Chapter Forty-Three
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
In the weeks after Julia died, Alaric had to kill two of his own chieftains. One who challenged his rule, calling down the ancient tradition of holmgang . Another after an assassin came for him at dinner and he almost took a blade in the ribs. This time, the assassin didn’t die before Riga tortured his employer out of him. Now there were two more bodies on the wall.
In his heart, he hoped one of them would kill him. It would end the horrible torment his life had become. Some days, when his mood was darkest—when the dead called loudest from out of the shadows—he considered ending it himself. It would be easy enough; he wasn’t the boy he’d been in the arena. He knew now how to die.
Even so. Alaric was a warrior. His own pride demanded that he find his death at the end of a spear. So he took every challenge as far as he could; escalated every confrontation to a war; led his men on the most dangerous raids.
The wound on his chest was healing, but it still burned painfully. It was a vicious reminder of Julia’s treachery. In his mind, she was Theodosius’s child, the betraying enemy; the copper-haired goddess in his arms; the excitable girl whose eyes lit like stars as she explained aqueducts to him. He reeled between love and hate, and could not answer what she was to him.
He could not resolve this war within himself. So he would rain down fire on the world. He would burn it to its foundations. In a scant few months, Stilicho would come down from the mountains and put him out of his misery, but Alaric did not want to give the old man the satisfaction.
So he went seeking his own death.
* * *
One night out of all the other nights, Alaric lounged in the chair Wallia had once occupied. The warriors were in an uproar, drinking and bellowing their war songs as a man was dragged from the room, a long crimson streak of blood gleaming on the white marble. Another challenger. This one only a little older than the twins, and doing it for the glory. Alaric didn’t think he’d killed him. But he’d not been as careful with his blade as he would have been, once.
He raised his horn to his lips, his eyes hooded, legs stretched out lazily before him. To any watching, he might appear bored.
In reality he was thinking of Julia. He could not stop imagining what she might have gone through, shut in that burning building. How the smoke must have filled her lungs. The despair of knowing there was no way out—hoping for his rescue, and he had never come for her. When he thought of how it had been him to lock her in—
He replaced that memory with one of her from life, and that was almost more painful. Still, he could not look away. Julia rising from the river, her hair streaming down her back, all of it in meticulous detail. He should have taken her in his arms right then and tried his hardest to make her love him. He’d wanted to remake the city, the world, into a place she could be safe in. He’d thought they had so much more time .
Then he remembered the way she’d laughed with that Roman woman who now decorated his wall. Sharp as broken glass, mocking him for loving her in the first place. Fury rose and burned the grief to ash.
Riga sat beside him, laughing at the carnage. A ruby of obscene size gleamed on his chest; gold glinted in his ears and winked on his hands. Two women draped themselves in his lap, a blonde and a brunette, kissing each other with furious abandon. Riga didn’t seem to mind; he rested a hand casually on the brunette’s thigh. “Continue as you are, ladies,” he said merrily. “When I’m ready, prepare yourselves.” He turned to Alaric, one dark eyebrow smugly raised. “Where’s your wench?”
Alaric’s hand tightened convulsively on his drinking horn. “Where did you get that fucking ruby?”
“I rifled through your things. I take my plunder wherever I can.”
“It’s Julia’s.”
“She would want me to have it.” Riga laughed easily. “Cheer up. Isn’t my way a vast improvement?” He swept a hand to indicate the chaos before them, nearly dislodging the women from his lap. “The warriors love you. And the ones who’d deny your rule are dead or driven off, which certainly makes things easier.”
Alaric raised the horn to his lips. “Damned if I’ll ever understand men or women.”
“It’s very simple, my friend. You lead the raids. You find the plunder. All their wealth, their honor, their glory comes from you now. You are the ring-giver. It’s far more effective than banning plunder and insisting on taking only grain.”
Riga was right. It was dark irony that to truly seize power in Noricum, he’d had to become everything he had fought against. He’d even let the walls lie unrepaired. He could hear Julia’s voice in his mind. You were just a barbarian after all. Never capable of anything better. My father and I were right about you.
The potent mead pounded through him. He understood why Julia drank so much now—to make herself forget the death of her old lover in the arena. Perhaps he was the one Julia had truly loved. It was good he was dead, or Alaric would have to find him and kill him on principle.
“Alaric.” Ataulf stood before him, looking exhausted. “We must discuss the grain. We’re running low—”
“Later.”
“No, now . Three days you’ve been ignoring me. If Thorismund was here—”
“Thorismund isn’t here,” Alaric growled. Thorismund had gone in the night, after a fierce raging argument, in which he’d blamed Alaric for Julia’s death. Fuck him. If Thorismund ever darkened his threshold again, Alaric would put him in the ground. As far as he was concerned, Thorismund was already dead. “I forbid the mention of his name within these walls.”
Riga looked up from nuzzling the neck of one of the women. “I never liked that hulking lout anyway. Too full of himself and his gods.”
“Alaric. The grain.” Ataulf said it with a kind of tight-lipped persistence. “You’ve taken the bulk of it to feed the warriors and now the refugees are starving. The riots are worse than ever. A whole neighborhood burned down last night.”
Alaric laughed. Thank the gods, an easy problem. “Let them eat the corpse dogs. There are more than enough of those.” One child for the slaver’s block, one dog for the roasting spit. “We’ll set bowmen on the dogs, and then distribute their meat among the people.”
“You’d waste arrows on dogs?”
“What else would you have me do? The land is ravaged. There is nothing in a fifty-mile radius to eat. Let the people eat the dogs. It solves two problems.”
