The Warlord's Mistress
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Juliet Landon
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Chapter One
The House of Women, Coria (Corbridge) AD 208
The girl knuckled away a tear from one large blue eye that would have melted the hearts of most women, but apparently not this one. She looked up with a growing respect at the lady Dania in whose spacious entrance hall she stood, noting again the woman’s elegance and intimidating dignity that were not quite what she had expected when she arrived. She had been treated courteously, but the answer was still no.
‘It’s not only that you’re too young, Lepida,’ said Dania, ‘and it’s not that you don’t have the looks. You are on the way to becoming a beauty, I’m sure of it. But this is not the way to punish your parents, nor do I need to be dragged before the magistrate to answer charges of procuring under-age girls, let alone kidnap. Had you thought of that?’
‘No, my lady.’
‘Then what had you thought?’
‘Well, that I’d prefer to live here…the excitement…the parties, pretty clothes and hair, and no parents telling me what not to do.’
‘And men?’
‘Yes.’ Long fair lashes, damply spiked, swept her cheeks.
Dania smiled and glanced sideways at Etaine, the woman who had come with her from Boar Hill six years ago. ‘It’s not quite what you think,’ she said, kindly. ‘We have to work, too.’
‘Oh, I know what happens,’ said Lepida, using one last flutter of her eyelashes to convince her audience. ‘I know why men come here. I’m sure I could…’
‘Lepida,’ said Dania firmly, ‘this is not an orphanage, nor is it a place for young daughters of officers. It’s a house of women. And you’re going home. Now, Etaine and Albiso will escort you, and your parents need know nothing about your visit here. If you still think the same way in five years’ time, when you’re nineteen, then you can come to me again and we’ll talk. No promises, mind.’ With a look, she summoned the man who stood apart over by the pink-washed wall, placing a warm hand on Lepida’s bony shoulder and easing her towards him. ‘Go home, my dear. Your parents need you there.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’ The liquid eyes lingered appreciatively over the panels of pink, ochre and white, the shrines alcoved in the walls, the shining mosaic floor whose imagery she only half-understood. The glimpse of a sun-washed garden on the far side of an adjoining room was all light and glamour and a far cry from the noisy squabbling of her siblings at home. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ she whispered, turning away.
Wistfully, Dania watched the slender young Lepida glide along the verandah, cross the cobbled courtyard and disappear into the passageway between two shops that led into the street. Weaver Street, just off Dere Street, was set on the quiet outer edges of Coria, the town that some were already calling Corbridge after the stout wooden bridge built by Roman legionaries across the Cor. There had been ancient settlements here since anyone could remember, but once the great fortified Wall had been built across Britain from coast to coast, Coria had become an important supply base for the army, growing steadily and attracting traders of every kind, integrating local civilians with the foreign military. What had once been a remote settlement of thatched huts, animal compounds and plots, was now an organised network of stone-built garrison blocks and storehouses, workshops, temples and granaries, large merchants’ houses and living quarters for all those who serviced the troops along the Wall, all seventy-three miles of it. Including the House of Women.
Dania’s establishment had grown from very modest beginnings that were quite unlike young Lepida’s innocent imaginings, different in fact from those of all but a select few of the now extensive household. Except for her closest henchmen, no one in Coria knew that the lady Dania was a Brigantian woman from nearby Boar Hill, or that her brother Somer was the chieftain of that local tribe.
It was early morning, a time of rest for the women who worked late and slept late, a time when Dania attended to the business of the house and to the shops on each side of the passageway fronting on to the street. A weaver and a tailor. This morning, however, there was another matter that needed her attention after the business of the volunteer Lepida. Passing through the outer door, she turned on to the covered verandah where Ram and Astinax stood side by side watching the departure of the trio. They stood to attention as she approached, bowing deferentially as she stopped before them. ‘How did that child get in here?’ she said.
The two men, ex-gladiators from Verulamium, were built like house-sides, but to Dania they represented security, reliability, never letting anyone unsuitable slip past their guard. ‘We believe she got into the kitchen, my lady,’ said Ram, ‘when the cook’s lad carried the supplies in earlier. We’ve spoken to him. Shall you dismiss him?’
‘No, Ram. But it mustn’t happen again. This is no place for children.’ She looked away into the sunny courtyard where tubs of lavender, violets and pansies were already alive with fumbling bees. Climbing roses twisted around the wooden columns that held up the upper storey, and the tree in the centre of the space dripped with white may-blossom that spiralled like snowdrifts beneath the stone benches.
Dania held up a small oblong piece of paper-thin beech-wood. ‘I’ve had a message from the garrison commander,’ she said. ‘What am I going to say to him about the man’s arm you broke?’
