Children of Tiber and Nile Read online

  But that was a concern for later. The request would keep, for now. Damkina went back to the work that she was here for, and not the work that kept her in good odor with her superiors among the Council of Magi.

  ______________

  Little sunlight filtered through the leaden clouds over the vast, open plain. Smoke from a fire drifted upwards, while snow fluttered down through the air, lightly feathering over the tips of the long grass, brown with winter. It fell, too, on the huge stones that marked this place as the greatest of the stone dances on this island—although there were hundreds of others. They dotted hilltops and glens from as far north as the Orkneys to places as far south as occupied Gaul—including the famous stones of Carnac, in the lands held by the Veneti tribe along the western coast of Gaul. Some marked graves thousands of years old. The men and women gathered here knew it. Could feel the graves as disruptions in the ground under their feet. Could feel how the cold soil wrapped around the softer, looser ashes, how the standing stones compressed the clay down on harder bits of bone. They all knew that here, their ancestors were with them. Ancestors who had dwelled in this land since before the Roman gods had even had names. And in testament to those gods and ancestors, further circles of wooden posts, carved and painted to represent each one, stood outside the stones. Many of which were further adorned with skulls, heads taken in battle by this noteworthy king or that, and brought here from far away. The king might have been cremated, or tucked into a barrow, but here, the worthy dead were remembered.

  Those ancestors had chosen the sites for their stone dances for many reasons. The stones themselves, certainly, lined up with celestial occurrences—just over two weeks ago, they’d all marked the passage of the winter solstice as the stars performed their dance above the dance made of stone. But the locations, well . . . they’d been chosen because they resonated with power. The Gallic gods had been, as far as their people knew, the only ones to teach their people how to use the power that was in the earth, in the water, and in the sky. Flowing currents of it, leaping from line to line. The stuff, they knew, that bound the universe together. Connected those stars above to the earth below.

  If other nations were aware of that power, they feared to use it. Thought that they’d tear the fabric of the universe by touching it. That’s because all they know how to do is take, the Gauls murmured among themselves. They don’t know how to shape power gently to their need, and then let go. What they have, they need to hold, like a dog with a bone, living in fear that someone else will come and take it.

  The men and women present represented the twenty-seven greater tribes of these lands, as well as the druids who did their best to bind them together, arbitrate disputes, and pass on the old stories and learning. The druids who’d pass over the seas with the traders and sailors, to connect this island to their far-flung Celtic brethren, who dwelled in Gaul, Hispania, and even as far away as the northern reaches of Hellas. A network of similar cultures and dialects, with the Goths camped out in between. And while the Goths were cousins, and thus closer kin than the damnable Roman invaders . . . they were not the same. Not even by half.

  “Two years ago,” the chief druid said, raising his hands for silence, “our brother Matru made it back to these shores after a year spent as a hostage to the leader of the Romans. A year in which Matru attempted to make this. . . Caesarion . . . understand the price he would pay if he came to our lands, as his father did. A year in which Matru attempted to sway this emperor’s hand, as he came down upon the holdings of our cousins, the Cantabri, in Hispania.” He paused. “My brother, will you not speak?”

  Matru stood, moving forward into the circle of robed people, their backs a break against the wind that pushed the smoke and the snow into complex patterns in the air above them. He was a tall man, with huge shoulders; his long brown hair hung loose, but for a few braids in it. A gold torc clung to his bear-like neck, and his arms, exposed by his sleeveless wool robe, held a dense pattern of woad tattoos—as did the rest of his frame, concealed by that same soft brown wool. Yet he, like several others here, was clean-shaven, or nearly, with only a few day’s worth of beard on his cheeks. And his blue eyes held a certain cold resolve, mixed with understanding. “Two of us were taken captive, two survivors of Aucissa’s expedition, as you all already know,” he said, in the tones of a trained storyteller. “We had the perfect ambush set up, and we would have wiped out five full legions—thirty thousand men—in heartbeats, burying them under ice and snow and rock, but for one woman. Caesarion’s sister, Eurydice. She is god-born, just as he is, and a sorceress of some power. She turned aside the avalanche, sparing most of Caesarion’s army.”

