Barbarian’s Concubine

Where’s everyone going?” I said.

“And why are they all drunk?” Terix asked as a man stumbled into him, patted his shoulder in apology, and followed his fellow weaving townsfolk down the dusty street of Tornacum. There was a gloomy, tense air about this river town huddled inside of old Roman walls. Some of the women looked to have been weeping, and the children were wide-eyed and pale-faced, clinging to their mothers’ skirts as they stood in the doorways of their wattle-and-daub houses.

It had been two weeks since the disaster in the stable. Two weeks of moving fast and hard toward the rising sun, avoiding towns and roads, stopping only at remote farmsteads where Terix traded items from Balmort’s peddler pack for food, while I hid nearby with Bone.

We’d debated leaving Bone, but more for form’s sake than because either of us would do it. The dog attracted notice, and anyone who saw him would remember him—and thus be able to tell Jax where we had been. Terix argued that the protection Bone offered was more important than how he gave our identities away. I agreed, although I knew that wasn’t the reason we couldn’t abandon the dog, assuming the dog would even let us do so.

No, the truth was that we felt less alone with Bone. With his steady stride and calm strength, we found strength and endurance of our own. When fear came out to torture us in the small, dark hours of the night, we would reach out and lay a hand on Bone’s warm chest, rising and falling with his breath, and feel the worst of our terrors recede.

For me, it was even more than that. After nine years of wearing a golden torque inscribed with Touch me not, for Sygarius’s I am, and therefor nine years devoid of the slightest contact of human skin to human skin, I was both starved for touch and frightened of it. I was startled each time I made contact with another person, their living, moving warmth a constant surprise to me: I was used to everything I touched being cold, inanimate. As soon as the startlement passed, however, the hunger raged and I wanted to rub my body against theirs. I wanted to hit, slap, tickle, lick. Hug, kiss, hold hands. Link arms, press cheeks, pat buttocks. I wanted all of it.

And because I wanted all of it so badly, I hung back. I didn’t know how to be normal. I didn’t know how not to be a maelstrom of seeking, reaching hands.

None of that mattered with Bone. The only thing he wouldn’t put up with was not being touched. He’d come up beside me and butt his head under my hand if we’d gone too long without contact.

Abandon him? Impossible.

“Let’s follow the townsfolk, and find out what’s going on,” I said.

“We should find the palace,” Terix said. He sounded as reluctant as I felt.

“A short delay won’t matter. Maybe we can find a cup of wine for ourselves, too. A little liquid courage.”

“Liquid craftiness would serve us better.”

“I don’t think anyone ever found that in a cup of wine.”

“They find lust, though.” Terix gave me a beady eye. “You’re not going to get half drunk and get yourself into trouble again, are you?”

“Gods, I hope not.”

“Hope isn’t good enough, Nimia.”

“Isn’t it? It’s the only thing that’s gotten us here.”

“I give more credit to fear: our fear of a greedy, murdering pirate. We wouldn’t be in Tornacum if there were any other good choice.”

“You may have more hope than I do, Terix, if you think being here is a good choice. So what do you want: to the palace, or follow the herd to the drinking trough?”

“Herd.” He smiled crookedly. “Was there really ever a question?”

So we set our feet in the same direction as the townsfolk, following them through the town that had once been a Roman outpost. Tornacum sat on the River Scheldt, northeast of Soissons, and the walls here had once helped to hold back the Germanic tribes, penning them in their dark, trackless forests that were said to go on without end, swallowing forever any Roman army foolish enough to invade them.

But Rome had retreated, and the tribes had come through. Tornacum now belonged to those tribes, and served as the seat of power for one of them: the Franks. The palace we would soon seek belonged to Childeric, the king of the Franks.

And, by extension, to his son.

Clovis.

My lover. My betrayer.

I clutched at the gold and garnet bee hanging around my neck, underneath my tunic. Clovis had given it to me along with a note: Forgive me. Crucially, he’d given his apology before betraying me. He had used me for his own ends, with regret, perhaps, but no less determination.

I was pinning my hopes now on the sincerity of that apology. Terix and I couldn’t run forever, and Gaul had become too small to shelter us. We needed a protector, to keep us safe from Sygarius and Jax.

We needed Clovis.

