Barbarian’s Concubine

Clovis wouldn’t tell me what the vision meant. If I were a proper seer, I thought to myself, I would be telling him how to interpret the prophecy. Instead, he’d left me in his bed and stationed guards at the door to his quarters, and I’d only seen him again near dawn when he’d crawled into the sheets and pulled me close, and sunk into slumber. I’d lain awake, examining the unusual feel of sleeping with another.

His skin, his warmth, the sound of his breathing, the weight of his arm holding me close and holding my hand in his, both of them wedged between my breasts . . . and despite the lush comfort of all those, there was the discomfort of his other arm under me, the sweaty heat where our bodies touched, and my fear that any movement would disturb him. So I lay with limbs going numb and muscles going sore, his breathing in my ear too startling a sound for me to slip back into sleep.

Although sleep I must have, for when I woke again the room was filled with bright sunlight, Clovis was gone, and his mother, Basina, was beside the bed, staring down at me.

That was enough to startle anyone into full wakefulness. I scrambled up, holding the sheet over my breasts. Had she stood there contemplating whether to smother me?

“We have in mind a small entertainment we’d like you and your friend Terix to perform for us this evening,” she said. “Clovis tells me you both have talents of that sort.”

“I dance and play music.”

“And act.”

I nodded. “Is it a play? Or a song?” My mood began to lift, and I felt a familiar excitement. I had not played much music since fleeing Sygarius, and I missed it. “I have pipes, but a cithara would be so much better. If you don’t have one, I suppose a lute would do.” I missed the rich tones of the eleven-stringed cithara, a difficult instrument that few could master.

She ignored my enthusiasm. “Do you speak other tongues than Latin?”

“I know a Visigoth dialect . . . and Phannic, of course.”

“Phannic. I’ve never heard of that; no one else will have, either. Say something in it.”

“I’m astonished that children survived the cold nest of your womb,” I said in Phannic, a smile on my face.

She narrowed her eyes. “That sounds almost . . .”

Oh gods, she hadn’t understood, had she?

“. . . Almost Celtic. Different, of course, and wonderfully archaic. No one will understand a word. It wouldn’t do to have you speaking Latin, after all, when you are presented as a daughter of Nerthus.”

“My lady?”

“Frankish would have been better. But we must work with what we have.” She tugged the sheet out of my hands. Her eyebrows rose as she stared at my tattooed breasts. “Not that anyone will be listening to you, with those on display.”

“My lady?”

Her plans were soon made clear, and by early evening I found myself sitting inside a curtained carriage hitched to a pair of flower-bedecked cows. Two hugely pregnant young women led the team, and Terix, garbed in a peculiar brown wool outfit of short, knit breeches, tight ribbed tunic, and a pointy-topped wool hat that tied under his chin, walked beside my carriage. Bone refused to be left behind, and loped in protective circles around our procession, alarming the cattle.

“These things are infested with lice, I’m sure of it,” Terix complained beneath his breath, for my ears only. I heard him scratching, though I couldn’t see him because of the curtains. “There’s no way wool can be this itchy.”

“Surely a little itching is worth it, to appear before Audofleda in such manly garb,” I whispered back, and couldn’t help a snorting giggle. Terix had declared Audofleda the sweetest flower ever to grace a meadow.

“Who could respect a priest who dressed like this? These Franks have fish sauce for brains.”

“You’re supposed to look like an oak tree.”

“I look like a turd.” I heard him scratch again. “An itchy turd.”

“Think oaky thoughts.”

“When I think of Audofleda, I get plenty of oaky thoughts. I could show her a tree she’d be glad to pray to.”

“Gods, Terix, I hope you don’t.”

“If you’re good enough for Clovis, no reason I can’t be good enough for his sister.”

“Trust me. This is not a family you want to have angry with you. Or even annoyed.”

“Why? What have you heard?”

I hadn’t told him about Childeric’s murder. There’d been no chance, and this wasn’t the right time, either. Or maybe I was being cowardly, not wanting to hear what Terix would say about Clovis, and about me, when he found out. I knew he wouldn’t blame me for the death, but he would turn a beady eye on my sharing Clovis’s bed, and my obvious weakness where the princeling was concerned. “You don’t have to have heard anything to know they’re dangerous, these Franks.”

