Chapter Forty-Four
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
In Julia’s dream, she lay in Alaric’s arms, her head on his chest, listening to the strength of his heartbeat. Their legs tangled beneath the blankets. She felt warm and protected and utterly safe.
You must wake, Julia.
“No.” She breathed in, tightened her arms around him as if she could hold him there forever. “Don’t go.”
Wake up.
She opened her eyes and the warmth of the dream bled away. It was still night. By the faint glow of the kicked-out fires, she saw shapes running, shouting in a dozen languages. Somewhere in the dark she saw a flash—polished metal, armor.
Then all dissolved into screaming chaos.
* * *
She tried to run but didn’t get ten steps.
Roman soldiers flooded the camp, rousing people from sleep, dragging them from their ragged blankets. Julia sprinted for the trees and a man leaped at her and drove her to the ground, his metal breastplate digging into her back. She hit the dirt so hard the breath was forced from her lungs. She was still heaving—struggling to breathe—when the faceless soldier hauled her up by one arm and dragged her back.
Not an hour later, Julia sat huddled under guard amidst a group of freezing refugees. There were maybe fifty, all rounded up from the camp and the surrounding hills. The sun was just starting to rise, casting a metal-gray light over everything, and it had begun to rain. The Roman soldiers stood stoic beneath their heavy helmets.
One of the guards spoke. He was young, with a clean-shaven, square-jawed face. “You have been taken under the protection of the Empire,” he said, in blade-crisp Imperial Latin. “You will not be harmed.”
Beside her, a man rose to his feet. “Where will we be going?” he asked, in polite, lawyerly tones. “Where, exactly.”
“To a place where you will be given food and shelter, and will work in return.” The man’s tone turned sardonic. “Surely none of you can object to that, given the state you are in.”
Julia felt her hands clench into fists. Slavery. Her first instinct was to rise to her feet herself, to flash her mother’s opal ring and demand to be taken to their commander.
She was halfway to her feet when the polite, lawyerly man spoke again.
“Wait! I’m a Roman citizen. A citizen! Send word to the family of Titus Publius Barius in Verona. Ask anyone in that town—”
The soldier glanced at a burly subordinate, who waded into the crowd and dragged the man forward. “What family is it that you come from?”
“Titus Publius Barius. In Verona. A very respected family.”
But the soldier only laughed, and his subordinates stripped the man to the waist and tied his arms to a wagon. “Let this be the message sent to the family of Titus Publius Barius.”
Then the guard shook out a scourge. The whip hit the man’s back with a wet, meaty thunk . It seemed to go on endlessly. Julia sat very still, the sight of the man’s torture burned into her eyes. The man had all but stopped screaming by the time the Roman soldiers untied his arms. He fell to the ground, his back flayed to ribbons.
Alaric’s voice was all she could hear. There are no princesses in these woods. Only predators and prey.
* * *
All night they walked, through rain that pounded the bone-dry grass, pressing Julia’s hair flat to her head. She huddled under Alaric’s soaking cloak; freezing water squelched in her boots. The Romans on their horses were rain-slicked shadows, glinting with menace. She wanted to fall to her knees and give up, but she knew what happened to those who stumbled. The Romans hauled them to their feet and whipped them along, and if they fell again, they were trampled into the mud beneath the horses’ hooves.
Her father never would have allowed his soldiers to treat people like this. Never would have allowed— he would, though . Alaric could have told her.
It was another day before they reached the mines.
Exhausted and terrified, she was herded amidst a crowd of refugees through the heavily guarded gates of a wooden enclosure. Beyond, the ground dropped into a vast pit. Watery light illuminated walls scarred and cracked; at the bottom, the condemned moved in sluggish lines, staggering under the weight of woven baskets piled high with stones. Sparkling dust filled the air. Marble dust. The air tasted dry and sharp. It hurt to breathe.
