The Triumphant, page 18
The wagon was runaway, and there was no stopping it.
My own horse pounded along behind the mount I’d appropriated, running full out even though he was riderless, because there was nowhere else to go but forward. Soon there would be no room for the horse I was on. The only thing for me to do was to switch mounts again—this time to the yoked wagon horse running beside me. The steep walls of the pass soared up on either side, closer and closer. I hitched my legs up under me and leaped—
Just as two more arrows split the air.
The first missed. The second laid a fiery kiss along the top of my shoulder, the razor-sharp point slicing through the fabric of both my cloak and my tunic and carving a searing gash in my flesh. The sudden bloom of pain made me twist midair and overshoot my target. I slewed across the draft horse’s broad withers and barely managed to grasp a handful of harness before tumbling off the other side and down between the two galloping beasts.
“Morrigan’s teeth!” I swore, hanging half upside down, with a clear view of Tanis on horseback, galloping along the top of the valley ridge high above. “Damn it, Hestia! Where are you . . .”
I snarled through my teeth, kicking my feet as I struggled to right myself. After that, there wasn’t much I could do but hang on. Draft horses didn’t exactly respond to the pressure of a rider’s knee and heel.
“Macha . . .” I ground out the first of the three sacred names of the Morrigan, my jaw clenched to keep my teeth from rattling out of my head. “Macha, Nemain . . . Badb Catha . . .” I despaired of the goddess hearing me over the thunder of hooves and wheels. “Hear me, my goddess . . . Help me save my friends. Send me your strength . . . Send me help! Take my blood, take anything you want from me . . . Raven of Battles . . . help me!”
My grip was failing. In another moment I would fall. The horses would falter. All would be lost . . .
And then, the Morrigan answered my prayer.
XV
“FALLON!”
I twisted and looked over my other shoulder to see that Sorcha had thrown a leg out over the front boards of the wagon. Charon was shouting at her to stop, but she ignored him and edged out onto the yoke pole that ran between the horses.
“Fallon!” she called to me again. “Stay where you are! I’m coming out . . .”
I didn’t have much choice but to stay where I was, crouched and clinging to the back of the wagon horse like a burr. My hair, torn from my braid by the wind, whipped into my eyes, and blood was running down my arm from the arrow crease on my shoulder. Sorcha was coming to save me, but the last time my sister had tried anything like the risky stunt she was about to attempt, it had been performing the Morrigan’s Flight in the Circus Maximus for the entertainment of the masses rather than the life and death of her friends. And she’d failed. Fallen. The chariot wheels had rolled over her, and she’d never completely recovered from her injuries.
No, I thought. When I prayed for help from the Morrigan, this is not what I meant.
But the Morrigan sent what help she saw fit. That was not for me to decide. I had asked . . . and this was her answer.
Sorcha . . .
The cloak she wore whirled madly around her, catching at her limbs, and she reached up and tore it from her throat. The wind caught it and spun it up into the sky like a great bird, wings spread wide. Her face a rigid grimace of fierce concentration, Sorcha edged farther out onto the rattling yoke pole. She tilted her head, squinting with her bad eye as if she were having trouble judging the distance between her outstretched foot and the pole. I held my breath. She was Sorcha. My warrior sister. Legend of my tribe and hero of the sands of Rome’s arenas. The accident had been a fluke. Sorcha didn’t even need her eyes, I told myself, she could do this blindfolded. And I almost believed it.
So did she.
She made it almost all the way out to the yoke that tethered the two galloping horses together when suddenly the far horse stumbled—a small misstep, barely a jostle—and Charon cried out in alarm. Sorcha’s arms circled madly in the air as she tried to right herself and she toppled, falling between the two horses, and slamming the side of her head—hard—on the edge of the wooden yoke . . .
Her panicked scream cut short the instant she realized I had her.
And I wasn’t about to let go.