“If I didn’t already know that, I wouldn’t be wearing a wool turd to please them. Jupiter’s balls, Nimia. I’m not sure we’re better off here than we were while running from Jax.”

“Neither am I.”

“Food’s better, though.”

I laughed.

“Get control of yourself,” Terix mock-scolded. “We’re getting close. No one should hear the daughter of Nerthus laughing. They might think she was just some Roman trollop, no better than a slave or an actress.”

“I am filled with shame.”

“We are close now, Nimia.”

“What mood for the audience?” I whispered.

“They look hairy and tense. But they’re barbarians, so I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Smiles might be more frightening.”

I had heard the murmur of voices all during the carriage ride, as our wooden wheels rumbled through the streets of Tornacum and the lesser folk of the town took notice of our passage. Drummers both preceded and followed us, attracting attention to this summer’s eve spectacle. We were taking a circuitous route to the great hall—because the carriage was part of the show, and it wouldn’t do to have it cross the piddling distance from the palace’s residential wing to the great hall. Better to have it wind through town and catch the eyes and tongues of all the people.

This carriage that I rode in was known. It was the conveyance of Nerthus, a great goddess of these people, who once a year emerged from her home on an island in the middle of a lake, to roam the countryside hidden inside this carriage, accompanied by a priest. Everywhere she stopped, feasts were held and fighting prohibited. No one ever saw her, for she remained secreted behind her curtains, but the priest conveyed her wishes and words to the gathered people.

And when she was sated with the peace and feasting of one village, she blessed the people with fertility and then she and her priest moved on to the next town. Together they circuited the countryside, until at last Nerthus returned again to her island home, on a lake deep in a wood, that wood itself on an island off the coast that no one had ever seen.

I suspected that this carriage got dragged around the countryside perfectly empty every year. There was no need for a “real” goddess if part of the tradition was that no one ever saw her.

But today . . . Today, Clovis wanted more than an empty myth to persuade his people. He needed a spectacle, in the form of a flesh-and-blood “daughter” of Nerthus, come to give her prophecy. A daughter who had been enslaved by the foul Roman Sygarius, but who had escaped (with her priest, Terix), and returned to her homeland to pay homage to the new king. Whoever he might be.

It seemed far too fantastical—far too silly—to work, but Clovis and Basina had been adamant that my appearance as a daughter of Nerthus would be taken for truth, my words for the voice of the goddess.

Everyone already knew about my first prophecy, after all. They already believed in me.

“They’ve opened the doors to the great hall,” Terix whispered to me. “They’ve put planks over the stone stairs, for the wheels. And here we go!”

I heard the coaxing of the cattle up the ramp, and then the carriage jolted and canted, and I bonked my head against the back wall. This was not an elegant way for the daughter of a goddess to travel.

The sound of the wheels changed as we entered the great hall, and the light behind my curtains dimmed to orange torchlight. The banging of the drums suddenly seemed twice as loud, and I could feel the presence of hundreds of people, as if their breath itself pressed in on the curtains, reaching for me, their curiosity and their tension a palpable thing.

“Nerthus,” I heard in whispers. “Nerthus!” Awe. Fear. A trembling joy. I could feel it all, in the air around my carriage. These people, I suddenly understood, yearned for clarity and decision. They had lost their king, and they wanted to replace him quickly, before chaos descended and tore them apart. They knew they stood in a fragile moment.

I heard a deep male voice speaking in Frankish to the crowd. The words were unintelligible to me, but the slow, booming delivery held passion and meaning. This was someone who felt strongly, and put his heart into his voice.

The carriage stopped. Voices, rustling. Clovis’s voice now, from above the carriage—was he on a dais?—speaking with surety, then amazement. He dragged the moment out, and I imagined all the eyes of the hall on him, and on the curtains of my carriage. They’d never seen Nerthus, and never imagined her to have a daughter. To be so privileged as to see such a one . . . it would be a tale to tell their grandchildren, and to recount over beer and mead through all the dark nights of their lives.

They deserved a show.

Clovis said something dramatic, the rising tone of his voice indicating that something more was to come, and then there was silence. Everyone seemed to be holding his breath.