They were led into a long, low building. The woman to Julia’s left had a bleeding cut on her head from a soldier’s club. One of the guards—a tall, hulking man with a protuberant belly—told them that they were in a marble mine, they were to work hard, and they would be fed.
There was only one mine this close to Noricum. Lucretia’s mine. Lucretia was dead but her husband was still alive. Of course, there could be no rescue by revealing herself. Lucretia’s husband would be just as likely to kill her as look at her.
The guards confiscated all their belongings. Gone was the pouch with Alaric’s salve and the finger-bone flute; gone was the cloak and her mother’s ring. Julia stood dry-eyed as they shackled her by the ankle to the woman with the bleeding cut. The slaves—for that was what she was now, a slave in a marble mine; how Lucretia would laugh—were led from one low building into another. In the second building, a line of massive cauldrons belched steam into the air. Rough wooden benches lined the walls. They were each given a bowl and a tin cup. Julia sniffed the drink and flinched. It was posca , a drink made from sour wine, unwatered and foul and very, very strong. A drink for soldiers and slaves.
She took an experimental sip. The posca was pure fire, harsh and fierce. Scouring away all that had come before.
* * *
The scarred walls of the mining pit told a story of enslaved workers hammering pins into the weak seams in the marble, shearing it off in heavy sheets that were used to clothe the great buildings of Rome’s many cities. Now the pit walls were stripped clean and the slaves were sent into tunnels, chasing veins of marble deep into the earth.
The children went the deepest. Most were between the ages of five and ten, none more than bones under translucent-thin skin. They moved with unnatural silence, their eyes huge with hunger, their skin red with welts and fleabites.
The enslaved men looked no better than the children. Their shoulders slumped; their ribs pushed at their ravaged skin. They shuffled down into the tunnels with haunted eyes, carrying wicker baskets on their backs and iron pickaxes, but there was no hint in their faces of even thinking of using them as weapons.
The tunnels were kept from flooding by a number of impressive screws, many times taller than a man, that twisted the water up and out. Archimedes screws. Julia had studied them as a child. She remembered sitting in a scented garden, a fountain trickling merrily nearby, dressed in the finest linen. Her nails perfect, her hair wound in flowers, her tutor droning on and on as she traced the line of the twisting screw on the parchment that spilled across her lap.
Now, under the overseer’s gaze, Julia grasped the smooth shaft and pushed, her feet slipping on the damp stone. The posca gave her strength.
There was more than rotten wine in the posca . Long after the effect of the drink should have worn off, her thoughts had a slow, feverish cast. There was a buzzing in her head; it blended into that memory, of tracing the image of the screw on the parchment, the buzz of insects at the height of summer. Now that summer day bled into nightmare. The guards leered from out of the dark, whips in their hands; whenever someone’s feet faltered, they felt the lash at their back. Julia felt it only once—a bright red fire lancing across her shoulders—and she did not falter again.
Night fell. The prisoners were herded up through the tunnels and into the uneven ground at the bottom of the pit, where marble dust hovered in the air like snow. In the long, low hall, everyone received their bowl of gristly stew and a cup of posca . Julia drank it greedily. Suddenly all her aches and pains diminished as fire pounded through her veins.
After, the prisoners were all brought to a dimly lit barracks that smelled of smoke and the rot of unchanged rushes. The beds were rickety towers of cots, with barely room to sleep between them. Julia and the curly-haired woman slept chained together on one cot.
Julia slept little; all night the woman next to her was gripped by ripping, convulsing coughs. That morning, Julia woke up to find she was chained to a corpse.
She needed the posca after that.
* * *
Time passed. Julia woke every day with a vicious headache, her tongue thick and furry in her mouth. Only the posca calmed the headache; only the posca made the world bearable.
It kept her standing when she should have collapsed. It made her mind eerily absent, so she didn’t notice the hours she spent pushing the shaft that turned the screw that passaged the water up and out of the tunnels. It dulled her pain, so that she didn’t notice the iron shackle digging her skin raw above the ankle. And it kept her numb to the violence around her.
