The Golden Slave, Poul William Anderson [best ereader for pc .TXT] 📗

Cimbri clawed at whetted iron in their flesh. Eodan was unhurt, but his shield was useless. What new trick was this? Only one metal pin left in the javelin head—it was bent and held fast by its crooked point; he could not wrench it free. He knew a chill. This Marius had thought of such a trick!

Casting his shield from him, Eodan joined the charge.

Elsewhere the invaders were already locked face to face with the enemy; now this part of their host met him. Eodan struck at a shield. His sword was blunted; it would not bite. A Roman blade flashed at him. He dodged it, planted his feet wide and hewed two-handed. A Roman helmet stopped his swing. He heard neckbones snap across. The man crashed to the ground. One behind him stepped into line. The legion advanced.

Gasping, Eodan retreated. It was a hailstorm of blows now—shouts, shocks, no more war-cries for lack of breath, but always the din of weapons. And the rising wildcat song of the pipes ... where were the lurs? No one blew the holy lurs? He yelled and struck out.

Backward step by step. His boot crushed something, the bones of a face. He looked down and saw it was Ingwar, with a Roman javelin in his armpit. He looked up again from the dead eyes, sobbed and hit through redness at a face above a shield. The Roman had a long thin nose like a beak. And he grinned. He grinned at Eodan.

Crash and clang and boom of iron. No more voices, except when a man hooted his pain. Eodan saw one of the linked Cimbri fall, holding his belly, trying to keep in his bowels. He died. His comrades dragged him backward. The man beside the corpse gasped—a slingstone had smashed his teeth—and sat down. A Roman took him by the hair and slashed off his head. Four Romans, close together, stepped into the gap and cut loose.

The battle banged and thundered under a white-hot sky. Italy's earth rose up in anger and stopped the nostrils of the Cimbri.

Eodan slipped and fell in a pool of blood. He looked stupidly at his hands, empty hands—where had his sword gone? Pain jagged through his skull. He looked up; the Roman line was upon him. He glimpsed the hairy knees of a man, drew his dagger and thrust weakly upward. A shield edge came down hard on his wrist. He cried out and lost the knife. The shield struck his helmet and darkness clapped down. The legionaries walked over him.

He sat up again, looking at their backs. For a little while he could not move. He could only watch them as they broke his people. There was a tuba being sounded. Was it in his head, or did it blow victory for Marius? His wrist was numb. Blood dripped slowly from a forearm gashed across.

At least he lived, he thought. The dead around him were thick. Never had he seen so many dead. And the wounded groaned until he sickened of their anguish. He sat there for a while longer. The field grew black with flies. The sun got low, a huge blood-colored shield seen through dust.

The Romans took the field, gathered themselves together and quick-marched after the fleeing.

Eodan struggled for wakefulness. He kept slipping back into night; it was like trying to climb out of a watery pit. There was something he must remember.... Was it his father? No, surely Boierik was dead; he would not outlive this day. He would fall on his own double-headed spear if he must. His mother had died two years ago, now let her ghost thank the earth Powers for that. And Hwicca—

It came to him. He reeled to his feet. "Hwicca," he croaked. "Othrik."

The Romans would take the wagon camp. They would take the camp. The Cimbri would be slaves.

Eodan lurched through nightmare across the Raudian plain. The hurt wailed at him. The gathering crows flew up as he passed and then settled down again. A riderless horse rushed past; he groped for its reins, but it was many yards away. The horizon seemed to shrink until it lay about him like bonds; then it stretched until he was the only thing that was; he heard the fever-hum of the world's brain under his feet.

When he neared the camp, miles beyond the battle, he had to rest for a while. His legs would carry him no more. He had some thought that there would be horses about; he and Hwicca and Othrik could get away. Oh, the wide cool Jutland moors! He remembered how the first snow fell in winter.

He saw the beaten Cimbri, such as lived, pouring into the camp. He got up again and stumbled among them. The Romans were already over the earthworks, briskly, like men who round up cattle.

Eodan went among them somehow. He saw the Cimbrian women stand in black clothes on their wagons, spears and swords in hand, screaming. They struck at their husbands and fathers and sons and brothers—"Coward! Whelp! You fled, you fled—" They strangled their own children, threw them under the wheels or the feet of the milling kine. Eodan passed a woman he knew who had hanged herself from the pole of a wagon, and her children were tied dangling at her heels.

Men who had thrown away their weapons, and saw the Romans gather in their folk, took what rope they could find. There were no trees here; they must tie themselves to the horns of the oxen, or by the neck to a steer's legs, to die.

The Romans worked hard, prodding prisoners into groups, stunning, binding. They took some sixty thousand alive.

Eodan paid small heed. It was happening elsewhere. He was a pair of feet and a pair of eyes, searching for Hwicca ... no more.

He found her at last. She stood beside the wagon that had been her household. She held Othrik to her breast and a knife in her hand. Eodan slipped, fell, picked himself up, fell again, crawled on hands and knees toward her. She did not see him. Her eyes were too wild. He had no voice left to call.

