Hero of Rome

XVIII

Afterwards, he wasn’t sure whether Cearan had engineered it.

The Briton seemed content with the conclusion of their discussion and settled down to supervise the butchering of the two boars, but after a few moments he looked up at the sky, which was still a pale, watery grey. ‘My stomach tells me the eighth hour is close, even if the sun does not,’ he said. ‘They will bring the feast to the forest edge. We are almost finished here; why don’t you walk ahead and make sure the wolves don’t get to it first?’

‘Where food is concerned Lunaris is more dangerous than any wolf.’

‘Go then and keep him at bay,’ Cearan urged cheerfully. ‘Or I must eat one of these pigs raw.’

Valerius left the clearing and set off through the wood towards the rendezvous point. He wasn’t entirely sure of his direction and his head still spun with the effects of the ale and clamoured with images of slashing tusks and a gaping tooth-filled maw snapping within inches of his face. He tried to concentrate on what Cearan had said; the subtle nuances in his voice, the messages in his eyes that had accompanied them. These were not Romans he was dealing with, for all Lucullus’s Roman airs. Less than twenty years ago they had been sworn enemies of everything he believed in. How could he trust them after only a few months’ acquaintance?

Maeve stepped from the shadow of an ancient oak straight into his path and when she saw him her hand went to her mouth and her dark eyes opened wide in alarm. The young Roman who had set her heart fluttering at the villa had been replaced by a dishevelled, mud-stained vagabond in a torn shirt who stared at her with startled eyes. She noticed something else.

‘You’re bleeding!’

For the first time Valerius heard something more than polite concern in her voice. She dropped her cloth-wrapped bundle and rushed towards him. He let her come. He would explain that it was the boar’s blood later.

She stopped two paces away, wanting to take the next step but not quite knowing how to, and they stared at each other for a few interminable seconds. The long brown cloak she wore over the blue dress hid the curves of her body but couldn’t disguise the way her breasts rose and fell sharply with each breath. She had bound her soft chestnut hair in a long plaited tail that draped over her left shoulder. Valerius saw the confusion in her eyes and knew it must be mirrored in his own, but he feared any decision he made would break the spell. An image of the Temple of Claudius filled his head and he recalled the priest’s message. The thought made him giddy and he swayed slightly, a movement that made her instinctively step forward to support him. Then they were in each other’s arms.

For a moment each was surprised by the other’s strength. He held her close so the softness of her body melted against the hardness of his and her head rested lightly on his shoulder. At first, that was enough, but then warmth was transformed into heat and he felt her stiffen. She raised her head and looked up at him in surprise, so he could see the mysterious golden shadows deep in her eyes. Her lips were so close it would have taken only the slightest movement to meet them. Maeve felt the moment, too, but this unfamiliar heat deep within had disturbed her. It conjured up feelings she hadn’t realized could exist and half-flashes of something which couldn’t be memory, but which was remembered all the same. Her throat went dry and her heart pounded like the beat of a Samhain drum. Another second and she would be consumed. She stepped back.

‘You’re bleeding,’ she repeated, but now her voice was a husky croak.

‘It’s boar’s blood,’ Valerius said cheerfully.

‘Not your face,’ she frowned. ‘Your shoulder.’

Valerius glanced down and noticed for the first time the ragged tear in his tunic and a patch where the wool was considerably darker. ‘It’s a scratch,’ he claimed, gingerly touching the area.

‘How do you know if you haven’t looked at it?’ Her voice had recovered its authority now and overflowed with the resigned exasperation women use for men they think are idiots. ‘Take your shirt off.’

Valerius hesitated. This wasn’t going the way he had imagined it would.

‘I am a Celt, Valerius. I’ve seen men with their shirts off before.’

‘You haven’t seen me with my shirt off,’ he protested. ‘It would not be seemly.’

She gave an earthy laugh that drove all thoughts of staid Roman maidens from his head. ‘What you seemed to have in mind for me a few minutes ago would not have been seemly either.’

Valerius felt a rush of heat in his face. He was a twenty-two-year-old Roman officer and he was blushing.

‘Or are Romans different from Celtic men? If so I think I should find out… especially if we are to see each other again.’

She kept her face solemn, but her eyes sparkled with gentle humour. He caught her mood and grinned, pulling the woollen tunic over his head and placing it on the ground beside him.

The breath caught in her throat. Yes, she had seen men before, in their many shapes and sizes, but this was different. The young Roman’s torso was tanned a deep shade of honey and constant practice with sword and shield had given him heavily muscled shoulders and upper arms. How could hands so powerful have felt so gentle when they held her earlier? His deep, sculpted chest narrowed towards the waist where a thin line of dark hair ran down a flat stomach to disappear somewhere she tried not to think about. She noticed a fresh scar across his ribs and had to stop herself reaching out to touch it. Closer inspection showed other smaller scars: indents and barely noticeable pale lines that spoke of narrow escapes from danger. Disturbingly, the heat she had experienced earlier returned, accompanied by a liquid feeling low in her body.

‘Are you going to help me or sell me in Colonia’s market?’ Valerius asked lightly, conscious of but not unhappy with her inspection. He knew the figure he cut, and took pride in it, but not to the point of arrogance. All the muscle in the world wouldn’t stop a well-flighted arrow or the edge of a blade.

