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Chapter 29 - The Spoils

Even when their defeat was indisputable some Gauls fought on, and not until dusk was the town declared pacified. Disarmed warriors were driven into the campus martius, women and children into the high town forum, the market square.

Pierrette did not think any Romans would get much sleep that night. Almost a third of their force stood guard over the captives, or on the walls and at the broken gates: the countryside was dotted with outlying Gaulish camps, and there were a dozen other oppida—though none as strong as Entremont, except Heraclea with its Greek walls.

Already, Calvinus pored over his maps of the Rhodanus Valley. Was he just planning the rest of his campaign—perhaps against the Vocontii, the Allobroges, the Calvarii who claimed much of that fertile plain—or was he envisioning the future Roman Province as Pierrette had described it: the cities marble-clad jewels pendant on great aqueducts that spanned rivers and chasms, and tunnelled under mountains, bringing fresh mountain water to splash in their fountains and shimmer in their pools? Or was he building, in his fertile mind, a villa of golden stone, red tile, and black basalt cobbles where he would keep his own jewel—his black-haired Ligure mistress—for those times when he was not in Roma?

Pierrette and Guihen wandered the streets that war had rendered once again unfamiliar. She carried a lead tablet with the consul's name and seal. Without that, the soldiers would have confined her with the other women and children, to await an iron collar—the legion's smiths were working through the night to forge those, and already a train of wagons was being loaded in Massilia with chains to link those collars together. Massilian, Iberian, and Italian slave merchants, who had awaited the outcome of the battle in the safety of the Greek city, were already arriving on lathered horses to have first pick of of the human spoils.

In coffles of fifty, the entire population of Entremont would be marched to their new homes: the slave quarters of Massilian nobles and Roman senators, of Campanian farmers and Etruscan industrialists, or to the benches of the great galleys that kept the Mare Nostrum, "Our Sea," free of pirates and foreign adventurers.

Pierrette and Guihen listened from the shadows as off-duty Romans tried to make sense of the last two days, especially the Battle Between the Gods. Those who had seen it firsthand argued with those who had not, and against the latter's skepticism they used ever-growing exaggeration until Teutatis stood higher than the sun itself, and Taranis became as broad as a mountain. As the imagery became more preposterous, the countering skepticism also intensified, and "explanations" proliferated: red-haired Teutatis had been the flames of the burning nemeton, and black Taranis a whirlwind, a cyclone that dropped from the storm clouds to quench the fire. "Thus," Pierrette told Guihen, "are legends born—and thus they also die. I wonder what my friend ibn Saul will make of this, when he reads what I will write?"

"Ask me later," Guihen said with a bemused grin. "I haven't met him yet."

Pierrette already knew what ibn Saul would say. There was no place in the scholar's universe for gods of any kind, but he would gladly envision fires, storms, even cyclones that reached down from the clouds to put them out.

"Where are we going now?" asked Guihen as Pierrette pressed upward into the high city.

"The baking ovens," Pierrette answered. "I am about to confirm for once and for all that I am really here, not in some suspended state in a Roman bath centuries away, or on a cold hillside among the beech trees." Guihen did not understand, but he followed, and he obligingly pushed the stone lid from the dolium and observed with Pierrette that the silt at the bottom of it was not smooth, but showed signs of disturbance—as if someone had struggled there, and had left a footprint just the size of Pierrette's own.

"This means I was in in there," she said, "and that I got out through . . . the Otherworld . . . and thus that I really am here, now."

"I could have told you that," said Guihen, who thought her reasoning convoluted, and perhaps mostly wishful thinking at that.

"I know," she said, sighing. "Seeing is believing, as I have often been told."

* * *

They caught a few hours' sleep in the anteroom of some nobleman's abandoned house, on sooty cushions that reeked—as did everything in the high city—of smoke and cedar oil. Several brown chickens pecked distastefully at oily, sooty insects in the dirt and cobbles just outside.

At dawn, when they tried to get out of the shattered main gate, Massilian sentries stopped them. The Massilians could not read Latin—or, most likely, Greek either—and Pierrette's tablet was only a sheet of lead, to them.

"I need a hot bath," Pierrette pouted. "Can you get us out of here?"

"All the gates will be guarded and even most Romans can't read. Unless there's a tribune handy to read your tablet . . ." They returned to the house where they had slept.

"Look!" exclaimed Pierrette. She pointed at the chickens.

"What?"

"That hen. Can you catch her?"

"I'm not hungry. Are you?"

"No. I don't want to eat her. I want you to catch her. I think that is Penelope."

