The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (8 page)

Tucked behind Cian’s shoulder, Minna squinted at the man. ‘You were behind us at the fort. And you passed us on the road.’

The man with the gold earring unveiled a startling white smile in his swarthy face. ‘Why, yes we were, and yes we did, little lady. What a good memory you have.’ Minna could not place his accent. He spoke Latin, but with an exotic lilt.

Cian eyed him warily. You have misjudged us. She’s no whore. We’re just on our way to see one of the soldiers – family.’

The man shrugged. ‘As you say.’

‘Well.’ Cian nudged Minna backwards again. ‘Sorry to startle you like that.’

‘But wait!’ The man stepped forward, hands spread. ‘Do not be so hasty! I am Jared, leader of our little band of travellers. There are wolves around these hills, marauding blueskins and Roman soldiers. Surely you would be safer staying here this night, with us?’

Wolves
, Minna thought, every nerve tingling. That was new.

Cian’s breathing was heavy in her ear. ‘No disrespect, friend, but I think not.’ He glanced at the others, who had left their fireside seats to gather close by. There were around fifteen, with patched clothes and sun-burned faces, though each sported pleasant expressions.

‘Please, I insist.’ Jared took Minna’s arm and drew her firmly from behind Cian, his eyes twinkling. ‘You know, lady, in these parts it is considered a grave discourtesy to refuse hospitality.’

The ranks of men parted like gates opening, and she threw a look of confusion at Cian as she was gently marched between them. His face was set in grim lines.

They were seated on bundles of hides beside the fire, and given bowls of steaming mutton stew with hunks of dark, nutty bread that Cian did not touch until their hosts had been eating for a time, Minna copying him. His knee was squashed against hers, so she could feel the tension in him.

‘What’s your business away up here, anyway?’ Cian asked boldly, after a long silence.

Jared swallowed ale from a horn cup. ‘We bring the soldiers valuable goods, boy. Better wine than they can get from Eboracum; finer flour for bread; trinkets for their sweethearts.’

Cian frowned, his ale untouched. ‘How can you afford to bring grain this far north, and still do a better deal for the soldiers than the local tribes?’

‘Ah!’ Jared grinned at his men. ‘Hark to the boy! He’s got a sharp business mind, eh? Should we invite him to join us?’

Laughter rumbled, and Minna glanced over her shoulder at the camp. She couldn’t see their carts or mules any more.

‘Let us say,’Jared went on, ‘that after a lot of hard work and travel, we’ve forged some very
favourable
relationships.’ He caught her eye and winked. ‘Bribing, cajoling, charming – with perhaps a
little
threat here and there – we have used every advantage open to us, as honest traders.’ He laughed.

Minna stared into his black eyes, thinking this Jared might be lots of things, but honest wasn’t one. The gold earring winked and her imagination ran riot, seeing him on a ship, squinting into the bright eastern sun as it glided into some perfumed port of painted women and dark-eyed men.

Cian was briskly brushing crumbs from his lap. ‘I must thank you, friend, for your hospitality.’ He got up, hauling Minna with him. ‘But we have an early start and will seek our beds. We can make our own camp—’

‘No, you must sleep here!’Jared frowned as if offended.

‘We’ve abused your goodwill quite enough.’ Cian polished his meat dagger down his trousers before sticking it back in his belt, unsheathed.

‘Nonsense! I insist, for your own good.’

Cian’s jaw tensed. ‘All right,’ he said evenly. ‘Then we’ll just spread our bed rolls on the edge of your camp.’

Jared hesitated. ‘As you wish.’

After some hearty farewells they took themselves off to the north side of camp, near a copse of birch trees. As they rolled out their sleeping hides Cian muttered, ‘When they are asleep, we go.’

Minna nodded, and, as they stretched out side by side, she was surprised at the comfort she felt from his nearness and his familiar scent, the wool-fat that greased the pony harness and oiled his body when he juggled. The brittle smiles of those men had unsettled her. But then, there were the wolves.

Cian put his hands behind his head, letting his tension out in a snort. ‘Honest traders! Thieves, more like. They’re up to something, and we’re in enough trouble without getting wrapped up in theirs.’

