“It was not,” I said quickly. “I told you that before. It is not.”
She looked unhappily into my face. Her hands made a quick, abortive gesture, as though she had been about to reach toward me, and stopped herself.
“And was that all?” I asked.
She took a deep breath. “You want the part his men will repeat, don’t you? He said, ‘It was different in our own country. Ariantes was famed as a warrior there and men admired him. But he was injured in the war, and it broke his spirit. Now one leg and his courage are crippled, and he contents himself with a thing like you after loving a golden princess.’ I told him to get off my land. He didn’t go, of course, so I turned and tried to go back to the house. His men wouldn’t let me; they closed in all around me. I tried to duck under the horses, but one of them caught my arm, and his friend caught my other arm, and they both held me, facing their master. He picked up his spear, and I thought for a moment he was going to kill me. Then I realized that he wouldn’t, he wanted me alive to tell you this. I understood-of course I understood-that he only wanted to humiliate me to provoke you. He rode toward me, smiling that horrible smile, and caught my cloak pin with the tip of his spear, and then he turned aside, and his men let him through the ring and fell in behind him; the men who’d held me threw me down in the mud and followed as well. He’d pulled my cloak off my shoulders, just like that, without scratching me: he shook it off his spear as he rode off, and the horses of his followers trampled it. The pin was broken. That is what happened, and that is everything that happened.”
“You ordered him to leave your land, even though you were alone and surrounded by his men?” asked Banadaspos. “And when he threatened you with his spear, you faced him in silence?”
Pervica glanced at him impatiently and nodded. Banadaspos smiled fiercely. He would report it to the rest of the men, I knew, and they would all be pleased that Pervica had the kind of courage they expected of their commander’s lady.
I sat in silence for a minute. There were two sides to this. One was what Arshak had meant by the visit. That was perfectly clear, and would be settled between us. The other was what Pervica had thought and felt because of it, and of that I was deeply uncertain.
“Banadaspos,” I said-in Latin, as a courtesy to Pervica-“go and explain to the bodyguard what happened; tell them that the dishonor will be revenged.”
He stood. He was stiff with excitement and apprehension. “Do we ride for Condercum now?” he asked.
“Gods, no! The horses are tired. His whole dragon is there, and I could not guarantee the security of the rest of you once the duel is over. Besides, do you think the Romans will allow us to fight? We will go back to Cilurnum tonight, send messengers, and make the arrangements.”
He nodded, bowed, and jingled out. I turned to Pervica. “Why do you say we should not marry?” I asked her. “Because you think that if we are not going to marry, there is no cause for me to revenge the insult to you? Or for some other reason?”
She bit her lip. “There are other reasons.”
“We are of different nations, whose customs and ways of life are very far apart. My life is threatened, and by that, yours is as well. I am the slave of my honor, which must always be the chief consideration, to which all others bow down. Those reasons?”
“No!” She looked intently into my face again. “No, I think I guessed all that before. I won’t say I understood it, but I think I could see it was there. No, it’s because so much of what Arshak said was true. You were born a prince in Sarmatia-not just one of the provincial nobility, a member of the equestrian order, but one of the really great families, the senatorial aristocracy of your own people, the consulars. I hadn’t understood it before. I’d been thinking of you as though you were just the prefect of a wing of cavalry, which was a rank above me but not out of reach. But I realized it when I met Arshak. There’s no equality between us, and a marriage without equality is dangerous-particularly to the lesser partner.”
“It is a very long ride from here to the Danube, and further to cross it,” I answered sharply. “Here I am only a cavalry commander. And anyway, it is not the same among us as among the Romans-we have no ‘provincial nobility’ and no ‘consulars,’ only scepter-holders, nobles, and commoners. You own flocks and have dependants, so by our own reckoning you are noble. For a scepter-holder to marry a member of the lesser nobility is no disgrace to anyone. Arshak said what he did to insult you, nothing more. And here near Corstopitum, some people must take another view of the whole matter. Here they must think, ‘Pervica is a landowner, a beautiful young widow with a prosperous farm and a position in the region. She can choose to marry anyone she pleases. What does she want with an illiterate barbarian who’s happier in a barn than in a house, and expects her to sleep in a wagon?’ ”
She flushed. People-probably Quintilius-had obviously not just thought it, they’d said it, and to her. “There is another reason!” she said, breathlessly, and I saw that the other had made her uncomfortable but that this was the real heart of it. “I don’t want you to remember your first wife, and then look at me and feel ashamed.”
“I would not.”
She shook her head. “I know you loved her. I knew that even before I knew your name or who you were. And I’m sure she was all that Arshak said she was. I thought I wouldn’t mind coming second to her, but I see now that it’s a mistake, you would mind, and I could not bear that. I will not be a rag tied to your tail, a disgrace-not even for you. The gap’s too big. In time you’d grow to hate me.”
“No.”
“I think you would.”
“Pervica.” I reached up and caught both her hands, forcing her to look at me. “I would not.”
Her eyes were full of tears, but her mouth was set in determination. The hands in mine did not twist, but they did not hold.
“I would not,” I told her again. “Listen, I have lived in two worlds, the one across the Danube and the one here; I was once a prince of the Iazyges, and I am now the commander of a unit of cavalry for the Romans. But there is a part of me that is neither of those things. I know, because I have balanced on it, shifting from one to the other. It has neither rank nor wealth nor title nor honors. All those things are gifts of either world, and have changed; it has not, and so it could choose a path in a land where all was unknown. That is the part of me that loves you. And because it owes nothing to either world, it cannot compare one with the other, or cheapen your great worth falsely beside the value of Tirgatao-whom, it is true, I loved dearly. Love is not like water in a bucket, which is full or poured out; it is like a river, which will flow where it can find a channel, and if it is blocked in one place, strives to find another pathway for itself, a new person to love. I will have no less love for you because I loved her first. I would not hate you, Pervica. I could not.”
Her mouth crumpled, and the hands clenched suddenly on mine. Then she flung her arms around me, dropping onto her knees beside me, and cried against my shoulder, scales and all.