She tossed her head, swinging the plaited tail from left to right and reminding him of a colt he had once seen frolicking in a field. ‘You were right,’ she said dismissively. ‘It is just a scratch, but you were a fool to allow yourself to get so close to a boar.’

‘Two boars,’ he announced, just to see her reaction. He wasn’t disappointed.

‘Two?’

‘Big ones. Enormous.’

‘How big?’ she demanded, and the wound was forgotten as he described the hunt and how the second boar had come so close to avenging his sibling. She made little ‘mmm’s of concern at just the right places and her face came closer and closer to his as he talked. Eventually she was so close that it became impossible to do anything but kiss her. When their lips met there was no resistance, just a soft and entirely natural moulding as he tasted her sweetness and the clean tang of freshly torn mint that made him wonder if she had prepared for just this moment. At first her lips stayed closed, but as the seconds passed and the thunder in his head grew louder she opened her mouth to draw him deeper and he felt as if he were being swept away in a swollen river torrent. It seemed right that his hands should move to her waist below the cloak and from there upwards…

‘Stop!’ She took a step away. ‘We can’t. It is not… right.’

‘How can it not be right?’ He heard the frustration in his voice, and knew that in another six words he would destroy everything he had won so far. But the thunder was still pounding inside his head and his tongue seemed to belong to someone else. ‘We-’

She gently placed the first finger of her right hand on his lips, and with her left hand took his.

‘Come,’ she said, and drew him beneath the boughs of the oak tree, where the sod rose thick over the roots and the grass remained dry despite the rain. She pushed him down and recovered the cloth pack. Among other items it contained a stoppered flask, the contents of which she used sparingly to clean the wound on his shoulder, dabbing gently with a corner of the cloth to clear away the dried blood.

‘A waste of good wine,’ he protested, reaching for the flask.

She held it away from him. ‘A man, a woman and wine are not a good combination,’ she said, clearly speaking from a well of experience. ‘Later.’

‘Later?’

‘When we have found my father, or Cearan. When it is more… seemly.’

He grinned and lay against the oak, feeling the rough bark against the skin of his back. Her hands worked delicately around the wound and he found himself more at ease than at any time since he had landed on Britain’s shores. It was as if they had always been together. Or they belonged together.

‘Your father is a fine man.’ He said it purely for the pleasure of hearing her voice, but her reply surprised him.

‘My father has forgotten who he truly is. He embraces every new Roman fashion and dismisses the old ways. We sacrifice to Roman gods and sleep under a Roman roof on Roman beds. The wine he drinks is shipped from Gaul, but it is Roman wine. The look in his eyes when he talks of his ambitions frightens me. He will never be satisfied.’

‘You talk as if you hate Rome, but you are here… with a Roman.’

She stared at him and he became lost in the depths of her eyes. ‘I am here with Valerius, a young man whose company I enjoy and whose origins I try to forget. It seems to me that Romans think strength is everything.’ She reached out absently to stroke the muscle of his right arm. It was a gesture of pure, unthinking affection which instantly took the sting from her words. ‘When I was young, I had a friend, the son of one of my father’s tenants. We grew up together, played in these woods and swam in the river; I shared my first kiss with Dywel.’ Valerius instantly resented Dywel and the time he had spent with Maeve that he could never share. ‘He herded his father’s cattle, took them out to pasture in the spring and kept them fed during the winter. Then the Romans came. My father had stayed at home when the young men rode off to join Caratacus in the west, so his estate was largely spared. But eight years ago they divided up the land all around us. They said the pasture was no longer my father’s to graze his beasts upon and that he could not water them at the dew pond. My father had other pasture and other water, but Dywel’s farm was on the far edge of the estate and his father was poor. He defied the Romans.’

‘What happened to him?’ Valerius asked, already knowing the answer. He remembered Falco’s words: Things were done, when Colonia was founded, that do none of us credit.

‘They cut Dywel’s throat with a knife.’

‘I am sorry. Your father should have taken his case before the magistrate.’

Maeve gave a bitter laugh. ‘That is a very Roman thing to say. Dywel was a Celt. Roman justice is for the Romans.’

He could have protested that she was wrong. That Roman justice was the best in the world: the product of a thousand years of lawyerly debate, discussion and study. But he didn’t. Because he realized she was right.

A shout rang out from the woods to their left and Maeve’s head whipped round like a frightened deer. ‘Here,’ she said urgently, thrusting his shirt into his hands. As he stood up to shrug it over his shoulders she poured most of the wine away and took a loaf from the bag she had been carrying and tore it in half, throwing one of the halves into the bushes. She did the same with a large piece of meat. ‘Bite it,’ she ordered, pushing the portion she’d retained into his mouth. He did as he was told, trying to speak as he chewed.

‘Gghwy?’

‘Because I stumbled upon you when you were lost. You were hungry and weak from loss of blood and we stayed until you were fed and felt strong enough to move. Quickly!’

She gathered up the cloth bag and thrust the remains of the food inside. When that was done, she studied him critically, brushed some leaves and grass from his back and turned to go.

‘Maeve?’

She turned back with a look of annoyance that faded when she saw the leather pouch he had retrieved from his belt. He held it out to her, and she hesitated for a moment before taking it, but when she did she smiled and lifted her head to kiss him lightly on the lips. He stood there grinning long after she disappeared into the trees.