The Golden Slave - Poul William Anderson (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

He heard her breath drawn in so sharply that it seemed her lungs must rip. He dropped his knife and made one more step, to take her in his hands. She began to shiver.

"Eodan, no, you are dead," she cried, like a lost child.

"If he told you that, I shall tear his tongue out," he answered in a wrath that hammered against his skull. "I am alive—I, Eodan, your man. I have come to take you home, Hwicca."

"Let me go!" Horror rode her voice.

He caught her arms. She shook as if with fever. "Can you give us light, Phryne?" he asked in Latin. "She must see I am no nightwalker."

Hwicca did not speak again. Having risen, she stood wholly mute. Her hand brushed him, and he felt the palm had changed, had gone soft; she had ground no grain and driven no oxen for nigh to a year. Oh his poor caged darling! He let his own grasp go about her shoulders and then her waist. He raised her chin and kissed her. The lips beneath his were dead. In an overwhelming grief, that she should have been so hurt, he drew her to him and laid her head on his breast.

Long afterward Phryne found flint and steel and a lamp. A tiny glow herded immense misshapen shadows into the corners. Eodan looked upon Hwicca.

She had not altered greatly to his eyes. Her skin was white now—the sun had touched it seldom, the rain and wind never; but the same dear small freckles dusted across her nose. She had taken on weight; she was fuller about breast and hip. Her hair streamed in a loose mane past a Roman gown and a Roman girdle, thin sheer stuff broidered with gold; she wore a necklace of opals and amber. He did not like the perfume smell, but—"Hwicca, Hwicca!"

Her eyes seemed black, wrenched upward to his. They were dry and fever-bright. Her shaking had eased, until he could only feel it as a quiver beneath the skin. "I thought you were killed," she told him, tonelessly.

"No. I was sent to a farm south of here. I escaped. Now we shall go home."

"Eodan—" The cold, softened hands reached down, pulling his arms away. She went from him to the chair in which she had been seated when he came in. She sat upon it, her weight against one arm, and stared at the floor. The curve of thigh and waist and drooping head was a sharp pain to him.

"Eodan," she said at last, wonderingly. She looked up. "I killed Othrik. I killed him myself."

"I saw it," he said. "I would have done so, too."

"Flavius brought me here," she mumbled.

"That was not your wish," he answered, through a wall in his throat he had raised against tears.

"There was only one thing that gave me the strength to live," she said. "I thought you had died."

Eodan wanted to take her in one arm, lead her out, hold a torch in the other hand; he would kindle the world and dance about its flames. He went to her, instead, and sat down at her feet, so she must look at him.

"Hwicca," he said, "it was I who failed. I brought you to this land of sorrow; when we were wedded, I could have turned our wagon northward. I let myself be overcome by the Romans. I even left you my own task, of free—freeing our son. The anger of the gods is on my head, not yours."

"Do you think I care for any gods now?" she said.

Suddenly she wept, not like a woman but like a man, great coughing gulping sobs that pulled the ribs and stretched the jaws. She lifted her head and howled, the Cimbrian wolf howl when they mourn for their slain. Phryne stepped back, drawing her knife by the door, but no one came. Perhaps, thought Eodan, they were used to hearing Flavius' new concubine yell.

Hwicca reached for him with unsteady hands and brushed them across his mouth. "You kissed me," she cried. "Now see what you kissed off." He looked upon a greasy redness. "My owner likes me painted. I have tried to please him."

Eodan sat in numbness.

Hwicca fought herself to quiet. Finally she said, stammering and choking, "He brought me here. He left me alone ... for many days ... until I had used up all my tears. At last he came. He spoke kindly. He offered his protection if—if—I should have asked him for a spear in my heart. I did not, Eodan. I gave him back his kindness."

He had thought many ugly fates for her. This he had not awaited.

"Go," she said. "Go while it is still dark. I have money, I will give you what I have. Leave this place of men's deaths, go north and raise me a memory-stone if you will—Eodan, I am dead, leave the dead alone!"

She turned away, looking into night. He got up, slowly, and went to where Phryne was standing.

"Well?" said the Grecian girl. "What is the trouble?" Her tone was unexpectedly stinging, almost contemptuous; it jerked him like a whip.

He bridled with an anger at her that drained off some of the hurt Hwicca had given. "She yielded herself to Flavius."

"Did you expect otherwise?" asked Phryne, winter-cold. "It is one thing to fall on your own sword in battle's heat—another to be a captive alone, and get the first soft word spoken in weeks! Romans have long known how to harness a soul."

"Oh ... well—" Eodan shook his head, stunned. "It is not that. I looked for nothing else, I have seen too many women taken ... But she will not come with me now, Phryne!"

The Hellene stared across the room at Hwicca, who sat with her face hidden in her hair. Then she glanced about at clothes and jewels and whatever else a man was blind to. She nodded.

