Chapter Forty-Two
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Julia was long through the gates and down onto the wreckage-strewn plain before she dared look back.
She’d slipped in with the crowds pouring out of the city, the hood of her cloak concealing her face and hair. Nobody stopped her; no one even looked at her twice. Now she walked amidst hundreds of blank-faced refugees. None of them spared her a glance. Why would they? She was just one of many fleeing the destruction Alaric had wrought.
Behind her, she could still see the city looming over the blasted valley. A column of smoke rose thick from the walls as if breathed from the mouth of hell. Somewhere far above, a hawk screamed and shattered the eerie quiet, carrying all the way to the low, parched hills.
* * *
Alaric had taught her how to be on the road. He’d taught her to set one foot in front of the other, to go on through grinding hunger and thirst. How to sleep on the ground, without fearing the bugs and the dirt.
Hundreds had fled Noricum once war erupted in the streets; hundreds more came from the north and east, fleeing the Huns. Everywhere, on the vast scorched plain haunted by broken war machines, wandered refugees alone and in groups, trudging through the dust with their meager belongings on their backs, all of them with that empty stare that spoke of the terrible things they’d seen.
She had a stare like that now. But she was not the same. The ransom was still out there. Her life depended on not being noticed. Everyone seemed to be part of some group, but Julia avoided those. She no longer trusted anyone, most especially men.
In the first week, she ran out of food.
Hunger was a gnawing thing, the feeling of her stomach devouring itself because it had nothing else. All she could think about was food. All the decadent feasts she’d been subjected to in Ravenna, when she’d lounged and yawned and eaten nothing—she should have devoured everything. As she walked, her imagination filled with delicacies. Baked swan stuffed with sea urchins. Eel in cream sauce. She’d always hated eel. Now she would eat one alive and squirming.
In the second week, she saw her first dead body by the side of the road. It was a child, his eyes open and flies crawling on his face. Others came after that—an old man in a ditch, a few others in a copse where Julia went to find water. One wrong step and that would be her, lying by the roadside with no kin to bury her.
Sometimes she took refuge in memories of being in Alaric’s arms. Julia found that her imagination was vivid; she could half close her eyes and imagine his arms around her, his mouth on her, what he felt like deep inside her. The tenderness in his eyes when he’d told her she should have been a general.
I’ve never seen anything so brave and wonderful as you. Those words kept her alive.
Some days she hoped— believed —he would come riding after her. How could he not, after all that had passed between them? But the days went by and he did not come. It’s just your love for him dying , she told herself when the old longing flared up. Eventually it subsided to a dull ache, eclipsed by hunger, which faded but would not go away.
Love was nothing but a lie after all. She’d been unforgivably foolish to believe anything else.
* * *
The hunger was bad, but the thirst was worse.
In the second week, she ran out of water and could not find more. The thirst dwarfed the hunger, devoured it. All the rivers were dry or fouled by the dead. Finally—after three weeks on the road—Julia sat on a low stone wall, her flask dry as dust, her tongue swollen in her mouth, her head pounding viciously—from thirst, not wine. If she did not drink, she would die.
If I die out here, nobody will know. Alaric wouldn’t know.
She pulled his cloak up over her head. It still smelled of him, somehow: leather and pine trees and wide-open spaces. She shut her eyes and imagined him riding up on Hannibal, reaching down and pulling her to safety, to shelter, to some world-wrecking adventure. She imagined the Alaric who had offered her food on the road, which she had refused. This had been his first act of caring, before he could express it in any other way.
No. He had never cared for her. Keeping her alive was a means to an end.
Maybe it’s easier if I just lie down here in the shadow of this wall.
As soon as she had the thought, another came fast on its heels. Get up, Julia. Alaric’s voice. She raised her head—it felt like a monumental effort—and something caught her eye, up the slope. A green cluster of trees amidst a slope of brown.
Where there was green, there was water.
* * *
The spring burst from beneath a birch tree—sweeter, more intoxicating than the finest Caecuban. How had she given her allegiance to wine? Water had been here all along. The best and only drink. She filled her flask, then washed the back of her neck, shivered as ice-cold springwater ran down her spine.
When she raised her eyes, a man was watching her. Tall and broad at the chest, his hair dark and curling at his sunburned neck. He took a step toward her as one might approach a nervous horse.
In an instant she had Horsa’s knife out of her boot.
“Easy, girl. I won’t hurt you.” He spoke in gutter Latin. “Are you alone?”
Men were always asking if she was alone. By answer, Julia shifted her stance, her knife held low and businesslike, as Horsa had taught her.
Touch me and you’ll lose a finger. That was what her stance said.
The man halted. “Come with me if your belly is empty. I have food and a warm fire.” He held out a hand. “You have a husband? He’s no worry of mine. A man only keeps what he can hold in this world.” He took another step toward her, and Julia felt a dizzying surge of fear. All Horsa’s directions— do it before he sees the knife; press here at the throat; don’t let him see, don’t make him mad —cascaded in her mind.
