They would burn him in the City for such an impiety, but this was only a dream. No one died for his dreams.
He woke in the darkness before dawn. After a moment of disorientation, he swung out of bed and crossed the cold floor to the window. He opened the shutters. The rain had stopped again, though water was still dripping off the roof. A heavy fog had drifted in; he could scarcely see the courtyard below. There were men stirring down there-Vargos would be among them, readying the mule-but sounds were muted and distant. The girl was awake, standing beside her pallet, a pale, thin figure, ghostlike, silently watching him.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, after a moment.
Not long afterwards they were on the road, three of them walking east a mist-shrouded half-world as dawn came without a sunrise on the pay of the Dead.
CHAPTER IV
Vargos of the Ihicii was not a slave.
Many of the Posting Inns’ servants-for-hire along the main Imperial roads were, of course, but Vargos had chosen this job of his own will, as he was quick to point out to those who erred in addressing him. He’d signed his second five-year indenture with the Imperial Post three years ago, carried his copy of the paper on his person, though he couldn’t read it, and collected a payment twice a year, in addition to his guaranteed room and board. It wasn’t much, but over the years he’d bought new boots twice, a woollen cloak, several tunics, an Esperanan knife, and he could offer a copper follis or two to a whore. The Imperial Post preferred slaves, naturally, but there weren’t enough of them, since the Emperor Apius had elected to pacify the northern barbarians rather than subdue them, and stout men were badly needed for parties on the roads. Some of those stout men, including Vargos, were northern barbarians.
At home, Vargos’s father had often expressed-generally with spilled ale and a table-thumping fist-his views on working or soldiering for Sarantium’s fat-rumped catamites, but Vargos had been of the habit of disagreeing with his parent on occasion. Indeed, it had been after the last such discussion that he had left their village one night and begun his journey south.
He couldn’t remember the details of the argument any more-something to do with a superstition about ploughing beneath a blue full moon-but it had ended with the old man, blood dripping from his scalp, deliberately branding his youngest son on the cheek with a hunting knife while Vargos’s brothers and uncles enthusiastically held him down. Vargos, for all his violent, injurious struggling at the time, had had to concede to himself afterwards that the scarring had probably been deserved. It was not really acceptable among the Inicii for a son to hammer his father half to death with a stick of firewood in the course of an agrarian dispute.
He’d chosen not to linger for further debate or familial chastisement, however. There was a world beyond their village, and precious little within it for a youngest son. He had walked out of the house that same spring night, the two nearly full moons high above the newly planted fields and the dense, well-known forests, and had set his marred face to the far south, never looking back.
He’d expected, of course, to join the Imperial army, but someone in a roadside caupona had mentioned positions on offer at the Posting Inns, and Vargos had thought he might try that for a season or two.
That had been eight summers ago. Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived. He’d his share of newer scars since then, for the roads were dangerous and hungry men turned outlaw easily enough in Sauradia, but the work suited Vargos. He liked open spaces, had no single master to knuckle his forehead to, and didn’t share his father’s bone-deep hatred of the Empires-either Sarantine or the old one in Batiara.
Even though he was known as a keep-to-himself man, he had acquaintances at every Posting Inn and roadside tavern from the Batiaran border to Trakesia by now. That meant decently clean sleeping straw or pallets, a fireside sometimes in winter, food and beer, and some of the girls could be soft enough on the occasions when they weren’t commanded elsewhere. It helped that he was one of the freemen, and had a coin or two to spend. He had never been out of Sauradia. Most of the Imperial Post servants stayed in their province, and Vargos had never had the least desire to wander farther than he already had eight years ago, cheek dripping blood, from the north.