She was a killer. He had seen that now. Caratacus was dead these long months past, and they said the killers were led by a woman, and presumably a woman familiar enough with the ways of Rome and Italia to pass without notice. Another woman, bold and quick thinking enough to bluff the soldier who stumbled upon her, had been there when Narcissus died, and had ridden off on horseback afterwards. Ferox tried hard to remember the voice of the woman paid off by Acco and Domitius while he was their prisoner. He did not think she had sounded like the young woman softly sighing in her sleep just a few feet away. Yet if Claudia the Roman and Enica the Brigantian were themselves performances, then perhaps there were other parts she could play just as convincingly. Cartimandua had betrayed Caratacus. Had her granddaughter murdered him?
Ferox had never fought a woman. The closest he had come had been when he and Vindex faced the masked Enica and that had never become serious. He feared having to kill her or any woman. The Silures did not kill women, or children for that matter, for it was seen as unlucky. They took captives on the raids, and the women suffered and became slaves or sometimes wives. It was not the softest of lives, but over time many became as much part of the tribe as those of the blood. That was if they realised that being of the Silures was to be of the finest people in the world, the only true people.
His instincts revolted at the thought that he might have to kill a woman, or hand her over to let someone else do the job since that was simply a cowardly way of doing the same thing. All boys born to his tribe were bound by bans against doing certain things. These were secret, known only to them and whoever had prophesied their fortune after their birth. He was bound never to harm a woman, child or creature from the deep sea. His soul, his very essence and certainly his power as a man would decay and crumble if he violated any of these taboos. The one about the sea creatures was easy enough, and the others fitted the beliefs of the Silures, although he suspected these were rare as he had never heard of any past warrior of his tribe bound in the same way. He wondered whether Acco was the one who had given him such a strange fate. After so many years as a Roman, Ferox should probably have dismissed all this as mere superstition. Yet not long ago he had seen the Mother break her oath and die moments later. There was so much about the world the Romans – or even the Greeks with all their cleverness – could simply not understand.
He must have slept in the end, for Vindex’s snoring woke him with a start. The sky was clear, the stars beginning to fade, and dawn not far off. Enica was gone, so he rose and went to find her. It was good to move to shake off the chill and stiffness of the night. He found her easily, standing straight, her heavy cloak pulled tightly around her. For a moment he thought of one of those statuettes of Ephesian Artemis that he had seen many Romans from the east carry with them. She was staring out across the valley at the high peaks in the far distance. Some still had snow on them from the last winter.
Enica smiled. ‘You came at my summons. Good.’
‘I just woke up, my lady. Vindex’s snores would wake a stone.’
‘Just chance, you think.’ She had coiled her pigtail and piled it on top of her head, making her almost as tall as him. It was a style he remembered Brigita using. ‘Have you become so much the Roman?’
He did not answer.
‘You know who my grandmother was, and you know of her power. Do you know of her grandmother? No. She was Mandua, daughter of Manubracius, King of the Trinovantes, at least until Cunobelinus defeated him. You know of him, at least, the father of Caratacus, although from all I hear the son was the greater of the two, though the father was great enough. I liked Caratacus, although of course I only met him when he was very old. We spoke of Britannia and he liked that, and I joked with him and he told me I was a naughty child and that next time if I did not behave he would spank me.’ She laughed. ‘I was so sorry to hear that he had passed.’
That could mean anything and nothing, and Ferox let her talk.
‘Mandubracius was ally of Julius Caesar in his war against Cassivellaunus. Heard of them?’ She pulled a face that was pure Claudia the Roman. ‘At least you must have heard of Caesar?’
‘I have.’
‘Silures.’ She shook her head. ‘My family say that Caesar took a shine to Mandua. That was his way, they say, and of course she was a beauty because all the women in my family are beauties. Soon afterwards she was sent north to marry the high king of the Brigantes – he was only a man so his name matters little – and at the end of the year she gave birth to a daughter.
‘My brother believes that the girl was the daughter of Caesar and not Mandua’s husband, so that we are of the line of Caesar himself.’
‘And what do you believe?’
‘I do not believe; I know. Some of Mandua and Cartimandua is reborn in me, each of us a different part of the same soul, and we see things that others do not. Caesar was my ancestor, and that is honourable enough, if of little consequence compared to being part of them.’ She reached up and plucked two pins from her hair, letting the ponytail drop down behind her back. ‘I know other things as well.’
‘We ought to rouse that snoring ox and tend to the horses. It will be time to leave very soon.’
‘You are mine.’ Enica took hold of her braided hair and toyed with it. ‘You are mine, prince of the Silures and centurion of Rome, as surely as if I were to tie you with my hair. It is the will of the gods. Your soul kneels to mine. I shall have to think what to do with you, shan’t I?’
Ferox was in no mood for more games. For all the confidence in her voice, this woman had seen just twenty-one summers. ‘Shall we go?’
Enica shook her head again. ‘Silures. So used to hiding the truth that they often cannot see it when it stares them in the face. Very well, let us go. But do not forget what I have said.’
Ferox bent his knees as if to kneel, then stopped and shrugged. He strode away and did not look back.
XIX
‘TWO,’ VINDEX SAID softly, giving a big smile. ‘One on either side.’
Ferox rubbed his face and grinned in return. ‘Five. Two on the left, one high up on the right and the other two behind those boulders near the base. Three have been following us since dawn.’
Vindex patted his horse’s neck. ‘What colour eyes have they got?’
Claudia Enica stared at the narrow defile. The setting sun sparkled for a moment on something metal in the heather up on the right. Hours before they had come across the track left by her brother’s men. It was almost a day old. They had followed because for a while it offered the easiest route down. For two miles they had gone along a valley that grew narrower and narrower until it came to this gap, with steep, heather and rock covered slopes on either side. It was an obvious place for an ambush, so obvious that Ferox doubted even a Silurian child would use it, but the Ordovices were not the wolf people.