People dropped like flies in this place. Some under the guards’ whips; other times, the dead would be found in the night, when guards would prod those who did not rise and drag them off to be burned outside the walls.
Julia understood that she would die here.
Sometimes she thought of Alaric. He had been a child in the mines. How long had he lived like this? In moments of lucidity, she wondered. But those moments were few—and she tried to forget Alaric ever existed. It was better—kinder—to forget.
Even so, she could not. She had little willpower now, and thoughts of him rose when she was shuffling with the others down into the mines or lying on the cot, trying to sleep. She spent hours lost inside those memories—Alaric driving her to ecstasy in the warm waters of that cave, or by the cliff with eagles circling in the air, or under the driving waterfall. Whenever someone dropped dead in front of her, she could close her eyes, summon his memory, and disappear.
He was an escape. No—he was an addiction, always had been. Worse than the posca .
Julia understood in a kind of detached way that the Roman guards would round up refugees and bring them in to replace the dead. Some fought; once a large, muscled man put down several guards before he was whipped within an inch of his life. The guards made everyone watch. Somewhere, vaguely as if through glass, Julia remembered being made to watch such things before.
Days later, the man was shuffling down into the earth, blank-faced, open wounds glistening on his back.
* * *
Sometimes, in the hard, vicious mornings before her first drink of posca , Julia felt a crushing shame that she had not fought. She had not tried to attack the guards, not tried to escape the forced march in the rain although she’d known where they were heading.
The guards watched the women. It was not uncommon for one of them to stroll up to a shackled line, select one of the slaves, and take them to a shed near the enclosure gate. It was obvious enough what went on in that shed.
Julia kept her eyes down under that predatory gaze. Eventually it would be her turn. Her old self, she was certain, would at least have fought that ; but now she felt only a profound indifference. It would be just another thing to survive.
But she could not survive forever. Every day she grew weaker; the air grew harder to breathe. Those who had been here longest had a dry, hacking cough that brought up blood, and breathing the air in this place felt like inhaling knives. Once that cough took root in the lungs, death was not long after.
She could not summon the energy to care.
* * *
One day—which one she could not tell; the days all bled into each other now—a new woman came to share her shackle.
Julia barely looked at her. It was breakfast time. She’d already devoured her bowl of gray slop. Any minute now, the guards would come with the posca and then she could drink, and everything wouldn’t hurt so much.
One of them at last put a cup in her hands and she raised it to her lips. Oh God, thank God.
A hand stayed hers. “Don’t drink it.”
It was the woman she was now chained to. Black hair, matted and braided. Dark eyes. Somewhere in her mind, a bell was clamoring. Recognition.
“Fuck. I thought it was you, but now I know for sure. Don’t drink that. It’s drugged.”
“I know it’s drugged,” Julia said dully. “I need it.”
“That’s how they keep you enslaved.” The woman glanced over her shoulder at the guards. “Watch.” She raised her own cup to her lips and waited until the guard glanced away. Then she spit it surreptitiously onto the floor. “Now you do it. Unless you want to die here.”
Maybe I do.
Julia took a measured sip of the posca and felt an immediate urge to swallow. The pain would go. Her mind would stop its ceaseless circling. But the other woman’s nails were digging hard into her knuckles, and she felt a sudden flush of shame. She’d never fought. Not once.
“Spit it out now ,” Ehre hissed. “Quickly.”
Julia spit the posca into the dirt.
So the finger-bone flute had worked. She had summoned help, and help had appeared. Too late, though. Curse her life.
* * *
That night, they lay in their wood-plank cot, in whispered conversation. Julia hadn’t had any of the posca since morning. Her body throbbed with pain, but she felt awake .