It was me they were waiting for. As I sat motionless inside the carriage, my hand poised a finger’s width from the curtain, I felt my own tension rising along with theirs.

Wait, Nimia . . . wait . . .

I’d long ago learned to prolong the anticipation for as long as the audience could bear. The greater their tension, the more they enjoyed the reward.

When I imagined I could feel their tension ready to break, ready to shift into restless impatience, I dropped a veil into place over my face, put my hand to the curtain, and shifted it a hand’s width. Just enough that all could see the movement, and all could crane their necks, trying to catch a glimpse inside the carriage.

Terix rushed to the opening and bowed low, and I tried not to look at the pointed brown cap that turned his head into an acorn. Now was not the time to succumb to a fit of the giggles. Instead, I extended one be-ringed foot out the curtain opening, letting those close by see the gold that adorned my toes and wrapped around my ankles.

We’d debated whether a demigoddess would wear sandals, and decided not. Leather soles seemed far too mundane for one who walked between the heavens and earth.

I pushed the curtains open wider with careful grace, letting my hands—with their own multitude of gold rings—show before my arms, with their twisted gold bands winding round me from wrist to elbow to upper arm. And then with all the skill of my dancer’s body, I flowed out of the carriage, moving with a gliding slowness like a length of silk being lifted by the wind. It was a movement of strength and control, although to my watchers it would—I hoped—look like the natural, easy motion of an otherworldly creature.

A murmur went through the hall, and bodies pressed for a closer view. I was standing on the stone floor, but saw that there was indeed a dais on the other side of the carriage. Terix rose from his bow and put out his hand for me. I laid mine lightly atop his and let him lead me to the dais stairs: my vision was hampered by the veil that covered my face from brow to chin, and his guidance left me free to focus on my flowing movements.

The murmurs grew louder as I climbed the stairs with Terix and more people could see me. My hair was pulled back in tight braids, and pinned to my head with more gold. I wore nothing between the veil on my face and a girdle of gold links at my hips, through the center of which a long white cloth was looped, making a skirt that hung to my feet at front and back, but left my legs with their tattoos as bare as my breasts. Between the black-blue spirals on my body and the multitude of gold adorning my limbs, I must have made a fine spectacle.

There were a dozen people I did not know on the dais, and whom I could barely see through the veil. Clovis was there, though, and Basina.

Now came the part we had rehearsed. I was given a gold goblet to drink from—plain water, to my disappointment—and then I was to pretend to be communing with higher powers. No one had ever told me what I looked like when in a trance, except that my eyes turned to a glowing copper. It would have been helpful to know what else happened. Did my limbs go stiff? Did I arch my back? Did my head roll?

Basina had instructed me to stretch out my arms and stare straight ahead, then speak my prophecy in Phannic. “Priest” Terix would then “translate” my words to Latin for a high-ranking Christian priest named Remigius to relate to the crowd. Remigius was a disinterested party, his religion followed by few if any of the Franks, and thus he was trusted not to embellish for any one Frank’s benefit.

I was to put my arms straight out? Pah. That hardly seemed sufficient for the occasion. Basina had no imagination. These people wanted an oracle, not an effigy.

I swept my arms out like wings, then brought them together, crossed, before my face and then slowly sank into a squat and began to make a flutelike noise in the back of my mouth, as high-pitched and fluttering as birdsong. Indeed, I’d taught myself this trick in an attempt to talk to birds, when I was a child.

I rose from my squat, stretching my arms above me as I did so, my chirpings growing louder and more strident, until I was making the piercing call of a hawk, my hands stretched up to the heavens hidden beyond the beamed roof of the hall.

And now for some acrobatics. Just a little, to give them something to look at.

I gave several sharp hunting cries as if traumatized by my visions, and then melted backward, bending my back and reaching out with my arms until I felt my hands touch the dais. As I arched in front of the hall, a fragile human bridge poised on tiptoes and fingertips, I realized that my plan to go into a handstand posed certain problems. Namely, my gold girdle and skirt would fall off my hips. I didn’t care about the nudity, but it seemed an undignified event for a demigoddess, to have her girdle flopping about her armpits and her skirts flapping in her face.

I could pull myself back upright, but my belly muscles, I’d just discovered, were suffering from my night with Clovis, and were unwilling to cooperate.