Guihen looked at her head as if she'd gone awry. "And I suppose the rooster over there is Odysseus."

"You don't understand. I want to get out of the main gate, and the guards won't let us, and . . ."

"You can't bribe them with a chicken—or maybe you can if you bake it first, with a bit of garlic and some crocus pollen from the kitchen over there . . ."

"The Guihen I knew as a child had . . . has? . . . a white hen. When he stroked her, he became invisible—or at least he came to resemble a tamarisk or a feral olive tree, or a . . ."

"That hen will not be hatched for centuries. And I can already `become' woodbine, when I need to."

His obtuseness frustrated her. "That is a white hen. It is the first white hen I have seen here, where all are brown. It is a sport, a unique thing, and I'm sure that is not a coincidence. That hen is Penelope, and you must catch her, or I will never get my bath!"

Guihen sighed, and got to his feet. "Here, bird," he cooed as he stalked the hen. "Cluck, cluck. In Chicken, that means `I have a nice juicy worm for you.' Cluck, cluck."

The hen, ignoring him, pecked among the stones. When Guihen got close, the other birds scurried and fluttered out of reach, but the white hen, now with a hefty beetle in her beak, merely looked annoyed. When Guihen picked her up, she settled in the crook of his arm, even though he had lied to her, and had no juicy worm.

"She is a lovely creature," Guihen said. "Soot doesn't even stick to her feet." He stroked her back and, briefly, Pierrette thought that Guihen became just a bit soft around the edges, like an ink drawing left in the rain.

"Listen carefully," she commanded him. "This is what you must say to her." She spoke words in the forgotten Hittite tongue, which was a little like Greek, but only a very little.

"I can't say that. Why can't I just say `cluck, cluck, squawk,' which, in Chicken, means . . ."

"Be serious! It is a spell. It will make people look past you, and see only a bush, or the stones of the wall you're leaning on. You must learn the words."

Guihen sighed again. He was getting quite good at expressing tired, condescending, skeptical, patient tolerance that way, without having to utter a word. When Pierrette repeated the phrase, he mimicked it almost perfectly, and that time she was sure his image wavered and she could see the mortar lines of the wall behind him, right through him.

The second time . . . he was gone, for a moment. But she could still hear him: "My hands! My arm. They're gone! What have you done to . . ." Then he was back. "Ah. There they are. I could feel them, but I couldn't see them. It gave me quite a fright. How can I be expected to do anything, in that condition? How can I go anywhere if I don't know where I am? I think your spell is more trouble than it's worth."

Pierrette giggled. "You don't need a mirror to pick your nose! And you don't look at your feet when you walk—or when you do, you bump into trees, like yesterday."

"That was different! I was watching out for twigs that would snap if I stepped on them."

She made a mental note to remember to teach him how to feel for dry twigs with his toes, as the hunter Aam had taught her, long ago, and to push them aside before putting her weight down. Being invisible would be useless if he made as much noise as a trotting horse.

"The spell worked, though. You'll get used to it. Now hold my hand, and let's get out of here. We'll be at the camp in hardly any time at all."

* * *

Steam arose from the warm water. Pierrette pillowed her head on her folded clothing—clean clothing, her blue skirt and a pretty, embroidered, cream-colored chiton salvaged from the noble house where she had napped, and her sagus, recovered from the woods near the Porta Praetoria on the way back. A nap sounded good, right now. . . .

* * *

"You did it, didn't you? I told you I'd be thanking you—but not yet, I'm afraid. You still have something to do."

Pierrette's eyes snapped open. This goddess was just as annoying as the other one, the one who had—in her own circuitous way—sent her here. Why couldn't she just sleep, in this lovely warm pool? Was there always something else to be done? "You mean sleep with Calvinus, as I promised, and lose the ability to perform even the simplest spell?"

"That will be as it will be. I'm talking about my people—your friend Kraton and his family, and the others, who torched the nemeton for you, and brought that upstart Teutomalos down to size. Where are they now?"

Pierrette sat up abruptly, splashing hot water over her fresh clothes and the goddess's skirt. "I forgot! Where is Calvinus? I must tell him . . ."

"He's on his way here. Listen. You've been sleeping for hours. Legio II is already back, the oppidum is empty, and everything there is aflame. Three thousand collared slaves are stumbling down the road, and will be here before you can dry off and get your clothes on."

Pierrette pulled herself from the pool, and wrapped her skirt around her waist without bothering to towel herself with her cloak. She pulled the chiton over her head and, belatedly remembering the resolution she had made the last time, backed toward the door, keeping the goddess in sight.

