The Wolf King (10 page)

But now! Hugo’s return brought some new and interesting troubles into Lucilla’s life. Dulcinia smiled.

“This is no laughing matter,” Lucilla said. “To be sure, but it’s late and I believe, if I remember correctly, you invited me to supper this evening. I haven’t had a bite since this morning. I skipped lunch, and then Silvie broke in and—”

“Oh, good Lord.” Lucilla slapped her forehead. “I had forgotten. I received a shipment of artichokes and a barrel of oysters, and the cook promised to do artichokes in Sicilian style with a wild boar stuffing made with olive oil, cheese, and bread crumbs. And the oysters raw with a tart citron butter sauce. Not only that, but I have a wonderful amphora of six-year-old Falernum from my own estate.”

“What a feast,” Dulcinia cried. “Just us two?”

“Yes, but I greatly fear I’ll make you sing for your supper.”

“It’s always a pleasure to sing for you, my love.” And the two women went off together, arm in arm.

Hugo and his friends had taken shelter in a tomb far outside the city gates along the road to Lombardy. The tomb wasn’t Roman or even an Etruscan tomb of the earlier period when the wealth yielded by iron and Greek trade made a civilization bloom in Etruria, but a still older one of the bronze age, when the dead were not separated from the family but returned to their kin as bones to be buried under the house floors, and were the recipients of sacrifices as revered ancestors. So it was a strangely vacant place, peaceful yet empty, made of dressed but unmortared stone in the shape of a beehive with a basin near the door to hold the lustral water and, at times, the sacred lire—both fire and water used to sanctify the burial rites.

It would soon be evening. Hugo and his cohorts were gobbling down some bread and a little cheese they’d managed to steal from Silvie’s wineshop. Hugo had given his friends only a few silver coins and kept the rest for himself. “After all, she’s my wife. I own the shop, and I can make her sell it, and—”

“If you do, you’ll be a fool,” the crop-eared man named Wedo said.

“Why? I’ve been thinking it over, and she is my wife. We were married before I left home, and—”

“If Rome is like every other city I’ve been in,” Wedo whispered, “a woman or, for that matter, a man alone couldn’t own any business—not without the protection of higher-ups.”

“Silvie’s a slut. She doesn’t have any highborn friends.”

“She does now,” Wedo said. “Depend on it. From what you told me, Silvie earned at the most a few coppers a night selling herself to drunks in the back room of taverns. I saw that shop. A counter with wine wells, tables, chairs… And upstairs was nicer. A bed with curtains around it, linen sheets, wool blankets, and three dresses and even more than three aprons, all hanging from nails on the wall. That woman of yours, she’s got friends, all right.

“If Gimp and you hadn’t been such fools and scared her, we might have gotten even more.”

Gimp ducked his head and tried to look invisible.

“No, you go back there, boy,” said Wedo, “and the next thing this Silvie cooks is your goose.

“Now, how about a decent split on what we got from your woman? Then we can all go our separate ways in peace.”

Hugo finished eating, stood up, brushed the grease and crumbs off his hands, then went and urinated in the basin that once held the water for the sacrificial rites.

No, he thought as his stream hit the meander that once marked the path the dead must take to paradise. No, he didn’t want to give any more of Silvie’s money to either the man called Gimp or to Wedo. He needed every copper of it if he was to gain an audience with any of Desiderius’s servants.

Regretfully he admitted to himself that Wedo was right. There was no way a girl like Silvie could have earned enough, even from a generous protector, to have paid for such an establishment. The only person he could think of with enough compassion to help Silvie was Regeane.

Hugo was afraid of Regeane, but the thought of Lucilla or Maeniel made the blood congeal in his veins. Compared to either of them, Regeane was a gentle person. Maeniel would certainly kill him on sight, and Lucilla would do worse: have him tortured until she was sure he had no more to tell her, then put him to death in the most painful way possible. She’d promised him just that. He’d been present when Lucilla was tortured by the Lombard duke’s men.

He finished urinating, then turned back to where his companions were eating. Hesitation. Hesitation had cost him his opportunity to kill Silvie. So he didn’t hesitate. He grabbed Wedo by the hair, jerked his head back, and slit his throat.

