The Phantom Queen Awakes (18 page)

Rufinius held his ground. “Yes. Do
you?”

The big man hesitated and Rufinius made his
move. Another darting slash, a twist, and he felt something wet
burst along the edge of his blade. Gederus fell against him,
throwing an arm around his shoulder and almost bearing them both to
the ground. His mouth worked to take in air but only succeeded in
producing red froth. Then he slumped to the ground and lay
still.

Rufinius was still kneeling over the body when
the first of the Silures reached him and, as the sediments of
personality were pared away again by the purity of battle, he
realized that something had changed. It almost didn’t matter what
they did to him now; he had played the game and won. And yet,
somehow, he fought, long and hard and well, until at last he stood
alone, the master of a crop of bodies lying open to the
rain.

When it was done he re-sheathed his sword,
fastened the pendant around his neck and began the long task of
dragging his friend’s corpse back to the fortress.

****

She was waiting for him in the lumber yard,
the great stacks of moldering timber forming a narrow alleyway that
screened them from the activity of the rest of the fortress. She
was younger than he remembered, her features stronger, more
handsome. There was something of the blush of motherhood about
her.

“You have it?” she asked.

He held it up for her to see.

“You are an exceptional young man,” she said,
cupping it in her hands as she might a small bird. “You have earned
everything I promised you.”

Rufinius looked around, uncomfortable. He
could make out the axe wounds in the rough flesh of the timber,
home to countless things that burrowed and teemed.

“I don’t want it,” he said at last. He had
been expecting the woman to show surprise or anger, but she did
neither. She just watched him.

“I thought I was fighting to escape, but in
the end I was just fighting. I wanted to beat them, to win myself a
prize.” He shrugged. “Well, there it is.”

The woman was smiling, but it had none of the
callousness of her former manner. “And what drives you to battle
now the prize is won?”

“Honestly?” And he smiled himself. “It’s the
only thing I’m good at.” He took a step back, towards the space and
noise. “Enjoy the pendant.”

She laughed then and swept towards him,
pressing it back into his unresisting hands. “I got the prize I
came for,” she whispered, her lips at his cheek, her breath hot and
stinging. “What need have I of trinkets?”

She forced her lips against his for an instant
and was gone, the taste of earth and blood all that
remained.

Rufinius stood there for a while, turning the
pendant over and over, the single black eye winking at him. Then he
slipped it round his neck and started back to the barracks, where
the Centurions would be waiting. The flood waters would recede
soon. There were battles ahead.

****

Afterword

I’m not usually a character-led
writer.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate how vital
a strong, multi-faceted character is to good story, but it's
usually that first, tantalizing plot thread that fires my
imagination.

‘The Trinket’ came to me back-to-front, when a
particular sentence in the submission guidelines leaped out and
grabbed me: “All stories must be set in the world of the Celts”.
And there he was ― a grim-faced Roman legionary, knee-deep in Welsh
mud while the freezing rain drummed a relentless tattoo on his
helmet.

A bit specific, you might think, and hardly
Celtic. But I grew up a pilum’s throw from Caerleon ― founded by
the Second Augustan Legion about seventy-five years after the birth
of Christ ― which still manages to feel as much Roman as it does
Welsh. It was a Wild West town; the sharp edge of the empire, where
civilization was imposed upon the wilderness that lay just beyond
Caesar’s reach. It is a good place for a story to unfold and an
excellent place for the Phantom Queen to do business.

My vague reservations about transplanting her
from Ireland to Wales soon evaporated once the writing was
underway. She didn’t seem to mind the journey ― she was having fun.
And, very soon, so was I.

****

Biography

Peter Bell was born and brought up in Newport,
South Wales; a handful of miles from the remains of Isca, where
much of "The Trinket" is set. He left to study French and Spanish,
living in the ancient Moorish city of Granada and operating roller
coasters at Disneyland Paris before settling in Cardiff with his
wife, Anna.

A keen writer since childhood, Peter is a
member of the British Fantasy Society and is currently working on
his first novel. ‘The Trinket’ is his second published short
story.

****

Michael
Bailey

The Dying Gaul

Oh! let that eye,
which, wild as the Gazelle’s

Now brightly bold or
beautifully shy,

Wins as it wanders,
dazzles where it dwells,

Glance o’er this
page, nor to my verse deny

That smile for which
my breast might vainly sigh

Could I to thee be
ever more than friend:

This much, dear maid,
accord; nor question why

To one so young my
strain I would commend,

But bid me with my
wreath one matchless lily blend.

Such is thy name with
this my verse entwined;

And long as kinder
eyes a look shall cast

On Harold’s page,
Ianthe’s here enshrined

Shall thus be first
beheld, forgotten last:

My days once
number’d, should this homage past

Attract thy fairy
fingers near the lyre

Of him who hail’d
thee loveliest, as thou wast,

Such is the most my
memory may desire;

Though more than Hope
can claim, could Friendship less require?

~ Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

(To Ianthe)

****

On woolen sheets we lie, vulnerable and as
white and bare as the stars against the black marble sky, placed by
the hands of love gods in a triangle of three.

Ianthe: I cannot have her; she belongs to
another in marriage.

