The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy (56 page)

Later, as the party climbed a long valley, she remained at the rear, musing on her dream. It wasn’t difficult to decipher – she needed to be back by Eremon’s side. Their individual power was at its most potent when they were joined.

With a surge of excitement Rhiann raised her face to the sun, which was struggling free from the shredded clouds above. Soon, her self-appointed mission would be complete, and she could not just tell Eremon she loved him, but make him believe it with her body. For Samana had been right in the midst of her twisted hatred. Rhiann
had
been incomplete, the passionate part of her imprisoned by the past.

Now, it was as if something had been awakened, for Rhiann’s body hungered just to feel Eremon’s bare skin against her own. And it was with her body that she would anoint them both, with the Mother’s light that shone through death and grief.

And betrayal.

Yes, surely where there was love, even betrayal, there was a place from which one could return.

On his return to his camp by the Forth, Agricola had not paused to bathe the dried salt spray from his face, or the grimy sweat from his body. Taking the
haruspex
, the priest he had brought from Eboracum, he made his way directly to the small temple he had caused to be built earlier in the season.

It was a square timber building with an open courtyard in the centre, and a room that held the sandstone shrines to the deities, with alcoves for the eagle emblems of the legions. The double timber gates had been left open all summer, to allow the god Janus to join his men on the field of war, and would not be closed now until all his units were back from their campaigns.

This day was one of double celebration for Agricola, though he had as yet heard no news from Lucius in the north. Perhaps it would be a triple triumph!

In the patch of sky framed by the temple courtyard, dark clouds milled restlessly, driven by the same keen wind which had slapped the waves against Agricola’s ship all the way north. Yet he barely felt the cool air on his bare arms, watching instead the ox blood run down the sacrificer’s knife with a secret smile. Agricola himself then dedicated the fallen beast to Mars, Jupiter and Venus Victoria, for his great triumph over the south-western British tribes whose rebellion he had just this summer quelled.

It had been an easy triumph, and the sight of those crushed bodies beneath his hooves as he inspected the battlefield afterwards had gone a long way to restoring the confidence that had been torn from him by last year’s Alban defeats. That, of course, and the holy island raid before he left, which had likewise been thoroughly successful.

Agricola savoured these things, as the priest touched the warm blood to his forehead. Yet as he bowed his head then, his prayers turned to something far more personal. For on his return to Eboracum he received the news that his wife was to bear him another child. And the conception at the time of a full moon, a diet of imported Thracian figs, sweet chestnuts and almond milk, and the shape of her already swelling belly guaranteed a son. At last!

Agricola smiled, as the smoke of the burnt flesh on its brazier curled up into the sky. He was in control again, as confident as he had been when he first set out to attack the Novantae. Since then, he’d allowed himself to fall into the sin of fear far too often. He would endeavour to rid himself of such a weakness from now on.

Slowly, he left the gates of the temple, unlacing his leather breastplate and handing it to a slave. It was time for the bathhouse now, followed by food.

The air held the barest hint of crispness, for the cold season came earlier every year here in the north. Still, if the victories kept coming now, he would be bathed in the sun of his own land perhaps sooner than he originally hoped.

With a spring in his step Agricola nodded at his door guard and entered the outer chamber of his quarters. There he stopped to sniff the rich scent of beef stew and malted ale, letting his eyes adjust to a darkness relieved only by two lamps and the single window set high in the wall, covered with thin, oiled hide.

It was only as Agricola’s sight cleared that he realized he wasn’t alone. A man was seated in one of his rush chairs, with his head in his hands. A suspicious dread breathed over Agricola, with a chill greater than the Alban air outside.

Then the man raised his face and Agricola had to stop himself from stepping back, with an instinct to ward away what was coming.

It was Lucius.

The
optio
in command of the small ridge fort tilted the gate to shield himself from the cold wind. On either side of him, six legionaries stood with their swords drawn, and above on the rampart more soldiers had their spears trained on the intruder, though the person was not only alone, but also a woman.