Given the chance, Childeric would likely toss us back to Sygarius; after making Sygarius pay, naturally. But Clovis . . . Clovis had different dreams than his father. Clovis wanted war with Sygarius. He wanted Sygarius’s province of Soissons. He wanted all of Gaul.

Who better, then, to protect us?

Except that I nurtured a burning fury in my heart for what he had done to me, and given the chance I would disembowel him with his own dagger and feed his entrails to the pigs.

Or so I told myself. The truth might be something different, and far more shameful to my sense of pride.

“Can you make out what anyone is saying?” Terix asked, as the crowd grew more dense. We had passed through the town now, and reached an open area just beyond its walls. The gathered Franks were too tall for us to see over, and we had no idea what everyone faced, although face something they did. The crowd was forming a semicircle around some activity we could not see.

I listened to the voices near me. Their language bore a resemblance to the tongue of the Visigoth tribe I’d been prisoner to, early in my childhood; it gave me the strange sense that I should be able to understand what was being said, and yet without any visual clues to what was happening, I couldn’t even guess. I shook my head. “I heard Childeric’s name, but that’s all.”

We edged around the half circle, out to the ends where the crowd thinned and we could slink our way forward.

The sight that met us was too stunning, too grotesque, to comprehend. I dug my hand into Bone’s fur, and gaped.

We stood at the rim of a massive pit ten feet deep and fifty feet across, the earth dug out and heaped in hills along one side. Inside the pit lay half a dozen white horses, their throats cut, their beautiful white hides covered in scarlet. In the center of the pit, a gold-bedecked wagon lay empty.

A man led another horse down a dirt ramp to a waiting priest and two soldiers with gilded axes in their hands. The horse shied and pranced, but there was no escape. The blades plunged, blood spurted, and the horse fell. The men moved a few paces around the circle, in time to meet yet another white horse coming down the ramp.

There was room enough left in the circle for another dozen horses.

“Fuck me in the face with a donkey’s prick,” Terix said under his breath, as Bone whined between us. “What in Hades are they doing?”

“Childeric,” I said, my voice so stunned and quiet that Terix could not hear me.

“What?”

“Childeric. The white horses . . . Oh, gods. It’s come true.”

Terix’s eyes widened and he looked back at the pit. “Your prophecy that Childeric would die?”

I nodded. It could be nothing else.

“But no one told us he was dead!” He meant when we had asked people if they’d heard where Childeric and his men were. The only news we’d heard was that Childeric and Clovis had returned to Tornacum, as their relationship with Sygarius was strained.

“It must have just happened.”

We both fell silent, unable to look away as horse after horse fell to the sacrificial axes. It was a gut-wrenching waste of equine beauty.

“Jupiter’s balls,” Terix said. “They must have an entire herd of those horses.”

“Not anymore.”

As the last horse fell—there were twenty-one in all—we heard in the distance the deep rumble of drums, playing a complicated rhythm unlike anything the Romans would have tolerated. Laid on top of their chest-rattling beat was a sound I took at first to be pipes; a moment later I realized it was voices. Women, ululating in grief, their voices piercingly high and otherworldly.

The crowd lowered to its knees, and we did the same, nudging Bone down as well.

Across the pit from us, the procession came into sight. The wailing women were naked, except for ragged black veils covering their heads and shoulders. Their sagging breasts and bellies bore red, smeared finger marks, as if they had tried to claw through their own bodies. Their straggling pubic hair, visible even at such a distance, was soaked in red that spilled down their inner thighs.

“They’re not going to kill them, too, are they?” Terix asked in horror.

“I don’t think so.” Raw and frightful as the women’s appearance was, some part of me understood it. They were the embodiment of every mother who had lost a child. They were Mother Earth herself, mourning her son, a king among men.

There were thirteen of the women. They arrayed themselves along the edge of the pit, dropped to their knees, and raised their arms to the heavens. Their ululations grew louder and more piercing, and the assembled Franks joined in, their cries of pain cutting into me like a sharp blade slicing upward along my spine. Bone howled along with them, his plaintive notes in sorrowful harmony to the human wails.

The drums gave one extra loud beat, and then they and the women fell silent. Several moments later the wailing of the Franks died down—and Bone’s, too, thank the gods.