I could feel the cords of muscle and tendons in Sorcha’s wrist beneath the vise-clamp of my fingers as I held on to her with every ounce of strength I possessed. Sorcha’s legs kicked and swung wildly through the air until she managed to gain a precarious foothold again. She steadied herself and looked over at me. Blood from a deep gash at her hairline painted half her face red, running into her dim eye, but she flashed a tight grin.
“There’s a bit of rust on the old sword . . .” she panted.
“But it still has an edge,” I finished for her, grinning back, my face full of horse mane and my own wild hair. “The Morrigan be praised.”
“I’m going to hand you the reins,” she said. “Be ready . . .”
I let go of her wrist, and she dropped into a crouch on the yoke pole. The lathered flanks of the galloping horses, so close on either side of her, heaved like the bellows in a blacksmith’s forge. Teeth gritted, jaw muscles clenched, Sorcha leaned down, fingers splayed and reaching for the trailing reins. Sweat ran from her skin like rain. Her first attempt fell short. So did the second. Then . . . with a cry torn from the center of her chest, she made one last, desperate grab—
Success!
Sorcha flung her arm out, whipping the outside rein up around my horse’s neck, and I caught it, grasping frantically at the leather with sweat-slick fingers. She threw me the inside rein next, and I hauled them up short—gradually, carefully—even as the horse, sensing a guiding hand on the reins again, instinctively, exhaustedly, began to slow. The second horse followed his lead.
The wagon slowed, finally, to a halt.
I looked back to see that the rest of the Dis riders had retreated. Their numbers were diminished by Ajani’s arrow fire, and the narrow valley was no place to stage an attack. With any luck, I thought, we could make it the rest of the way to Cosa before they had a chance to regroup.
The wagon horses stamped and snorted as Cai galloped up beside us, pulling his horse to a rearing stop, then catching me around the waist as I leaned from the back of the wagon horse and fell into his arms. On the other side of the wagon, Charon swung himself down from the driver’s bench and ran to help Sorcha extricate herself from the tangle of harnesses and horses.
“The queen . . .” I gasped into Cai’s chest. “Take me to her.”
He wheeled his mount, and we cantered back over to the middle cart, dismounting to assess any damage or injuries and hoping for the best. My contingent of Amazons remained mostly intact. Kallista sported a blossoming purple bruise along her jawline, and Selene had blood in her hair and at the corner of her mouth, but the other four seemed fine as they clambered to their feet, still surrounding their charge with a protective wall of Amazonian wrath.
At the center of their circle, Sennefer stirred and drew back the voluminous robes he’d thrown like a shield over the queen. Cleopatra sat on the floor of the cart with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms wrapped over her head. Freed from Sennefer’s protective encumbrance, she stood—slowly, but without the assistance of all the hands reaching out to help—her eyes glittering like shards of onyx.
The arrows had stopped raining down, and I silently blessed Hestia and Acheron, as Cai held out an arm to help the queen down from the cart. Cleopatra accepted his help, stepping daintily to the road. She was about to nod her thanks when a heavy groaning sound came from the far side of the wagon. Her wide eyes met mine, and I gestured to stay where she was and circled around to see what had made the noise.
I looked down to see that one of the Dis riders had, it seemed, gotten his cloak caught on the hinge of the wagon’s back board and been dragged for some way behind it. The man lay upon the ground, covered in scrapes and road dust, his arm bent at an unnatural angle beneath him, but otherwise he appeared relatively unharmed. He glared up at me, eyes clouded with pain, chest heaving. When his gaze suddenly shifted, I realized that Cleopatra had followed me and was standing at my side.
“Majesty—”
She lifted a hand to silence me.
Then she walked up to him, her gait purposeful but unhurried, her azure blue cloak flowing majestically in her wake. I watched as she drew a small, jeweled dagger from her belt and cut the fabric of the rider’s cloak, releasing him. He slumped to the ground and she crouched before him, lifting the man’s head up by his hair.
“You know who I am?” she asked.
The man nodded.
