Authors: Alice Borchardt
Uther felt the heat in his face.
The count elbowed Aife, high laughter redoubled. “Bathe them. Give them clean clothes, and prepare them and yourself for the feast tonight.”
Alex cupped his hands. Alexia came down, using his hand as a step. Severius strolled out, unconcerned, still laughing, but Aife studied Uther for a second.
“He should listen,” she said.
“Yes,” Uther answered, “he should.”
Alex and Alexia gathered up the cup and dish that were still lying in the corner of the room. Aife watched the king don his clothing again. Then she led the three of them out into the clear blue day to the bathhouse. She didn’t speak to him again; her face was stiff with disapproval.
Alex and Alexia went somewhere else. Uther avoided the cold plunge and scrubbed himself in the
tepidarium
. There were attendants, but he dismissed them and bathed alone. Standing on the drain in the floor, he scrubbed with the rough pumice-filled soap and dipped his own rinse water out of the central pool.
One feature of the
tepidarium
was three clear glass windows that looked out beyond the plow land and pasture toward the still, forested hills beyond. The room was very bright, there being high, clerestory windows in the domed roof also. When he was finished washing, he wrapped a linen towel around his waist and turned toward the door, hoping for a servant with fresh clothing.
She—Aife—was standing there with a bundle in her arms. He stood shocked, wondering how long she’d been there. She placed the bundle on a stool near the door. He could see even from where he stood the mantle, tunic, and trousers were fine cloth—expensive.
“Why do you do that?” she asked.
“What?” he asked, though he knew very well what.
“Blush,” she answered.
“I was wondering how long you had been there. I’m not used to women looking at me when I’m naked. And the fact that you’re a young, pretty woman makes it all that more embarrassing.”
“I’m not a woman,” she said.
“No?” he asked.
“No! I was interested. There is no place on your body without a scar.”
He smiled a little ironically. “Well, one,” he said.
“No!”
And he realized she had no sense of irony or modesty, either, because she said, “Even that place is marked.”
And he remembered she was right. He had nearly been parted from his left testicle by an assassin who went for his groin with a double-edged knife and missed.
“What’s the worst wound you ever had?” she asked. “That one?” And she pointed to a zigzag scar that crossed his abdomen, traveled up his ribs, and ended at his collarbone.
“No, though it gave me a lot of trouble. This was the worst.” He pointed to a small but ugly puckered scar on his left arm. “The wound mortified. The arm swelled. I was among my men, and there were no women about.”
“They are much superior to men at leechcraft,” she agreed.
“I burned with fever and could hold nothing in my stomach. By the fifth night, I was dying, and—”
“Five nights? So long?” she asked.
“I am a strong man. Makes living easier, but dying harder.” He smiled grimly. “On the fifth night, the bird-masked women came with their bright-eyed leader. I woke from a fever dream and saw them standing six on each side of my bed. She of the glowing eyes stood at the foot.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen them. The bright-eyed one told me . . . I couldn’t be a woman. She barred my path.”
“My men were mourning me as dead. But she told the bird-masked women not to prepare the mercy cup for me. You cannot imagine the pain and fire consuming me. I wanted them to make an end. But in the absence of her permission, they wouldn’t do it. So I accepted the suffering, knowing one way or another, it would end.”
“Do we dream her or is she real?” Aife asked.
“I can’t say,” the king answered. “My men didn’t see her, but the bird-masked priestess said no matter how many times they cast the divinatory wands, she would in no wise answer yes. Then she, the bright-eyed one, caused a fire to be kindled and began to pack my swollen arm with hot cloths. Or was it my sister who came and did so? I have never known, never been sure. Sometimes when I look at my sister’s face, I see those shining eyes.
“I screamed with the pain, but ‘she’ would not relent, and by dawn the hot packs had drawn the poison from my arm. The fever broke and I slept. It took some time for me to recover, but I did.”
“She is a very bad thing,” Aife said. “And she punished me for not wanting to be a woman. My father would have no wife, but only concubines, so he brought up my brother and I as sons. We rode and hunted with him, but you know, a girl may not play the boy forever. And when I was fourteen, he sent me home to my mother. She wasn’t pleased.”