"You won't figure it out," the red-clad woman said, laughing indulgently. "You never will, until you're a goddess yourself. Go ahead! Watch both doors. You won't see me leave."

Pierrette backed out, and shut the door. She wedged a stone under it, and though she couldn't see the far door, she could see the approach to it. Now if she quickly dashed to that end, and opened it before anyone could push the other one open . . . then she, too, laughed. "Until I'm a goddess too? Is that a prophecy? I should ask you to define `goddess,' but would you comply?"

No one answered her. She walked away without looking back. Goddess, sorceress, masc, or ordinary girl, that future she had not lived through, and thus had not seen. She would do what she had to. Even if she fulfilled her promise to the consul, she still had her dream of darkly handsome Minho, of two ivory thrones at the edge of the stormy sea, and that had not yet come to pass. Perhaps it was indeed a child's fantasy, and it never would. Perhaps otherwise. But Kraton was as real as anything in this strange universe, and the thought of him, of his wife Chiomara, his daughter Onomaris, with iron collars about their necks, was more than she could bear.

* * *

The first coffles of newly enslaved Gauls had arrived in front of the Porta Praetoria. They were silent, exhausted from the march from Entremont, their feet bruised, their necks chafed raw. Even the babies in their mothers' arms only whimpered.

Calvinus and his tribunes stood in the gateway, in the shade of the timbered towers. Pierrette walked up to him, and he smiled, and put a proprietary hand around her waist, pulling her against him. Her own reaction confused her: his affection was genuine, and so was her sense of comfort and security, close against him like that. But so, too, was her despair.

Refusing to surrender to either emotion, she told him how Kraton had agitated for a peaceful agreement with Roma, and had consequently lost his fine house in the high city, his place on the council, and the respect of his tribe.

"Most of the male captives are still on the road," the consul said. "When they arrive, point him out to me." Then he saw something that required his attention, and he left her standing alone.

* * *

"This is Kraton," she said. The Gaul did not speak. His expression was solemn, resigned—no expression at all. How could he know what promise she had gotten from his captor?

"Unchain him," Calvinus commanded. That was easily ordered, not easily done. The single chain was threaded through loops on all fifty collars, and Kraton was near the middle of the coffle. Every prisoner to the end of the chain had to be released before Kraton could be. The chain had to be drawn from twenty collars, before being drawn through his.

"Strike loose his collar," the consul said. A smith was already on hand with a hammer and chisel, and a field anvil spiked to a short, thick log. Calvinus motioned Kraton to kneel. When the Gaul placed his cheek flat against the cold iron anvil, the smith wedged his hardened chisel between the collar's tabs and, with one blow, severed the soft iron rivet. When Kraton stood, the smith, muscles bulging with effort, bent the collar wide. Kraton was again a free man. "How many others stood by you?" the consul asked him. "How many stood by your commitment to Roma?"

"Fifty of us protested Teutomalos's rebellion," Kraton said. "We favored peace, and the chance for free trade. But neither are we traitors—to either side."

"I would not imply it. This woman, whom I trust, has spoken for you, and that is enough. Now tell me, how many others might have stood by their agreement with Roma, but for their fear of Teutomalos and his druids?"

"A hundred of us were banished from the high city when Teutomalos led the revolt, last winter."

"One hundred men. I presume most had wives, and children. Grandchildren too." Kraton nodded, but did not speak. "Then nine hundred seems a fair number to me." Calvinus turned to address the tribunes. "This loyal Gaul will choose nine hundred of his fellows to be freed."

Again, to Kraton: "Choose well. Exactly nine hundred of you will go free to rebuild your town, or to go elsewhere. Nine hundred, including you. Not one man or one woman more—except children too young to grow hair beneath their arms and at their groins."

Kraton's face was now animated by an emotion Pierrette could only surmise, as much despair as elation: how could he choose fairly? How could he say "This one," and not "That one?" And how could he meet the eyes of those he did not choose?

Calvinus had thought everything out in advance, she realized, when a decurion and ten legionaries stepped forward with brushes and buckets of lime mixed with oil, when ten more smiths came up, dragging their anvils and bags of tools. Pierrette watched for a while. When Kraton indicated a particular man, a soldier painted large white circles on his back and chest. When Kraton walked on, other soldiers released the chosen one, and led him to the line of smiths, where his collar was removed. The freed men were ordered to stand apart from the bound, in ranks of ten. Would Kraton allow each man to choose what kinfolk he most wanted freed? Overcome with emotion she could not explain, Pierrette rushed back through the gate, to the dubious comfort of the tent she shared with Guihen.

 

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