Roman (19 page)

Her words brought back the image of Roman's hardened, unrecognizable face, the scream of the man, and the lurch of the wagon when Roman was inside.

Isra fell onto the dirt atop the woman, her arms flailing. In her mind she heard every feminine voice that had ever insulted her, degraded her, humiliated her.

“You evil, wretched woman!” Isra screamed. “What you made him do!”

“I didn't make him do anything!” Fran shouted, fending off the blows as best she could. “You invited it!”

Isra shrieked, and her next slap caught Fran across the mouth. She took great handfuls of the woman's blond hair in her fists and raised her head so that her face was close to Isra's.

“
I am speaking of what you made
Roman
do!
”

Fran gave Isra a belligerent, drunken smile. “Oh, I see. Jealous, were you? How d'you like it?”

Isra raised her arm again, but she was snatched into the air in the next instant, her feet sailing out in front of her, long silken strands of blond hair floating down lazily like fairy streamers.

She knew it was Roman's arm around her middle, Roman who held her suspended against him, her feet still far from the ground, and so she struggled, pried her fingers around his arm.

“Let me go, my lord!”

“No,” Roman said. “Isra, what is this?”

She saw Asa van Groen and the rest of the band streaming into the fire circle around Mother, who only looked on with her arms crossed over her flat chest, shaking her head.

When Asa caught sight of the blond woman on the ground, he broke into a run toward her, skidded to a stop in the dirt on his knees by her side. He lifted her by the shoulders.

“Fran! Franny! What is it? What's happened?”

“She's mad!” Fran cried, seizing the front of Asa'a white undershirt. “She came into my wagon! She tried to kill me!”

Roman let Isra slide to her feet but retained a hold on her arm. “Isra?” he asked. “Why would you attack Fran?”

She looked around and saw that every pair of eyes around the fire was trained on her, the performers sharing similar looks of astonishment. But Isra looked only at Fran when she spoke.

“She sent the guard to our cart,” she said. “She told him I would be alone.”

Fran snorted. “He was harmless! Such attention hasn't seemed to bother her before.”

“He would have raped me!” Isra screamed and lunged forward, but Roman held her firm. “Are you blind to my costume?”

“Did you, Franny?” Asa asked.

The blond woman frowned, looked from Isra to van Groen and back again. “He said he wanted to meet her, give her a token of his admi—” She broke off and looked back to van Groen. “Asa? What happened?”

“He's dead, Franny,” van Groen said.

Fran looked back at Isra, who was shocked at the genuine horror that seemed to come over the woman's face as she appeared to look at Isra's gown for the first time. Or perhaps it was only now that the sight of it could penetrate the fog of drink enveloping Fran.

“Are you—are you hurt?” Fran asked, and her chin flinched.

Isra could only stare at the woman.

“Did he . . .” Fran pulled away from Asa and struggled to her feet. She put out a hand and began walking toward Isra. “Are you hurt?” she insisted again, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Stay away from me,” Isra warned.

Fran halted, although she let her hand remain outstretched. “I didn't think he—I . . .” She couldn't seem to form a coherent sentence. She looked around at all gathered, first in one direction, then the other, before turning back to Isra. “I'm sorry,” she choked. “I'm—I only . . .” She looked to Asa. “There's a body now?”

He nodded, his expression grim, sorrowful, but Isra couldn't fathom the complexity of it. There was much going on beneath the surface of this scene that she did not understand.

“I'm sorry,” she said again, but this time she turned to address the group as a whole. “I'm sorry, everyone. I did go a bit mad, I suppose. It's only that . . . it's been a year now. I know it's warm here, but . . .”

Many of those gathered glanced away, as if it pained them to look at Fran.

“I'm sorry!” she cried out. “
I'm so sorry!
” Her words deteriorated into a sob and she brought her hands up to cover her face.

Asa went to her, his own face creasing into a mask of—pain? Regret? Isra couldn't tell. But he wrapped his arms about her, murmuring into her ear while he steered her back toward her wagon. He looked over Fran's head to where Isra and Roman still stood.