Astinax was bald and genial at this time of the day, bald and threatening by evening. ‘To Claudius Karus, my lady? You won’t need to say much to him,’ he said, facetiously.
She held back a laugh. ‘I can’t quite understand why he needs to pursue the matter,’ she said, ‘unless he’s been told to, of course. Karus knows we don’t allow bad behaviour. He’s been here often enough.’
Ram, the shorter of the two giants, fended off an inquiring wasp. ‘You’d better let one of us go with you, my lady. The streets are swarming with extra troops. I heard that the emperor himself is expected any day now, him and his son. The builders are preparing that big place on the side of the Stanegate for him and his retinue.’
‘The emperor?’ said Dania, staring at him. ‘Are you sure?’
Ram, one would have thought, would not be too moved by the sight of a lovely woman after all he had suffered. He had been taken from his family in southern Britain, forced to be a gladiator and, excelling at that, had been granted his freedom. He had worked for Dania at the House of Women for the last three years and, so far, had shown not the slightest interest in the women themselves, and only Dania was able to thaw, one by one, the ice crystals that encased his heart. Unable to ignore the beautiful languid curves of her back under the long cotton tunic, he released his breath slowly as her green almond-shaped eyes opened wide with surprise. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Septimus Severus, no less. We’ll find out more today, and still more tonight. I’ll come with you to see my lord Karus, since I know what happened and, if I keep my eyes peeled and my ears open, who knows what we might discover between us?’
Having picked up a good working knowledge of several languages during his time at Verulamium, Ram would be a useful escort in more ways than one. Dania looked down at her bare toes, aware of his singular protectiveness. ‘I’d better go and put something on my feet then,’ she said.
Ram swiped a hand around his chin. ‘And I’d better go and have a shave in case I bump into the emperor himself.’
‘And I’ll hold the fort,’ said Astinax, grinning through the gaps left by missing teeth. He wore the resilient and not unattractive expression of a battered man whose spirit was still intact.
‘Thank you, Astinax. I don’t suppose we’ll be long.’
‘What shall I do if your friend the lady Julia arrives?’
Pertly, Dania looked over her shoulder. ‘If you can keep an eye on things at the same time, entertain her. The bath-house will be empty.’
‘Hah!’ said Ram, scathingly. ‘He’ll not get a word in edgeways.’
‘Good,’ said Dania. ‘So just listen. As a centurion’s woman, she should know what’s going on. Be nice to her, Astinax. Yes?’
The grin widened.
No Brigantian woman, let alone one of the Boar Hill tribe, would have needed to enquire too deeply into the reason for a personal visit of a Roman emperor at this time, for it was well known by now that the occupying Roman army were having a hard time of it in this far-flung northern outpost of the empire on the Wall. Ha-drian’s Wall, they called it, begun by the Emperor Hadrian to control the flow of tribes and traffic, taxes, tribute and trade between the hill tribes on the southern side and the barbarian Caledonians on the northern side. The British hill tribes, the Briganti, had never split themselves into two sections as neatly as the Wall would suggest, for some of them were scattered on the far side, too.
Over the last six years, the resistance against Roman authority had grown more successful than anyone could have foreseen; anyone except Dania herself and her brother Somer, now chieftain of Boar Hill. Had it not been for the amazing success of her venture, her people would still be in the sorry mess they’d been in when she left. But for her courage and foresight, the whole of the Brigantian fighting force would have remained ignorant of the Roman army’s strengths and weaknesses, their movements from fort to fort and all the changes that enabled the hill tribes to strike, time and time again, like satanic fiends in the night, disabling, wounding and even thrashing them on more than one occasion.
Eventually, the Roman command had decided that more must be done to reverse the tide and, having acquired at last an emperor with a reputation for fearlessness, had sent more reinforcements than ever before from all parts of the Roman world to deal with the problem. The emperor Septimus Severus and his eldest son were to see to it personally, using the regional headquarters at Eboracum and Coria as the main supply base. Extra cohorts of troops were pouring almost daily into the town, hastily building new barracks, covering the surrounding fields with tents of hide in tidy rows, drilling the men well into the evening of each day, crowding the streets with their silver-scaled clanking bodies, demanding produce and ‘requisitioning’ horses and waggons. To Dania’s annoyance, some had even made a nuisance of themselves at her house.
The House of Women, open only from late afternoon onwards, was always popular with those soldiers and citizens who could afford it. Never had the competition for admittance been so fierce, and never before had the inmates had such an opportunity to discover what the chieftain Somer and his Brigantian compatriots needed to know. Looking, sounding, and living as a freeborn but local citizen of Rome, Dania had taken great care in the preceding six years never to disclose her origins. Only two people had come with her from Boar Hill, one of whom was Etaine, her woman; the other was Bran, son of Brigg, who had been renamed Brannius. Romanised Briton by day and Briganti messenger by night, Brannius was now twenty years old, only two years younger than his half-sister and utterly devoted to her, tall, comely, and proud of his dual role.