Mouse farts.

There was no way out but down.

I put on a great screeching show of birdcalls, relying heavily on ravens with their raucous caws, and slowly collapsed onto the dais.

I saw Basina glaring down at me.

Yes, well, seers were known to be peculiar. She should have expected the unexpected.

The dais floor seemed as good a place as any to deliver my proclamations, so I shouted out the first of them, in Phannic: “I want wine with my dinner!”

No one could understand me, so it didn’t matter what I said. Terix was the one who had had to memorize his lines, in order to recount my vision to Remigius. Terix, more sensible of his skin than I was of mine, stayed true to his script and spoke of a rumble of thunder. Remigius repeated the Latin words for everyone to hear, and then translated into Frankish.

“I want naked, virile young men to attend me at my bath,” I shouted. And why not?

Terix dutifully “translated” my words.

And so on.

There was a stirring and a change in the atmosphere of the hall when Terix got to the part about the snake being cloven in two, and blue blood spurting out. Angry murmurings emerged, quickly countered by tones of gleeful satisfaction.

I might not know what the vision meant, but the Franks did. It was an odd feeling, to be the one who “knew” the future and yet to have no idea what was coming. The symbols I saw were meant for other people, not me.

Someday I’d have to think more closely on that, and what it said about whether I should share my visions with others or hoard them inside where they could do no harm.

“I like it when Clovis licks my cunny!” I shouted. “And he has a marvelous thick rod!”

Terix spoke of lightning striking Clovis, Remigius repeated, then translated . . . and the hall erupted in violent chaos. I heard steel being drawn, shouts, flesh striking flesh, pounding footsteps, screams, the lowing of the frightened cows. Metal striking metal.

Terix grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet; there were twice as many people on the dais now, and all were fighting or fleeing, their motions a blur from behind the veil. A man lunged toward us, short-sword drawn, his mouth screaming something in Frankish. Bone leaped on him from behind, snarling, taking him down and sinking his massive jaw onto the man’s neck, snapping it.

“The carriage roof,” Terix said, and led me to the edge of the dais. I ripped off the veil and together we jumped the small gap, landing on the wood planks of the roof just as the cows tried to bolt. The roof was a small ship in a sea of violence, and we huddled together upon it, clinging to the edges, as the cows dragged us from the worse of the tumult.

As quickly as the violence erupted, it ended, and two men stopped and calmed the cattle. As the churning in the great hall stilled, I followed the eyes of everyone else and saw the man from my vision, as big as a tree. There were no teeth tied in his hair, but the small ivory squares sewn in neat geometric designs on his tunic, and the black hair fringe at the tunic’s hem, told tales I dare not hear. His arm was raised, and from his fist dangled the head of a man.

A cheer throbbed through the hall.

The headless body on the floor had a blue snake embroidered upon the shoulder of the tunic.

The man climbed the steps to the dais, carrying the head in one hand, his bloodied sword in the other. He came before Clovis, who stood straight though his tunic was slashed and he was splattered with blood. The man held the head out to Clovis, the blood dripping from the severed neck.

The hall went silent.

The man spoke in Frankish. “Gods, what’s he saying?” I complained under my breath, just as the Christian priest, Remigius, poked his balding head out from inside the carriage. He must have taken refuge there when the fighting started. And no wonder: he had the pudgy body of a scholar, not a fighter.

Terix reached down and shook the priest’s shoulder, making him jump. “What’s the fellow with the head saying?”

As soon as Remigius realized he wasn’t about to have his own head sliced off, he translated for us. “I give you Danoweg of the River Franks, he whose symbol is the blue water snake. He who tried to strike you down in your own hall. He who would deny the words of the daughter of Nerthus, which proclaim that you, and only you, Chlodowig, son of Childeric and descendant of the great demigod Merovech, are to sit upon the Lightning Throne. I pledge my strength and my tribe to you, for now and eternity.”

The man placed the head at Clovis’s feet, then dropped to his knees and offered his sword up to Clovis.

The Lightning Throne.

Ah.

I couldn’t have given Clovis a more optimistic prophecy, than that he would be struck by lightning.

I no longer wondered why he’d come as soon as I said it.