“Take my cart,” he said. “I'll need to stay with Fran. I should have been staying with her for a while now,” he said, his voice heavy with regret. He helped the blonde into the wagon and pulled the door shut after them.

Isra looked around at the others, who were dispersing to sit around the fire, the mood considerably subdued. Some of the women were even weeping quietly.

Only Mother was walking toward her and Roman now, a tall mug in each gnarled fist, and when she reached them, she offered the drinks.

“Here you are, children,” she said with a touch of breathlessness in her voice, as if carrying the mugs had been a physical trial. “I suppose someone ought tell you what all this is about.” She turned around and began shuffling back toward her perch on the far side of the fire.

Isra looked up from the steaming mug to see that everyone gathered around the flickering flames was now looking at her and Roman expectantly. Zeus stood up from a three-legged stool and looked to Isra as he swept his hand toward it, a clear invitation to sit.

“You might as well,” he said, moving away to lower himself down onto the dirt beneath the sturdy chair in which Delilah sat. “It'll take a fair bit.”

“Not really so long,” Mother said as she resumed her perch on her tall stool. She sent a bowl and a bundle of rags around the circle of people to place near the stool Zeus had offered. “I suppose we shouldn't be surprised at Franny's behavior of late. And I further suppose we all share some of the responsibility for it.”

She looked across the fire at Isra specifically, her old, colorless eyes seeming to bore into Isra's skull. “It's a year since we lost Max.”

Somehow, Isra knew in that instant; she could see the signs, the clues, and it caused a cold, bitter dread to creep into her heart.

Roman voiced the question Isra thought she had already answered. “Who is Max?”

Now Mother's eyes left Isra and looked at Roman. “Franny and Asa's son. He would have been six years this winter, we reckon. Although that's only a guess. We didn't know how old he was when we found him.”

Isra did sit down then, feeling as though all the strength had gone out of her legs. She pulled a rag from the pile and dipped it in the bowl of water. “You found him?”

Mother nodded her old head as she stared into the fire. “On the side of the road outside of Budapest, four years ago. It was winter, the snow unusually deep that year. The baby was crouched in a ditch, only a long shirt on him that barely covered his little legs.” The old woman paused, her mouth pursed with the memories Isra was glad she couldn't see. “Dirty, cold. Hungry. Franny and Asa'd been together for nigh on ten years at that point, and no babes had come.”

Standing just behind her stool, Roman took the wrung-out cloth Isra had handed him and then offered, “I didn't know van Groen and Fran were married.”

Mother looked up from the fire and sent him a kind smile while he wiped at his arms. “Things like that aren't of much import to people like us, big fellow. Any matter, 'twas Franny who found him. We stayed about Budapest for weeks, mostly because of the snow, but also to see if the babe's parents were searching for him. By the time the snow melted, it was clear the child had been abandoned. Max was Franny and Asa's, as certainly as if she'd borne him herself. Maximilian George van Groen,” Mother finished in a gentle voice, as if in prayer.

“He worshiped Nickle when he joined the troupe two summers ago,” Zeus added, and Isra looked up, her eyes instinctively seeking out the boy. She saw him sitting with his slumped back to the fire just behind Mother, his long, straight hair hiding his face. “Treated him like an older brother. Followed him everywhere.”

Nickle stood from the stool and walked into the maze of wagons, and Isra's heart flinched.

“Max was ill when we found him in Budapest, and although Franny and Asa did their best to care for him, he was never a healthy lad. At the slightest chill in the air, he'd come down with the ague; keep it for weeks, it seemed. Last winter he was especially touched. He never recovered.”

Helena was stroking her favorite pet, asleep in her arms. “Neither did Fran.”

“Things became uneasy between her and Asa,” Zeus said. “We . . . we were all mourning. In different ways. It seemed they were better apart than together for a time. But we could see Fran slipping away from us all. We could see.”