“If people wanted to eat the dogs, they don’t need your permission. You cannot simply order them to—”
“And why not?” Several people glanced over at his tone. “Back in the camps, we were lucky if we had dog meat. When I was a boy—”
“You don’t have to describe it to me. I was there, you pathetic drunkard.” Ataulf seized his shoulders. “ Will you snap out of it? We fought the Empire so we’d never be in that position again. If your people are reduced to eating dogs, we’ve failed. We’ve failed , Alaric.”
“Touch me again, Ataulf, and I’ll let Riga cut off your hands,” Alaric said coldly. “Get out.”
“Out of this room or out of this city?” Ataulf snapped. “Seems to me you’re bleeding allies.”
“This is the only ally I need.” His hand strayed to his knife.
“Not even your thrice-cursed Roman wife would have approved of this,” Ataulf said in a low voice. And then he was gone.
* * *
Much later, Alaric stalked the hallways, stepping over snoring bodies. He wasn’t drunk enough to fall asleep in this manor house that stank of beer and sweat.
Maybe he would take a woman to his bed tonight. There were plenty; even some of the warriors’ wives had made overtures. He didn’t fool himself that they wanted him —it was proximity to power they wanted, or safety, or both. But that was what Julia had wanted too, and he hadn’t given a fuck. He’d been happy enough to have her, no matter her reasons.
He should have a new woman. He should have a dozen.
Outside the manor, the city stank of death and open sewage and he thought again of Julia’s aqueduct. Its crumbling bones stood black against the sky. He wanted to tear it down.
A dark shape stood in the moon-drowned street, amidst the cracked cobblestones. For a moment his heart leaped and he hoped—he hoped —it was Julia’s ghost. Since she died, he’d believed she would haunt him. But she hadn’t. He’d have paid a kingdom for Julia to haunt him.
But it wasn’t her. Fucking Calthrax again.
Was Theodosius’s slut of a daughter really so good that you’ll stay celibate all your life out of grief for her? Blood glinted in the wound Alaric had put in Calthrax’s neck. Perhaps I should have tried her before I died.
“You’d have only died quicker.”
Calthrax laughed. You really are as big a fool as the rumors say. Willing to be led around on a leash for a chance to get between her legs. You didn’t care how many lives it cost.
“I risk no life save my own.”
That’s a lie and you know it. Thousands of our own are enslaved in Italy. Hostages, all of them. Goths. What do you think her brother will do to them when his sister isn’t returned?
“The Romans need no pretext for what they do.”
And neither do you. Calthrax laughed. You did not have to kill me, for example. With very little persuasion—and the woman—I’d have told Stilicho you slipped through my fingers. He wanted that, you know. Even if he would not say it.
“And you could have thrown off the Roman yoke and come with me at Frigidus.” Alaric threw it back in his face. “You wanted to. You hated them more than I did.”
Not all of us had the luxury of rebellion, Alaric. His bared teeth gleamed. All of us were painted with your brush after you turned. I had a brother. A wife. A son—
“You think I would not have welcomed them?” An old anger rose in his chest. “Half my army goes to war with their families trailing after. Your own would have found a place with us.”
They would have found slavery and death with you , Calthrax snarled. Everyone who follows you dies. That Roman princess was no exception.
What the hell was he doing? Standing in the middle of the street and arguing with a ghost. “Go away,” he growled, his hand on his sword, for all the fucking good it would do. “Or I’ll send you back where you came from.”
“Alaric?”
The world shifted beneath his feet. It was the same moon-drenched street, empty windows gaping at him like eye sockets in a line of skulls. But the shape standing before him was Horsa, pale hair spiked up silver in the moonlight.
Alaric took his hand off his sword hilt. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough,” Horsa said. “Who were you talking to?”
“Nobody.” He said it in a tone that forbid further questions.
Horsa was staring as if he’d sprouted an extra eye. “Where is Hengist?”
“Out raiding.” He’d told the boy already. Days ago. “Go to bed, Horsa.”
Horsa smirked bitterly. “Hengist gone. Thorismund gone. Soon you’ll have no one.”
Alaric felt his jaw clench. He was too tired and drunk for this fucking conversation. “Do you know why I didn’t send you out to raid with your brother, Horsa? You’re impulsive. You put yourself in danger. You put Julia in danger.” Grief rose up and gripped his throat. “If you’d stuck close to her when that Roman legion came, she never would have—”
“If I’d stayed with her? You were the one who left!” Horsa was in his face now. Teeth bared. Feral. “You left us both behind. I was there; I saw everything. She never betrayed you, she loved you.”
Alaric grabbed the boy and shoved him against the nearest wall, gripping his tunic in one fist. His envy nearly crippled him. “How the fuck do you know? Is she talking to you?”
“No. She isn’t talking to me,” Horsa snarled. “Why would she talk to either one of us? I couldn’t keep her safe, and you’re the one who killed her.”
Violence ripped through him. The argument with Thorismund thundered in his mind. Your fault. All your fault. He could kill Horsa out of sheer envy for having been with Julia when he had not.
Even as he had the thought, Gaufrid screamed at him from out of the dark, an arrow buried in his belly. What the fuck was he doing? His life had been protecting the twins.
“Get out of my sight,” he growled, giving the boy a violent shove. Horsa ran off into the night, his footsteps echoing against the buildings, not looking back.
He’s right, you know , came Calthrax’s laughing voice, out of the shadows that gathered in the alleys. Redolent with the voices of all the dead who’d come before him.
Alaric stared down the empty street. “I know.”