Her wondrous beauty ― she is on her back ―
stares upside-down at a set of rotten eyes that capture and hold
her own as she is penetrated, moaning her fake moans, the tears
welling on her cheeks from both pleasure and pain, while her
quavering body creaks the bed underneath. A head is mounted high on
the wall, held by an iron stake: a fallen barbarian whom her
husband Cadmon had slain with much contempt ― a worthy foe. The
pegged part of this dead man watches as Cadmon exits the luscious
gap between her legs. He tosses her aside like spoiled meat and I,
just a boy, reach for the silk flesh below her navel, but my wrist
is taken and held at my back as he flips me around and pilfers me
next, the fingers of my other hand only capable of caressing her
thigh before they are guided away. Ianthe takes herself in one hand
and her breast in the other. She cries out to the man on the wall
and the sound is angels with clipped wings falling from
heaven.

She is twice my age and I have known her half
my life. Harold, my sweet, she calls me. She is my love, but I
cannot have her; I can only be had for now, she tells me when we
are alone. I am not yet of age, but I see the way she looks at me
when the three of us are together or even when we are not. Her
smile holds a secret. Her body smells of lust. Her touch is
desirous, but cautious. We can never be together without Cadmon,
she says, for I am not yet a man.

Someday I will join the battle and become a
greater warrior than Cadmon could ever be. Someday he will die in
melee and I will take his place inside my love. I will take her
from the back, from the front, from the side, and she will cry out,
but only because it pleases her and because it is me and not her
joyless husband. There will be no pain as her body swallows my seed
to bear a child. She will whisper my name: Harold. Together, we
will melt.

****

For he through Sin’s
long labyrinth had run,

Nor made atonement
when he did amiss,

Had sigh’d to many
though he loved but one,

And that loved one,
alas! could n’er be his.

Ah, happy she! to
‘scape from him whose kiss

Had been pollution
unto aught so chaste;

Who soon had left her
charms for vulgar bliss,

And spoil’d her
goodly lands to gild his waste,

Nor calm domestic
peace had ever deign’d to taste.

And now Childe Harold
was sore sick at heart,

And from his fellow
bacchanals would flee;

‘Tis said, at times
the sullen tear would start,

But Pride congeal’d
the drop within his eye:

Apart he stalk’d in
joyless reverie,

And from his native
land resolved to go,

And visit scorching
climes beyond the sea;

With pleasure
drugg’d, he almost long’d for woe,

And e’en for change
of scene would seek the shades below.

~ Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

(from Canto the First)

****

I spy her through a silken shade. Ianthe
dresses with patience and dignity, the white fabric draping over
her shoulders and down like an ocean wave sprayed against the upper
shore of her bosom. Her long brown hair is in braids, and it falls
between the valleys of her back.

Her bare feet on the floor bend against the
cold, her toes dimple. Gold rings jangle from her ankles as she
shifts balance and places more jewelry on the soft lobes of her
ears. She looks back and sees my stare. I blush and so does she. A
smile forms from the edge of her carved mouth as she turns back to
her husband.

I see the red spider webs stretching between
the yellow of Cadmon’s eyes as I part the shade that separates us.
I had heard his stupefied drinking the night before as I lay in bed
thinking of nothing but Ianthe and that sweet caress of her thigh.
They had argued through the night.

Cadmon does not see me just yet. He sees the
crescent smile on her face.

He brings the backside of his hand across her
mouth and the smile is gone as quickly as it had formed. He stands
a full foot taller and towers over her, his face flushed. He wears
only a torc around his neck. His giant triangle of a chest reveals
a pair of sweaty breasts larger than those of my love, strewn with
crisscrossed battle scars. Bulging abdominal muscles mock his
flaccid manhood; it hangs below them like the husk of a shriveled
reptile. He stands before her like a giant with a wrinkled date
wedged between his legs.

I desire nothing more than to see his head
nailed above the bed someday, as Ianthe takes me in as her own. To
see her struck fills my heart with a wrath that burns and rises
within my throat. There is nothing I can do but swallow it back
down, for Cadmon is three times my size and he would take my life.
He could easily crush my throat with a single hand.

A single tear falls from her check. One falls
from my own.

Ianthe holds her head and sobs as Cadmon
leaves her. He takes his sword from against the wall and walks
naked out into the cool morning air. He must train for battle. The
tip of the sword scrapes across the floor.

As I part the silken shade further, I wait
eagerly for the sound to disappear, meaning Cadmon’s absence. I
quietly rush to her aid. She is bent in half, clutching her face. I
pull a delicate hand away from her swollen jaw. Her lip is split
and leaking red. She doesn’t want me to see her cry.

Her hand pulls back, but mine is stronger. I
tell her I love her, but she pushes me away. She tells me to leave,
that we can never be together for it would mean the death of us
both, but I stay at her side. She shakes as I wipe the blood from
her mouth and lift her head so that she looks directly at me. I
kiss the wound, my eyes never leaving hers. I taste her blood on my
lips.

Ianthe kisses me back and touches my tongue
with her own. She quakes, as do I. Her sputtering breath is warm
and smells like ripened peaches. She takes my palm from her cheek
and this time she is stronger. She flattens my hand under her own
and guides it down the soft skin of her neck, her chest, and
underneath the fabric of her gown. The curve of her left breast
leads to a mound of blissful heaven. The god at its peak trembles
between my fingers. Her other hand finds a forbidden part of
me.

Cold steel and sick warmth ends our
connection. Cadmon separates me from Ianthe with his sword. As he
pushes me back, the edge digs into my flesh. His blade at my neck,
I only come to his chest. His eyes bulge, as do the dark veins on
his brow. He breathes fast and raspy and I taste the hot drink on
his breath. He looks down at me, ready to add my head to his
collection.