"Your wife told you she did not merely obey," she said to Eodan. "She tried to please Flavius. She wanted to."

He started. "Are you a witch?"

"Only a woman," said Phryne. "Eodan, think, if you are able. She believed you dead, did she not? I heard the gossip in this household last winter. And Flavius was a man, and there was life in this woman, enough life to draw you here into the she-wolf's throat to get her back! What would you have her do?"

Phryne brought down her foot so the floor thudded. Beneath the boy-cropped dark bangs she regarded Eodan with eyes that crackled. Her scorn flayed him: "She feels she has betrayed you because, for a while, she kissed Flavius willingly. She will send you off and remain here, caged, waiting for him to tire of her and sell her to a brothel and so at last to destruction and a corpse rotting in the Tiber. She will damn herself to that, for no other reason than that she remained a living woman! And you, you rutting, bawling, preening man-thing, you think you might actually go from her as she asks?"

Phryne snatched up a vase and hurled it shattering at his feet. "Well, go then," she said. "Go, and the Erinyes have you, for I am done with you!"

Eodan stared, from one to another of them, for very long. Finally he said, "What thanks I owed you before, Phryne, can be forgotten beside this."

He went to Hwicca, stood behind her, pulled her head back against him and stroked her hair. "Forgive me," he said. "There is much I do not understand. But you shall come with me, for I have always loved you."

"No," she whispered. "I will not. There is no luck in me. I will not!"

He wondered, with a deep harsh wound in the thought, how wide of the mark Phryne, too, might have been. But if they lived beyond this night—if his weird should carry him back to Jutland horizons—he would have their lifetimes to learn, and to heal.

But first it was to escape.

Boierik's son said calmly, "You are going with us, Hwicca. Let me hear no more about that."

But still they tarried. A new thought had come to Eodan. When he asked Phryne, she said it was good—less hopeless, at least, than most things they might attempt.

They sat in the chamber and waited. Little was spoken. Hwicca lay on the couch, after Eodan told her to rest. She stared at the ceiling; only her lungs moved. Eodan sat beside her, stroking her hair. Phryne kept her back to them.

The night grew gray. Hwicca had said Flavius was out to some banquet. Eodan began to wonder if her own slave-girls might not come in to attend her before the Roman returned. That could be a risky thing, capturing them!

The Cimbrian had not dreamed he would be glad to see Flavius again, save as an object of revenge. But when "Vale!" and laughter sounded in the hall, and a little afterward the latch went up, he drew his sword and glided to the door with more happiness than the night had yet given him.

Flavius entered. He wore a wine-stained toga and a wreath slightly askew. He saw Hwicca sitting up on the couch and raised his free arm. "Are you awake, my dear? I did not mean to be so late. It was tedious without you—"

Eodan put the sword against his back and laid a hand on his shoulder. He closed his fingers as tightly as he could, so that Flavius gasped with pain. "If you cry out, you are a dead man," said Eodan.

Phryne closed the door. Flavius turned about with great care. Lamplight gleamed on steel. For a moment the Roman's narrow, curving face was nearly fluid, as he struggled to cast off bewilderment and wine. Then it steadied. The dim light sparkled wet across his brow, but he straightened himself.

"Eodan," he said. "I did not know you at once, with your hair black."

"Not so loudly," said Phryne. She barred the door and circled about, her own dagger cocked for an underhanded stab in the way Eodan had shown her.

"But where did you find this handsome boy?" asked Flavius as if a gibe would armor him.

"No matter that," snapped the Cimbrian. He looked into the other man's rust-colored eyes. A lock of hair had fallen across one of them. Eodan thought of Hwicca's hands brushing it back, and for a moment he stood in flames.

A year ago he would have seen Flavius' heart. A few months back, he would have found some quiet place and stretched his revenge through days. But, on this night, he shuddered to stillness. His blade was almost at Flavius' throat; the Roman had backed against the wall, panting, trying to shed his clumsy toga.

Eodan skinned his teeth and said, "You owe me a heavy blood price. You can never pay it, not with all your lands. So for my honor I should kill you. But I will forego that. It is more to my honor that we three here gain our own lives back."

"I could manumit you," whispered Flavius through sandy lips.

Eodan laughed unmirthfully. "How long afterward would we live? No, you shall see us to safety. Once we are beyond Rome's reach, we can let you go. Meanwhile, you shall not be without us. This sword will be under my cloak. Do not think to trick us and call for help, because, if it even looks as if we are not going to get free, I will kill you."

Flavius nodded. "Let me past," he said. Eodan drew the blade back a few inches. Flavius walked to a table, shedding his toga. Eodan followed each step. Flavius took a wine jug and poured into a chalice; he drank with care.

Then, turning about and looking straight up at Eodan: "I would be interested to know how you escaped. It is a leak I must plug, when this affair is over."

The Cimbrian answered with relish: "Part of the road went through your wife's bed."

"Oh, so." Flavius nodded again. His