Leaning close, almost close enough to taste her gamy breath, while the toe of his sandal shifted to dig in hard just below her voicebox. Close enough to see her pale eyes flicker to him with one last wet flash, the tail-end spark of her earlier accidental deification: Blank, cold, silver. Impenetrable as mercury.
(Unnatural creature!)
“Look behind tha, Roman.”
Behind, where the fog was already rolling away to disclose a cave’s open mouth: Cracked chalk lips set in lichen-clad stone, bracketted by the same blue spirals as either pair of her own. And inside, a dropping off, a falling away; gentle but fatal, downwards into darkness.
A slope whose tilt struck the same angle—exactly—as the seer-girl’s bloodied grin.
Lucian, always prepared, had already lit his lamp. Now he stepped forward, lifting it, to show the others where best to make their entrance. They slipped inside one by one, leaving he, Arcturus and the girl alone together.
And: One must keep to one’s fides, Arcturus found himself thinking, automatic as drill. When a cohort steps so bravely into the very inmost heart of their former error, the very least their commander may do is to not hang back—not to show fear or hesitance, but discipline and consistency. To set an example.
To be Roman, without dispute, even in the face of all that is not—can never be—Roma. Not even if it wants to.
(If it does, indeed.)
Behind them—forgotten, for the moment—the girl was levering herself, shakily, to her feet again; Lucian handed his lamp on to the last man in and turned back, frowning, to see why his magistere was so slow in joining them.
“Wilt come?” he asked, finally. “’Tis an old-folk stopping-place, that’s what; where they as chasing we kennel their goods under Goddess’s protection, so can’t stay out here, no-wise, with suchlike out to track us. But down-a-ways, in cave-heart, that’s where we’ll doubtless find what waits thee—”
The man meant his words to be comforting, Arcturus supposed, though their construction was anything but. For all his fine sentiments, however, he found himself locked fast right where he was: Eyes on the cave, unable to pry them free long enough to answer. Frozen core-deep in the knowledge that places such as this, legendarily, had always been what the route to his Land of the Dead was supposed to look like.
With more confidence than he felt: “Yes. Of course.”
Lucian gave an odd little mouth-twist at that, neither happy nor disappointed—took the girl’s dirty hand in his own equally filthy paw, with quite unnecessary delicacy, then moved aside to let her through.
“Lead on,” he told her, rather than ordered; the girl just nodded, face set, impassive as ever.
But oh, Arcturus knew, that was never the way to deal with her, or any of her kind—closer to Lucian than he would ever be, in the final, most depressing analysis. Her with her bent head, her empty face, her lying, broke-toothed mouth: The least trustworthy guide he ever could possibly have picked to put his faith in, here beyond Wall and camp alike, not to mention that straight-sketched road-to-be which had taken him—along with those he led—away from it . . .
But this place had no roads at all, not that such as he or his former masters could travel. And when no place is paved, then everywhere is road—a mapless marsh of
false turf over cold, wasting depths, where anything can happen.
The girl looked back at him, once, over Lucian’s shoulder—an obvious challenge, albeit unspoken: See how your tamed dog comes to my whistle? Much like you, sniffing up under my skirt at all hours; you, always grinding my face into the dirt even while you dig grave-deep between my legs, so as not to risk catching your own fear reflected there.
A-true, Roman?
Not her voice, surely, so clear and plausible, another mocking echo within the confines of his increasingly-haunted head. But, perhaps—
—Hers?
Impossible to deny, either way, leaving him only two potential courses of action to pursue or discard; Arcturus tapped gladius-hilt to steady himself, and found it unyielding as ever. For though the Gods might be silent, yet his blade stayed sharp, his resolve firm—he would not be beaten, not now. Not even here.
So he followed her in, and down.
* * *
And now, down here in the deep, the dark . . . here in the Place of Skulls, the Goddess’s own Grove, where meat hangs headless to ripen for her hogs, and the fruit of her worshippers’ efforts lies everywhere in irregular, dun-glint, empty-socketted piles . . .
Down here near a rock pool lined with the same stones they’ve travelled so far to find, careless wealth heaped high and calcite dripping white in folds around its rim, a cruel blind eye surrounded by stalagmites carved so that stroking their ridges produces a weird, rasping kind of music—oh, and by a veritable forest of heads on sticks, too: Three or four to a spear each, some fresh, some mummified, their jawbones left flapping by sinew in the cave’s black no-wind. Some yet recognizable, also, for all that the only light revealing them comes from Lucian’s lamp’s pitiful, guttering flame.
Cairn-gorms and “grove-stones,” an equal treasure, equally sacred: Both taken in battle, as honor to the Goddess. Run the one through your fingers and they click wetly, soft as old bones. Raise the other to your ear and they whisper, like shells.
Here is where she struck him down with one blow, almost as though mimicking his attack in kind: Her small, single hand like a hammer, heavy enough to crush two planks together and make a crucifixion of them. Where she turned on him in full warp-spasm, the hero-halo breaking from her head to rend the darkness around them with an awful, pallid haze, her neck-muscles puffed and rigid like ropes, veins writhing up and down her naked limbs. Where her face first took on the glare and rictus it still wears, so utterly other—that of an actor’s mask, the Oracle at Delphi, a Bacchante in full frenzy.
Maiden become mother become crone, become all three in one, all one in three: Proserpine, Hecate, the Gorgon on the shield. She become She, at long, long last.