‘Oh, yes,’ Marcellina said bitterly. ‘He’ll look after me. He has to – he’s the head of the family now. Even if he is only thirteen. But now Father’s… gone he’ll have no trouble marrying me off to some cousin or other from the south. He won’t have to give much of a dowry.’
‘Is that what you want?’ Castus asked her.
‘I’m seventeen years old,’ the girl said with a sour irony that startled him. ‘I should have been married years ago. What I want doesn’t matter.’
The rain had eased outside, and Castus got up and crawled towards the low door of the hut. Marcellina grabbed his arm – her touch was unexpected, and shocked him.
‘Where are you going? Don’t leave me!’
‘I need to check on the horse, then do some other things. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Stay here. Don’t go outside.’
‘Take me with you!’
Castus shook his head, tugged his arm away from her and went out into the wet dusk.
It was fully night by the time he returned, and the rain had stopped. He stamped back into the hut and tossed two damp Pictish cloaks down on the floor. One of the cloaks was stained with blood, but he hoped the girl would not notice in the dark.
‘Where did you go?’ she asked quietly.
‘Just along the river. There’s a bend to the north of here where we can cross, but we’ll have to swim with the horse – can you do that? If we wear these cloaks we might pass as Picts till we’re close enough to the walls, then we’ll have to ride hard.’
‘You killed some more of them, didn’t you?’
‘A couple. Hard work – I nearly slipped on the wet ground.’
‘But you’re hurt – you’re bleeding.’
Castus grunted, seating himself against the wall. The second Pictish sentry had gashed his arm with a spear. Marcellina crawled across the hut on her knees and knelt beside him. He could see her face in the shadows, her smooth cheek and the curve of her lips, her large eyes watching him as he tore the ripped sleeve of his tunic from the wound and washed away the blood.
‘I need a strip of your shawl,’ he said, ‘to use as a bandage.’
For a moment she drew back, uncertain, maybe disgusted, but then nodded quickly and ripped at the hem of the shawl. She passed him the torn strip and watched again as he wrapped it around his biceps and tied it, one end gripped in his teeth.
‘Tell me what happened to you, back there at the villa,’ Castus asked her as he flexed his bandaged arm. He saw her flinch at the memory. ‘No – maybe I don’t need to know,’ he added.
Marcellina sat with her knees drawn up and said nothing for a long time, but in the half-dark Castus saw her expression shifting, her lips opening to speak and then closing. He wished he had not asked, but still he wanted to know.
‘They came very suddenly, the Picts…’ the girl said at last. She spoke in a calm, measured voice. ‘We were in the dining room, just lying down to eat, and we heard the shouting from outside. They must have come from the back of the house and surprised the watchman… Mother told me to hide in the large closet.’
Castus saw her eyes closing, her throat tightening. She was gripping her knees in the circle of her arms. ‘I heard… but I didn’t see,’ she said. ‘Mother tried to talk with them. Tried to order them away. Then I heard… I think they killed the slaves first. I was too terrified to think about what was happening. One of them opened the closet door but didn’t see me. It seems impossible – some god protected me…’
Castus touched his brow, and saw the girl do the same.
‘Then I looked out, and saw Mother and Brita the maid dead on the floor. Their clothes were gone, they were… there was a lot of blood. Several others dead, and the roof was burning… I just stayed where I was, hiding. I couldn’t breathe because of the smoke. When I looked again the whole room was on fire, the whole villa… I wrapped myself in a blanket and ran outside…’
‘You were brave,’ he said quietly, and the sound of his voice was harsh and rough compared to hers. She was shaking her head, the pendant earrings swinging.
‘No. Just scared. So scared I didn’t know what I was doing. It was… maybe a day I was hiding in the old bath-house, or two. Then I heard those men outside, talking and laughing. I found the tool, the pickaxe thing… One of them came through the door and I just hit him as hard as I could.’
‘Hard enough to break his spine,’ Castus said. ‘Not bad. And you’d have brained me too if I hadn’t seen the body on the floor and been on my guard.’
‘But there were three of them. If you hadn’t come…’
‘Don’t think about that. Just thank the gods it happened as it did, eh?’
‘How can I thank the gods for anything? My family are dead. My home is destroyed. I have nothing left. Maybe it would have been better if I’d died.’
‘You’re still strong,’ Castus told her. ‘Think about what happens next, not what might have been.’ He felt the same sensation he remembered from their talk in the villa long before, when the girl had made him vow to protect her father. A desire to comfort her somehow, or ease her distress, but no idea how to do it. He felt clumsy, untrained in kindness. Strange, he thought, that he should find killing two men in the darkness quite easy, but talking to a frightened seventeen-year-old girl so hard. Perhaps for other people it would be quite the reverse?
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I promised your father I’d protect you.’
‘You did?’ In fact Castus could not remember if that was the promise he had made – but it was in the spirit of it, he was sure.
‘Yes. So sleep now, and in a few hours we’ll move.’
He spread his own cloak on the floor for the girl, then took the less bloody of the Pictish capes and, wrapping it around his shoulders, lay down on the other side of the hut. His wounded arm stung, but he could ignore the pain.
For a while he lay still, eyes closed, thinking back over what he had seen on his reconnaissance foray earlier: the bend in the river screened by trees, sixty paces, more or less, to the far bank with trees and then flat meadows on the other side. A mile to the walls of the fortress… His mind clouded, dulled by sleep, and he thought he was back in the Pictish hut, waiting for Cunomagla to come and join him. Warmth spread through his body at the recollection. If I die in the next few hours, he thought, will that be the last sensation I remember?
A slight noise, a shuffle and a step from the darkness, and Castus opened his eyes as Marcellina eased herself down beside him. He felt her body against his, her arm wrapping his chest.
‘Let me stay here,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t feel so scared now.’
He made a sound, low in his throat, and tried to resist the urge to move and embrace her. She was unmarried, he reminded himself, and a virgin. She was stunned, and not in control of herself. The girl’s head lay against his shoulder; then she was pressing her face into the hollow of his neck, her breath on his skin.
‘Wouldn’t it be good’, she murmured, ‘if we could just stay like this? Not go back to the city… just go away somewhere safe, into the hills…’
‘We both have our duty,’ he said quietly.
In the darkness he saw her raise her head and look at him for a moment.
‘It’s a shame,’ she whispered. Then she lay down beside him again.
Four hours later, they were riding along beside the river. Willows grew close to the banks, trailing foliage into the slow water, the moon was screened by cloud and in the thick darkness Castus could barely see anything. The river was a moving grey shape to his left, the trees a spreading blackness all around. Behind him, Marcellina rode with her legs astride, like a man, clasping his waist. Both of them wore Pictish capes of dark tanned leather, and Castus had removed his boots and breeches.
The horse moved slowly, ears back, nervous in the dark with the sound of the flowing water. Castus knew this stretch of river well – the soldiers used it for swimming practice – but in the darkness it was an alien and uncanny place, almost supernatural. The willows creaked and hissed as they passed beneath them, and the sound of the river was unnervingly like voices. The spirits of the wood and the water felt close, and not comforting.