“To rule, yes. And to protect. From beasts such as you.”
A red light came into her husband’s smile.
“Listen now, and be silent,” he said. “You are the merest shadow of what you were. You are dead. You are alone. Together, we might take this land and everything beyond—if we are quick, and discreet. We may even love each other, in the end. But leave me, knowing nothing, and fear will dog you forever. Your prey will turn on you, and hunt you back into the grave.”
And he brought her face to his, coming even closer.
“You are nothing,” he whispered. “You have nothing. Nothing but me.”
Carola felt behind her, eyes on his, along the curtain and the wall beneath it. Felt until she found her hold—
“Well, then,” she said. “Let us to our union—husband.”
—and twisted aside, ripping the curtain open, flat to the wall as the sun came washing over him in a hot, gold wave. She held rigid, self-blinded, until his screams turned to gurgles.
By sunset, there was nothing left but ash.
* * *
Dark crept in near supper-time, leeching the sky of every color but black. A cold wind blew in from the marshes. Flakes of snow lit and tumbled on its wake, like spindrift. Under the trees, assignations of long standing were kept and made again. Here a fire burned, and naked men and women danced back to back, as a goat in human clothes marked time. Here the Unkind Court rode in their finery, lances garnished with skulls, to hunt a mourning thing forever across the landscape of a thousand dreams. Here the wolves slunk anew from their lair, bound for yet another farm.
And here the captain’s grieving woman, finding her husband dead by Carola’s uprooted grave, cut her throat with the rusted blade of his pike.
Carola sat in state at the tower’s top, ashes blowing about her feet. Behind her, the Hand of Glory still burned. She had turned her chair to face the open window.
And all this is mine, she thought. Everything.
(And nothing.)
The sky dimmed further. A lidless moon rose and stared, without pity, down upon Carola’s victory. Carola stared back . . .
For whatever else befalls, I am still Raum.
. . . as a tear of blood, unheeded, made its slow way down her cheek.
Sent Down
. . . that this, too, was one of the dark places of the earth.
—Jack Conrad.
DIVIUS ARCTURUS MARTIALIS’ bladder woke him, without dignity, well before dawn. Inside the tent an exported slice of Rome lay dozing, all shifting armor-clink and sour-stale sweat: Torc-burnt necks hidden beneath tarnished Medusa-head breastplates, Legionnaires’ badges muffled in sweat-stiff furs, hides, woolen cloaks. The ragged remains of a “cohort” cobbled together from Northumbrian numeri, Romano-Briton infantry recruits trained to fight their own in the service of an Empire too cheap to reinforce their own crude weaponry with more than a used gladius each—an Empire which once took their loyalty for granted, but now barely acknowledged their existence. Arcturus‘ cohort, for all that was worth; not much, nowadays, plainest of plain truth be told. Less, and less . . .
. . . and less.
Outside, meanwhile, Northumbria itself still waited: Slate-grey on black punctuated by intermittent salt-white flare of scraped-bare quartz turf-bed, chalk cliffs grey with fresh snow, darkness still pooled in their open cracks like oil on weather-waxed hide. Wet mist eddying in on every side, erasing the lightening sky.
This godsless, gods-full place. This land where even shadows cast shadows.
Arcturus barely had words enough to tell how he had come to hate it.
Pausing by the foot of his standard, he shifted his kilt to empty himself, and watched a contemptuous curl of steam rise from the resultant puddle. His stomach reminded him just how far the village they had last taken booty from now lay behind them, even as he tried to shock it silent with a quick, reflexive curse, a half-attempted prayer—
Mars Ultor, war’s Avenger, succor me. Look favorably on your faithful servitor. Ancestors, hold me up. Make me able to do what I must, for my men. For my own name’s sake.
Call and response, automatic as breath: Roma Invicta, fraterni!
(Roma Aeterna, magistere!)