Cian’s fingers pressed on Minna’s lips, waking her. ‘Hush,’ he breathed. ‘I think I heard something.’

She rubbed her eyes, annoyed she had fallen asleep. The moon was higher now, silver not bronze as it wove in and out of the clouds.

‘I can hear snoring,’ Cian whispered. ‘But not the dogs. I think—’

There he was abruptly cut off as the black shapes of men swarmed about them, spidery shadows in the moonlight.

Cian was hauled away, scrabbling and swearing before he grunted as if he’d been thumped. Minna got out one scream, struggling up on all fours, before a hand clamped over her ankle. Then it gripped her thigh before others came down on both arms, wrists and neck. Men were shouting at each other in Latin.

Cian cursed and cried out to her again, as feet thudded in the turf all around her head. Her ear was ground into the soil and someone stood on her wrist, pinning her there.

‘Get the damn cub down!’ There were more muffled yells.

‘Thump him, Ori, in the head!’

Cian bellowed again as Minna was roughly flipped over, and then someone was kneeling on her arms. ‘Get it in, then, Jared!’

She choked on a horrified cry, squirming with all her strength, arching her back.

‘Little wildcat, she is!
Hurry up
!’

Fingers pinched her nose and her mouth gaped to breathe, and then something cold was pressed to her lips. A stream of foul-tasting stuff poured down her open throat. Spluttering, Minna tried to tear her face away, to spit, but the hands were implacable. They held her jaw closed, her head still.

‘Enough! Don’t kill her,’Jared barked, ‘and get it down him before he kills
us
!’

Minna kept trying to struggle, but something was happening. Her thrashing limbs were losing their strength and a mist was closing in around her. Everything grew blurred and slow-moving. Her soul was shrinking, disappearing down into a pinprick. And that pinprick was receding along a dark tunnel, away from everything that was sharp and loud and clear.

At last the tunnel ended in darkness, and she fell away from the solid earth into nothing.

She must have been dreaming, though it was unlike any dream she had ever had.

Awake-dreams were sharp and vivid, but now she was heavy and trapped, forced down into a dark, viscous soup that bound her limbs and flooded her throat, silencing her screams. She was drowning.

Every now and then, she gained a sense that she was struggling up to the light, fighting free of the dragging weight. At those times, other snatches of sense would filter through.

A rumble of wheels. The stink of urine. The close reek of bodies. Cold metal around her neck.

And then the hands would grip her again, and bitterness flood her tongue, and she would find herself sinking back into the sticky mire. No! she cried, inside where they could not silence her.

But then, as the black despair claimed her, she would hear a voice singing close in her ear. She would feel warm lips breathing into the side of her own.
Safe you will be
, the voice sang,
when you come to me. Come. Come.

Chapter 8

M
inna woke at last to a stench that clawed its way up her nostrils and down her throat, and she immediately gagged it back up again.

Her cheek was pressed into a slimy floor, while the world lurched underneath her. Pain lanced her temples and aching limbs. Far away a man shouted, answered by another. She dragged her eyes open. She was in a dark place, lit by a dull glow spilling down a narrow ladder from above. Thirst curled her tongue up like a shrivelled leaf.

The world tilted again, and Minna slid across the slippery floor and slammed into a wall, her arms brought up short by a chain locked to an iron ring in the floor. Whimpering, she gritted her teeth against the darts of fire in her head. She was enveloped in a musty fug of tar, salt and fish, urine and vomit. It was the reek of the docks at Eboracum, the stench of a ship.

‘By tomorrow you’ll be used to the smell.’

She turned her head, blinking. In the dimness she made out Cian. He was hunched against the other wall, his tunic stained with vomit. A line of blood curved from one eye to cheek, sickle-shaped.

She tried to croak his name, but was stopped by a cloying wave from her belly and she could only turn her face and retch weakly down one arm.

‘Good, good,’ someone rumbled cheerily, and Jared swung himself down the ladder with a lamp he set on the bottom rung. He crouched by Minna and lifted a cup to her lips. Seized by thirst, she forgot all else as she gulped greedily at the water.

