“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. But his eyes were dancing.
“I did something you think is funny?” I asked resignedly.
He chuckled again. “The way you sat there on the floor, my lord, the perfect picture of a noble savage, telling Senicianus that you’d lost count of the number of men you’d killed! He was so shocked I thought he’d fall off his seat. I thought you’d lost them all, I really did. But it worked: they could see that you were being completely honest with them, and they realized that they could trust you.”
I snorted. “I was not trying to be amusing. And you must not go about telling people that I am a peacemaker. It is a disgraceful thing to report of the commander of a dragon.”
He chuckled again. “Not to Christians. But I will keep my mouth shut in future on that shocking truth.”
I looked at him with affection. There he sat, a small dark man in his forties, perched clumsily astride my red bay carriage horse and grinning at me. Riding, the cost of horse fodder and size of stud farms, the Sarmatian language: he had struggled valiantly to master them all. By rights he ought to hate me. He had been given to me very much against his own wishes, snatched away from home and friends and forced to adapt himself to a world nearly as alien to him as it was to me. “What would you do if I freed you?” I asked him.
The grin vanished. We were crossing the bridge from the city to the fortress now, and for a long minute we rode in a silence stirred only by the soft clopping of the hooves of our horses. “Would you do that?” Eukairios asked, in a strained voice.
I stopped my courser. “If you would agree to stay in my service, as a paid secretary, yes. But if you would go back to Bononia, no. I am sorry, but I cannot afford to lose you.”
He clenched his hands together on the reins and stared at me in consternation. “I hated Bononia!” he exclaimed. “I found that out within ten days of leaving it. All the stupid petty rules, and the short rations and the beatings if I complained or made a mistake; the way my supervisor loaded me with other people’s work and took the credit for mine. I loved my friends there, who supported me and cared for me when times were bad, but I was utterly wretched. But I didn’t even realize that until it ended; if you’ve staggered a long way under a burden, you don’t really know how heavy it is until you put it down. I’ve been very happy working for you. Hadn’t you realized that?”
I thought he had not been unhappy, but this astonished me. I shook my head.
“I would be very glad to go on working for you, my lord, very glad, in any circumstances.”
“If you want your freedom, then, you may have it,” I told him. “You know my people do not keep slaves. You can… How does one go about freeing a slave?”
He laughed out loud, a laugh that ended in something very like a sob. “ ‘She may sing, but we are dumb,’ ” he said, quoting verses in a voice suddenly harsh with both triumph and extraordinary pain.
“ ‘Oh, when will my spring come?
When will I be like the swallow, and renew my tongue?
By silence my song has perished, and Phoebus looks aside.
Thus Amyklai raised no alarm, and by its silence, died.
Whoever’s never loved, love tomorrow; love tomorrow, whoever’s loved before.’
“I can draw up a document for you.”
I had a sudden conviction that he had quoted those lines before, in the days when he had talked back to his superiors and been beaten for it. He had watched love passing him by then, and cried out for the spring of freedom that came now, too late. It was as though the solid rock of my own identity shivered, and I reached at the unimaginably foreign state of what I might have been if I had been born a slave.
What Eukairios cried in that moment was for himself, and I had no business intruding into it. “Then do so this afternoon,” I ordered. “But now we must hurry or we will be late for our appointment with the legate.”
We left the horses in the stable yard, which reassured my men, who were fretful as heifers that have lost their calves. We were not late arriving for the meeting with Priscus, which was just as well, since we were very late leaving. To my relief, the legate made no reference to the events of the night before and began at once to discuss the arrangements for the other dragons instead. We’d talked for a couple of hours and written a few letters when the legate’s secretary stuck his head round the door and announced that Siyavak and Victor had come, as ordered. Priscus told the secretary to admit them-in just a minute.
“I want to extend the plan for the horses to their numerus,” he explained. “But I don’t want any talk about the other Sarmatian troops in front of Siyavak. It will be some time before the Fourth Sarmatians live down their previous commander’s mutiny, and it would be better if they didn’t know how many other Sarmatians there are in Britain or where they’re posted. Do you understand me?”
I nodded, though I was taken aback. I had, of course, noticed that I was being trusted with knowledge, but
