The Lion and the Lark Read Free Page B

had put him in this reflective mood.  He didn’t normally indulge in ruminations about the past because he felt like the last leaf on the family tree.  His mother had died of the same affliction as his wife, puerperal fever, the scourge of Roman women, a third of whom died in childbirth.  And now that his father and younger brother were gone, the latter killed serving with Caesar in Cisalpine Gaul, everyone from his early life was dead.  Father, mother, brother, wife and child had all crossed the River Styx before him, and he had buried each one with a coin in the mouth for the ferryman.
         “Would you like something else, master?” Pollux said from the doorway, eyeing Claudius’ barely touched tray.  “Almeria has something special for dessert, honey cakes filled with gooseberries and crushed almonds from Judea.”
         Claudius shook his head.  “Just leave this here.  Maybe I’ll get hungry later.”
         Pollux bowed and disappeared, and Claudius stood again, annoyed with himself for becoming maudlin.  It served no purpose to review his losses.  He told himself again that he had plenty of time to start a new life. 
         And when he got back from Britain he planned to do just that.
     
     
         “You’re late,” Bronwen said to her brother, plunking a plate containing half a boiled fowl onto the table.  “Where have you been?”
         Brettix ignored her, straddling the oak bench before him and reaching for the round loaf of manchet bread sitting alone on a polished wooden platter. 
         “I asked you a question,” Bronwen said, ladling lentil soup flavored with woad into a bowl and placing it next to his plate.  She added a cup of corma , wheaten beer laced with honey, which Brettix seized and drank from immediately.
         “I was trying out some new hunting trails up in the foothills,” Brettix said.
         That meant hanging around the Roman garrison, trying to pick up information and seeking ways to infiltrate it.  Brettix and his friends were all budding spies.
         “Is the Roman troop strength increasing?” Bronwen asked him innocently.
         He shot her a dark look.
         Bronwen sat across from him and picked up her own cup of corma, sipping delicately.  Her portion was diluted to the point of almost eradicating the alcohol.  “The rumor is rampant that reinforcements will be arriving shortly.”
         “Don’t believe everything you hear over the washtubs,” Brettix said scoffingly, cutting a wing from the carcass before him with a small dagger attached by a chain to his belt.  In the flickering light from the tallow candles his set face seemed carved of stone.
         “If you don’t think it’s true why are you scouting the garrison every day?”
         Brettix dropped a naked bone onto his plate and eyed his sister balefully.  “You just mind your own business.”
         “That is my business.  We all want to get rid of the Romans, Brettix, you’re not fighting them alone.  It might help if you talked to me about what you’re doing.  I’m not an idiot, I’ll keep my mouth shut and maybe I can help you.”
         Brettix regarded her skeptically, his ice blue eyes the exact color of their father’s.  His hair was lighter than hers, wheat blond without a trace of red, and he had the height and solid build of his warrior ancestors.  Bronwen knew that he was the catch of the tribe, but she couldn’t help seeing him as her two year’s older brother who had bailed her out of many scrapes until he grew old enough to realize that he was a boy and also a king’s son.  He was therefore too exalted to play with a mere girl, and from then on he was lost to her, drawn into the world of masculine rituals from which she was excluded.  But she was fond of the man he had become, for the treasured memory of the boy he had been.
         “If I need you, I’ll tell you,” he said shortly, reaching