Uther had no problem with that. He could see the woman facing a slender hoyden she was supposed to tame and turn into a marriageable property.
“The price of my return was that the count must come and honor her bed.”
“And she conceived,” Uther said.
“Yes.”
Uther knew how the game was played. Desire was simply another counter on the board. The woman was furious about being neglected, and probably furious with the husband. Since she couldn’t take the object of her wrath to task, she struck at the girl.
“I began to bleed the day I arrived, and she sent me to a hut near the forest, where unclean things reside.”
Uther knew. His people were given to such practices also. A girl’s first passage into womanhood was fraught with peril, both for herself and any who came into contact with her. Nor were they easy on boys, either. He vividly remembered the stricken look in his son’s eyes when he told his father he had gone to sleep a child and awakened as a man.
He and Morgana had done their best for him, but he must still retreat to a stone room in the mountains and, though the boy never spoke of it, the king knew something dreadful had happened there. Dea Arto had claimed him, and his son returned to join the fiercest, most cruel, most primitive of all the warrior societies. He became a bear. In his life, Uther could never remember a bear dying in bed, and he knew Arthur wouldn’t yield up his life in that comfortable spot, either.
Uther rested his hand on her neck. There were tears in her eyes.
“Don’t trouble yourself so,” he told her gently. “The power to give life is a costly one. The powers of heaven don’t bless the hours when we know we have left the peace of childhood behind.”
She bit her lip, slicing an incisor down into it until it bled. A thin red stream trickled down to her chin.
“The blood,” she whispered. “I and the hut stank of it. It was only a lean-to, but there was a small house nearby where women were supposed to reside and give the alarm if the girl in the lean-to had problems. They . . . the ladies of the grove . . . sacrifice to drive off evil shadows that might creep in from the dark wilderness and strike at the girl undergoing her first passage.”
“Yes.” Uther nodded.
“When I came there, it didn’t seem so bad. The ladies were kind and gave me a drink to ease the cramps. And in the hut was a warm, dry bed. I went to sleep. When I woke, it was dark and silent. Rain pattered on the roof of the hut. There was no light from the place where the priestesses of the grove slept.
“I rose. I was in pain. My back hurt. You know, women say sometimes those cramps hurt almost as much as childbirth. These did. But I managed to get to my feet and go to the house where the women resided. I was hoping they would give me another drink.
“But they were gone. The house was empty, and all the fires on the hearths inside ash. So, you see, I knew they had been gone a long time. And I knew. I knew my mother wanted to ruin me. There were stories about how she ruined other girls of whom she was jealous. Sometimes she scarred their faces; others she had beaten and crippled their bodies. But in my case, that wouldn’t matter, because I was my father’s daughter and men would marry me, crippled or not. She meant to have my honor. And I was in so much pain that the idea of a man putting his thing up there was . . . the most horrible thing I could think of.
“I hunkered down at the hearth. The stones were still warm from the fire. I saw a staff, a blackthorn staff, on the floor. I seized the staff, pushed the end into a crack between the floor stones, and leaned on it. The wood was so hard, I didn’t think even with my slight weight on it that it would break. And in truth, it bent nearly double. But then, it broke at an angle, leaving me with a club and a spear. My father taught me how to do this. Break a stick at an angle when you need a spear quickly. I made for the door. I was going to hide in the forest in the deep coverts.
“But I was too slow. I saw the first man. He was standing in the doorway, between it and myself, outlined against the rolling storm clouds above. He seized my left arm while speaking to someone nearby. ‘Here she is,’ he said. ‘Come. We must hurry. Get this done before the daylight. Will you go first or shall I?’
“The spear was in my right hand. I drove it through his body. He let go of my arm and took a back step, then another. I don’t think he quite knew what had happened. It was so dark. He couldn’t see how badly he was wounded.
“His friend spoke then. ‘Hey, what’s wrong? Why did you let . . . ?’ But the first man fell against him, and he went to his knees. He shouted, ‘What’s wrong? She’s going to get away!’