He stood by her side as she concluded her ritual at the small shrine of Diana, where a painted figurine of the goddess of woodlands and hunters reminded them both of their beginnings. ‘I feel some unease about this meeting,’ Dania whispered to him, adjusting the beeswax candle in the alcove. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘Don’t be,’ he whispered back.
Turning to share the personal nature of the advice, she touched his smooth chin with her knuckle and a smile that made him wish they were not related. ‘We’ve come a long way, Bran, son of Brigg,’ she said. ‘I think we may have redeemed ourselves, after our six successful years. I’m sure you’re right. What is there for us to fear?’
Bran could have explained, but now was not the time for that.
Six years ago they had been brought here to Coria to establish a small weaving shop, just as she had suggested. They had not been left penniless or ill equipped, but nor had they found that first year easy, for they could scarcely make the beautiful hooded cloaks of waterproof wool fast enough to keep up with the demand, and they had taken on two local women to help them.
The sudden eviction from close-knit family into the vast bewildering strangeness of town life had been even harder, especially for Dania who, as a chieftain’s daughter, had expected to retain her high rank for the rest of her life. Now she was, if not exactly a nobody, an ordinary citizen subject to a host of restrictions far more irksome than any she’d been used to. Romanised British women, she discovered, did not enjoy the same status as hill-fort women, and the closeness that had sheltered her at Boar Hill had disappeared overnight. It was a terrible loss she had not anticipated when she had bargained for her life, for her parents and Somer had been her world to whom she had never needed to explain anything. Somer had stood up to protect her against Mog; he had been the one to arrange her new life. He was her hero, and it was to each other that they owed their existence. Daily, her scorn of the Roman invaders remained intact while she strived to rob them of every slip of the tongue that would help to build Somer’s status as the most fearsome chieftain ever.
Bran’s regular returns to the tribe with any information he could glean, always at night, soon made a difference to Somer’s success, and results quickly began to show, causing consternation to the Roman command along the Wall. So lax had things grown at the forts in the vicinity that the garrison once lost an entire tent-carrying unit when they were ambushed and, soon after that, another two units were lost when a fort was set on fire during the long hours of winter darkness.
It was about this time that Dana, who had re-styled herself Dania in keeping with her new status, discovered that Etaine had regularly been sleeping with soldiers from the garrison for money, her matter-of-fact explanation being that it was an easier, quicker and more lucrative method of making ends meet than by standing at a loom all day and half the night. Since they both knew how to avoid conception, there had been little danger to Etaine, and when she brought in a young camp-follower one day who was in dire need of medical assistance, their lives began to take on an unexpected and most unusual dimension. Their reputation as healers of women’s problems soon spread like a forest fire through the gossipy, nosy, close-knit town of Coria.
Yet, because their arrival on Weaver Street had been so carefully arranged and executed, Dania’s apparent connections with the relatively new breed of Romanised Britons and her background story of well-bred relatives in Eboracum and Cateractonium seemed to satisfy even the most curious of neighbours. It was not thought remarkable that she should be an unmarried woman in business, or that she should employ local people to help with the weaving and, when she extended her property to include the shop next door, mostly on the earnings of Etaine and Jovina, it made sense to employ a tailor who could help to maintain a front behind which the other more personal services could continue in private.
In their third year, Dania bought the land behind the shops and built a large three-sided house of two storeys and a garden that sloped down to the Cor burn. More recruits applied to join the House of Women as a safe base from which to work where they would be treated respectfully. She applied for a licence and was given one. Dania vetted the women carefully for intelligence as well as beauty and, just as importantly, for their willingness to listen when their clients, mostly of officer rank, talked about their work either in bed, at the table, or in the luxurious baths. That willingness had to include the accurate passing-on of any information to Dania, for now all her household shared a common loyalty to the larger tribe of the Briganti. What their lovely mistress did with the information they did not ask, though they may have deduced something from the increasing irritation of their clients towards the local hill tribes, particularly the one situated on Boar Hill, hidden in the woodland twenty miles to the west of Coria.
