The Worm in Every Heart
But this was no Roma, nor they Romans, for all their rapt devotion to their conquerors’ ideals. This was elsewhere, beyond Empire’s reach, beyond even the shadow of the Wall itself. Roadless ruin and darkness. Trackless waste.
Arcturus felt the wet cold—ever-present, never-escapable—begin to seep up through his bones towards his heart, and shrugged his wolf-skins closer. He turned back for the fire-pit, veering to where the seer-girl lay tethered at its outermost edge: Pale and still, her fine-boned wrists and ankles strung with gut, under a smoky blanket of ash-blackened spindrift.
She had refused to tell her tribe’s true name—or her own, for that matter. They had dragged her by her pale hair from a stone beehive in that last village, a skull-clogged dirt-trap full of blood-mess and hanging herbs that gave a heavy, fragrant smoke when Lucian—Arcturus’ numericus second, native-born himself, though better-tamed than most—fired them with his torch, almost as an afterthought.
‘Tis sacred, that’s what, he had said, his patois-inflected Latin even harder than usual to understand, as he rooted through the debris with the butt of his spear. A holy place for gods to speak through—through here, through . . .
Pointing: . . . her.
Our gods? Arcturus had asked. Only to see Lucian give an all-purpose shrug, his blue-tattooed cheeks glistening in the herbs’ light. And reply, without much (apparent) interest—
. . . gods.
The girl bore similar marks, as they all did—even Arcturus, for all that he kept his Legionnaire’s SPQR hidden beneath one shoulderplate: Light wounds rubbed with ash or woad, a charcoaled thread sewn beneath the skin and left to heal, uncleaned; permanent grey-blue lines bracketing the line of the girl’s nose, circling out over her nostrils to spiral beneath her eyes.
Those pale, pale eyes.
Arcturus reached down and shook her roughly, by one nude shoulder—cold white skin, dappled with dew. “Do you
live yet, barbarian?” he asked, slitting her hands apart. “Come back to me now, before I take mind to do your body some injury.”
A long shiver took her, from heels to head. She bent back, bow-taut: Damp skin flushing like a caught eel’s, as her absent spirit poured back into her. Her “fetch,” Lucian had termed it.
We’ve the corpse, but she goes out anyroad, coming to call. She’s sent for by those she serves, and ‘tis her fetch what answers.
Her daimon, you mean? Her soul? A stolid, minimal shrug. Why call it ‘fetch’, if that’s all?
Lucian laughed, shortly. Ask it tha’self, magistere. When it comes to FETCH thee.
In Roma, as Arcturus remembered, the gods only spoke when spoken to. Oracular justification of policy. Reward for public service. Deities were twenty a sesterce, the Pantheon stuffed to bursting with them: Borrowed, stolen, made up fresh from scratch to suit every purpose under heaven.
This one, though—she might look young in the body, this one, but she was sworn to old gods indeed. He had seen them look from her eyes, and laugh at him; felt their hands on him directly, now and always, more intimate than rape. Their invisible touch steering him here and there . . . softer, and more full of febrile activity, than a dead dog’s belly by any given paved, spear-straight, Roman-laid road’s side.
It was no great mystery, to loose your soul and bid it do secret business. There were witches in Roma, too.
Opening her eyes, now, as she rubbed—weakly—at her bruise-banded wrists: Faint rim of bloodshot cilia, fire-caught iris pale as dirty snow. Whispering—
“She hears tha, Roman.”
“Arcturus.”
“A, Roman. Tha.”
“Speak true Latin, slut,” he ordered her, yet again, freeing her feet likewise. Then: “Did you see our path?”
“A, Roman. She sees.”
“You’ll show us where it leads, then—and truly, understand? Or I’ll cut your cords.”
“She shows tha, a. As She shows she.”
“As . . . your goddess . . . shows you?”
“A, Roman. ‘Tis lore-ful, this. She takes she out-body, into dream. Sends she down.”
“Down where?”
The girl gave him a grin—bloody lip-twist, complete with rim of broken teeth. All at once, Arcturus wanted to shove his tongue between them and let her bite down, abrade him with every (currently) hidden part of her filthy body. Watched as she reached up under her sodden twill skirt and rummaged, then drew her hand out and sketched a spiral in her opposite palm: Wet red, dark against her dirty grey-white skin. Juice of her split fruit, her open wound.