Barbarian’s Concubine

I was bait.

And so scared, I could barely put one foot in front of the other.

It had taken six weeks to load the hook with the tasty tidbit that was Nimia, but once Clovis was confident he had arranged me as an enticing lure, the line had been cast. I was about to land in the stream, writhing like a worm, helpless. Waiting to be eaten.

The fish he hoped to catch was Sygarius.

I feared that no matter all the clever baiting and casting, the fish would steal the worm from off the hook, and swim away laughing.

The fish was deadly clever.

“This way, my dear,” Remigius said, guiding my stumbling steps down a lightless alley between houses in Soissons, the eponymous capital city of the province. I had spent half my life in this city, but knew little of it: like many slaves, my life had been confined to the house in which I served.

It hadn’t been a loss, I thought, as the stench of human waste and rotted food filled my nose. My sandal squished in something soft, and as I paused to scrape it off on a loose stone, I was glad of the darkness that kept me from seeing what it was. The smell was bad enough.

“Just a little farther,” Remigius said, pausing as the alley crossed a wider street, where the quarter moon painted the buildings in deep blue. There were patrols in the city, a necessary precaution with Clovis’s army camped in a field a couple of miles away, but we had yet to have one cross our path. I doubted they bothered with this sad corner of the town, hemmed in by garbage middens and tanneries, and inhabited by the poorest of the poor.

Another narrow alley, a few more turns, and we emerged from between two buildings into a small open square, neatly paved, and inhabited by the mounded forms of sleeping beggars.

Remigius made a tch noise. “So many poor. See how they seek solace near Christ.”

He saw what he wished to see. If he had looked closer, he would have seen the tip of a scabbard protruding from a blanket here, the well-shod foot of a soldier there. The sleeping men were not beggars.

It was some consolation to the writhing worm. Not much, but some.

The soldiers were from one of Sygarius’s legions, a legion that Childeric had once commanded. Clovis had turned them to his cause, though as far as Sygarius knew, they were still loyal to him.

I didn’t like having my safety put in the hands of traitors. They were, by their nature, untrustworthy.

Across the square, a basilica two stories high loomed against the starlit sky, its ground-floor windows shuttered and its great doors closed against the night, though the clerestory windows above showed the faintest hints of orange light.

“Are you certain of this, my child?” Remigius asked. I could hear the concern in his voice. He’d be even more concerned if he knew the real reason we were here. The priest—honest, sincere man that he was—thought he was leading me to a chance at freedom, and a life in his faith.

I nodded, because I had no choice.

I didn’t want to be bait. I wanted even less for Clovis’s plan to succeed. But what I’d told Clovis was the truth: for good or ill, I had chosen him. I was on his side, whether or not I agreed with his decisions, and I knew that I would have to prove my loyalty to him . . . no matter how distasteful I found the tasks he set me.

I tried to console myself that either with me or without me, Clovis would seek to destroy Sygarius; it was a fantasy to think he could be persuaded from the goal that had consumed his ambitions since boyhood.

When that justification failed to mollify my conscience, I told myself that hundreds, if not thousands, of lives might be saved and much misery avoided if this plan succeeded. There might be no war. The Franks might gain Soissons without shedding a drop of blood.

Another fantasy.

So when my guilt and fears tortured me in the middle of the night and my thoughts spun in useless circles, I came back to the only truth that mattered: I would rather see Sygarius captured by Clovis, than Clovis struck down on a battlefield.

So here I was, scared half out of my skin, unwilling to speak for fear of a betraying quaver in my voice.

I followed Remigius across the square, and down one side of the basilica to a small door that I wouldn’t have known was there, so hidden was it in the shadows, though it had a small stone porch.

Remigius knocked softly three times, paused, knocked once, paused, then three times again. I heard the heavy clunk and scrape of a key being turned, and then the door opened and we slipped inside the cold building. Dimly burning lanterns hung on iron brackets to either side of the door.

“Father Albus. It is good to see you.” Remigius took the other man’s hands in his.

Albus was bent with age, his bald head speckled with brown spots. “It has been too long. Four years, is it? Five?”

“Six, I think. But alas, this is not a visit where we can catch up, talking until dawn over our goblets of wine. Is Sygarius here yet?”

Albus shook his head, and led us down one side of the church, along an aisle separated from the nave by arched columns. Remigius took my hand and squeezed it in reassurance.

I was grateful for the warmth of contact, but it made me feel awful for the deceit I’d practiced on him. It had been necessary, though: we would never have gained his cooperation through honesty.

It had been my vision that had inspired Clovis’s plan. Of course. His ability to take small prophecies and weave them into a grand plot was enough to make me doubt my own powers: I almost thought I could choose three things at random, toss them out, and he would find a way to make them come true.

Maybe that’s what I’d been doing all along.

Clovis might not be deeply imaginative in bed, but the man was a creative genius in pursuit of power.

My vision of the cross, he’d decided, referred to Remigius. The singing bird was me, sitting as bait in a gilded, domed building: a church. Sygarius on his knees, licking my cunny . . . That, Clovis had declared, meant that Sygarius would be defeated—brought to his knees—by his passion for me.

And so began a long ruse, where Clovis acted as if he had no affection for me, and I behaved as a woman scorned. In my “heartbreak” I sought the counsel of Remigius, who was only too eager to offer spiritual consolation and guidance.

We’d stuck to our playacting day and night, Clovis and I. He knew there were likely spies at his court. He could not show one face to me during the day, and then have me slip into his quarters at night. Someone would notice; someone would talk. And it was essential that Remigius—and any spy—be convinced.

