"You should have been more specific," I said wryly.
Her eyes widened and a startled laugh escaped her. "Oh, Bona Dea!" She stifled her laugh with her hands. "It's not funny. But when I saw you, I was so sure…"
"I'm just—"
"I know," Helena said, growing somber. "I do. But it's true, too, isn't it? True and not true. Do you think… do you think the gods always answer our prayers like this? Sideways?"
"Mayhap." I smiled. "That's a good way of putting it."
She smiled back at me; a real smile. It faded, though. "I'd take it back if I could." She rubbed her knees. "If it meant bringing Bartolomeo back."
"It's not your fault," I said gently. "Valpetra's a cruel, greedy man. He wanted Lucca and he was bound to act on it, Helena. Your prayers had naught to do with it."
"Didn't they?" She rubbed harder. "Bartolomeo died because he loved me. I wanted to die that night. I did. But I was afraid, and Valpetra promised… he promised he would spare my parents if I did what he said. So I did." Tears filled her eyes. "Oh gods! I should have let him kill me. If I had any courage, I'd take my own life and join Bartolomeo."
"Helena, no." I knelt on the floor beside her couch and eased her hands into mine. "It would only break your mother's heart. None of this is your fault."
"It feels as though it is," she whispered.
"I know." I nodded. "You'll carry guilt like a stone in your belly because a bad thing happened to you. I don't know why. I don't know why we do that. Mayhap because it's easier than acknowledging that the world can be cruel and unfair, and the gods only answer our prayers sideways at best."
Helena sniffled, but her eyes were intent through her tears. "How do you live with it?"
I sat back on my heels. "You just do. Day by day. It gets easier to bear. You accept the gift of your life with grace and try to be worthy of it." I squeezed her hands. "Does that make sense?"
"Some, yes." Freeing one hand, she touched my bruised cheek, a touch as delicate as the brush of a moth's wing. "You wouldn't be here if you hadn't saved me, would you? I heard about what Valpetra told the D'Angelines who came for you."
I shrugged. "It doesn't matter."
"It does to me." Her face was grave. "I'll try to be worthy of it."
We gazed at one another a moment too long.
Long enough for me to realize I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss away her tears, to soothe the ache in her heart with gentle words. To let her know that love is a trust, a sacred thing, that no debasement can besmirch it, that no betrayal can destroy it. To give her a haven, to offer her protection. Ah, Elua! I yearned for tenderness.
"I should go," I murmured, pulling away.
Her voice broke. "Please, don't!"
"I have to." I stood up, and she followed. "Helena…"
"I know. It's just…" She scrubbed away the marks of her tears with fierce determination, though a fresh onslaught stood brimming in her eyes. "What was it you said about a stunted tree?"
I touched her hair. It felt as silken-fine as it looked.
"Asclepius came to me in a dream," I said to her. "At his temple. We spoke of wounds. He told me to bear the scars with pride. He told me, 'Even a stunted tree reaches toward the sunlight.' You shine very brightly behind your tears, my lady. But I fear this is the only gift we are meant to give one another."
She closed her eyes, new tears falling. "It's enough."
I nodded. "It is."
I felt lighter when I left the Correggio household; all at once melancholy, yet lighter and strange within my own skin. Peace. I was at peace with myself. I hadn't felt that way since I'd left Balm House, healed of the aching wounds of my adolescent desires. The rain-washed streets of Lucca seemed uncommonly beautiful to me. All throughout the city, people were going about their daily chores, striving for normality. They were cold and hungry and frightened, but they were surviving as best they might, quarreling and living and loving. I wished I could protect them all, fold them all within my arms.
A vast tenderness filled me.
I have been blessed in my life, I thought. For as much darkness as I'd endured, there had been brightness, too; brightness beyond telling. If I died here in Lucca, my life would not have been lived in vain.
In the central square, I dismounted. Heedless of the curious glances, I stooped and touched the cobblestones. I bowed my head, my damp hair hiding my face. "Blessed Elua," I whispered, "I am in your hand. If you have sent me here for a reason, let me serve you well. Mighty Kushiel, accept your reluctant scion's prayer. If I may serve as the instrument of your justice, wield me as you will."