A tense stillness fell over the scene: kneeling, naked women; dead, bloodied horses arrayed in a circle in a pit; a thousand Franks with tears on their cheeks. Even the skies held motionless, a cool silver haze of light that cast no shadows.

In silence came Childeric’s body, lying in state upon a board covered in red cloth, and carried on the shoulders of six richly dressed men. The first of them was Clovis.

The rest of the scene blurred out of my vision, and I saw only him. He had refused to leave my thoughts and my dreams these past two months, but even as I’d held imaginary conversations with him, I’d been unsure of his face. The harder I tried to draw his features exactly in my mind, the more they had shifted and changed, until I doubted I would recognize him should I see him again.

And yet here, from across the gruesome pit, his face bowed down so all I saw was the top of his head, I knew it was he. My heart raced, and sweat broke out over my body. I felt light-headed.

They carried Childeric down into the pit, and placed his body inside the waiting wagon.

The king looked . . . dead. His face was sunken, the flesh pale and purpled. His cheeks sagged, while his lips seemed to have shrunk, peeling back from his yellow teeth. His beard looked weirdly spry and lively on such an obvious corpse.

One of the naked women spoke in a carrying voice, reciting words I could not understand; the rhythm and rhyme were almost musical, though, as was the synchronized, spoken response from the other twelve women whenever she paused. Her prayer continued as resplendent soldiers came down the ramp next, bearing two long swords that they laid crossed over Childeric’s chest. I recognized both the men, from their time at Sygarius’s country villa.

I could see Clovis’s face clearly now—his profile was to me, no more than thirty feet away. He looked absent, as if his thoughts were a thousand miles from here. I tried to control my emotions, and to look at him as a stranger.

Did he not care that his father was dead? Did he not grieve? Maybe he rejoiced, and that was the emotion he would not allow on his face.

I remembered then what Sygarius had said: that if Childeric died, there was little chance Clovis would take his place as king. The Franks chose their kings based on which man was left alive after a bloody fight for the crown. Clovis was too young, too inexperienced, to survive the tricks and politics of men ten or twenty years his senior. His faraway look might be acknowledgment of his doom.

I doubted it. He was probably considering which of his rivals to kill first.

The soldiers laid a shield over Childeric, and then all the men filed back up the ramp, replaced by men carrying down foodstuffs and amphorae. My eyes followed Clovis; now was the time to try to catch him—he was so close. But I could not stand and run after him while all around me knelt. They’d likely slit my throat and throw me on top of the horses if I did.

A regal woman with graying ash-blond hair entered the pit next, accompanied by a pretty blond girl near my own age, and two more women carrying coffers. The naked women continued their prayer as the women in the pit opened the coffers, revealing a treasury’s worth of gold. Piece by piece they distributed it on and around Childeric’s body.

I lost sight of Clovis for a moment in a crowd of nobles on the far side of the pit, and panicked, but then his golden-brown head emerged again, surrounded now by a cadre of soldiers.

Bodyguards.

Would a Frank dare attack a man at their king’s funeral? Apparently.

“Nimia, look,” Terix whispered.

I turned my attention back to the pit, and my eyes widened. The bees. The gold and garnet bees that matched the one hanging from my neck, which had been part of the payment given to Childeric when he reached his last agreement with Sygarius. The older and younger women spread them over Childeric’s body, alongside him, on the ground. And one final bee, they placed between his teeth: a gold offering to their god of the underworld, I guessed, to pay for safe passage to eternity.

A small knowing inside me denied it. No, that’s not the meaning of a bee. A bee is sacred.

Was it? I’d never heard such said.

At last the women left the pit, and the naked women stood. They and the drummers took up their beat and their ululations, and led the way from the pit back toward town. A small army of men went to work with shovels, throwing dirt back into the grave, while a group of soldiers guarded the ramp. With all that gold shining in the open air, there wasn’t a need to question why.

The Franks around us began to stir and rise to their feet. Terix and I exchanged a quick glance, rose to our feet, and dashed as quickly as we could manage through the crowd, trying to reach the last place we’d seen Clovis.

On the edge of town, wagons full of wooden barrels had been brought in. The somber mood quickly turned brighter as the meaning of that sank in. Drink, free for the taking!

Terix cast a longing glance at the barrels, but we had no time for that.

I’d lost sight of Clovis again.

