GIRL GLADIATOR (8 page)

And then just before steel met flesh, Sharn had to look away – in fact Sharn had to run away. There was a gasp from one of the officials to announce it was done, as Sharn broke into a run … and ran and ran.

S
harn ran all the way back to Ryant, trying to outstrip the memory of what had just taken place.

He burst into the hut, his ragged breathing making Fritha turn from the hearth and rush to him. He drooped in her arms as she led him to the sleeping platform and made him lie down. He huddled there with his face to the wall, covered in clammy sweat.

Fritha tended him, as he had once looked after her. Guyleen prepared infusions of skullcap and valerian which allowed him to doze for a while, but she also had something upsetting to tell them. She had decided to settle with relatives deeper in the tribal lands where the Romans had not penetrated. “They blight this land with their murder!” she grunted with distaste and spat into the fire. She kissed Sharn quickly and handed Fritha a pouch of herbs, before she closed the door behind her for the last time.

And only an hour later, Sharn’s fragile grip on reality was disturbed even further when Cumbria visited and brought troubling news.

“Crassus has asked me to be his wife.”

Sharn turned over in the bed and gaped at Cumbria. “And you laughed in his face?”

“I told him I would be honoured.”

Sharn was dumbfounded, and his world unravelled a little more. “You can’t mean that, Cumbria.”

“I love him,” she replied.”

“He killed da. Have you forgotten already?”

Cumbria winced.

Sharn tried to make himself as imposing as possible, difficult as that was, feeling like death in his sweat-drenched bed. “I am head of this family now and I forbid it!”

Cumbria shrugged. “The old ways are over, Sharn. Rome is here to stay. Christianity is here to stay. Celtic ways are dying. I am a Celtic Christian marrying a Christian Roman. I’m not going to say sorry for that.”

Sharn stared reproachfully at her and she stared steadily back. He wracked his brain for something to say but he couldn’t think of a thing.

Cumbria put her hand on his. “There is a very good military physician who might be able to help you. I will ask Seth to come and see you.” She stood quickly and kissed Sharn on the cheek.

“Get well, brother. Peace be with you.” She crossed the hut to embrace Fritha, who had been listening to all this in the background.

“Look after him for me,” she murmured as she hurried out.

Everything was closing in on Sharn. The Romans had taken his father and were now getting his sister too. He shivered as the room seemed to grow colder. Fritha arranged their thick bearskin around his shoulders. She held him close but Sharn could not feel her. His body seemed to be coated with ice, as if the cold of the earth had travelled through him, freezing his bones.

He tried to sleep but when he closed his eyes, the darkness inside him spawned horrifying sights: headless corpses, bleeding Africans, black crows with stabbing beaks.

And so he opened his eyes, but then the light from the fire and the flickering mutton-fat lamps lanced into his brain. The light was his enemy, as the dark was also, and his head filled with screeching and buzzing.

Sharn couldn’t stand it any more. He jumped up and stood in the middle of the hut, swaying on his feet. Fritha hardly recognised the haggard, lank-haired creature staring at her with unfocused eyes. Then he turned and ran out. Fritha rose quickly and followed him.

“Stay here! I don’t need your help for what I’m going to do,” Sharn shouted back over his shoulder as he sped off. Fritha waited a second and gave chase.

As Sharn ran through the night, he did something he hadn’t done for a long time – in fact since his mother died. He called on Taranis, the god of thunder, to help him make sense of all the dreadful things that had happened. He stopped on the dark forest path, looking to the heavens and waited for an answer. But the night remained quiet. Silence. Nothing. Sharn nodded grimly … just as he thought. There was nobody out there who cared.

“This life you gave me, God, I don’t want it any more,” Sharn shouted into the emptiness.

And that is why on this hopeless night, he ran towards the Roman wall.

F
ritha loped behind Sharn, far enough back for him not to know she was shadowing him. Once or twice she thought she had lost him in the thick mist; and she was getting more and more worried as she realised where he was heading. What was Sharn up to? He knew he could not enter Damnonium after dark unless he had business approved by the military.

