When the girl had provided me with clouts and padding, I sat for a long time in the moist shadow, gazing at the swirling waters and waiting for more tears to come. But for the moment I had no more emotion. My life stretched before me, devoid of magic. But not, I reminded myself, of love. By now, Constantius would be waiting. It was not he who had broken my heart—I had done that all by myself.
Deceived, lured from his ordinary world into Avalon and then burdened with a disgraced and weeping priestess when he left it, Constantius had not complained. He at least deserved a cheerful companion. By this time my hair was drying, the shorter strands curling in moist tendrils around my brow. I called to the slave girl once more to dress it high with pins and help me to disguise my puffy eyes with kohl and my pale cheeks with rouge. When I looked into the bronze mirror I saw a fashionable stranger.
When I came out of the baths the sun was about to sink behind the hills that sheltered the town. I turned from the dazzle of light and stopped short, facing a pediment that was the twin to the one that led to the sacred spring. But here, the dominant figure was a goddess, her hair twisted up on each side and caught in the middle by a ring. She was haloed by a crescent moon.
For a moment I simply stood, staring, as a traveller will stop who suddenly glimpses someone from home. Then I remembered how I had come here.
“It will do you little good, Lady, to lie in wait for me,” I said softly. “It is you who cast me out—I owe you no loyalty!”
From Aquae Sulis, the military road angled northeast across Britannia. After we left Corinium it rose gradually, passing through wild hill country as it approached Ratae. Nonetheless, we continued to find mansios and posting inns spaced a day’s travel apart along the road, and from time to time I would glimpse through the trees the red-tiled roof of a villa. This, Constantius assured me, was a gentle land compared to the mountains near Eburacum, but I, accustomed to the marshlands of the Summer Country, gazed at the blue distances and wondered.
As we neared Lindum, we came to flat green countryside like the Trinovante lands where I had lived as a child. I took refuge in those memories, and began to talk to Constantius about my father and my brothers, fitting together my memories like some Roman mosaic of the life of a British prince who had adopted, for the most part, the ways of Rome.
“My own family is not so different,” said Constantius. “My people come from Dacia, the land away to the north of Greece, where the Carpatus mountains curve around the great plain. I was born in a villa on the Danuvius, where the river cuts through the grasslands. Dacia is still a frontier province—we became Roman even later than you Britons—and the Goths keep trying to make us barbarian once again…”
“We heard that the Emperor Claudius had beaten them at Nissa,” I said when the silence had continued for too long. It had been some time since we had passed a villa, and though the road was elevated, a tangle of trees pressed close on either side. The clip-clop of our mounts’ hooves seemed loud in that empty land.
“Yes… I was there…” answered Constantius, rubbing at the spot on his thigh where I remembered seeing a scar. “But it was a near thing. They came from the east, across the Euxine Sea. Our garrison at Marcianopolis fought them off, but they sailed south and managed to break through into the Aegeum, where they split into three armies. Gallienus wiped out the Herulians in Thracia, but the Goths were still rampaging around Macedonia.
“We finally caught up with them at Nissa. It’s hard to defend against wandering bands that hit a village and run, but barbarian troops can’t stand against our heavy cavalry…” His eyes were bleak with memory. “It was a slaughter. After that, it was mostly a matter of mopping up. Hunger and bad weather killed as many of the stragglers as we did. That, and the plague.” He fell silent, and I remembered that the plague had killed Romans as well, including his great-uncle the Emperor.