She stood, a shivering, dark shadow against the vivid bracken and birches lining the slope behind her. Their leaves were already beginning to turn, yet the
optio
knew, after three seasons in Alba, that the flame of autumn colour licking over the land was a trick for foreigners such as he, for it heralded the most bitter cold. He hated the wind in particular, which was why being drawn away from his warm brazier and his dice to deal with this sudden arrival had put him in a brutal mood.

The
optio
peered at the woman. Beneath her shapeless, brown tunic, dirt-streaked cheeks and lank, black hair, he could now glimpse a hint of beauty, and he wondered, with a stab of warmth, whether her body matched the fineness of her eyes, vacant as they were.

‘I must see your commander, Agricola,’ she repeated, as she had for his scouts, and then for the men on watch. The woman’s words and demeanour had only added to the enigma she presented. She spoke faultless Latin, yet though her words were authoritative, her voice was colourless, and she hunched into her tattered cloak and would not meet his eyes.

‘And what might you be wanting with him, sweetheart?’ the
optio
mocked, peevish with cold. The soldier beside him laughed and, boldened, the commander stepped closer to the woman. She reeked of unwashed flesh and damp wool.

‘That is for him to decide.’

Her head was down now, her cheek turned away, and on impulse the
optio
took hold of her jaw and turned her face up to his. Even in the shadow of the fort palisade, the combined beauty of the woman’s skin and exotic features was unmistakable. ‘You’re a pretty one to be wandering these border lands all alone, without the protection of men.’

The woman shrugged, her large, dark eyes drifting past him to gaze at the sky. They were most unusual, those eyes – almond-shaped, the edges slanted – and something about their languid cast made the warmth pulse in the
optio
’s groin. ‘I am the queen of the Votadini,’ the woman murmured, ‘and I am under Agricola’s protection. I need no more.’

At this ludicrous claim, the guards on the rampart above the gate guffawed, resting on their spears to gain a better view.

‘Queen, eh?’ the
optio
jeered, tilting her chin higher. The cold sun glinted on the fine, downy hairs on her smooth skin. He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘You might need to peel off those rags and show me how much of a queen you really are, pretty maid. Dance under me with some royal flair and I might believe you.’

No flicker of emotion passed across those black eyes, only the reflection of the clouds. ‘Will it make you take me to Agricola quicker?’

The
optio
was confused, his desire rapidly cooling. Alban women were known for their fight – that’s what made them so alluring – but the dullness of this one’s voice only made the hairs on his neck rise.

‘If you please me,’ he muttered, releasing her jaw. With a breath he pushed his disquiet away, for he was a practical man at heart. Mars knew when he’d have the opportunity to bed anything female, let alone some flesh as fine as this.

The woman shrugged again, uncaring, and pulled the ragged edges of her woollen cloak over her breasts, her hands trembling with cold.

‘Come, I will question you in my quarters,’ he announced loudly, for the benefit of his men, and made to lead her towards one of the two long timber barracks. She did not even try to avoid the mud puddles in the rutted track, but plodded along behind him listlessly. ‘You’d best tell me everything you know, and quickly,’ he ordered, swallowing down his unease.

A week later, Agricola had been able to hold to his self-made promise about resisting fear.

It was easy, of course, in the face of the rage that overwhelmed him as he heard Lucius’s tale of woe, a rage that was given a final, painful twist with Lucius’s stuttering recitation of the numbers of Roman dead.

Another 1,500 men
. Agricola was still struggling to believe it.

And then suddenly Samana had returned, scratched, thin and dirty; alive only because she gained food from those people who had not yet learned of her banishment. Amid his anger, Agricola had marvelled with a kind of disbelieving horror how these Albans, so obsessed with royal blood, could turn on a noble so resolutely that the order would be followed by every man, woman and child in the land.

Of course, his fury had little to do with empathy for Samana herself. What truly burned in his gut was the arrogance of the Erin prince, snatching a party of Agricola’s allies under the nose of a legion, and the careless swagger with which he had dealt with Samana, blatantly defying both the threat of the Roman forces and Agricola’s personal wrath.

Samana had assured Agricola that the raid on the sacred island would destroy much of the tribes’ resistance, but resist they still did.