“I had the clubbed end of the staff in my right hand. I don’t remember how it got there, but it was. I hit him on the head with it hard, and kept on hitting him until he stopped moving. Then I did the same with the other, because when the first was still, he kept twisting around, trying to get the spear out. I knew I couldn’t let him do that.
“The rain had stopped and the wind was blowing. I walked into the grove. But once I got past the trees at the edges, I saw the grove was gone, the big trees felled, and it was as though the ground was almost paved with the rotting stumps. And in between the stumps, saplings had sprung up, but they weren’t healthy. Each one was crusted with lichen moss and overgrown with mistletoe. The grove was ruined and would make no more mast for the winter run pigs. This place was not blessed but cursed.
“I met her there. She held a cup in her hand and was accompanied by a one-eyed, crippled stag. I fell to my knees. Her eyes were as you said, filled with light. They glowed as though the cold winter moon was in them. The stag was no more a stag, but the Horned One, a man bearing the antlers of the rutting male. The one-eyed one with the tools to open a woman.
“She handed the cup to me. I drank, and the pain left me. I felt nothing, even as he embraced me and bore me to the ground.”
“What happened to your mother?” Uther asked.
Aife shivered, then walked toward one of the windows in the bathhouse. “She went into labor, was delivered of a stillborn boy. Then, near dawn, she died. The blood loss, I think.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Uther asked.
“Because you know. You’ve seen her. The others don’t believe me. Not really. Not even my brother. I brought you good clothes. Tell me—you didn’t have any food concealed in that harp case, did you?”
“No,” the king answered.
“I knew that,” she said.
Her back was to him. She was gazing out the window at the forest. He dropped the linen bath sheet and began hurriedly to dress.
“If I hadn’t found a reason for the cup and plate to be there, he would have had your guards tortured. And probably you, also.”
“He’s now count of the Saxon shore? He has money from the pirates?” Uther asked.
She nodded, her back still to him.
“Goes without saying he has larger ambitions,” Uther commented.
“He wants to be emperor and is collecting people he thinks can help him. You are one of them. So am I.”
Uther added up the political situation on the Continent. The Franks held Gaul, held it loosely. They fought among themselves constantly. Italy and what remained of Germania were ruled and protected by again loosely held barbarian principalities that, in theory, owed allegiance to the emperor no longer residing in Rome but in Ravenna.
Uther’s blood ran cold. It was just possible that with the right mix of successful warfare, treachery, and murder, he might succeed. But so far as the king could tell, nothing the Imperial Pretenders gained lasted.
Truth to tell, all that survived in the chaos of the decaying empire was a shrinking fiscal structure, whose function was to secure land for the rich and collect taxes from the poor. The completely ephemeral structures of the various barbarian kingdoms lasted only as long as they could field armies to protect their fiscal domains. When these large landholdings that fed the polyglot mercenaries who preyed on them were either lost to another predatory force or ruined by endless warfare, the kingdoms of the Visigoths, Lombards, or Huns were swept away like sand castles overtaken by the sea.
Given sufficient ferocity, cruelty, and good luck, Severius might wear that purple one day, and in the meantime, he would strip southern England of what little stability and safety remained and further impoverish a peasantry already ground down almost to dust by taxation.
“No!” Uther whispered. “No!”
“Yes.” Aife turned from the window.
He was dressed now, and indeed the clothing she had procured for him was luxurious. A mantle, wool on the outside, lined with scarlet silk. Fine linen shirt and trousers, cross-gartered leather leggings, boots, and a linen undershirt with embroidered sleeves that matched the embroidery on the short-sleeved tunic.
Alex and Alexia entered, and without further ado, Aife led them toward a magnificent basilican building that was at the heart of the villa complex. Uther knew there had been a forum in London, but this villa and its environs must once have been the heart of Roman power in Britain. The formal gardens were extensive and, at this season of the year, barren. But the tall spires of the Mediterranean cypress remained, as did the brushlike Lombardy poplar, which marked out the paths and flower beds. These and the façade of the basilica might almost fool an observer into believing he or she were looking at an impressive carryover from Roman times.