The line of Ehre’s body stood out in sharp relief, turned toward her in the dark. “I was coming down the mountains to find Alaric. I wanted to get out from under my sister’s shadow. They rounded me up in the foothills.” Her strong, calloused fingers interlaced with Julia’s. “How did this happen to you? Why are you not with him?”
Easily ruined and easily led, none more than her. “It’s rather a long story.”
“I don’t believe he let you go,” Ehre said, quietly. “I remember how he looked at you.”
Julia shut her eyes. If she wasn’t so wrung out—so broken and empty—she would sob. Better the posca than love. Better oblivion.
“Compose yourself,” Ehre hissed. “This is not the Julia who stood tall and brave before the axes. I’m here to rescue that Julia. Not a sad corpse of a girl who thinks she’s already dead.”
Julia drew a breath. To think of herself as still alive felt like climbing a mountain. “But how will we escape?”
Ehre grinned and pulled a long, slender knife out of her boot. “The guards missed this.”
* * *
There were no guards in the barracks, never had been. The posca was guard enough.
They picked the lock on the shackles using the knife. Then they snuck out of the barracks. Julia stood blinking in the moonlight, everything cast into sharp light and shadow.
She knew this place inside and out. She knew its routines, knew when its guards came and went, knew when the corpse cart did its hideous cycle. Always they burned the dead at night, and always outside the mine—it wouldn’t do to rile the workers unnecessarily. That stench clung to everything.
Julia crouched in the shadows of one of the rough-hewn buildings with these thoughts piling up in her head, more than she’d had in days.
Hastily, in whispered scraps, she and Ehre worked out their plan.
* * *
At the gate, three guards passed a wineskin. Ehre and Julia hid themselves in the shadows between buildings, waiting for the terrible cart to trundle into view.
The cart stopped at each barracks, the driver looking for the dead. The plan was to wait until it came to the last, and hide themselves among the corpses while the driver was inside. Then, once they were outside the wall, Ehre was confident she could kill the cart driver, and they could both escape. Julia thought this a tenuous plan. But at least she would die trying .
But when the cart arrived, its load of bodies was fewer than usual. It would not hide them both. Julia cursed. “We must go back.”
“You’ll not live another week if we go back, Julia. Look at you.”
Julia knew Ehre was right. She was hardly more than bones now, and this morning she’d coughed up blood. “So what will we do instead?”
“I’ll rush the gate and kill them all.”
“No.” Somehow Julia held the other woman back. At the gate she could hear guards laughing and telling ribald stories. “Listen,” she hissed. “Only one of us can hide in that cart. You go and get Alaric. I will distract them.”
Ehre nodded. “Take this,” she whispered, pushing her knife into Julia’s hands. “You may need it.”
Julia objected, but Ehre was already gone, darting between buildings. Julia strode out into the moonlight, in full view of the guards, to cause the biggest scene she ever had in her life.
* * *
The three guards were drinking posca . She could smell it—the soldiers usually got their own wine, but if the supply ran low, they would pilfer the posca rather than go sober.
Ehre would not find Alaric. Not in time to save her life. Julia knew that well enough. And even if she did find him, there was no guarantee he would come. He had not come to her rescue before; why would he now?
Julia was certain this would end in her death. But securing Ehre’s freedom seemed a good enough reason to die. Better than dying in the tunnels, of use to no one.
From somewhere she summoned the old self—the woman who had beguiled a man to his death, who had won the heart of Alaric of the Goths for a little while. She knew how the posca would put a nimbus behind her, how it would make her glow in the torchlight. When she stepped out from the shadows—at just the right angle for the light to be favorable—all three guards looked up and stared, their mouths falling open. “Is she real?” the shortest one asked, the one with the crooked helmet. It was the posca , erasing her flaws.
One of them seemed less drunk than the others. He was tall, wiry. “She’s out of her barracks, where she shouldn’t be.” His eyes narrowed. “How’d you get out?”