‘That’s a girl,’ Jared cooed. ‘Keep purging the red flower from your belly. Its caress takes you to some fine places, but it’s not so good for your looks, eh?’ His voice was still hoarse, but the ingratiating tone had gone, replaced with a note of satisfaction. One callused hand turned her chin to the lamplight. ‘Well worth it indeed,’ he muttered. ‘A fine jewel from the moors of the north.’

Minna had heard that before.
A rare jewel.
Her mind stumbled, groping for the familiar.
Mamo. Mamo.

‘Now.’ Jared turned to the ladder and came back with an iron pot. ‘Seeing as you’re awake, my lovely, I want you to piss in this now, and not all over your clothes.’ He smiled as he thunked down the pot. ‘No sense getting sores on that smooth white skin, eh?’ It was only then she realized she was no longer wearing her wool trousers, just her long tunic. Her legs were bare.

Jared spared a glance for Cian. ‘And you too, boy – your flesh is almost as sweet as hers. Kick it back and forth between the two of you, as you will.’

Minna’s head thumped back on the wall, some sense restored by the water. Jared glanced down. ‘You’ll need some fingers, though.’ Stepping over, he unlocked the chain with a key at his belt, freeing one hand, then re-locked the other. Fury flooded her, rousing anger, and she spat at Jared, spraying saliva over his fingers.

His smile did not falter. ‘Good,’ he chuckled. ‘Keep fighting free of it.’ He neatly dodged a feeble spasm of her heel, then freed Cian’s arm. ‘The weather will be smoother soon, my lovelies. Sweet dreams!’ He thudded back up the ladder.

Panting, Minna flexed her tingling fingers. Then she understood it all. For those fingers crept up to a metal ring encasing her neck. The thin shackle was in two neat halves joined by a hinge, with a forged ring at the other end. The ring could be attached to a rope – or a chain.

‘It’s a slave shackle.’ Cian’s voice was as thin and pale as his face.

‘I know.’ Her heart plummeted. ‘I know.’

‘They are slave traders … I should have known …’ Cian rolled his head on the wall, then thumped it back. ‘They ply their filthy trade in Alba, and the Roman soldiers turn a blind eye to it – fewer barbarians to kill, after all.’

‘But we aren’t barbarians.’

‘No.’ Cian’s eyes, she could see now, were shadowed underneath. ‘Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

They were in that place and time because of her.

‘Gods! Don’t look at me like that, Tiger.’ His voice was sullen with suppressed fury. ‘I was beyond stupid. I knew we should have walked away.’

‘But I made you come with me in the first place!’

Cian mustered a tight smile. ‘Made me? I’m not a pony to be led about by a girl – and a clumsy one at that.’ She clenched her fingers, her eyes stinging, as he shifted to ease his back. ‘Think on this,’ he said. ‘Slaves are like any other goods. To get the best price you must look after them. If they were thieves they could have killed us there and then, but now they won’t.’

It was a bleak assessment either way. She closed her eyes, sick with guilt. ‘Do you know where we are?’

‘I woke up yesterday. We stopped in some port where they were still speaking Latin. But whether we are for Erin or Gaul or Rome, I don’t know.’

Minna turned her cheek on the wall. She would never see Broc, or breathe the air of home again. She was a slave, after her family fought so hard to be free. She slowly curled on her side, her bound wrist caught by the chain. The drug that Jared had called the red flower still pulsed in her blood and she gave herself up to it now, tightening into a miserable ball.

An argument, raging above her head on deck, roused her many hours later.

‘But Jared,’ one of the men was whining, ‘she’s pretty flesh, what does it matter?’

‘You damn well know where we’re going, and it does matter,’ came Jared’s voice. ‘Those savages at Dunadd pay good money, but only for
unmarked
flesh, and if she’s a maid I want her to stay that way.’

‘Gods, Jared!’ another protested. ‘The barbarians don’t give a bear’s ball about women’s holes, open or shut!’ His tone turned wheedling. ‘So let’s have her, then, all of us. Finest flesh we’ve had aboard for years. Better than those poxed whores worn out by dirty Romans.’