“Good,” she said. “Then tell your dark god when you meet him that it was I who sent you to his realm.” Then the queen of Aegypt calmly slit the man’s throat from ear to ear.
A thunderous silence descended upon us all as Cleopatra stood, sidestepped the blood spreading in a pool beneath the body, and handed her dagger to Sennefer so he could wipe the blade clean. As she made her way back to the wagon, he knelt and used the dead man’s cloak to do so. Then he spat on the corpse and, smoothing a crease from his flowing robes, turned to follow after his queen. Cai watched the two of them climb back into the wagon and then turned to me, a rueful expression on his face.
“I understand her anger,” he said to me in a low murmur, “but we could have at least gotten some information out of him before she cut his throat.”
I sighed, nodding in agreement, but it was a rather moot point.
There was nothing for us to do but carry on and hope the message left behind by the queen might deter any of his friends who decided to continue the hunt. Cai and I doubled up on his mount—mine had bolted and was nowhere to be seen, nor was there time to go back to look—and we moved out in short order, continuing on our way toward Cosa.
We brought up the rear while the rest of the caravan rumbled along ahead of us, with Quint riding point. After Cleopatra’s execution of the Dis rider, we’d wasted no time tending to wounds beyond rudimentary bandaging and washing the blood from Sorcha’s face with water from one of the skins we’d hastily filled. There would be opportunity enough for Neferet to work her medical magic later, hopefully. Once we were on board a ship and safely away from the shores of Italia.
Cai’s arms were wrapped around me, and it was tempting to just lean back against his chest and close my eyes as we rode, but I couldn’t relax. Not yet. “I’m starting to worry about Hestia,” I said. “And—”
I was about to say “Acheron,” but then I heard him, hallooing us from a distance. I twisted in the saddle to see him riding down a steep path from the top of the ridge of hills. He was covered in dust and leading Hestia’s mount—her riderless mount—and there were bloodstains on Acheron’s hands and arms. I felt my guts grow cold. His expression was grim, and there was a black-feathered arrow shoved through his belt. Cai pulled his horse to a stop, and we waited until he’d caught up to us.
“I’m sorry,” Acheron said, and pulled the arrow from his belt, holding it out to me. The iron point was stained with blood. “They got too far ahead of me. When I caught up . . .”
The arrow in his hand was like a poisonous viper, and I shrank from it. “Where is Tanis?” was all I could ask. “The archer—where is she?”
He just shook his head.
“You lose some along the way,” Charon had once said to me. It was after Meriel had fallen, saving me from Nyx’s sword. Now calm, steady, capable Hestia was lost. And wry, wintry, methodically dangerous Vorya. I was losing too many.
“What happened?” Cai asked, when I couldn’t.
“I found the girl—Hestia, was it?—on the ground,” Acheron said. “With this arrow through her heart. No sign of the archer. I took the time to pile what rocks I could find over her. You know. To discourage scavengers . . .” He looked at me, an expression of helplessness in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Victrix.”
I nodded, wondering . . . was Hestia’s sacrifice part of the price the Morrigan demanded of my prayer? What more would she ask me to pay? I dismounted and reached for the black-feathered arrow Acheron held. He gave it to me, and I snapped it in two over my knee, hurling its pieces into the scrub with a snarled curse.
I mounted up on Hestia’s horse and turned to Cai. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
* * *
—
We arrived in Cosa to an eerily calm market square. The port settlement, nestled in the harbor below the actual town, was one of those hardscrabble places where everyone kept to themselves, avoiding too much familiarity or even, in most cases, simple eye contact. What I knew of its history was that, never hugely popular due to its relative proximity to Ostia, Cosa had, some twenty years earlier, endured a string of bad luck: an earthquake, a full-scale pirate sacking, and a plague of vermin. It showed. While the forbidding structures of temples loomed over the town from a high hill, down along the shoreline most of the houses and shops were squat, ugly, makeshift structures that looked like they might blow over in a good stiff breeze. The whole place smelled of rancid fish sauce.