Julia raised the knife and held it to her own throat.
The man frowned. His eyes fell to her blade, and for a minute Julia dared not breathe.
Finally, after interminable time, he took a step back. “Too skinny to be this much trouble,” he muttered. “By Cernunnos, woman. I meant you no harm.”
He stamped off down the slope. Julia breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now, why did you do that?”
A voice at her back. Julia turned, her knife up, but this time it was a woman—dark hair cut short, cheekbones hollow. The woman gave a strange, ironic half smile that would not have been out of place in the court at Ravenna. “You can put it away. I won’t attack.”
Warily, Julia slid the knife back in her boot.
“Why did you drive him off?” The woman knelt and filled her waterskin. “It’s dangerous to walk these roads without protection. And you have none.”
“I don’t like men.”
“No one likes men. Most don’t get to forswear them entirely. Have you taken vows?”
Julia did not answer. Her throat felt dry. Speaking felt like an alien act.
The woman stood and started back down the slope. “You can come with us if you want,” she said without turning around. “We’re all women. No men to talk to.”
* * *
There was a donkey cart at the bottom of the hill. The donkey stood in the stays, eyes at half-mast, one back foot cocked as if sleeping where he stood. A group of women were making a camp around him. One of them—a tall, red-haired Thracian—took one assessing look at Julia and pressed a leather flask into her hand. “You look like you need this.”
It was liquor—not quite as strong as ealu , but with a fierce, fiery bite. As night fell, Julia joined the women around a fire, passing the flask at the end of days.
There were about twenty of them. Some were Roman women who had lived in Noricum when Alaric besieged the city. They spoke of how they had run to the rooftops, throwing down anything on the attacking Goths—heavy roof tiles, pottery, torches—until the Goths started setting the houses on fire.
The Thracian woman told a tale of fleeing from the Huns, who had killed everyone in her village in their inexorable sweep west. And others had followed Alaric’s army for years, until the Romans took Noricum. They hadn’t wanted to be enslaved, and had lost hope of ever finding a homeland.
“Alaric doesn’t want a homeland,” Julia said quietly. “No—that’s not true. He wants a homeland, but he doesn’t know how to live in one. All he knows is war.”
The women’s eyes were all on her now. “And what is your story, then?”
“She doesn’t owe anyone her story,” the Thracian said harshly.
“No. It’s all right.” They had shared their food and drink; she had little else to offer in return. “I’m Roman. From Ravenna, although I was born in Rome.” She stuck scrupulously to her gutter Latin; the palace accent would require explanation. “I followed Alaric, and I did it of my own will. I—I fell in love.” It hurt to admit it. That love was still there, aching under her skin, of no use at all. She had not truly killed it, only buried it alive like a misbehaving vestal.
“You remind me of someone.” The Thracian woman’s eyes narrowed. “King Alaric’s bride. The Roman princess.”
Silence fell. That old, brittle laugh came easily to Julia’s lips, her first weapon. “I’ve never been confused with a princess. That is flattering.”
Suddenly the women were all talking at once. I heard that she rode through the city like a queen out of legend. I heard she was the one who let the Romans in. And then King Alaric locked her in the palace. Maybe she’s dead. Probably better off. I shouldn’t like to be married to him .
Julia took another sip of the Thracian liquor. “I suppose she got what she deserved. Good riddance.”
Her old self had died in that city. It was time she put that foolish girl to rest.
* * *
A week went by and Julia traveled with the women. They foraged together and shared a fire at night, swapping stories of siege and war. There was a sameness to these days that felt strangely comforting, but Julia knew they would soon end.
They were coming to the foothills. Eventually she would have to make a decision.
At first she’d barely been able to consider beyond the present. But as the mountains drew closer, Julia began to give thought to her future. She had no blessed idea where she was going. And who would have her? Who would willingly stand against Honorius’s wrath? Only Alaric could have done it, and Alaric was lost to her now. There was no one else.
But of course that was not true. Brisca would not turn her away; nor would she sell her back to Honorius. But getting there would not be simple. The mountains were vast and treacherous. She would need a guide. But Julia recoiled from the thought of trusting anyone, especially a man. You could seduce one , said the Cleopatra voice. Make him love you. Julia recoiled at the thought. She had played that game and lost badly.
One night, as the women lay sleeping, Julia walked off by herself toward the rising hills. She slipped her hand into the bag at her waist, and her fingers closed around Calthrax’s finger bone.
Play it in the mountains if you have the need, and we will find you.
She raised the flute to her lips and blew. What emerged was a thin, pathetic whistle; nothing like the oscillating birdsong that Alaric had played. Pathetic.
Julia shoved the flute back in her bag, feeling ridiculous. She was doomed after all.