The changes to the original modest business were also reflected in Dania herself, so much so that, on her secret visits to Boar Hill, she always reverted to the way she had looked when she left it as a defiant and hurt sixteen-year-old. In Coria, however, she was the lady Dania, tall and slender and as close to men’s ideals of a goddess as it was possible to be. She had grown to be a radiantly lovely woman with enchanting green black-lashed eyes, the same rich black as her abundantly waving hair which, as a lady of quality, she amassed on top of her head, bound by cords and ribbons that almost, but not quite, kept it in check. She held her superb figure as if she’d had dancing lessons since childhood, capturing men’s attention with the sway of her walk and the unconscious grace of her hands and arms. Adopting the Roman style of dressing, as most civilians were doing nowadays, the softly draped fine wools, gauzy linens and silks skimmed modestly but provocatively over her lovely breasts and narrow waist, her hips and long shapely legs. The swan-like neck that, in public, was always covered by a fine veil, was by evening exposed to reveal necklaces of gold, amber, jet and pearls.
Demanding a high standard from the women who worked for her, Dania’s personal principles had placed her totally beyond the reach of men. Not once had she joined the ranks of those who served the wealthy officers on their nightly visits to the House of Women, who came by recommendation only. She refused to admit all and sundry, nor would they have been able to afford it. Dania herself none of them would have been able to afford, and, although once or twice she had allowed herself to become fond of a man, thankfully he had been posted before a situation could develop. She was mistress of the house, no more, no less.
One of their most frequent guests was the centurion Claudius Karus, whose generous and frequent offers she had never accepted, though he had always taken it well. As an officer, he had the advantages of better pay and the permission to marry, which his legionaries had not. But Karus preferred bachelorhood and his visits to the House of Women; and to his revealing grumbles about life on the Wall, Dania and the others listened with interest and sympathy before passing on the information, usually within the same night. Now, she fully expected that Claudius Karus had sent for her to prove his efficiency to someone while putting her usual discretion to the test in public. No, there was no reason for her to be concerned, except that the soldier whose arm had been broken might have decided on some kind of revenge.
They walked in single file through the busy streets of the town, the giant bare-legged Ram one pace ahead of Dania, and Brannius one pace behind, hailed from both sides by friends within the narrow confines of the street. Once in Dere Street, they were obliged to keep well out of the way of the marching boots and pack-bearing burly bodies of soldiers, heads encased in shining steel, spears bristling from the ranks like a monstrous hedgehog.
‘Legionaries,’ Brannius whispered. Dedicated, disciplined and very dangerous, they were the fighting machines that the men in their tribal family hoped to vanquish by more unorthodox methods than open warfare.
‘Auxiliaries, not legionaries,’ Ram contradicted him. ‘Syrians, too. The worst sort. Not renowned for discipline. Horses…well, we have better ones than those in the local knacker’s yard.’
‘How many?’ said Dania, noting the swarthy skins. Her words were masked by the clatter of hob-nailed sandals and hooves on the stone road.
‘A cohort. Usually eight hundred. Mixed, half-infantry, half-cavalry. Come, that’s the last of them. We can get across to the Stanegate now. Mind that muck.’
Stepping over the mounds of steaming manure, they crossed over into the wide main street lined with big stone-built granaries on one side and towering temples, soldiers’ barracks and officers’ houses on the other behind a high stone wall. All around them people jostled and swerved to avoid the piled and lumbering carts and solid groups of soldiers who strutted with helmets dangling like buckets from their arms. Turning left into a side street, they were even more enclosed by the military world of shouted commands and the crash and yell of men practising arms, the stamp of feet and the shrill blast of a bugle that sent shivers down Dania’s spine. All about them was ordered, white and polished, monumental and regimented, typically Roman.
‘We turn right through this archway,’ said Ram who had been in places like this before. ‘My lord Karus’s office will be somewhere down here.’
Twice they were challenged and allowed to pass before they reached the wooden door where a polished legionary stood on guard duty, his spear held across it, his eyes beneath the steel brow-band wandering with furtive curiosity over the three visitors. ‘Your business?’ he said to Ram, assessing the impressive bulk. Ram’s knee-length tunic was the only garment he wore over a pair of short pants, and its short sleeves revealed arms like tree trunks bound by leather wristbands.
He placed himself in front of Dania, shielding her from the man’s too-obvious scrutiny. ‘My lady’s business is with Centurion Claudius Karus,’ he said. ‘She is expected.’
The guard opened the door and spoke briefly to the man inside. White-robed officials carrying piles of wax tablets in their arms passed to and fro over the tiled floor, their sandals slapping, ahead of shaven-headed slaves. Fully armed soldiers clattered past in coloured tunics, belted and buckled with silver and leather, with dangling dagger-sheaths and scabbards, their faces studiously intent. From the shadows of the echoing hall, the large red fan-shaped crest of a centurion approached them, his expression hidden between the curving cheek-pieces that met under his chin.