“We should have seen,” Mother corrected with a frown. She looked up at Isra and Roman again. “We're a superstitious lot, we are. You don't talk about a thing lest you want it, you see? We'd hoped they'd find their way back to each other.”

“Then we came,” Isra said to no one in particular. She felt the warmth of Roman's hand on her shoulder, and without thinking, she reached up and grasped his fingers.

“This is not your fault, child,” Mother said. “But now you know.” Her dark eyes bored into Isra's. “Now you know.”

R
oman helped Isra into the back of van Groen's wagon as most of the rest of the band dispersed from around the fire. He got the feeling no one really wanted to sleep then, but even though they would not begin performing until the noon hour, there was a watch to keep now over Roman and Isra's cart until the moment they left Dubrovnik, lest the body hidden inside it be discovered.

She ducked through the doorway and then turned to look over her shoulder, her eyes fixed somewhere on the ground. The gown Helena had lent her was clutched in her fist.

“Are you coming?”

He paused in closing the door, his own rough tunic borrowed from Zeus rustling against the painted wood. “Ah . . . I'm just going to . . .” He pointed in the direction of a wheel.

Isra did raise her eyes to his then, and he realized at once how frightened she had been this night—not only by the man who had attacked her but by her own reaction to Fran, the news of van Groen and Fran's relationship, their dead child. Roman himself could pretend Isra was as calm as she sounded until he looked into her eyes. Like a window into her very soul, the emotions she'd likely long ago learned to hide thrashed and wailed and relived their damnable memories. When faced with the truth in Isra's eyes, Roman faltered.

She blinked. “You have no blanket, my lord. Everything in the cart—”

“It's mild here,” he said, looking away from her as if he would observe the weather. He didn't think he could be so close to her tonight.

“Then I shall sleep on the ground with you,” she announced, grasping the door ledge with both hands and beginning to reach her foot toward the dirt.

“No,” he said, reaching up to stay her. She looked at his fingers on her knee and then back into his face. He dropped his hand, his neck warming. “You've had a harrowing evening and—”

“As have you,” she interrupted.

“Isra, I can't,” he said, looking up at her again. “It wouldn't be wise.”

“Is it not time that you slept inside,” she asked levelly, but the wild emotion in her eyes were legion when she added, “with me?” She reached out with trembling fingers and touched his jaw.

His heart slowed nearly to a stop at her words, and he tried to construct an alternate meaning behind her query; some way she could have meant something besides what he wanted her to mean.

“I'm not certain you know what you're asking me to do this night,” he pressed.

He saw the line of her throat move as she swallowed and then nodded. She backed inside once more, and Roman grasped the door frame and pulled himself inside Asa van Groen's wagon after Isra and shut the door behind them.

He sat on his heels in the blackness until the scrape and spark of flint flashed in the dark and then the interior of the wagon was filled with a soft yellow glow and Isra was pulling a lantern up closer to the ceiling. Roman felt like a giant within the confines of the cart, as if he was looming over the small woman who mirrored his pose, her hands on her thighs.

“My costume is ruined,” she said matter-of-factly and then rose up on her knees. “I apologize for my appearance.” Her fingers began curling and uncurling against the flaxen material along her thighs until she grasped the hem of her gown in each fist. Then she pulled it up to her waist, and Roman realized the stains had penetrated all the way through her underdress, and that it was both thicknesses of material that were being peeled from the smooth, tan skin that was glowing in the lantern light. In an instant, Isra was completely nude, kneeling before him.

The crushed tunic fell from his grip as he struggled to breathe. Her body was so perfect, so marvelous in its natural state, she could have been the inspiration for sculpture.

“Is that more pleasing to you?” she asked with a bow of her head.

He forced himself to take a deep, hitching breath. “I've never seen anything more beautiful in all my life.”