  “Aucissa nearly killed her for it, didn’t she?” someone with a Silures accent asked, trying to bolster everyone’s spirits. Mentioning the powerful god-born of the Morrigan might have cheered them—if only that tale hadn’t ended badly.

  “Threw the Roman god-born right atop a stone spire. Impaled her. And then Caesarion came down and jabbed his knife into Aucissa’s throat. And used her life to bring his sister back from death,” Matru said, his jaw working. He’d held to that story—the gods’ own truth—for two years now. Few here believed him. No mortal man could wield that kind of power. “Then he married his sister in observance of the rites required by another kingdom. This . . . Egypt. Lands far south of Rome. Their mother comes from there.”

  Fascinated murmurs. They were accustomed to the notion that gods might marry their close-kin—and certainly, some heroes out of legends had lain with their sisters, too!—but it wasn’t much practiced here. Matru cleared his throat. “As I said, two of us were captured. Docca was the other. As he was a Venicone, and Venicones are born with their mouths open, and never do learn to shut them and listen a while,” a dark look at the Venicones actually present, “he made himself a nuisance and got himself executed, while I gathered information.” He exhaled, seeing the steam of his own breath rise into the air. “I spent the next year with their emperor and his family. I saw their great city. Houses made of stone. Patterns and designs worked into every floor, ever so cunning. When they want to bathe, they don’t go to a river or to the hot springs that the gods have made in the earth; they go to buildings where they’ve made hot springs of their own. Pools of water, lined in stone, and heated from below with fire.” He shook his head. “Wealth so vast that they can’t be counting it all.”

  “And yet they want more,” came the condemning voices from all around him.

  Matru held up his hand, stilling the others. “This Caesarion . . . think of him as a flea on the back of a large and hungry dog,” he said grimly. “He’s a cautious leader, for all that his own war-chiefs call him impatient. He could have gone straight into Cantabri lands. He didn’t. He gave them a chance to surrender and make reparations, as I suggested. When they refused, he spent most of a year surrounding them. Taking all the tribes around them, by treaty or by force. And then, the next year, he came in force. Took the Cantabri’s lands village by village, and from all sides at once. Like a snake, crushing its prey in its coils.” He looked away, seeing in the smoke of this fire all the clouds that had billowed over the mountain villages of the Cantabri. “His soldiers are fine and disciplined. But they wanted spoils and wealth to bring home. He has to walk the same balance as every other war-leader, between placating his people and doing what he thinks is best. His people? Wanted the Cantabri annihilated. His generals? Told him that to leave even one village standing meant that they’d just rise up again in a generation.”

  “As we would,” another druid muttered.

  “As we should,” came another voice.

  “What did he wind up doing?” A third voice, this one from a woman standing nearby.

  Matru grimaced. He’d seen the Roman war machine at its most ferocious. They’d come to this island twice before, both times under Caesar. The first had been an exploratory mission, he now realized, and had been quickly repelled. The second had been the campaign in the southeast, w
hich they’d managed to stave off. “Any man who surrendered was captured and made a slave,” he said shortly. “Men who didn’t surrender were slaughtered. The women and girl children were allowed to go free. The boy children were taken as slaves. You can imagine their fate in Rome,” he added, off-handedly. “They have a belief that slaves of both sexes can be raped by their masters. At will. And that if a boy-child is chosen for such attentions, they should be grateful for it, as they’ll be primped and perfumed and coddled until they’re adult men, instead of having to work at harder labor. Some of these concubines are even passed down from father to son as a delightful inheritance, I’m told. So that they can be used by two generations of the same family.” He shrugged. “This isn’t the only possible fate before those captives,” Matru added, with scrupulous honesty, “but it explains why so many of our Cantabri brethren set fire to their own villages. Fathers killed their own wives and children before taking their own lives, rather than allow them to be sold as slaves in Rome.”

  “You said that he’s a flea on a dog’s back, though?” the woman asked, pushing closer, her expression interested.