‘The lady Dania?’ he said. ‘My lord Karus will see you in here.’ His stiff glance at Brannius and Ram suggested that they should be excluded, but Dania changed his mind before he spoke.
‘My bodyguards always attend me,’ she said, sweetly. ‘My lord Karus knows them both.’
The centurion looked as if he was about to say something, but the door at the end of the hall opened and an officer beckoned them forward, and Dania was left with the strangely elusive sensation that there was more to this than a routine enquiry into a man’s injury. They entered and the feeling was reinforced by the lack of greeting from Claudius Karus, for now he was rigidly poised in full armour behind an unknown officer, his usual welcoming smile stifled, his arms like ramrods, his blue and usually twinkling eyes registering little by the way of recognition. So, it seemed that Karus’s office had been taken over, and she would have to fend for herself.
Resigned, Dania turned her attention to the profile of the officer responsible for Karus’s unusual silence, a tall powerfully built man too engrossed in speaking to his clerk to acknowledge her arrival with Brannius and Ram. At first glance, she was unable to guess at his rank, though it was obviously a very superior one. His dark red tunic was carefully pleated, but it was covered from the hips upward by a moulded and embossed leather body-piece, to the chest of which were strapped three vertical rows of engraved silver discs that she knew to be awards for outstanding service. Upon each broad shoulder lay a silver torque in the shape of a laurel wreath, drawing her eyes briefly to the thick column of his neck. Leather flaps hung from his armour, almost covering his short sleeves, and the light from high windows caught upon his heavily muscled arms ornamented with wide gold armlets, more awards for valour and service. Tight leather breeches reached as far as mid-calf and showed him to be a cavalry officer, the bare skin below as bronzed and hairy as his arms. As he slowly turned to her at last, she saw the face of a man of thirty years or so, though with the helmet covering so much of it, it was hard to tell. The huge black-and-white striped crest on his helmet rocked and steadied.
Dark eyes looked her over without giving anything away, though it was the slight backward pull of his shoulders that contradicted his seeming indifference. Dania could by now interpret most of the signals sent out by men. ‘Who’s this?’ he said, curtly.
His voice was deep and not, she thought, of this country. And his manner was churlish, to say the least. Nettled, she glanced at Karus, thinking that he might unbend enough to introduce her. But when his eyes remained fixed on some distant object above the door, she returned her attention to the aggressive male and quickly decided that silence would be the best way to deal with him. The room was scattered with men, one of them with his arm in a sling and looking very ill at ease in full uniform.
When the officer received no immediate reply, he looked sharply at Karus. ‘Well?’ he barked. ‘Is somebody going to tell me?’
‘The lady Dania Rhiannon,’ said Karus, tonelessly. ‘The next on your list, my lord. The assault case. Owns two shops and a house on Weaver Street where the assault took place. Sir.’
‘And these two?’ the man barked again, setting the plume nodding.
‘The lady’s bodyguard and companion, my lord.’
‘Which one’s the husband and which the lover?’
Dania thought it was time to speak for herself. ‘I’m sure you meant that as an insult, my lord, but, as insults go, it could have been much worse. This is Ram, a free man employed by me to protect the inmates of my house. Brannius is also freeborn, as I am. He is my half-brother and therefore could not possibly qualify as either husband or lover. Have you any more questions of a personal nature before we discuss the reason for our being here?’
The man’s eyes narrowed and, for an instant, he appeared to be totally taken aback by her fluent reproof. Through a half-open door, sounds of shouting and a loud yelp cut through the room’s uneasy silence, and then the crest waved violently as the man signalled for the door to be closed against the ensuing sounds of a scuffle. It did nothing to steady Dania’s racing heartbeat. He looked down at a wooden tablet being shoved slowly across the table by the clerk’s finger. ‘You are here to answer a charge of assault upon a soldier in the Imperial Roman Army,’ he said, sternly. ‘You have a house on Weaver Street. Is that the house to which you invited the legionary Lucius Grappus? Step forward!’ he yelled at the arm-sling. The injured man obeyed.
‘I did not invite Lucius Grappus to my house,’ Dania said. ‘He invited himself.’
‘Eh? That’s not what I’ve been given to understand. But he was assaulted and he does have a broken arm, sustained on your property. So, how do you explain that?’
‘He was not assaulted, he was ejected from my premises for unacceptable behaviour. His broken arm is his own fault. My two bodyguards have orders to—’
‘What unacceptable behaviour, exactly?’ The officer had not moved from the spot, but Dania felt his overpowering closeness and the strength of his hostility from where she stood. ‘What was his offence?’
‘He was drunk,’ she said, not wishing to go into all the details.
‘And…so? Is that something you can’t handle at your house?’
