"So.... I fell asleep, waiting. I did not hear. Flavius sang me a song to make me sleep when I could not ... he had first made me laugh, too." Hwicca smiled. "He promised to bring me some of these flowers they have—roses, he calls them—"
"That is enough of Flavius!" snapped Eodan. May the wind run off with that Roman, he thought, the way he bewitches all women. I come back and the first thing I hear from my wife is how wonderful Flavius is.
Hwicca cocked her head. "Do you know," she murmured, "I think you are jealous? As if you had any reason!"
She withdrew. He followed, awkwardly taking off his clothes in the black, cramped space. He heard Hwicca go to Othrik, the small, milky wonder who would one day sit in his high seat, and draw a skin over the curled-up form. He waited on their own straw. Presently her arms found him.
[II]
The Cimbri met the joint forces of Marius and Catulus on the Raudian plain near the city Vercellae. It was on the third day before the new moon in the month Sextilis, which is now called August. The Romans numbered 52,300; no one had counted the Cimbri, but it is said each side of their army took up thirty furlongs and that they had 15,000 horses.
Eodan led a wing of these. He was not on one of the shaggy, short-legged, long-headed Northern ponies that had trotted across Europe—the tall black stallion he had found in Spain snorted and danced beneath him. He dreamed about herds of such horses, his own stock on his own land. He would raise horses like none the world had ever seen. Meanwhile he rode with silver-jingling harness to cast down Consul Marius.
His big body strained against a plate of hammered iron; his helmet carried the mask of a wolf, and plumes nodded above it; a cloak like flame blew from his shoulders; he wore gilt spurs on boots inlaid with gold. He shouted and bandied jokes—the lusty mirth of a stock-breeding people—with comrades even younger than he, shook his lance to catch the sun on its metal, put the aurochs horn to his lips and blew, till his temples hammered, for the joy of hearing it. "Hoy-ah, there, Romans, have you any word I can take to your wives? I'll see them before you do!" And the young riders galloped in and out, back and forth, till dust grayed their banners.
Boierik—huge and silent, scarred hawk face and grizzled red hair beneath a horned helmet, armed with a two-pronged spear—rode more steadily in the van of the army. And not all the Cimbri who marched after the horses owned so much as an iron head covering: there were many leather caps and arrows merely fire-hardened. Yet even some bare-legged twelve-year-old boy, wielding no more than a sling, might be wearing a plundered golden necklace.