“Perhaps,” I said. “But why should you say that what we saw in that extreme is false, and how we appear at a market, true? The gods gave with both hands when they spared me from dying in the water. For my part, I mean to take their gifts and bless them.”
“So I notice,” she said, and I could sense the ironic smile, invisible in the dark.
I kissed it. “You are laughing at me,” I told her. “People have been laughing at me a great deal recently. It is very bad for my reputation. I am supposed to be a bloodthirsty savage.”
She giggled. “And staying in here with you much longer will be very bad for mine. I’m supposed to be a modest young widow. You’re going to have to let me go back and reassure them all that I am a respectable woman, really.”
Whatever reputation she got in the fort now, she would have to live with over many years. I helped her down from the wagon, and we walked back to the fire.
Longus’ sister Flavina lifted her mournful dark face to Pervica and said, “So do you think it looks comfortable?”
Pervica sat down and hugged her knees, her face radiant. “Yes.”
Flavina laughed. “And when are you going to move in?”
“That will have to be decided,” I intervened. “But the lady has consented to marry me. Wish us joy.”
They all jumped up exclaiming, and wished us joy.
By the end of the evening we had fixed a date for the wedding-early February, which I hoped would give us enough time to sort out all the details of houses and lands and legal arrangements. I was not eager to sort out anything just then, in that perfect hour. I stood at my wagon watching when Pervica at last walked back to the village with Flavina, past the fires, under the thick winter stars. Already the line of her back, the way she held her head and draped her cloak, the soft shadow of her hair, were familiar to me. In a little while, I thought, I would recognize even the sound of her voice calling in the distance, or her body in the darkness; she would become more familiar to me than my own face, a pillar of my world. For all my desire, I felt in that instant neither anticipation nor dread of anything that fate could hold, but I was wholly content, at peace in that one shining moment of time.
I turned to go back into the wagon-and saw Facilis, still sitting beside the fire that the others had now left. When he saw me notice him, he got up.
“I need to talk to you, Ariantes,” he said harshly.
I sighed. “Tomorrow.”
“No. Now.”
I looked at him a moment in silence.
“There are some things I need to know,” he told me. “And I suspect there are some things you should have heard before you asked that lovely young woman to marry you.”
“If that is so, it is already too late.”
“I know, I know, I should have talked to you before, but I didn’t want to ruin the festival, and I didn’t realize you were going to make up your mind so fast. Still, the sooner you hear it, the better.”
“Very well,” I said, reluctantly. “We can talk.”
“Not here. It’s too public. Come to my house in the fort.”
I hesitated, and he added, very quietly, “I can vouch for your safety going there and back, and I won’t ask you to eat or drink anything.”
I should have realized that he would notice my precautions. I sighed again, and nodded.
He had one of the empty Asturian barrack blocks to himself, and lived in the decurion’s quarters at the headquarters end. He’d bought one slave in Eburacum to look after it for him, a thin, ugly boy who was snoring by the hearth in the main room when we came in, flushed with festival drink and happily gorged with feasting. Facilis grunted, put a blanket over the boy, and left him asleep. He ushered me into the bedroom instead and lit the lamp. It cast a yellow light over the cold stone walls. The floor was packed clay, without even bracken to warm it, and the bed had been shoved into the corner to make room for a desk. It was so cold that our breaths steamed in the lamplight. If ever a room looked like a tomb, it was that one.
“Now,” said Facilis, “First the things I need to know. What happened to you on the road back to Condercum?”
“That is common knowledge.”
“The hell it is! You didn’t go hunting. Longus told me: your bow was still unstrung in its case. The woman hadn’t unstrung it, because she commented on the shape of it, and thought the water must have spoiled it. And it’s a pretty odd hunter who wades into the river to collect a quarry he’s killed with an unstrung bow.”
“A bow can be unstrung after use, and put back, to keep it dry.”
“It can be-but it wouldn’t be, with a quarry about to be washed downstream. And I talked to your young woman. When you were found, you were lying on your back in the shallows-but your face was covered with mud. The lady’s no fooclass="underline" she understood what that meant, though she was trying to pretend to me that she didn’t even when she told me about it. She can see for herself that you’re not admitting to anything and she’s going along with it, but she’s worried, and was letting me know as much as she could. Come on! I know there’s something going on. You’ve stopped eating in the fort, and you wear armor and take your bodyguard with you even to exercise your horses-you, the slip-in-and-out sick-of-war shirtsleeves one. Someone tried to murder you, and you think someone’s going to try again. And I can guess why. Someone made you an offer, and you turned it down, didn’t you? Who? What did they want? Has Arshak accepted it?”
“Facilis,” I said slowly, “I am sorry.”
“Please!” His voice cracked. “I’m not your enemy. I was an idiot on the way from Aquincum, I can see that now. But I was sick with grief, I thought then it was my one chance to get a little of my own back, and I never expected to want to make alliances later. Look, what we used to be died at the ocean, and we know each other better now. You’re a brave man, and an honorable one, and a damned fine officer who’ll do anything to look after his lads, but you can’t handle this alone. I want to help. Trust me, please! This is my fort now, and your people are my lads, too, and we’re in the thick of somebody’s plot to make them die in a mutiny like Gatalas and take a few thousand Roman lives as they do it.”
“Facilis…” I began again, then stopped. “You are right, we know each other better. You are also a brave man, and an honorable one, and, I would guess, by nature a kind and decent man as well. I do trust you. But if what we were died at the ocean, it has left ghosts to haunt us, and one of those ghosts is a bullying centurion who tormented us from Aquincum to Bononia and tried to make things difficult for us even in Britain. My people have a saying: ‘Some horses cannot be driven in pairs.’ To Arshak’s people, and to many of Siyavak’s, and perhaps even to some of mine, I am damned as a Romanizer already. Arshak at least holds it against me that you, you specifically, vouched for me to the legate. Siyavak is my ally now, but he hates the Romans, and I dare not do anything that would lose him. I cannot make an alliance with you.”
“You’ve lost Siyavak already. I saw him in Corstopitum, while you were recovering from drowning, cozily chatting with Arshak and… a certain lady.”
I shook my head. “I have not lost him yet. But if Arshak and the lady you mention knew that, he would die. You see, I do trust you.”
“May I perish! So Siyavak is spying on them? Things have gone further than I thought.” He was silent for a minute, then said, “And do you understand why? And who? Because I still don’t.”
This I could answer. I told him, quietly and quickly, what Eukairios had told me about the druids, though I said nothing about the man he had mentioned, Cunedda. I did not trust Facilis not to investigate him further, and that investigation could put Eukairios’ life at risk.
“May I perish!” he said again, when I’d finished. “That fits.” After a moment, he asked, “Who told you all this?”
“Another ally.”