  Matru nodded. “I saw his eyes. He is, as I said, inclined towards mercy. But in this case, we’d forced his hand. Twelve thousand Roman lives were taken. He needed to retaliate in a way that his people would find acceptable.” He sighed. “And he did spare the women and girls. I watched him personally execute some of his men caught raping the women.” A buzz of questions, and he struggled to explain. “Once they’re slaves, they’re legally someone else’s property, and he can’t stop what will happen to them. But while they’re captives or non-combatants . . . he can spare them. Romans are so bound up by their laws, it sometimes . . . incapacitates them.” And yet, I saw Caesarion’s eyes. I saw the regret in them. “Once, an entire village surrendered without a fight. He spared them. Men, women, and children.” He exhaled again. “And, to a certain extent, they admire us. We interest them. They put on armor like ours to fight like us in their arenas. And I even saw a Gaul fight for and receive his freedom from slavery in one of those places where they battle to please their gods.”

  “But the only way to be spared their fury is to capitulate,” someone with a deep southern accent shouted—from mainland Gaul, surely! “You know what they’re doing in my homeland?” he said, and the crowd parted to let him be seen and heard more clearly. Long hair, still—this southern Pairisi held to Gallic norms, not Roman ones.

  “They’re building temples. And they put their gods inside, and say that their gods and our gods are the same—just with different names. They say that their Jupiter and Zeus are Taranis, and that we should just worship in their temples. When Taranis can only be venerated under the open sky!”

  Matru turned his head and spat. I wouldn’t have a problem with it, if they put their temples up and said “Come inside if you wish to. Worship our gods or worship your own. But saying that our gods and their gods are the same beings? Where is their three-faced Morrigan, then? Why is their moon a goddess and not a god? They’re not the same. Their gods are clearly powerful, and worthy of being worshipped—but they’re not ours.

  “All of this, we already know,” came another voice, bored and impatient. Venicone accent, and Matru stiffened on hearing it. “What are we to do about it?”

  “We’ve been preparing for an invasion since Matru returned to warn us that this Caesarion would surely mount a retaliatory strike for our interference in the affairs of the continent,” the lead druid, Minconis, replied.

  “Which hasn’t materialized,” the Venicone replied, pushing forward. As he did, Matru recognized him—Necto, heir-apparent to the Venicone chiefdom. “A phantom invasion to go with the Caledonian love of a good tale.”

  “He’ll come,” Matru replied stolidly. “As I said, he’s cautious. He had a rebellion on his eastern flank that his step-father had to crush—“

  “And who would be this step-father, now? Who would follow into Caesar’s bed?” Necto cracked, making the crowd laugh.

  “Marcus Antonius,” Matru said, clearly and distinctly, and the crowd went silent. They knew that name from the Roman invasion of continental Gaul. “Now married to Caesarion’s mother, Cleopatra. Caesar’s widow. Now that the rebellion in the east has been crushed, and the Cantabri have fallen, the only hope we have is that something will distract Caesarion from dealing with us, if we’re not ready to present a united front against him and his armies.”

  Mutters from the crowd. Many of these tribes were traditional enemies. Matru personally loathed the Venicones; they’d taken him and his sister captive when he’d been twelve and she’d been ten. He’d survived their torture. She hadn’t. But he was a druid now, and stood for all his people, not just his native Caledonii.

  They broke into smaller groups, arguing the best course, as usual. Matru sighed and walked away; he’d done his best. His feet crunched through the cap of snow now blanketing the dead grass and he came to a halt, putting a hand on one of the stones of the great dance. Letting himself feel the earth here. The power humming under the upper layers of soil. What a few of us could do here, if we made a stand . . . . would it be enough to turn the tide of Rome? Or will they push north, and north, until even my people’s Forest is in flames?

  A hand touched his elbow, and he turned, startled. A woman stood there. Green eyes, red hair—from one of the eastern regions, most likely. “How did you escape?” she asked, smiling. “You left out that part of the tale.”

