‘Why … how does this matter?’ she dared to ask.
He sighed. ‘You’re right. It doesn’t. Do you want to go home?’
‘What?’
‘Your village. I’m going to free you, you know. I have not the least need for a girl in Sarantium, and after what… happened to us today I do not propose to tempt any gods at all by making a profit on you.’ A Rhodian voice, a firelit room. Night, the edge of winter. The world being remade.
He said, ‘I don’t think that. . . whatever we saw today . . . spared your life to clean house or heat bath water on a fire for me. Not that I have any notion why it spared my life. So, do you want to go back to your… oh. Jad. Jad’s blood. Stop that, woman!’
She tried, biting her lip, wiping with the sooty backs of her hands at her streaming face. But how did one not weep, confronted with this? Last night she had known she would be dead today.
‘Kasia, I mean it. I will throw you downstairs and let Carullus’s men take turns with you! I detest crying women!’
She didn’t think he really did. She thought he was pretending to be angry and fierce. She wasn’t sure of what else she thought. Sometimes things happened too quickly. How does the riven tree explain the lightning bolt?
The girl had fallen asleep, close to what remained of the fire’s warmth. She was still in her tunic, wrapped in one cloak, pillowed on the other, under one of his blankets. He could have had her come into the bed, but the habit of sleeping alone since Ilandra died was entrenched by now, had become something mystical, talismanic. It was morbid and spirit-ridden, Crispin thought sleepily, but he wasn’t about to try to break free of it this night with a slave girl bought for him the night before.
Though slave girl was unfair, really. She’d been as free as he was a year ago, a victim of the same plague summer that had smashed his own. There were, he thought, any number of ways a life could be ruined.
Linon would have declared him an imbecile for having the girl sleep by the fire, he knew. Linon wasn’t here. He had laid her down on wet grass; by wet leaves in a forest this morning and walked away. Remember me.
What happens to an unhoused soul when a body and its heart are sacrificed to a god? Did Zoticus know the answer to that? What happens to’ the soul when the god comes to claim it, after all? Could an alchemist know? He had a difficult letter to write. Tell him goodbye.
A shutter was banging along the wall. Windy tonight; would be cold on the road tomorrow. The girl was coming east with him. It seemed, both of these Inicii were. So odd, really, the circles and patterns one’s life made. Or seemed to make. Patterns men tried to impose on their lives, for the comforting illusion of order?
He’d overheard men talking in a cookshop one day when he was still a boy. His father’s head, he’d learned, had been completely severed from his shoulders. By an axe blow. Had landed some distance away, blood spraying from the toppling, headless body. Like a red fountain, one of the I men told the other in an awed voice. It was dramatic enough, unsetding enough even for soldiers, to have become a tale: the death of the stonemason, Horius Crispus.
Crispin had been ten years old when he’d heard that. An Inici axe. The tribes that went west to Ferrieres had been wilder. Everyone said that. The girl had said it tonight. They’d pressed south into Batiara constantly, harrying the northern farms and villages. The Antae sent armies, including the urban militia, into Ferrieres just about every year. Usually they were successful campaigns, bringing back needed slaves. There were casualties, however. Always. The Inicii, even outnumbered, knew how to I fight. A red fountain. He ought not to have heard such a thing. Not at ten years of age. He’d had dreams after, for a long time, had been unable to tell them to his mother. He was certain, even then, that the men in that cookshop would have been appalled had they known Horius’s boy had been listening to them.