‘If you must know, he relieved himself into the pool. Some of my guests were in it at the time.’ Now the officer moved at last, coming to stand before her to take a closer look. ‘You have a pool? Do you mean you have baths at your premises? A bath-house? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes,’ she said, lifting her chin to look him in the eye. ‘I have a bath-house. Is there some reason why I should not?’
He turned to glare at the injured man, whose expressionless face inside the helmet was, chameleon-like, taking on the same colour as his red tunic. Clearly, this was a detail he had omitted from his report. Though his superior kept up his visual attack upon the embarrassed soldier, his next question was aimed at Dania. ‘So tell me, lady, exactly what kind of establishment do you keep on Weaver Street that has a bath-house where both men and women too, I take it, bathe together?’
She took a deep breath. ‘It is a house that some of the men in this room have visited often enough,’ she said, tiring of having to defend them when they were doing so little to back her up. ‘It is a house of great charm and pleasure to which only men of impeccable manners and refinement are admitted. With money, naturally. Your Lucius Grappus does not fulfil any of those requirements. In fact, he then went on to vomit on my dining room floor and, if I’d had my way, he’d have had both arms broken. I had to have the cool pool scrubbed out, and my mosaic floor too.’
His eyes widened again. ‘You have mosaics?’
‘Yes. Don’t you? You find that of more interest than the insulting behaviour of one of your men?’ The snub would have been hard to ignore.
Like rival mastiffs, they faced each other down until the officer turned angrily away to snarl at the wretched arm-sling. ‘Get out! I’ll deal with you later. I can hardly fine a woman, whatever kind of house she runs, for objecting to scum like you. And why…’ he rounded on the poker-faced Karus next ‘…was I not given all the facts, Centurion? This woman runs a brothel, no less. Does she pay the proper taxes?’
‘I beg your pardon, Tribune Peregrinus,’ said Karus. ‘I expected to hear this case myself. Yes, she pays the appropriate tax. Sir.’
‘Do you?’ he said to Dania.
‘My lord Karus has told you that I do. He collects it.’
‘Does he, indeed?’
‘You may examine my accounts whenever you wish, and my receipts. I’ll have them sent to you. I have a trusted slave to do them. A Greek.’
‘You have slaves?’
Trying not to show how ruffled she felt by his constant challenges, she swept him a pitying look from her emerald green eyes. ‘You have been too long in the army, my lord,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you should see more of the world.’ Making the slightest signal to Ram and Brannius, she made an exit of such velocity towards the door that the soldier there hardly had time to open it before her, ‘I bid you good day’ floated back into the room on the tip of her long diaphanous stola.
Expecting some kind of explosive intervention at any moment, the three of them felt something like bewilderment to find themselves so promptly and easily freed, with a silence dogging each hurried step. The bright light outside made them gulp and move on without a pause, the soft linen of Dania’s deep plum-coloured tunic swirling round her ankles, its wide gold-embroidered border glinting in the sun. It was not until they were once more in the narrow side street that she slowed. ‘Bran, my sandal’s undone,’ she whispered.
He took her wrist and drew her to a halt, dropping to a crouch to attend to her laces while Ram stood close, with his back to her.
Brannius straightened. ‘You’re shaking,’ he said.
They walked more slowly. ‘Thank you. Yes. Let’s get home.’
‘You did well, my lady,’ said Ram, in front. ‘I wonder who that bastard is. Tribune, Karus called him. First time we’ve had one of them up here since we came. Things must be hotting up.’
Brannius was cynical. ‘Having sorted out the local barbarians,’ he said, ‘he’ll be off back to Eboracum tomorrow to collect another silver gong. Job done. We’ll not see him again.’
‘Oh, you have mosaics,’ Dania mimicked, ‘and baths, and slaves…and you wear shoes, too? Whatever next? Peasant!’
‘Did you recognise the accent, Ram?’ said Brannius.
‘It’s familiar, but I can’t place it. I’ll find out. Leave it to me.’
Julia Fortunata’s incessant chatter was the very last thing Dania wanted but, hearing the high-pitched squeals echoing through the entrance hall from the distant bath-house, she knew that the chance of picking up some of the latest information was too good to miss.
To her relief, Astinax was still at his post and still grinning at the outrageous invitation he had politely refused from the centurion’s woman. He chuckled as his mistress approached. ‘Etaine and the bath attendants are with her, and her woman, whatever her name is,’ he said.
Dania’s eyes laughed at him. ‘I’m sure you know exactly what her name is,’ she said. ‘But I wish they’d go home to bathe instead of coming here. It takes up my morning.’
‘But just think,’ said Brannius, ‘what juicy morsels you’d be missing. She has to tell it to someone, so it might as well be you.’
