Priscus gave him a kindly glance and looked away. "We promised these people peace when we conquered them—least we could do, you’d think, would be to protect them. But we’ll catch up with the bastards that did it, never fear, and teach them not to meddle with Rome. What a pity the gods never invented any other way to civilize the world. Oh well, we could have been turnip farmers; but one way or the other, we picked soldiering for our job, and that’s part of it. Friends of yours, were they?”
"I guested here,” Gaius replied stiffly. "Last spring.” At least his voice was back under control.
"Well, that’s the way the world goes,” Priscus replied. "Here one day and gone the next. But I reckon the gods must have known what they were doing.”
"Yes,” Gaius replied, as much to cut off the man’s homely philosophy as anything else. "Give the order to march; let’s get the men out of the rain as soon as we can reach the next town.”
"Right, sir. Column, form up!” he bawled. "Who knows, maybe the family were all away visiting friends. That’s the way it goes sometimes.”
As they moved on through a gathering mist that was once more turning to rain, Gaius recalled seeing Cynric in the marketplace shortly before leaving Deva; there had been some talk of sending the young man to some college of weapons in the North, so he might very well have survived. The death of a Druid as important as Bendeigid would make some stir. Gaius suspected that his father had sources of information he kept secret. Surely he would know. He had only to wait and see.
Gaius tried to summon up some hope. Priscus was right. The burning of the house did not necessarily mean the death or imprisonment of the people who had lived there. Mairi might well have returned to her home; Dieda was not even a member of Bendeigid’s household, at least not any more. But Eilan…probably it was too much to hope that Eilan, or little Senara, or the gentle Rheis, had survived. At that moment he would not have given the smallest of copper coins for his own career or for the whole of the empire.
He thought, If I had taken Eilan away she would still be living—if I had stood up to my father, even stolen her away…
A sudden memory made his throat ache—the vision of his mother lying cold and white in her sleeping place, and the women wailing over her body. He had wailed with them, but then his father had taken him away and taught him that a Roman does not cry. But he wept for her now, as he wept for these women who had for a little while, made him feel part of a family.
He could not let the soldiers see him cry. He put his cloak over his head and tried to pretend that the tears that rolled down his cheeks were rain.
NINE
"I want my husband.” At midmorning, the day after the birth of her child, Mairi had awakened fretful and demanding. "Where is Rhodri? He would have protected us from those men—”
The roundhouse was warm after the cold outside. Eilan, who was beginning to feel the effects of her own interrupted night, looked at her sister in exasperation and sat down by the fire. It was bad enough that the raiders had driven off all their milk cows, and she had had to slog several miles through the wet woods to borrow a beast so that Mairi, whose own milk had not yet come in, could feed the child. At least the main herds were off in the summer pastures, so her sister was not without dowry if she married again, although Eilan was not heartless enough to speak of that yet.
"The cows would not have been taken if Rhodri had been here!”
"More likely he would have tried to fight the raiders, and you would still—” Eilan bit her lip, appalled at what she had been saying. She had forgotten that Mairi did not know. "Caillean—” She looked at the priestess in appeal.
"You would still be a widow—” Caillean said brutally, bringing the pannikin of warm milk from the hearth and setting it down.
Mairi’s eyes widened. "What are you saying—” She looked up into the face of the priestess and her own grew pale at what she read there.