She came toward him on her knees, her shadow self already reclining on the cot fitted into the front wall of van Groen's cart. She reached out and placed her palms on his abdomen before leaning up and pressing her lips to his chest through the material of his shirt, hesitantly at first, but then she rolled her cheek into him and drew a deep breath through her nose.

Roman brought his hands up behind her and he looked at his palms as if seeing them in a dream. Isra was pressed to him, his hands just inches from her bare skin—
and now touching her
. The peaks and valleys of her shoulder blades, the pearl-strand fineness of her spine. Her skin was silk lain too long near the fire, smooth and searing and shining in the light. The smell of her like incense and bright blossoms, an offering for a flaming altar so hot that it surely must be an atonement for sin.

Was this sin?

Roman reached down and cupped the side of her jaw, turning her face toward him and then lowering his lips to hers. She answered his kiss readily, and the eagerness of her mouth made him groan in surprise. He pulled away from her.

“Isra,” he whispered. “I—”

“Shh, my lord,” she whispered against his skin, bringing one hand around the back of his neck and pulling his head toward hers once more. He could feel the trembling of her body against his. “Only tell me how you would have me first. I shall give you whatever pleasure you desire.”

He pulled her even closer before the ugly subtlety of her words penetrated his passion-absorbed mind. He tried to ignore it, wave it away as if it was no more than a passing odor on the breeze. He might have been able to disregard the elusive bit of trouble her words alluded to had she spoken no more.

“It is the least I can do for you, after all you have done for me.”

If he had jumped into the cold sea beyond the wall so close to van Groen's wagon, his desire could not have cooled more quickly. Roman grasped Isra's shoulders and moved her away from him, pulling her lips from his chest once more so that he could look into her wide, dark eyes, glistening with—passion? Fear? Resentment?

“Do you mean to sleep with me as . . . as payment for coming to your aid tonight?”

Her smooth forehead wrinkled with what perhaps might have been confusion. “Not only tonight, my lord. I owe you my life, many times over. I have nothing else to give you.”

Roman felt the first stirrings of anger in his gut, a new experience for him when holding a nude, willing woman.

“You've made a fair amount of coin with Kahn by now, have you not?” he challenged.

Now it was true confusion he saw on her face. “Yes. I . . . would you rather I give you silver? I apologize.” She crossed one arm over her bosom and sat back down on her heels, dropping her eyes as her cheeks bloomed and reaching her other arm around for Helena's gown. “I thought it was me you wanted.”

He seized her again by her shoulders, and this time it did not matter to him whether she was clothed or not. The import of his words trumped any desire of the flesh he felt for her.

“I do want you,” he insisted, “but I don't want to be . . .
paid
with your body. How could you think that of me? Of yourself?”

She turned from him as she pulled the gown up to her chest and then flipped it around her hip. “I misunderstood.”

“You misunderstood?” he pressed.

“Yes,” she said, rising up to her feet and turning toward the cot. She exchanged the gown for the coverlet, wrapping it about her in a one-shouldered manner, causing her to look even more like the work of some ancient artist come to warm life.

“I don't believe that,” he said. “If I deserve anything this night, it's the truth, Isra. What have I done to make you think so little of me?”

“I do not think so little of you!” she insisted and turned to face him. “It is simply what I
do
, Roman! You do not understand! It is what I
am
!”

“What?” he demanded, also gaining his feet but finding he had to bend his neck in the shallow conveyance. And so he pressed between her and the cot and sat down. “What exactly are you?”

“You know,” she said. “Everyone knows.”

“I know the living you were forced into in order to give your sister some sort of life,” he challenged. “That was what you
did
, not who you are.”

“There is little difference,” she said bitterly.

“I think there is a bloody lot of difference,” he said, his voice growing louder. “And it's insulting that you liken me to a man no better than any of those you knew before.”

“No!” she said, her eyes wide as she turned to him. “You are nothing like them.”

“There was little difference between us a moment ago, was there not?” he challenged.

She stared at him for several heartbeats. “I do not know how to be with you in any other way.”