There was no answer, only a waiting stillness. Rising, I gazed at the scorched bell-tower. In all the days I'd been here, I'd never dared enter it.
Today, I did.
There wasn't much to see. The interior was gutted by fire with only the remnants of a stair winding its way up the inner walls. The outer walls rose around a hollow shell. There were a few blackened timbers at the roofless top where the bell had once hung. A handful of roosting pigeons took flight as I entered, the clap of their wings echoing in the empty tower.
In the center of the floor, half-hidden by rubble, was the mundus manes.
The circular slab of marble that covered it had cracked in half. No one had disturbed it since the fire. The gap between the two halves was slight, no more than a few inches at its widest. I stood before the mundus manes, gazing at the dark, jagged crevice, trying to imagine what lay beneath it.
An earthen pit or a portal to hell?
If I'd had a torch, I might have dragged aside one half of the broken slab and cast light into that darkness. And I knew, as surely as I knew my own name, what I would see. An earthen pit, dug by human hands. Crawling segmented bugs, scuttling away from the light on a multitude of legs. That, and nothing more.
And yet the hair at the back of my neck prickled.
True and not true.
A thing may be both, I thought. Helena was right. And so I bowed my head once more and offered prayers; prayers to the gods of this place, the Caerdicci lares of family and city and field. Prayers to the honored dead, and prayers to the dishonorable dead. Prayers to Dis Pater, lord of the underworld, and his bride Proserpina. There was no blasphemy in it. When all is said and done, D'Angelines are Earth's youngest children, and we seek to tread lightly on her bosom, honoring the gods of all places.
Mounting the Bastard, I departed.
My sense of strangeness stayed with me. It had settled over my shoulders like a cloak, and I was enfolded in it. Eamonn noted it when we rode on patrol together that night. I was unwontedly quiet, wrapped in my own sensibilities.
"You're in a fey mood," he said.
"Thinking about life," I said. "And death."
Eamonn nodded. "Good to do."
The nights were quiet. Inside Lucca's wall, we rode in uneventful circuits. Outside the wall, Valpetra's small company of cavalry did the same. They rode in shifts, day and night; circling the city to ensure that no one attempted an escape, riding the length of the canal to ensure that we didn't endeavor to sabotage it. Our sentries kept watch to ensure Valpetra didn't launch a surprise offensive and a lookout for any lapse in his men's vigilance. Gallus Tadius had a company of saboteurs at the ready, armed with pickaxes and prying bars. We were poised to carry word at the first opportunity. If the saboteurs could demolish a section of the canal, the river would be diverted to flood the fields outside the city.
But there was no lapse, and at the river, the dam took shape.
I went to see it the day after I visited Helena.
There was a massive pile of rubble where once the acqueduct had flowed beneath the wall. The masons had done their best to construct a solid bulwark, but they were hampered by a lack of building materials. They'd salvaged bricks from buildings in ill repair, cobbling together a graceless structure held together by mortar that refused to set properly in the rain. On top of that, they'd simply heaped as much dirt and debris as they could haul. Whether or not it would hold, and for how long, was anyone's guess.
The sentry on duty, a good-natured fellow named Pollio, let me come atop the wall. Gallus Tadius didn't discourage us from getting a good hard look at our enemy's labors. He reckoned we were better off knowing what we were up against. Some of the men preferred not to know. I wasn't one of them.
It was a dismal view. A steady fall of rain soaked the fire-blackened fields. Beyond lay the river. It no longer cut a path like a silvery ribbon across the plain. Valpetra's men had done exactly what Gallus Tadius had predicted. They'd built a pair of dams flanking the canal and filled in the trench, returning the river to its proper course. The dams were as ugly as our bulwark; uglier, I daresay, built of packed earth and felled trees. Neither one was likely to hold for long.
But they were holding now.
Above the upper dam, the river was rising. It was rain-swollen and angry, forcing paths around the edges of the dam. I could see Valpetra's men scurrying atop the dam's surface, building it higher, reinforcing the sides. Others worked furiously on the lower dam. It didn't need to hold long, not long at all. Only long enough to shunt that first, furious surge of water into Lucca's waiting canal.
