The Wolves of the North Read Online Free PDF Page A

of tiles, it had been given a roof of reeds. The Gothic guards at the door told them to wait outside the
Bouleuterion
. They waited. A gang of slaves – Greeks or Romans – was working to repair the gymnasium next door. They were overseen by an architect, who in turn was watched by a Goth.
    Ballista stood, feet apart, leaning on the hilt of his scabbarded long sword, head down. Behind him, unconsciously in similar pose, stood Maximus and the Suanian Tarchon. The ruins all around, they looked like penitents of some strange, grim militant sect.
    As Calgacus regarded Ballista, he felt a not unfamiliar stab of jealousy. Ballista had been loved from birth. His mother, of course, but also a fierce pride and affection from his father. Isangrim, war leader of the Angles, had other, older children by other women. Politics, not desire nor love, dictated a man of his position in Germania would most likely marry more than once, sometimes concurrently. His relations had not been good withall his offspring, especially with his eldest son, Morcar. Ballista – Dernhelm, as he was called then – the solemn but affectionate, golden-haired child had been another chance, a chance to make things right.
    Calgacus had never known his parents. He had been too young when the Angle slavers came. A faint, half-recalled woman’s face, a strange tugging at his memory with the smell of a peat fire, that was all he had of a childhood.
    The Caledonian cuffed the jealousy down like an unruly dog. He had been with Ballista since the boy was little more than a babe in arms. The boy had suffered too. It was not Ballista’s fault, none of it. He had always done his best, tried to do the right thing – by the world, by Calgacus. They could not be closer. Once in a while, they talked openly. Usually, the grumbling on one side, the teasing on the other, both masked and expressed their strong affection. Calgacus loved the man he would always think of as a boy, and knew it was returned.
    Calgacus wished he had not made the graceless comment on the boat about freedom. He had been thinking about Rebecca, the Jewish woman, a slave of Ballista’s wife in Sicily. Calgacus had grown close to her. He wanted her freedom; hers and Simon’s, the Jewish boy she had been bought to look after. If they returned from the grasslands, he would ask Ballista for her freedom, maybe marry her. Ballista would grant it, would feel guilty he had not offered it. Old as he was, Calgacus thought it would be good to have a son of his own. He grunted an obscenity. With luck the child would have her looks.
    If they returned from the grasslands and the Heruli … The curse lay heavy on Ballista.
Let him wander the face of the earth … among strange peoples, always
in exile, homeless and hated
. Not just on Ballista.
Kill his sons … all those he
loves
. The Suanian Pythonissa was a hot bitch. You could not really blame Ballista for fuckingher. But what a choice: a priestess dedicated to Hecate. Calgacus had no doubt the dark goddess of the underworld would heed her priestess. You could never tell how, but he had no doubt the curse would play out some way or another.
    The time in the Caucasus the previous year had not been good, and not just because of the curse. For weeks, Calgacus had been besieged by a force of the nomadic Alani in a tiny stone tower, just a few paces across. There had been a few others in that close, evil confinement. Most had endured, the eunuch Mastabates, the young Angle slave Wulfstan among them. But it had done Hippothous no good. By the end, the Greek
accensus
’s interest in the nonsense he called something like ‘physiognomy’ had grown to an obsession. Endless drivel about the eyes as the windows of the soul, peering into your face, him watching you unnervingly in odd moments. It had nearly driven Calgacus mad. After but a few days, he would quite happily have killed the man.
    Hippothous was not the only one the mountains had changed. Little