"Othrik," said Hwicca. Her words wavered. He could barely hear them above the noise. "Good Othrik." The hand with the dagger stroked across his fine pale-gold hair as he slept in the curve of her arm. "Be not afraid, Othrik," she said. "It is well. All is well."

A Roman squad came from beyond the god-cars. "There's a beauty!" Eodan heard one of them shout. "Get her!"

Hwicca sucked in a gasp. She laid the knife at her son's throat. The blade fell out of her fingers. Two of the Romans ran toward her. She looked at them at they neared. She picked up the baby by his ankles and dashed his head against the wagon boards.

"Othrik," she said numbly, and let the thing drop to earth.

The Romans—they were both young, hardly more than boys—stopped and gaped. One of them took a backward step. Hwicca went down on her knees and fumbled blindly after the dagger. "I am coming, I am coming," she called. "Wait for me, Othrik. You are too little to go down hellroad alone. I will come hold your hand."

The Roman squad was kicking some of Eodan's thralls toward the main slave group. Their officer looked over his shoulder at the two boys he had sent after Hwicca. "Snatch her up or she'll kill herself!" he barked. "You can't peddle dead meat!"

They broke into a run again. Hwicca's hand touched the dagger.

Flavius the slave sprang from behind the baggage cart. He put his foot on the knife. Hwicca stared like a clubbed animal up into his face. He smiled. "No," he said.

Eodan hitched himself forward another yard. She had not seen him, even yet. The two legionaries reached her, pulled her erect and hustled her off. Flavius went after them. Presently another Roman detachment came by and found Eodan.

Early the next year, only a few days after the feast of Mars had signaled the vernal equinox, they brought an injured slave to the master's house. This was on a Samnian latifundium owned by Gnaeus Valerius Flavius.

It was a raw day—low smoky clouds scudded over the fields, with a cold whistle of wind and a few rain-spatters. The rolling land lay wet and dark, its trees nearly bare save for a clump of pines. A rutted road gleamed with wind-ruffled puddles, and a few cows and goats, still winter-shaggy, huddled behind the sheds. The field slaves stamped their feet, blew on chafed hands and bent to their task; no idleness now, this was plowing and sowing time, that the flax might clothe Rome next winter. Their overseers rode up and down the lines, touching a back here and there with a skilled lash, but lightly; today the air did all the needful whipping for them.

Phryne came out of the house and felt how the wind bit. Her stola skirts streamed from her girdle, and she almost lost the blue palla before she got it on. Nevertheless, she could not have stayed another hour in the villa. Mistress Cordelia would have it hot as Ethiopia, and drown the brazier fumes in enough incense to throttle a mule!

As she walked over the sere lawn, smiling to old gardener Mopsus but hurrying on (he was a dear, and so lonely since the master sold his last grandchild—and a Greek—but how he talked), she saw two field hands approach. They were common dark men, some or other kind of barbarian, she didn't know what. But the one they supported was something else. She had not seen so big a man in a long time, and his unkempt yellow hair and beard tossed a blaze across the sunless sky.

Why ... he must be a Cimbrian ... one of the very people who had captured Master Flavius in Gaul! It was a Euripidean situation. Phryne went down the hill for a closer look. One of the dark men saw her and bobbed his head with coarse deference—a household slave, personal attendant to the mistress herself, was not common folks.

"What is the matter?" asked Phryne. "What happened?"

The Cimbrian lifted his head. He bore a strongly molded face, heavy about the jaw and brows but almost Hellenic of nose. His eyes were wide apart beneath a tattooed triskele (how had the yelping barbarians of Thule ever come on that most ancient symbol?) and a green color like winter seas. He was white about the lips. His left leg dragged.

"He got hurt by a bull," said the first of the dark slaves. "The big white stud bull broke out of the pen and come ramping down in the field. Gored one man."

"They didn't dare kill him," added the other. "He's worth too much, you see. And we couldn't lay a rope on him. Then this fellow got in, took him by the horns, threw him and held him down till help come."

Phryne felt how the blood flew into her face. "But that was wonderful!" she cried. "Another Theseus! And only hurt in the leg!"

The Cimbrian laughed, a short inhuman bark, and said: "I would not have been hurt at all—we used to throw bulls every year at the spring rites—but when those trained pigs of cowherds let him up they held the ropes too slack." His Latin was rough and ungrammatical, but it flowed quickly.

"Foreman says get him to the barracks and fix the bone," said one of those who upbore him. "Best we go."

Phryne stamped her foot. At once she realized that she had driven her small shoe into the mud. She saw the Cimbrian's eyes slide down, and a grin went like a ghost over his mouth. He looked back at her and nodded wryly. He knew.

She blurted in confusion: "Certainly not! I know what you would do, have that fool of a blacksmith splint it—and he will limp for the rest of