The place, Cai told me, was a den of thieves and scoundrels. Perfect for making bargains with very few questions asked. The folk of the town came and went about their business, eyes averted, browsing the stalls and ignoring our wagons. As if it were just any other day, I thought, and not the beginning of the end of the Republic as they knew it. News, it seemed, had yet to really travel as far north as this little seaside settlement. I did notice one or two groups of men—soldiers or men with the bearing of ex-legionnaires—huddled in clusters of urgent conversation.
But word clearly hadn’t filtered out to the general citizenry, and that was cause for relief. Because even here, the plebs had heard of the Aegyptian queen and her sorceress’s sway over Julius Caesar. Word of his death wouldn’t take long to spark the kind of gossipy tinder that could light a bonfire of fear. Or worse, avarice. With her hood pulled far up over her face, Cleopatra was as anonymous as any of us, but for her kohl-rimmed eyes, which stared out from the shadows of her cowl with an intensity a blind man could feel. I sent up silent prayers to the Morrigan and Minerva and Sekhemet that we could just get her aboard a ship without incident.
We rolled through the rutted streets of the town, and I felt like there were eyes watching us from every shadowed doorway. I rode beside the queen’s wagon, where Elka had taken over the reins. She glanced over at me.
“If this all goes south,” she said in a low voice, “I say we just get out of Her Majesty’s way and let her unleash all that wrath she’s carrying around. This place wouldn’t stand a chance.”
I laughed a little, but she wasn’t wrong. I still had the image of the queen cutting that man’s throat in the forefront of my mind. Cleopatra was no wilting lily, that was certain. And I’d heard tales of the terrible things her unfettered anger had wrought in her own country from time to time.
I nudged my horse into a trot and pulled up beside the lead wagon as we reached a shabby wharf that still boasted more than a half dozen vessels at berth of varying shapes and sizes, plus a few more out in the harbor, coming and going. Our caravan rumbled to a stop, and Charon and I exchanged a glance as I dismounted and he swung himself down from the driver’s bench. Sorcha was in no shape to accompany him, not with her head wrapped in a linen bandage from Neferet’s surgeon’s bag, and we decided that—for appearance’s sake—the men should stay guarding the wagons while Charon conducted business. That way we could hopefully maintain the illusion of Charon’s slave trader origins, while in reality trying to secure passage for some fifteen gladiatrices, six Amazons, two ex-legionnaires, a fugitive gladiator, a eunuch, and the queen of Aegypt.
“Shall we?” Charon said, gesturing to the docks.
I loosened my swords in their scabbards beneath my cloak, while I adopted a deferential attitude to him, walking slightly behind as if he owned me. But, as it happened, we didn’t actually have to fight our way onto a ship. Thanks to Charon’s artful persuasion—his “asking politely”—there was a shipmaster in Cosa who was happy to take us aboard for passage. Well, perhaps “happy” was too strong a word.
From where I stood meekly behind him, I craned my neck so that I could hear what passed between Charon and the captain of the large, low-slung merchant galley that was moored directly in front of us. She had the look of a fast vessel, and I’d felt a surge of optimism as we approached. All I had to do was stand by and wait for Charon to work his devious magic. Most of which seemed to consist of him being rather upfront with the captain.
To a point . . .
“You know me, Darius,” Charon was saying. “I deal straight.”
“Aye,” the man he’d called Darius grunted. “Straighter’n most for all you’re a slaver.”
Charon let that go without comment. “Will you allow me and mine the use of your ship and crew?” he asked. “We need transport out of Italia.”
Darius sniffed, rubbing at his ear and seeming to contemplate the request. I could tell he smelled the money in it, in spite of Charon’s deceptively casual demeanor. “Where’re you headed?” he asked.
“South. Beyond that, I’ll tell you when we’re cast off and well away.”
Darius’s eyes narrowed, but I could tell the scent of denarii was strong in his nostrils. “When?” he asked.
“With the next tide.”