“We seemed to be doing just fine before tonight,” he said, and when she had no reply for him, he rose from the cot and shuffled to the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked, her voice tight, and Roman didn't want to think it was with panic. Even as angry as he was, he could not cause her any further anxiety.

“Beneath the cart, as was my original intention,” he said and opened the door. But then he paused and looked back at her. “And if you still don't mind,” he said, and reached out to seize a fold of the coverlet she had wrapped about her body and yanked. She was nude again in the next instant, but Roman averted his eyes before the magnificent sight of her flesh could warp his mind.

He hopped to the ground and slammed the wagon door behind him.

It was only after he'd situated himself with the thin blanket and settled down on his side to face the fire that he noticed old Mother still about, tending the flames. She was looking toward him and shaking her head, something of an exasperated expression on her face.

Roman shut her out by closing his eyes, but the sight that awaited him there was no better, as Isra Tak'Ahn's bare skin glowed as brightly in his mind as the sun.

Either way, he thought it would be a very long, uncomfortable night.

* * *

Isra lay in the plush cot belonging to Asa van Groen for what seemed like hours, staring at the golden arc of light cast from the lantern she hadn't bothered to put out. Or, rather, she hadn't wished to be locked alone in the dark with the memories that were sure to plague her after she'd humiliated herself before Roman. The same old horrors, fertilized by fresh pain, were only just bearable in the light; she knew all too well that they were strangling in the lonely dark, where memories of colors and sounds and smells could explode in bright relief against the blackness of her mind.

At least with the lantern lit, she could keep her eyes open.

She had wanted so much for Roman to see her when he looked at her—to somehow be able to forget about her past and perhaps believe that she might be of value to him as a woman. Perhaps as his woman. But her actions had only reinforced her insignificance. Reminded him of the other men she had been forced to know.

He was right; she had treated him no differently.

Roman hadn't understood that he was intrinsically different, though; she'd never wished to give herself to any man before him. She'd
wanted
to share her body with him, to give him ease, to be close to him, to show him how much he meant to her. Wasn't that what a woman did for her man? But now she understood that even though her instinct to love him had been correct, the way she'd offered herself to him had been all wrong.

Should she have played coy? Or lain back and pretended disinterest? Those were the tales she'd heard of some wives' behaviors. But neither one of those would have been the truth; Isra wanted to know what being had by a man you loved was like. Now she might have only the memory of the way Roman's lips had felt on hers to try to fill the aching chasm in her heart.

Isra turned over on her side to face the door, pulling the borrowed gown down over her legs as she drew her knees up on the pallet. She had disappointed him, and he would never look at her differently now. Isra found that she wasn't so very surprised; she didn't think she'd ever look at herself differently.

She must have dozed, for the image she held in her mind was not a memory—small Huda, only the top of her dark head visible as she crouched in the dirt of the alley behind their apartment, playing with stones in a circle she'd drawn with her finger. Yes, that image Isra had seen many happy times, but it was the tiger pacing in circles around the little girl that made the memory a nightmare. Kahn, perhaps, saliva running from his yellowed beard, his glowing eyes watching the oblivious child hungrily.

Isra wanted to call out to the Huda in the dream, to warn her to be still, be very quiet, and perhaps the tiger wouldn't see her. And then she remembered that that advice had failed so miserably in the waking world, and little Huda was dead. Brutally, and forever.

The child in the dream suddenly lifted her face and Isra saw the swollen eye, the bruised and bloodied mouth, the torn ear missing its jewel, as if Huda was immediately before her.

“Isra!” she cried in alarm.

Isra's eyes snapped open as the door to the wagon was pulled wide with a whoosh of cold air.

Roman stood in the square of night, the lantern light causing him to squint.

“Hurry,” was all he said.

She didn't question him, only pushed her legs from inside the gown and stumbled toward the door, half in, half out of her nightmare, the reality returning to her like the blast of chilly December air outside the wagon: Huda only came to her in her dreams when there was impending disaster.