Gillian Bradshaw - Island of Ghosts

“Yes,” I said. “They learn fear quickly, but trust takes longer.” And I thought of my men, and Gatalas’.

“I don’t have the time to teach the horse trust. I’d sell him if I could, but he has a bad reputation in the area now, and no one would buy him.”

“I would.”

She smiled. “Now, should I take advantage of that? Friend, you don’t have to buy my horse because I saved your life.”

“That is nothing to do with it.”

“I forgot-you can handle him, and you want a big stallion to breed to your mare. Well, perhaps…” She smiled crookedly again. “Talk to me about it in a few days, when you’ve recovered from the shock of finding yourself alive again. I confess, I’d like to sell him to a kind owner. He gulps food and is good for nothing-but I haven’t felt able to dispose of him to the few who’d take him, given how much he’s suffered already.”

“Why could you not use him for stud? You have land here.”

She shook her head. “We have land-but nobody on it is skilled with horses. Cluim’s the only one who can ride at all, and he can’t ride well. I can drive a cart, but that’s it. My husband should never have bought the horse-but he was full of enthusiasms and ambitious projects”-the crooked smile-“mostly misguided ones.” She waved a hand at the room around us. “This was another project. A fine Roman dining room, and an extra wing to the house. And the painting, another great bargain-hideous, isn’t it? We couldn’t afford that either. But I shouldn’t complain. He was a good man; I pray the earth is light on him. And I was another one of his misguided enthusiasms. I’m a soldier’s daughter whose father had been posted to the Danube, and I lost him all the dowry I never had, so everyone said he was a fool to marry me. Now you know all about me.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. Soldiers of Rome below the rank of centurion, in the infantry, and decurion, in the cavalry, are not legally allowed to marry. Most of them do anyway, but the army does not recognize the marriages, and if a soldier is posted far away, his family will be left behind impoverished unless he can scrape together enough money for their passage. I finished the porridge. “My wife died last spring,” I replied at last, a confidence in exchange for a confidence.

Her look of amusement vanished. “The one you were calling for.”

I nodded. “You have children?”

“No.” After a moment she smiled a nervous acknowledgment of the curiosity that I could not quite conceal, and went on. “My mother was another soldier’s daughter, and lived in the fort village at Hunnum: she made a living by weaving and selling vegetables after my father left. She died when I was fifteen. My sister died in childbirth three years ago, and my brother is also with the army on the Danube. I am entirely on my own, and quite independent. You?”

“I have two sisters who live in my own country, whom I can never see again. I had a little son, who died with my wife.”

“I’m sorry.” She paused, then asked, “Where are you from?”

“The Romans call the land Sarmatia.”

“Oh! Oh, Deae Matres! You’re one of the notorious Sarmatians?”

“Notorious?” I asked, amused.

She smiled back, with an air of surprise, but her reply was serious. “In the marketplace in Corstopitum they say you drink blood out of skulls and wear cloaks of human skin. People who used to go to Condercum or Cilurnum to trade started coming to Corstopitum instead. They were just thinking of going back again when there was that mutiny, and the battle against the Picts. We were glad, very glad, that the Selgovae and Votadini didn’t have the chance to steal our cattle and carry us off as slaves-but we were frightened, too, to hear how completely they’d been crushed. And when the Sarmatians at Condercum mutinied, just thirty killed over a hundred…” She stopped. I could see the awful possibility running through her mind, that I was a mutineer who had escaped and was fleeing justice. “You’re not from Condercum, are you?” she asked anxiously.

“No,” I replied, “Cilurnum.”

But I remembered now, going to Condercum and starting back with Arshak. At the bottom of my mind the memory of what had happened on the road heaved, like a serpent hidden in the dust. I was silent, the white morning dimmed.

“So you’re a soldier,” Pervica said, after a silence, in a flat voice. “I didn’t realize that. You weren’t armed, except for the dagger. You said you worked with horses-but of course, you’re a cavalryman.” After another silence, she said, “When Cluim went in to Corstopitum yesterday, he told the town authorities, not the military ones. That explains why they’d never heard of you.”

“Lend me a horse and I will ride in myself,” I said, trying to shake off a sense of horror at the shadow of memory. “I remember now, I was at Corstopitum on fort business. I think my friends will still be there. Lend me the stallion Wildfire, if you like; I think I can persuade him to carry me to the gates.”

She looked at me with the crooked smile, but her eyes were sad. “Lend you Wildfire? Oh, he was never broken to the saddle; he’s a carriage horse. And you certainly shouldn’t try to ride all the way to Corstopitum. You were almost dead, night before last. When we brought you into the house, you were gray and cold as ice, and I thought we were carrying a corpse. I’ll take you in in the cart this afternoon.”

“I thank you. My men will be concerned for me.”

Her face changed again, the faint regret shifting to wariness. “Your men? You’re an officer?”

I nodded.

She dropped her eyes. “Oh, I’m a fool!” she exclaimed. She didn’t explain why, and I had no chance to ask her, because she went on immediately, “It seems so strange that you’re a Sarmatian. All my life I’ve seen troops leaving Britain for the Danube. My father went when I was seven, and my elder brother was recruited for the war six years ago. And now your people are being sent here to defend us!”

“Where were your father and brother posted?” I asked.

“My father was with the Second Aelian Cohort, at a place called Cibalae, in Lower Pannonia. We had one letter from him after he left, with some money, and then nothing more. My brother was further west, at Vindobona, with the Second Brittones. Do you know of them?”

I knew the places. Vindobona was well to the west of my own country, and Pervica’s brother probably had to fight Quadi, not Sarmatians. But Cibalae was closer to home. The fort there had been at the western edge of the territory I used to raid, and I had an unpleasant feeling that I’d once scalped one of the Second Aelian Cohort. I struggled to clear the memory, and came up with the image of an auxiliary kneeling to brace his spear as I rode at him, a round-faced man in a long mail shirt. Yes. The scalp was brown, with no white in it, and the man had been about thirty. That had been three years ago-he couldn’t have been Pervica’s father, who would have had to be in his late forties. That was a relief.

“You fought them?” asked Pervica, who was still watching me.

“The Second Aelians, yes,” I admitted, “but not your father.”

“It must be very strange for you, after fighting Romans, to come here as soldiers of Rome.”

That summary of our twisted place in the world was so simple and straightforward I could almost have laughed. “It is,” I agreed. “It is very strange.”

There was a moment of silence, and then she said, “Well, I can send Cluim in to town today, and tell him to go to the military authorities this time. Or, if you like, I can drive you in, in the cart. I need to buy some things in Corstopitum anyway.”

At that moment there was a shriek of terror, shrill and piercing, from outside the house. Pervica leapt to her feet and pelted out the door. I followed her more slowly, still stiff-legged and clumsy.