Марк Ньютон - Drakenfeld

We said nothing for a while, though it wasn’t awkward and didn’t seem to matter. The contours of her face seemed so familiar, which in itself was a strange sensation.

‘I must go,’ she whispered eventually.

‘Tomorrow. You know my old house?’

‘I can’t exactly forget it,’ she replied.

‘You’ll come then?’ I asked. ‘Tomorrow evening, at sunset.’

‘OK.’ Titiana opened the door behind her. ‘But I really must go.’

With that she disappeared back inside the tavern, closing the door behind her.

Veron was standing outside waiting for me, his hands in his pockets, and he was grinning like a child who had just discovered the taste of sugar.

‘So,’ he declared, ‘finally there is a woman who gets the blood pumping through the veins of Lucan Drakenfeld. And a dancer, too! Now I’m jealous. You know, I was starting to think you possessed the libido of a statue.’

‘You’re going to want to know who she is, aren’t you?’

‘I am.’

‘I thought you might,’ I replied. I looked up and down the street, and it was busy with evening activity. ‘Let’s go back to mine – it will be a lot quieter there.’

‘As long as there is wine to go with this story of yours, I do not mind.’

In the calm sanctuary of my garden, we sat on the edge of the fountain, regarding the shadows beyond the regularly spaced columns. Leana had gone out for the evening, and Bellona decided she would light some cressets and candles on our behalf. Despite saying that we didn’t mind the darkness, she was terribly keen to impress our visitor.

Class divisions weren’t that noticeable during my time in Venyn, but in Tryum I felt guilty every time I spoke with Bellona. For many, to see a senator, king or queen could seem like walking with gods. It wasn’t right, it was something which even Polla had disapproved of, but how could an entire culture be changed?

We settled in. I gathered my thoughts.

Senator Veron reached down to scoop up the cup of wine by his feet and, once he’d taken a couple of gulps, he motioned for me to tell the story, as if I had become his entertainment for the evening. ‘When you’re ready, Drakenfeld.’

My mind travelled back all those years, to simpler times, when all I cared about was my studies, listening to a good tune played on a lyre and feeling the body of one girl in particular against my own.

‘Everything I know about love I learned from Titiana,’ I began.

‘Just the one teacher?’ Veron smiled.

‘I was twenty summers old, and she was seventeen. I’d completed my third year of training for the Sun Chamber that very year and was shadowing my father on some of his minor work, when our paths crossed at a festival celebration. She was the daughter of a cleric who worked under Licintius’ father, and came from a reasonably well-to-do family. Her father made the mistake of being caught in private discussions with a non-royalist faction of the Senate, and found himself booted out. That meant Titiana and her family were soon fighting for their status. So her father lined up Titiana for marriage to the son of a senator.

‘That didn’t stop our affair, however. Perhaps I hoped we could be something more, but that was not for us to say – that was for our mothers and fathers to decide. My mother might not have minded had she been alive. She was from Locco, near the deserts, and attitudes on sexuality were more relaxed there. If you loved someone, you could choose to marry them, as strange as it sounds. Anyway, the life of someone attached to an official of the Sun Chamber is not always a happy one given our often constant movement about the continent. Our passions were confined to sudden, discreet moments, wherever we could find them. We knew it was wrong.’

‘That often makes it all the more interesting,’ Veron commented.

‘I don’t know what it was about her that appealed so much. There were so many qualities. Perhaps it was her stubbornness, a wish to be her own person, a refreshing change for the families of this city. Perhaps it was the way we could converse about the great poets of the past, as well as speculate on the meaning behind the stars. Perhaps it was—’

‘The fact that she possessed the beauty and body of a goddess?’ Veron interrupted.

I smiled. It was some effort to pretend I was above all that, but that would have meant lying to myself. ‘You never got to see her eyes. Such big oval eyes. You’d think they were the colour of chestnuts at first, but there were so many shades beyond. I could stare at them all day and never reach the other end.’

‘My gaze didn’t get that far,’ Veron replied.

‘So there we were,’ I continued, ‘two young lovers of Tryum doing the things that young lovers do.’

‘And what happened to this great passion?’ Veron asked. ‘She was betrothed to someone else and that was that? You left the city, jaded, never to return?’

‘Not quite,’ I replied, and sipped my cup of wine.

‘Well, what else could it have been?’ Veron laughed. ‘You didn’t arrest her, did you?’

I said nothing.

‘You did arrest her.’ Veron clutched my arm with excitement. ‘By Trymus’ tomb, you’re certainly efficient, Lucan Drakenfeld, I’ll give you that much.’ He sat back still chuckling to himself. ‘I can’t believe you’d do that to your own lover.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I protested. ‘Not quite anyway. Let me explain. Her family was starting to suffer and they were losing money. Titiana and her sister took it upon themselves to make money for the family funds. Her sister took to sleeping with senators and selling their gifts, while Titiana stole from well-to-do houses, family connections and so on. I caught her with jewellery she’d taken from a lady in Tradum and she confessed everything. I didn’t have the money to help her, since all I had was an allowance from my father. I didn’t know what to do. So foolishly I turned to my father for help, hoping he could lend me the money and…’

‘Did he not help?’

I snorted a laugh. ‘He informed the Civil Cohorts, who later arrested her, took her confession and let due process take its course. What surprised me was that the lady whose jewels Titiana had stolen actually decided to go ahead and prosecute her, rather than forgive her, despite my efforts at reasoning with the old bag.’

‘Well, she was fully entitled to do so,’ Veron observed.

‘Though I didn’t think she would to a young woman whose family had fallen on hard times.’

‘And her punishment came shortly after?’ He seemed to enjoy this story, thriving on a bad story that had happened long enough ago for him to bother with sympathy.

‘She was to be whipped in public. It was not as brutal as it could have been, thank the gods, but it was enough. I tried to help out, once justice had been administered, but understandably she wanted nothing more to do with me. The last time I saw her, she ripped off her dress in public and showed me the wound on her back, which was so raw. She told me that I had done that to her.’

‘Nonsense,’ Veron said. ‘She brought it on herself.’

It was my father’s fault, I told myself, though in my darker hours I felt the blame ultimately belonged with me. ‘At the time, Titiana was not in the mood to discuss the technicalities, which was perfectly understandable. We never spoke again. Shortly after that I decided that there was nothing left for me in Tryum so I ventured across Vispasia.’

‘To forget about a woman,’ Veron added.