She became even more alarmed when he did not slow his steps as he drew near the wall. He was almost within archery range and if it was a clear night, he might have already been brought down by an arrow.

If only Fritha could cry out at Sharn to halt. She turned on a spurt of speed to try to head him off but what she saw next stopped her in her tracks. A javelin arced out from the ramparts. She saw it catch Sharn high up on his body and he spilled down into the ditch. She cried out as if she felt the pain herself and took off again like an unleashed hunting dog.

She jumped into the ditch without breaking her stride. The javelin struck out point first through his shoulder, blood welling through his cloak and steaming in the chill. Fritha did not know what to do. Some women are good at the healing arts, but she never had been. She was a fighter, making wounds not mending them.

As she knelt and tried to comfort him, she heard the nailed sandals of a Roman soldier ring on the stones and then the slit gate open. Fritha was almost relieved – now she was under attack, she knew what to do. She pulled the spear out of Sharn’s shoulder. It was easier than she had expected because the wound was so big from his tumble into the ditch.

Fritha waited for the soldier to rush her, taking deep breaths to calm herself. A familiar stillness settled on her as she waited, her heart starting to thud slower as she took charge of her body, time stretching out like catgut. She even had a moment to wish she’d snatched up a shawl because the wind was blowing colder. When the legionnaire made his run towards her, it was like she could predict his every move and soon he was bleeding to death at her feet.

But then she heard the gate open again. Sharn ordered her to run away but she would never leave him to die alone. If it was his time, then it was her time too.

She was surprised how easily she dealt with her next assailant, noticing that he had shaved carelessly that morning, as she gutted him with his friend’s spear. She tried to assist Sharn to stand but, besides the wound in his shoulder, his leg was broken. She could see the bone sticking out through his leggings.

And then three men materialised out of the gloom, carrying torches. She lay Sharn gently back down and gathered the spear again. Fritha looked for the eyes of the leader of the three men, as Bredan had taught her to do. The two soldiers she had just killed had shallow eyes – fighting spirit, but not much else. The centurion who arrived now had clever eyes and had brought an archer to pick her off from a distance. That was smart, Fritha thought.

For a moment, she contemplated throwing the spear but her special skill was fighting in close – and besides, she would only hit one, so she turned her back on the men who had come to kill her. She gazed down at Sharn, to fix his face in her soul.

There was a thump between her shoulder blades as if someone had poked her hard with a stick. Her knees turned to liquid and she felt like a necklace when the thread breaks and all the beads scatter. And then she toppled into nothingness.

F
alling, falling, falling … through the endless mist into the cold darkness. Cold was the thing she remembered most in her life. Right from her first moments – when her unwed mother, still just a child herself, left her in the ice-stiff heather outside Cirig wrapped in rags. It began to snow – snowflakes tumbling out of the cold face of the moon onto her cold face. The breath started to freeze in her lungs. Just new born, she had come from nowhere and now she would return there. She knew no words, she knew no prayers, she knew nothing … except one thing – she wanted to stay here in this breathing world.

All at once huge grey shapes appeared from the fog. Two wolves circled once or twice and lay down next to her. Their coarse grey hair pricked against her skin but she didn’t mind because they were so warm. They licked her all over, their rasping tongues darting out from between their deadly teeth, driving away death. They kept her alive till the morning when she was found by the people of the village, then they melted into the mist.

She was sure that she would never be as cold as that again … but she was wrong. Nobody in the household that raised her showed her much love. And a life without love is worse than snow and ice. As she grew up there was only one person in Cirig who took an interest in her and that was Bredan. He invited her to join the warrior-circle and told her why. “You have the gift of cold-bloodedness. I have never come across anyone who feels no fear … it is as if you have no feelings when you have a weapon in your hand.” But he was wrong. It was not just in a fight that she had no feelings. She had no feelings ever. She had no need for them in the life she was leading, surrounded by stony people. Feelings were like shoes that were too small. That is until she met Sharn and something blossomed inside her.