“Does it matter?” She adopted a throaty purr. “I seek a protector in this place. One of you will do, I suppose.” Her eyes fell to the least drunk one. “You, perhaps.”
His mouth turned down suspiciously. “What for?”
“For special treatment. Extra food. Protection. Is that not how this works?”
The man raised an eyebrow. “It could be how it works.”
The third guard lurched to his feet. “Why’d you choose his skinny arse?”
The cart driver had drawn up to the gate, and even he was staring at her, dumbfounded. From the corner of her eye, Julia saw a shadow flitting under the cart. Ehre, leveraging herself up beneath it, muscles standing in her arms. How long could she hold herself like that?
Julia licked her lips and the men’s stares turned glassy. “Send that cart through.” It was the tone of command that had come so easily in Ravenna. “It’s spoiling the mood.”
“Open the gate,” the wiry one barked. The others scrambled to do his bidding. The cart rattled through the open gates. Thank the gods. Now all Ehre had to do was kill the man driving the cart—somehow without a weapon—and escape.
The wiry man approached her, his eyes hard in the torchlight. “Now then. Why don’t we get to know each other better?”
* * *
Julia entered the hut knowing she was already dead. The guards would kill her, or this place would. It did not matter which. Even so, she could not bear this man to touch her.
The shed stank of unwashed bodies. It was a guard’s living quarters, with a narrow, stained cot in the corner and piles of belongings everywhere, confiscated from the slaves.
The man’s breath was hot in her ear. “You want special treatment, do you?”
Despite knowing she was already dead, Julia recoiled instinctively. You have to do it. You have to. Outside, it had seemed simply like a thing she would have to endure. But now, in this stinking place—she should have drunk a barrel of posca before trying this.
“So shy?” His eyes narrowed pugnaciously. “Go sit on the bed.” He gave her a shove onto the cot. The man lowered himself next to her. “Be good, now.” He leaned in to kiss her, his lips cold and wet like garden slugs. He rolled on top of her, pressing her onto the bed.
Ehre’s knife was in her palm.
Julia did not hesitate. She thrust it into the side of his throat, just as Horsa had shown her. The man made a horrific choking sound. Blood gushed warm over her hands.
Julia lay still, the dead man on top of her, and fought back an eternity of screams.
* * *
Her tunic was covered in hot blood.
She rifled through the dead man’s belongings until she found another, stinking but not bloodstained, and pulled it over her head. Something fell off the pile of rags; it was a cloth bag she recognized. It was hers . Calthrax’s bone flute, her mother’s ring. She tied it under her tunic.
If she wasn’t guaranteed to die before, she was now. Even so, she refused to do it in this hut. Somehow, on shaking legs, she slipped outside. The men by the gate had slumped into a dazed half sleep brought on by the posca , and Julia slipped back into her barracks with no one noticing. Not even the other slaves noticed; if they did, they didn’t care.
It didn’t matter. Soon someone would find the guard’s corpse. She’d be dead by dawn.
Just kill me, then , she thought wearily, turning on her side. Get it over with. Her bones dug into the hard cot and she felt like an empty amphora. A home for ghosts and wind.
* * *
Julia was jerked out of sleep by the sound of a horse screaming. There was a great crash. A cacophony of shouting.
Battle sounds.
She rose from her bed. All around her the other slaves were stirring, but they were still drugged and chained. Julia was not chained. There was nothing to stop her from going outside, from shading her eyes against a sky lit up with fire.
The gate hung on its hinges, and through it streamed a crowd of wild men on horses. Bandits. A wind stirred her cheek. Behind her, a guard dropped like a stone, an arrow sprouting from his eye. Someone had lit the sheds on fire, and it had already spread to the enclosure walls. And through the smoke that bellowed up at the gate galloped a woman, hair jet-black, wielding a Hunnic axe. Ehre.
Horsa followed close behind, blond hair spiked up and eyes blackened with campfire-black, a wolf-tooth necklace gleaming about his neck.