  Matru shrugged. “I gave them my word I’d not try to escape for a year and a day. On the night after that, we were still in the mountains of Hispania. One of their forts—what they call a castra. I opened the earth and let the waters below come up. They were most surprised by the geysers of hot water spouting everywhere. Mud and sludge and smell of sulfur, panicking animals. While they were all occupied with the flood, and under cover of darkness, I walked out the front gate and summoned a spirit. By the time they looked for me—after quite some time spent, I think, wondering how they had offended their god of the underworld—I was long gone, on a mount that needed no rest.” He clenched his hands unconsciously on the knife scars that he’d made to summon the spirit with his own blood. That particular bargain to the kelpie of the Durius river had cost him a year of his life—but the spirit had run him the entire length of the river bed in a single night, leaving him hundreds of miles from Caesarion’s camp, soaked to the skin, and deeply chilled.

  She nodded, her eyes filled with deep sympathy. “I’m Sulicena,” she introduced herself. “Priestess of Ceridwen. Also, daughter of Nynniaw of the Cantiaci.” The name was a shock; Nynniaw supposedly had fought Julius Caesar in single combat. And not only had he survived, but he’d stripped the Roman general of his sword, which to this day, Nynniaw carried. Sulicena touched his face, now, lightly. “Tell me, did you like this Caesarion? Respect him?”

  Matru closed his eyes, trying not to enjoy the sensation of her fingers on his face too much. “He has honor,” he told her somberly. “And I can’t help but respect a man with that much power. But if he comes here—for all that he talks of philosophy and learning and trade? His people will demand fire and war and blood. It’s how they honor their gods. It’ll be the end of everything we’ve built here. Our ancestors, part of this land since time began, will cry out, but there’ll be none of us left to hear them.”

  “So what do we do? Surrender to his mercy—as much as he can offer us?” She snorted.

  Matru shook his head. “No. We fight him with every last breath we have. Till the land is stained with our blood. Make their wounds too painful for even Rome to stomach.” And pray that they break before we perish.

  ______________

  In Rome, Livia Drusilla, widow of Octavian and current wife of Agrippa, sat on a couch in the triclinium of her new husband’s home, her face rigid as she listened to her guests speak. Most were all of the optimates—the old, good families, with whom she’d maintained such tenuous connections after her d
ivorce from her patrician-born first husband and remarriage to Octavian, whose family had been so recently ennobled at Caesar’s hands. “It’s disgusting,” she said flatly, drawing everyone’s attention for a moment. “Even here, in my dear Agrippa’s house, I see that some of you are wearing kohl around your eyes, ladies. What happened to Roman virtue? What happened to holding the line against the decadence of the east?”

  Poppaea, one of the women so addressed, reached up to touch her face, a little abashed, but then laughed it off. “It’s just a style, Livia, darling,” she told the older woman lightly. “Ever since Caesarion married Eurydice, Egyptian fashions have been quite the rage. I don’t see myself wearing a kalasiris, and those enormous necklaces are simply ostentatious displays of wealth, but a little kohl to set off my eyes? What’s the harm in that?”

  Livia felt her lips harden, and felt Agrippa, her husband, ease away from her on the couch. “What’s the harm?” Livia snapped. “It’s not Roman. You let in one thing, half a dozen others will crawl under the door. And by accepting a fashion started by that incestuous harlot, you intimate that you accept her.”

  Another woman raised her cup, murmuring, “Actually, the fashion started over twenty years ago, Livia, dear. When Caesar first brought Cleopatra to Rome.”

  Fury can’t be maintained for long. Fury exhausts. Fury dies. What’s left in its wake are the banked embers of loathing and hatred, contempt and prejudice. Livia nearly choked on the black tide of her own bile at the mention of the name Cleopatra, but paused before she spoke. Pressed her fingertips to her forehead, and finally said, her voice weary and filled with a kind of sad wonder, “Has it really been so long since Caesar brought his Egyptian concubine to Rome? Has it been so long since he forced the Senate to allow his divorce, and made them recognize the house of Ptolemy as citizens for services to Rome—services in his bedchamber, more like.” She sighed. “Has it been so long since he made a half-breed bastard his heir, and all Rome stood by and allowed it? Has it been so long since that same bastard murdered my late husband, my dear Octavian, and again, Rome stood by? Has it been so long since that same half-breed, murderous bastard married his own sister, and all Rome applauded?” Her voice rose with each question, reaching a crescendo by the end—a precisely calculated oratorical effect. Livia was at her best when she’d rehearsed her speeches. And this one, she’d rehearsed for several days.