It was quite true, Dania thought as she kicked off her sandals and padded softly along the corridor towards the bath-house. The air here was humid, the tiled floors warm underfoot, and the squeals had subsided. Julia Fortunata was being massaged.
Dania breathed in deeply, pushing the recent unpleasant scene at the barracks to the back of her mind. It would return later, she was sure, to nag her with every offensive detail, reinforcing her belief that men were best kept at arm’s length. ‘Julia!’ she called across the shimmering pool. ‘Lovely to see you again. What’s the news?’ It was best to get her own questions in before Julia’s.
A damp head of yellow bleached hair lifted from the white pillow, the plump face changing from a frown at her washed-off nail paint to one of relief. ‘Darling!’ she called. ‘Come over here quickly. I must tell you about the most amazing man I’ve seen for years. He’s…ooh…he’s a brute!’ She giggled, rolling her slightly prominent eyes while, above her, Etaine’s hands glided smoothly over her shoulders, oiling and kneading the superfluous layers. Julia’s black mascara had run during her time in the steam room, her flushed cheeks and large pouting mouth reminding Dania of a full-blown rose about to drop its petals. Julia had always been ready to drop her petals at the slightest invitation.
Inwardly, Dania groaned at the prospect of having to listen to yet another of Julia’s finds who, since the start of the new arrivals, would be the latest object of her lust. ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘You must tell me. Where’s Titus gone off to?’
As mistress of the centurion Titus Flavius, Julia had the best of both worlds, the security of well-appointed married quarters close to the officers’ barracks and the freedom to release herself if she was offered a better deal. Needless to say, she made it her business to keep looking and, if Titus Flavius had not been so blind to the wiles of this vivacious and amoral woman, he might have been more receptive to the not-so-subtle warnings of his fellow officers concerning her virtue. Titus had no need to visit the House of Women, but he had no objection to his mistress’s friendship with the lady Dania while he was so often away on duty.
Julia’s plump pink body wobbled under Etaine’s hands, her mop of hair flopping down again. ‘Oh, Titus has hardly been home since the new battalions started to arrive. His men have been up at the Wall for the last few days. They have to extend the fort there ready to house the new cavalry unit. He’s never been so busy, Dania. I’m getting quite desperate.’
‘Desperate for what?’
‘For a man, silly. What else? Ouch! Etaine, be careful!’
‘I beg your pardon, my lady. Is it tender there?’
‘It’s tender everywhere,’ said Julia, petulantly, looking with some envy at Dania’s approach and the plum-coloured gown that slithered to the floor. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘To the commander’s office. Nothing much.’
‘Ooh! See anyone nice?’
‘No. They’re so wrapped up in armour and their own importance that you can hardly see them at all.’
‘I don’t know how you exist without a man, Dania.’ Back on the subject, she set about giving her friend a full description of his height, build, limbs, apparent virility and, sadly, his marked indifference so far to her attempts at friendship. So now, she told Dania, she needed the full treatment: a massage, manicure and pedicure, hair removal, facial, and a promise from Dania to invite him here so that she could drop in, accidentally of course, at the same time.
‘No,’ said Dania, swishing her feet in the cooling pool. ‘Out of the question.’ She sat on the edge of the deep blue-tiled bath that would have been lined with white marble if she’d been able to afford it. She had had the room painted to look like a sunny garden with trees and birds on fences under a blue-painted sky with cotton-wool clouds, though the floor was tiled. Behind them was the rest of the bath complex where guests could sit in hot steam, be oiled and scraped, sponged down in warm water before being toned in the pool. There were bath-houses at most of the forts along the Wall, but none of them, so her guests said, compared to Dania’s, where they could enjoy the company of women at the same time. For a price.
‘Why not?’ said Julia, seeing her well-laid plans go astray.
‘You know why not. I have to make a living, and my girls don’t need your kind of competition. If you want to meet your handsome brute, you’ll have to invite him to dinner yourself, love.’
Julia giggled at the compliment. ‘You’re mean,’ she simpered, hanging a limp arm over the edge of the couch.
And you, Dania thought, are self-indulgent and manipulative. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know. But to make up for my meanness, I’ll do your eyebrows.’ Anything rather than have her here in the evening drooling over her latest heart-throb, whoever he was. ‘What’s his name, this new man?’
‘Er…Fabian Cornelius Something-or-other. They always have three names, don’t they, and I can never remember them all.’ Like Dania, Julia was a Romanised Briton, but from Londinium in the south.
Dania lowered herself into the water’s silky embrace and felt the refreshing coolness steal upwards to her chin, comforting her after the anger of the morning and the unbelievable escape with not so much as a warning. Nor had there been an apology, but that would have been expecting too much from such a man. He had rattled her more than she wished to admit, for now she realised that his attempted insult had been to get her to speak for herself. And it had worked.