Agricola glanced at Samana now, curled in his bed asleep, shivering despite the glow of the brazier that brought sweat to his own brow. Anyone observing his utter stillness, as he sat on a stool, chin resting on fingertips, would think he had reached some place of cold acceptance. Yet they would be wrong. The more he commanded his muscles to immobility, so the anger only roared brighter.

In another week, the Ninth Legion units he had taken south with him would return on foot. So far, Agricola’s wrathful eye had fallen on the north-east of Alba. There lay the richest lands, the flat plains his men could easily reach while being protected on one side by the sea. Most of Alba’s population also lived there, and if they’d only stayed to fight perhaps all this would have already ended, and he would be in possession of the entire nation.

Yet the promised enemy had melted away into those hellish mountains, and all Agricola’s men got for their pains were cowardly raids that came out of the night, the rain and the woods. He could not afford to lose any more soldiers on such a fool’s chase, and the fort of the Caledonii king seemed, unfortunately, too far to reach after all. But there was another option, and it had been slowly taking shape all through these hours of darkness.

Now there was a rustle and stirring among the bedclothes. Agricola brought his gaze back from the shadowed roof-beams to meet the black emptiness of Samana’s eyes. He had never seen her as she had been this last week; lifeless, the dark fire of her doused. Yet now she was at least fully awake, and in the glassy stare with which she fixed him he saw a spark of life, and knew somehow that she had sensed the drift of his thoughts. He’d always found it uncanny, that ability of hers.

‘You must strike at the den of the wolf himself,’ Samana whispered, her eyes suddenly hungry. ‘Take your revenge and mine, for the season of sun is fading. You have not far to go.’

Mesmerized, Agricola stared at her, his chest stirring with a sudden, unnamed yearning.

‘Not far,’ she whispered again, and raised a finger to point west, white and crooked against her tangle of black hair. ‘Just over the mountains. Dunadd.’

CHAPTER 52

Leaf-fall, AD 82

F
ar in the north, the season turned early. At a sacred pool in a remote glen, birch leaves torn free by early storms swirled across the surface of the water, as an evening wind crept up the back of Rhiann’s neck. The rowan boughs dipped and shivered, their scarlet berries bright splashes of colour in the dusk shadows. From a nearby valley over the hills floated the creaking boom of a stag in rut, and drifting from farther west, another.

Their thoughts on the south and the harvest being undertaken even now at Dunadd, Fola and Rhiann watched the bronze finger-ring shimmer to the bottom of the stream-fed pool at which they knelt. After a silent moment they came to their feet and, as Rhiann pinned her cloak around her shoulders, she glimpsed Fola’s face in the last rays of the sinking sun, and saw how pale it was; as white as the birch trunks behind her.

On the path, Rhiann slung her arm around her friend’s shoulders. ‘I have a surprise for you. We are turning back this very day. Nectan and I agreed this afternoon.’

She glanced at Fola, and was pleased to see her tired mouth lift a little. ‘On the island, I dreamed sometimes of the life you led, Rhiann. I thought it exciting then … but now … I yearn only to be by the fire in Nerida’s house …’

Rhiann heard how she bit off her words, and so she stopped and took Fola by both shoulders. There was pain in her friend’s face, yet Rhiann wasn’t afraid of it any more. She hadn’t been able to let it in for fear she herself would falter. Now she could give back to Fola what she had received. ‘And you will soon be by
my
fire. At least I can give you that.’

Fola forced a smile, laying her fingers over Rhiann’s hand. ‘As you will soon be by
his
side.’

She turned to hop over the stream on the mossy stepping stones, and Rhiann followed, hugging to her the knowledge that her own reunion with Eremon would come sooner than even Fola knew. For Rhiann had already made up her mind what she would do – send the others to Dunadd while she sought out Eremon in the east.

A day later, Rhiann’s band was wending its way back down among the mountains to the west of Calgacus’s dun, when Nectan’s last scout found them. And with him was someone Rhiann knew immediately, for his hair flamed in the sun as he galloped towards them along the loch shore.