Gimp raised his head, looking shocked, but a second later Hugo’s boot toe caught him on the point of the chin. He never felt the blow when Hugo’s knife pierced his throat from the front and severed his spine at the back.

The tomb was suddenly quiet. Hugo had killed men before, his first in a tavern brawl not long after Gundabald died. But usually it was more difficult than this had been, and far more complications followed. He sensed, however, that it wouldn’t be prudent to linger, so he cleaned his knife on Wedo’s shirt, then searched both corpses, noting as he did that blood was still flowing from Gimp’s throat in a dark stream.

Predictably, Gimp had nothing. But Wedo yielded two gold coins he must have held back from the money in Silvie’s strongbox.

Hugo congratulated himself on taking the sensible approach to the problem of dealing with his two companions. He had needed to rid himself of them both. They would certainly have proven an embarrassment at the Lombard court. And the two gold coins would go far to helping him put on the show necessary to gain Desiderius’s ear.

Then he rose and left the tomb.

The brightness of late afternoon stung Hugo’s eyes for a second. He glanced around furtively, but he was absolutely alone. The only sound came from insects singing in the tall new grass, and the only moving thing in sight was a dust devil whirling along the stones of the ancient Roman road to Lombardy.

He set out walking, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the corpses he’d left behind.

Inside the tomb, Gimp began moving; the dark blood from his jugular vein flowed faster as he began returning to consciousness.

On the road outside the tomb, the evening breeze dropped and the dust devil vanished, melting into the still air like a wisp of smoke. The consciousness riding it hung motionless, indifferent to movement or stillness. It remembered a sort of grim malice but not much else. It was fading; without human energies to feed on, it would soon dissipate the way even thick fog does in sunlight, fading into tenuous filaments until at last it is gone.

The tomb guardians were only shadows now. The last processions they could remember were over two thousand years ago. They lay and dreamed of a vanished people who came with offerings of wheat, fruit, and flowers to feast the dead before they were burned on a pyre. Thus the spirits might begin the journey to the distant land of the dead. The people they had known were gone, the world so changed that their intercession was no longer deemed to be necessary. The only reason they lingered was because some few farmers hereabouts came and made offerings of oil and wine, believing such offerings brought good luck.

They had always done so. Time out of mind.

The guardians slept even when shepherds used the ancient tomb as a refuge in bad weather for themselves and for their sheep. Because the shepherds, no fools, made such offerings as they could, and these spirits understood the eternal needs of those who struggle to gain a living from the dusty, hot soil near the sea. Understood them, in fact, far better than their later counterparts and were both more tolerant and kind.

But Hugo had awakened them, first with his desecration of the ancient bowl and then by shedding the blood of his companions. They would have done but little to avenge his vandalism—could have done but little, they were now so weak and shadowy—but they sensed both the stronger presence in the road and Gimp’s weakening struggle for life. So they invited it in.

Antonius was up first. He left his wagon in the campground and picked out a tent, one of those used by Maeniel’s people, and cleared it of furniture. Joseph arrived about then. He’d wanted to take a leak, but after he’d poked his nose out of Maeniel’s tent, he realized doing it against a tree as a wolf might entail complications. There were what seemed to him an uncomfortable number of humans wandering around. He became human, dressed, and was able to find a trench nearby. Then he ambled—Joseph never moved any faster than an amble—back to the tent he shared with Gavin.

“What are you doing?” he asked Antonius, who was drawing lines and circles in the sandy floor of the tent.

“Ah, good, someone is up. I need rocks, all sizes, small and large; at least four or five buckets of dirt; and some green branches.”

Joseph, who had no affection for work, looked at Antonius in disbelief. “Why?”

“Never mind why. Just get them. I’m busy.”

Joseph considered asking Maeniel if he should obey Antonius, but was smart enough to know his leader would say yes, and if he was wolf would probably follow the yes with a nip on the shoulder. So he shambled out, followed by Antonius’s order “And be quick about it.”

An hour later, Antonius had built a pretty good model of the mountains on the floor of Joseph’s tent. He used the dirt for the lower hills, the greenery for forest, and the rocks for the higher peaks. True, it was schematic, not to scale, and ignored a number of features, but it was clear enough to Maeniel, who had lived in the Alpine vastness for a greater number of years than Antonius cared to think about.