"It's coming," Pollio said. "Any day now."
Beyond the river was a forest of tents, sagging in the rain. I thought about Valpetra's men; Silvanus' men. They must be soaked and weary, chilled to the bone. And hungry, too. As miserable as the endless days of drilling and nights of patrol were, at least I was able to retire to the villa where I had a ration of food, a proper roof over my head, and a bed laden with warm, dry blankets. It seemed bizarre to me that unless fate intervened, we'd all be doing our best to kill one another in a fairly short amount of time. After all, we were strangers to each other. I asked Pollio if he found it odd.
He eyed me as though I'd spoken in a foreign tongue. "That's war, isn't it?" he said. "Anyway, you're no stranger to Valpetra. He'll remember you."
"I know," I said.
Every free hour was filled with drilling, now. We rehearsed Gallus Tadius' plan of engaging and falling back. By now, there was no squadron but had developed some degree of proficiency. I had to own, as much as I disliked it, that I took a measure of pride in our progress. We invented friendly rivalries, staging mock invasions of one another's territories. The squadrons acquired nicknames—ours was Barbarus, of course—but we were all part of the Red Scourge. We drilled in the streets, we memorized alleys and byways, and the horn signals that would carry Gallus Tadius' orders. We stashed caches of food and water-skins in the emptied lower stories of buildings, worked out plans for ambushes and pitfalls.
There was a fierce camaraderie in it like nothing I'd ever known. All the men in Barbarus came to know one another in a way wholly outside my experience, at once superficial and intimate. For the most part, I didn't know their histories, their hopes and dreams… indeed, we seldom knew one another's surnames. But I knew that Orfeo wanted revenge for Bartolomeo Ponzi's death and was apt to be hotheaded. I knew that quiet Constantin never flinched at a feint and was a good man to have at your side. I knew that Matius struggled to hold his position when he locked shields with an opponent, and Baldessare could always be counted on for a jest. I knew somewhat about all of them.
All men; ordinary men.
What they thought of me, I couldn't say. At first, there was a mixture of awe and disdain, which seemed to be the common attitude toward D'Angelines among the Caerdicci. And too, word had gotten about that I was a Prince of the Blood, that I had cut off the Duke of Valpetra's hand and he wanted vengeance for it. But after the bout with Gallus Tadius, I did nothing to draw attention to myself and worked without complaint. I found a leather-worker to repair the chin-strap on my helmet. In the rain and muck, one muddy, helmeted conscript looks much like any other, D'Angeline or no. In time, they forgot.
Eamonn, they adored.
Truly, he had a knack for leadership. He was clever, good-hearted, and fearless, and he had a gift for making men like him. No one seemed to care that he was a prince in his own right and half-D'Angeline to boot; he was Eamonn. He won their respect with Gallus Tadius' praise and his own actions, and their affections with a grin. He worked as hard as or harder than any man in Barbaras during the drills, bareheaded in the rain, his red-gold hair plastered to his skull and his loud, cheerful voice calling out orders.
I didn't begrudge him, not a bit. It was a heavy burden. And there wasn't a man among us, myself included, who didn't know beyond a shadow of doubt that Eamonn would be the first to advance and the last to retreat. Betimes, I wished for his sake that he showed a little less valor.
Gallus Tadius did us one kindness, though. There were twenty-four squadrons all told, and Barbarus would be stationed near the rearguard. If the wall was breached and Valpetra's men were engaged, we would be among the last to peel away before the rearguard made its final stand in an effort to halt the enemy. The section of the city Barbarus was to defend lay in the farthest outskirts, backing up against the gatehouse itself.
It was the most safety he could offer us… save, of course, forbearing to execute us for treason if we refused to fight for Lucca.
I thanked him for it anyway.
He gave me one of those long, gimlet stares. He'd gone back to his old ways, going without sleep, and his face had resumed its hollow-eyed, fearsome aspect. There was no trace of Lucius behind the mask. "You're welcome," he said.