She pushed herself away from the side to lie upon the first surge of water and to feel the sensuous ripples flow over her skin. ‘So they’re expanding the fort up on the Wall, are they?’ she said to Julia, recalling a waving black-and-white striped crest above a shining helmet with a guard as big as a shelf sticking out over the back of his neck. There had been a small mascot of a bird up there too, she was sure. A peregrine falcon, perhaps? Peregrinus? Was that what Karus had called him? Tribune Peregrinus? Well, she need not worry; no tribune would visit a house of women, for he would certainly have one of the best officer’s houses at the fort where his wife and family would live also. Poor things.
Well before Julia’s massage was finished, Dania stepped out of the pool like a water-goddess, dripping and sleek, her back turned away from the inquisitive eyes of her gossiping friend. Not even the two young bath attendants or Julia’s slave were allowed a glimpse of Dania’s back, for only Etaine and Brannius knew about the puckered scar on her left shoulder-blade like two crescents one inside the other. The two deadly tusks of the wild boar. The mark of the Boar Hill. She had not even seen it herself, but she remembered her mother’s tears, and Etaine’s too, and the malevolent fanatical gleam in the eyes of Mog, the chief Druid, as he prepared to flaw the perfection of her loveliness. Mog had gone, just before her father, and she had refused to attend his funeral.
But by some happy quirk of fate, the coolness that once had existed between Dania and Mona, her older sister, had changed to a more mature understanding after the news of Dania’s injury and expulsion had reached her. Mona had married into a Caledonian tribe over on the northern side of the Wall, not too many miles away, but separated by the physical barrier that made contact difficult. Mona’s childhood envy of her younger sister had grown worse in the early years of her marriage, for she had lost both family and freedom while Dania still had both. Then, after hearing of the harsh treatment meted out to Dania, and her near-escape from a terrible death, Mona’s heart had softened, and she had sent messages of support.
She had two young children; her young husband had two concubines who also had children. She could not reach Dania at Coria, nor dare she try. Regularly, they had sent verbal messages by whatever means they could over the last six years, by travelling merchants, by local traders and anyone who was allowed to pass along Dere Street through the Wall at Portgate and back again. Eventually their communications began to contain certain coded information that Mona’s adopted tribe and their neighbours found extremely useful in planning their swift attacks against the Roman presence. In the eyes of her family, Mona’s esteem began to soar, for it was only she who could decode Dania’s seemingly innocent messages. The only problem was the unreliable nature of those who carried them and the lapse of time between sending and receiving. It was time, Mona’s warrior husband said, that the two sisters met.
‘Leave it to me,’ Ram had told Dania earlier. Sure enough, as soon as he’d locked the street gate behind Julia Fortunata and her slave, he came striding back to his mistress. She was standing alone in the deserted garden where the singing birds and droning bees sounded like heaven after that barrage of inane chatter. He loped down the white stone steps towards her, nimble-footed in spite of his bulk. ‘I’ve made enquiries,’ he said. ‘That bastard’s come to tighten up on things before the emperor arrives.’
‘So he’ll be returning to Eboracum after that?’
‘No, he won’t. He’s the new commander of a top cavalry wing of five hundred known as the Ala II Peregrina. The Second Peregrine Cavalry Wing. It’s to be housed up at Onnum on the Wall, next to Portgate. They’re already enlarging the fort up there. Stables, new bath-house, the lot.’
‘Yes, I heard about the enlargement. I take it he was testing the ropes this morning. And his family will be here in Coria, or at Eboracum?’
‘No family. He’s a career man, one of four tribunes come over with the emperor to command a double-strength auxiliary unit between them. No time for a wife, apparently. And he’s from Gaul, like his men. Brilliant horsemen.’
Dania sat down on the stone bench, carefully arranging the folds of her loose tunic over her knees. She was aware of a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘His name?’ she said, recalling the earlier disquiet she had felt before their meeting. When it came, she found herself saying it under her breath in time to Ram’s reply.
‘Tribune Fabian Cornelius Peregrinus.’
‘May the gods help us,’ she whispered. It had been her wish to come to live here at Coria, to help her tribe in return for her life, and she had kept her word since then at great personal cost, ever fearful of being discovered. Now, the might of Rome and the emperor himself had come to punish them, and doubtless every northern tribe would be made to suffer. ‘Warlords,’ she said. ‘They’ve come for vengeance, have they not, my friend?’
‘Yes, my lady,’ said Ram. ‘Warlords. The price of success is seldom cheap. I should know.’