The one bright benefit of our ruse was that, forbidden to approach each other, our longing grew. I caught him looking at me with more hunger than I’d seen since I arrived, and though I looked away—lovers underestimate how obvious their hidden passions can be, how frequently their adoring looks are intercepted by others—I felt the heat of his gaze all through my body.

Clovis prepared to take both his army and me to Soissons, ostensibly to talk with Sygarius about continuing Childeric’s arrangement. I, meanwhile, told Remigius that I wanted to escape from Clovis and return to Sygarius, as long as he would have me back as a free woman and not a slave.

“What chance have I at a Christian life if I am kept as Clovis’s pet sorceress?” I’d asked Remigius. “Is not my wish to follow your Christ, and the salvation of my soul, greater than any use I might be to Clovis as his false prophetess? For surely you do not believe that I have the powers he thinks I do. Indeed, his clinging to such notions, clinging to the old gods, is a block to his seeing the light that is Christ. Both our souls might be saved if I were not here.”

It was Sygarius who had taught me that if I knew what a man wanted, and had the power to dangle his desires before him, I could control him.

When Remigius expressed worry over how I would become Christian in Sygarius’s household, I told him, “Sygarius’s wife, Lydia, has spoken of your faith. She has interest in following it. I have no doubt that her husband will soon follow her lead.”

Remigius didn’t notice that I’d used his own convictions of the power of wifely spirituality to persuade him. Deceiving him had been too easy, and I felt bad about that, too. It was like playing a prank on a child too innocent to suspect a lie. There was no joy in it; only a feeling like one’s body was coated in snail slime.

I would wash away the feeling if I could, but everyone knows that snail slime is impossible to get off your skin.

Remigius, through Albus, had set up this meeting between me and Sygarius. We were to approach each other as under a truce, on the neutral ground that was the church, and if Sygarius swore that I was a free woman and that he would not punish me, I would come home.

If he didn’t agree, or if I doubted his word, I would be allowed to leave without hindrance or harm, with Remigius as my escort. Remigius was what the Christians called a “bishop,” and he had connections that reached as far as Constantinople, and the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. Sygarius, who dreamt of all Gaul once again being Roman, would not wish to make an enemy of him.

That’s how the plan appeared on the surface. What was supposed to happen was entirely different.

Sygarius would come. The “sleeping” soldiers would ambush him, taking him captive. Remigius and Albus would both think that Sygarius’s own troops had betrayed him, and Remigius would flee with me back to Clovis. Both Clovis and I would appear innocent in Remigius’s eyes.

With Sygarius removed from power and rumors of troop rebellions sweeping Soissons, it would be but a simple shift for the province to fall under Frankish rule.

I couldn’t shake the feeling, however, that Clovis’s carefully laid plan would go awry, and I would be the one left to pay the consequences. Was it a premonition? Or maybe it was knowledge, based on years of watching the deep, careful thinking of Sygarius. I did not think myself so tempting a bait that Sygarius would be blind to a hidden hook.

But surely I would be safe with the soldiers outside, waiting. They’d been ordered to protect me at all costs, and not to let Sygarius drag me away.

The basilica felt empty of life, but filled with shadows. Our footsteps were loud in the silence, the sound bouncing off the walls and disappearing into the darkness. At the end of the nave was the apse, the half-circle space that held the altar. Candles burned on iron stands, making a beacon of the space, and casting light up onto the giant wood cross hung upon the wall.

I barely glanced at the cross or altar, before my eye was caught by a pink shimmer: shortly before the apse, an architectural crossing of the nave formed a great dome high above, and a square upon the floor. In the center of this space, on a great stone pedestal, sat something of pale pink. Its surface caught the candlelight and sent it dancing. My mind flashed to the vision I’d had of Childeric’s death: of the bowl out of which the white horse had drunk.

All thought left me, my mind—my very being—caught up in the strange object. I abandoned the priests and rushed over to it.

It was a vase or bowl, oblong, the length of my arm from elbow to fingertips, its ends coming to points like a boat. It didn’t look much like the one in my vision, but somehow that didn’t matter: its essence was the same. The material was glass or—no—stone. Clear pink stone, carved deeply in concentric lines . . . that ended, at the bottom of the vase, in the hook shape found at the center of a labyrinth.

I felt a shiver go over me, and the hairs standing up all over my skin. I placed my hands on either end of the vase, and my vision swam. I heard the hum of a hundred thousand bees, and in the vase appeared a newborn babe, its small red face scrunched up and wailing.

My son.

I gasped, and as I did so a gag was pulled over my mouth. My hands were jerked off the vase and tied behind me, and as I began to scream and thrash, I was thrown over a man’s shoulder.

I tried to shout for Remigius, but then I saw him and Albus, sacks over their heads, hog-tied and lying on the stone floor before the altar, struggling against their bonds.

I saw the men now: no more than five, including my captor, and all dressed in black, moving like ghosts. How had they gotten in? What of the soldiers outside? I tried again to scream for help, but even to my own ears my cries were muffled, and I knew there was no hope that they would reach beyond the stone walls.

I was carried to a deeply shadowed corner of the basilica, and then lowered . . . into the floor. I fought madly as hands from below took hold of me. Torchlight flared, and I saw the white gleam of a skull. Bones. Ribs. Ragged, rotted clothing and desiccated flower wreaths. My struggles stopped in horror.

I was in a catacomb.

One man took my feet, the other my shoulders, and they ran hunched over with me between them, down the long gallery of underground graves, corpses stacked on shelves to either side. I heard, behind us, the scrape of a stone slab being pulled back into place. Sealing us in.

And sealing my fate.