Aise stood looking at her for a long time, standing square in the doorway so Rian could not see.
This is what awaits us all, she thought.
One of Sertorius’s men came up behind her, his mouth full of the barley bannock Aise had baked that morning.
“Bitch had a knife on her, cut me good – you see what she did?”
Aise turned. He was heavily built, and the hair from his chest rose up to join with that of his beard. He had a fresh wound at the side of his eye, a finger-long slice with the blood already dry upon it.
“All we wanted was some sport,” he said, shaking his head. “Fucking waste.” He smiled at Aise. “You make good bannock. Tasty.” His grin widened, and he slapped Aise on the rump. “High and mighty, aren’t we? Wife of the great Rictus.” He took another bite of bannock, and held it up to her. “Hope you can suck cock as well as you cook.”
When they were outside again with a pitiful collection of belongings furled in blankets upon their backs, Sertorius grabbed their hands and bound them with rawhide strips cut from the milking buckets.
He leaned in close to Rian as she stood there and sniffed at her neck. She flicked her head as though a fly had settled on her, and he laughed – then straightened as Phaestus and his son approached.
“The bodies go in the house,” Phaestus said.
“What does it matter, for Phobos’s sake, if they burn or the wolves have them?” Sertorius protested.
“Wouldn’t you want someone to do it for you?” Aise asked him.
Sertorius looked at her. “Don’t speak to me, cunt.”
“Just do it,” Phaestus said quickly. “One of your own is lying here.”
“Fars was always a slow lazy bastard – oh, all right. Adurnos, Bosca, you heard the fellow – trail this rubbish in the house before we fire it.”
Aise looked up at the sky. It had been such a beautiful morning, a blue, still winter’s day. She wished it had not been so beautiful; now, when there were other days as fine as this, she would be remembering the events of this morning, and they would taint every blue winter’s sky for her.
If she lived long enough to have the memories.
I wronged Garin, she thought. I should not have sold Veria, for she was his wife in everything but name. I got rid of her because she reminded me too much of my own hurt, of the boy we lost. For that at least, I am paying now.
Lord, in thy goodness and thy glory, let me take it all upon myself, what remains ahead of us. Let it all be mine, the hurt and the evil to come. Protect my girls, and let the pain be on me alone.
She smelted smoke, heard a crackling, and turned round to find the thatch of the farmhouse on fire. Phaestus’s son, Philemos, was shooing the goats out of their bothy while the roof broke into flame above him.
“What’s with this, goatherder boy?” Sertorius asked.
“No need for them to burn,” Philemos said. His colour was up and his eyes were shining dark. “There’s been enough death here for one day.” He looked over at Aise and Rian and then looked away again quickly.
They gathered together in front of the farmhouse as it went up and the two mules brayed in fear at the smell of smoke and the massive rush of heat. All the outbuildings were on fire also, and the goats were streaming away in panic from the blaze. Sertorius was wearing Rictus’s spare soldier’s cloak, mercenary scarlet, while his accomplices were loading down the mules with hams, barley-flour, oil-jars and skins of wine.
“Not an obol in the place,” Sertorius said, staring at the burning house. “Where did the famous Rictus keep his money, is what I want to know? The bastard lives simply – there’s hardly a damn thing worth stealing.”
“The moneydealers in Hal Goshen have it all,” Aise said, “Safe in one of their cellar-vaults. He is not stupid enough to keep it here.” Sertorius looked at her with an eyebrow raised.
“We have what we came for,” Phaestus said. “It’s the best part of three hundred pasangs to Machran, and winter is on us. When we deliver these three to Karnos, you won’t want for money, Sertorius. I’ll see to that.”
“See that you do,” Sertorius said. “I am a man of many virtues and vices, Phaestus, and one might say that the one weighs in the balance against the other. Don’t try to leave your thumb on my scales.”
Then he grinned. “Ah, the warmth! Let us hope our campfire tonight will keep us as warm! But to the logistics of today. Adurnos, you will lead the spitfire girl. I will take the woman -”
“No,” Phaestos said. He stepped forward and grasped the long lashing of hide that hung from Aise’s wrists. “I’ll take her. Philemos, you lead the girl, and you, Sertorius, the child.”
“Fuck that,” Sertorius said. “Adurnos, the brat is yours. At least she’ll be light, carried. Shall we leave then, brothers and sisters? The day is trailing on and I want to get past the drifts at the top of this dungheap valley before darkness finds us.”
They set out. Sertorius led the way, and Aise was jerked into motion behind Phaestus as the older man tugged on her bonds. Philemos came next, Rian walking at his side as though he was escorting her for a ramble through the woods. Then came the big man with the broken nose, Adurnos. He settled Ona up on a mule with a curse, while Bosca, whom Styra had marked with her knife, brought up the rear, leading another heavily laden mule.
They crossed the river, their feet breaking through the snow-covered ice that had thickened on the surface of the water. The bite of the stream cleared Aise’s head somewhat. She heard a great crash behind her and looked back to see the roof of the farmhouse cave in with a rush of black smoke and scattered sparks. In the bright day, the flames were saffron-dark and solid as swords, drenched in sunlight.
Smoke the colour of an autumn storm rose in a high pillar in the air above the valley. It loomed over them all, casting its own shadow on the snow, and smuts from the burning floated over the trees like ethereal carrion birds.
At least you had a pyre worthy of you, Eunion, Aise thought. Now your ashes will be in the air and water of this place, like my son’s.
And Rictus, your precious gold is under the hearthstone where we put it.
Aise bent her head and followed her captors through the snow to the woods that hung dark and deep on the slopes of the glen above.
Behind her the home that she and Rictus and Fornyx and Eunion had made blazed into destruction, the stone walls toppling as the heat cracked them open, the hoarded grain, the oil, the olives and the wine -the very stuff of life – taking light and combusting in a boiling tower of black smoke that blighted the morning.
And in the flames at its base the bodies of the dead lay darkening into ash and dust; a grey taste on the wind, no more.
FIFTEEN
The city of Afteni, famous for its metal-workers, was now an island in a shallow sea. Built, like most Macht cities, on rising ground and surrounded by a twenty-foot wall, it found itself surrounded by water also, a knee-deep lake extending for two thirds of the city’s circumference.
Since the Battle of the Afteni Plain, which had seen the scattering – if not the destruction – of the army of the Avennan League, the clouds had gathered, black over the lowlands at the foot of the Gosthere Mountains, and had released their burden upon already saturated farmland. The Imperial Road had disappeared, sunk in brown water, and the entire plain had gone with it. There was only the endless dreary expanse of rain-stippled floodwater, with groves of olives and bedraggled vines and sodden trees straggling above it, cowering from the endless downpour.
And that had proved a salvation.
Karnos stood on the battlements of the citadel with a soldier’s oilskin cloak thrown round him, his own little tent against the wet, and peered east, striving to pierce the rain-curtain. Unconsciously, his arm came up and he began carefully kneading the bandaged flesh of his shoulder.