Not long after he and Regeane had joined the others in the mountain fastness, Antonius had plied Gavin with wine one evening and gotten him into a state of deep drunkenness. Gavin babbled about a number of things: Caesar—the first Caesar, the one who gave his name to all the rest; Britain; a powerful sorceress; Romans—imperial Romans who, according to Gavin, Maeniel had known well; and all manner of oddities. Antonius didn’t believe even the half of what Gavin told him, but if any—even a tenth—of it was true, Maeniel was a far stranger and more powerful man than he’d ever imagined.

In any case, he submitted his model to Maeniel for approval.

He received it. Maeniel made some changes, not very big ones, and pronounced it true.

About this time, Arbeo arrived to inform them that the king was breakfasting with his nobles and would arrive shortly. Regeane retired to her room, leaving the rest of the women to greet the king.

She lay on the bed and closed her eyes.

Barbara and Matrona entered. “What’s wrong?” Barbara asked.

“I have a headache,” Regeane answered.

Barbara placed her hands on her hips. “You never have headaches.”

Matrona looked at Regeane speculatively.

“I have one now,” Regeane said shortly.

Barbara looked at Matrona. She felt at a loss, but Matrona simply studied Regeane, looking at her with opaque, dark eyes. “I think I have something for this headache,” she said, left, and returned with her Etruscan mirror. She handed it to Regeane.

“Oh, it’s that sort of headache,” Barbara said.

“Yes,” Matrona answered.

“I don’t want to look,” Regeane insisted.

“No?” Matrona asked. “Why not?”

“I am afraid of what I will see. In Rome I looked before the trial and saw myself burning.”

“I know,” Matrona said, “and you couldn’t know that a second later they would extinguish the fire. But you went forward courageously, and you will do the same now.”

Barbara walked over to one of the camp chairs and sat. These people were prescient, Barbara knew that much. She did not consider them fortunate. Foreknowledge was a disturbing gift, far more apt to be painful than not.

For a second, Regeane held the mirror in her hand, pressed flat against her supine body.

Matrona walked over to the brazier in the corner intended to warm the room on cold winter nights. The coals were almost burned out. Only a small cluster in the center covered with white ash still glowed, the rest were black and dead. Matrona threw something on the coals.

Regeane found herself sitting in a forest populated with numberless high, tall trees. The trunks rose like the pillars of a great church, limbless until they reached a great height. There they harvested the sunlight, leaving the ground below in deep shadow, thick with the discards of a thousand winters that formed a soft, springy carpet. The forest floor was dappled by sunlight only when the wind moved the giant tree-tops in a slough of whispers, eternal sound wedded somehow to eternal silence.

In the bed, Regeane felt a flash of panic. She was here, and yet not here, as she had been in the tent when she faced the dark one. She could see Matrona and Barbara, the room and its furniture, but somehow the incredibly ancient forest seemed more real to her than the shadows of people and things surrounding her, so she sat up and looked into the mirror.

Wind moved through the forest, a dazzle of sunlight came and went. Then it vanished, fading the way mist does before sunlight.

“Well?” Matrona asked.

“That was an anticlimax,” Regeane said.

“What did you see?”

Regeane’s lips curled in disgust. “Hugo!”

Matrona chuckled. “Is that all?”

“Well,” Regeane said, “he looked frightened.”

Hugo was frightened.

Gimp had caught up to him.

Hugo bought bread and cheese from a farmhouse not far away. He’d seen no men, but the place was fortified and the women suspicious. But when he’d offered silver, they chained their dogs and sold him an onion bread mixed with black olives, and soft, white cheese in a pottery jar. It had the sharp tang of goat cheese. It was heavy, salted, and had a thick, pale crust on it, but the inner part beyond the rind was rich with cream and had a good taste.

The level countryside here was deserted and the Roman road dwindled to a dust trace, at times only indicated by the cypresses the Roman engineers planted along its borders. Here and there he saw the tumbled stones of a farmhouse long ago abandoned, weeds growing tall in the courtyard.