Going on the assumption that he would be headed back to the palace somewhere in town, I shoved through the milling people, Terix and Bone at my heels. Back inside the town wall, I spotted a group of richly dressed people and followed them, guessing them to be nobles. They turned a corner, and when I followed I saw Clovis up ahead, amid his soldiers.

I hurried my steps, pushing past dawdling nobles, and was but twenty feet behind him when I ran face-first into the wall of a soldier’s chest. His hands gripped my shoulders with crushing strength, and he said something low and warning in the Frankish tongue. I looked up at his hard face and saw what he must see as he looked down at me: a filthy, poor, black-haired girl who looked as if she’d been sleeping out-of-doors for two months.

I craned my neck to look past the soldier at Clovis’s retreating head. “Clovis!” I called out. “Clovis! It’s Nimia!” He didn’t hear me. The soldier, annoyed, gave me a shake.

I dredged up some of the Visigoth tongue that I knew. “Clovis. He knows me. I must talk to him.”

The guard’s face twisted in confusion. I tried the same words in Latin, and must have made some impression, for the confusion partially cleared. “No,” he said, and turned me around and gave me a shove back the other way.

Terix and Bone had caught up to me. “The bee, Nimia. Show him the bee!”

Of course! I drew out the bee from the neckline of my tunic and, turning back to the guard, held it up. The leather thong was wound in a crisscross around it, but the gold and garnet shone brightly, and there was no mistaking what it was. “Clovis,” I said firmly.

The soldier looked uncertain, then scowled and put out his hand, palm up. I took the bee off over my head and laid it in his hand, although not without a good deal of misgiving. If he were to take it for himself . . .

The soldier pointed to me. “Name?”

“Nimia.”

“Stay.”

I nodded, and watched as he jogged after the cadre, now out of sight around another corner. We stood in the middle of the street, the heat of the day making the dust stick to our skin. I realized we hadn’t had anything to eat since a heel of stale bread this morning, soaked in water to soften it. I swayed, and set a hand on Bone’s back to steady myself.

As the moments passed without anyone appearing around the corner ahead, all my doubts and fears began to bubble to the surface. He didn’t care about me; he felt he owed me nothing; he would be ashamed of me, a slave; I had been a means to an end, and he didn’t need me anymore.

“If he doesn’t come . . .” Terix said.

“He has to.”

He had to, because we were out of ideas. We’d been on the run for two months, and all at once I felt the weight of that strain. The fear, the physical exhaustion, the uncertainty, the hunger, the dirt. I was sunburnt and bruised, and had lost so much weight that when I lay on my back, there was a hollow between my hip bones where the softness of a well-fed stomach should have been. No man would want to lie upon such a bony bed.

If Clovis didn’t come . . .

I was too tired to think beyond that. He had to come.

The time slipped by. The numbers of passersby dwindled, dispersing like smoke in the breeze until Terix, Bone, and I were the only creatures left in the street. I could hear the revelry from the edge of town, where the barrels were. We’d have to find shelter, or leave, before that rowdiness spilled back into town.

A voice, somewhere behind me: “Is it really you?”

I spun round and saw him a short distance down the street, his guards hanging back. “I don’t forgive you!” I shouted. I don’t know why; my stupid tongue had a mind of its own.

Clovis came toward me, a chuckle rumbling in his voice. “So you came all this way to tell me.”

“I would show you, if I had the strength.”

“You have only to lie back and let me do the work.”

I made a noise of annoyance. He was always joking with me, never serious. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Do you know, Nimia, I can go nowhere near a grape-pressing room without my rod growing stiff as a sword?” He had reached me, and looked down into my face with an expression of bemused affection—such a pale, halfhearted emotion, compared to all those I felt for him. “By Wotan’s breath, Nimia. You look awful.”

After all I’d been through to get here, this is what he had to say to me. I laughed, the laughter edging into a hysteria born of exhaustion before it turned to tears, and I was weeping. Two months’ worth of tears based on fright and misery came pouring forth. I stood alone with my sobbing, my chest heaving, and my breath keening, but then I saw movement from the corner of my eye—Terix gesturing. And his voice, “Hold her, you idiot.”

Clovis’s arms came around me uncertainly, bands of support reluctantly given. I sank against his warm, broad chest. For the first time in two months, I allowed myself to forget the world.

Remembrance would come soon enough.