But now here she was falling into a bottomless pit, leaving behind the only person she had ever loved. Her life had been a chilly one with one short chapter of cosiness. Such a pity there were to be no more chapters of warmth – in fact no more chapters at all. And then her mind stopped, as night closed its black arms around her.

I
t was Cumbria’s concerned face Sharn recognised first, as she gave him cool drinks or hot broth. And there was another face, which Sharn did not recognise, a kindly face, swarthy with a curved beak of a nose. He must have been a healer because Sharn associated his visits with pain, the pain of changing the dressing on his shoulder or the binding on his leg.

As Sharn’s consciousness sharpened, he realised he must be in the house of Crassus in the officers’ compound. There was the sound of a military bugle, the tramp of sandaled feet and the faint bark of orders from the parade ground.

“You’re mending very well, young man,” Sharn heard a voice say.

He opened his eyes to see the swarthy man tearing up strips of linen to make bandages. When Sharn tried to sit up, the man leant forward eagerly.

“Fritha. Where is Fritha?” Sharn croaked.

“The girl who killed the soldiers?”

Sharn nodded.

“The legionnaires fed her to the wolves. They said she was a witch.”

Sharn closed his eyes, as the shiver of loss ran through him.

“I am Seth, a military physician.” Seth handed him a glass of water. “Are you strong enough to hold this by yourself?”

Sharn took the glass but needed both hands to raise it to his lips. He glanced around the room, his eyes coming to rest on the effigy of the fish. “Are you a Christian too?” Sharn asked, for something to say.

“I am a man of science,” Seth replied, his face darkening. “Religion is a sickness of the mind for which I would love to find a cure.”

Sharn was a little taken aback at this outburst. “So you don’t believe in the gods?”

“We have a brain to think!” Seth growled.

Sharn closed his eyes, pretending to doze. He didn’t want to rile the surgeon any further. Seth continued to change the dressing on the spear wound.

“Are you a believer?” Seth asked after a moment, as if he couldn’t leave the subject alone. “No doubt it was a vow to some horned demon which made you attack the wall with your bare hands!” Seth knotted the bandage tight around Sharn’s shoulder to emphasise his point and made Sharn wince.

“Er … no … it wasn’t religion.”

“What was it then?”

Sharn shrugged. “I get moods … which make me do strange things.”

“What sort of moods?” Seth enquired with professional interest.

And so Sharn tried to explain. “I get very sad. It’s like a huge crow blocks out the sun.”

“Will you tell me when you feel one of these moods coming on? I have some medicine which might help.”

As Sharn was nodding in agreement, Crassus entered. Sharn had only ever seen Crassus in armour and uniform, so he hardly recognised him dressed in his casual tunic.

“Seth, could I talk to our patient?”

“Of course, Crassus. I’m finished here anyway.”

Seth stowed his instruments in a case and, with a pleasant nod at Sharn, left the room.

Crassus sat down beside the bed without speaking. Sharn shifted uncomfortably as the silence dragged on. What did the Roman want?

“I plan to marry Cumbria as you know … and since you’re the head of the family now, I’d like to ask your permission,” he said at last.

Sharn was puzzled. This was very civil of Crassus. As far as Sharn knew he was a prisoner, so why was Crassus bothering with the niceties?

“You probably don’t like me. I understand that … but if we’re going to be related we should start off on the right foot. That’s why we delayed our wedding until you were well.”

Sharn remained quiet, thinking. Yes, he wished that the Romans were not here at all and he would have liked to stop them from taking over any more of his life, but he knew that Cumbria loved this soldier already, so what was the point?

“Is it because I’m older than Cumbria?” Crassus asked.

Sharn smiled bitterly. “It’s got more to do with the fact that you executed my father … and put an arrow through my best friend.”

Crassus shrugged. “She had just killed two of my troopers, and would have done the same to me without a second thought.”

Sharn had to acknowledge that this was true but he didn’t want to give Crassus the satisfaction of agreeing with him. “Why did you spare my life?” Sharn countered.