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second
coupling had real joy in it, like some flash of memory, a moment from the past
when she had more flesh on her bones, and he fewer scars on his.
     
    Thus, day by day, his other life
claimed him, and Rictus’s spirit began to attune itself to the quiet routine of
the farm.
    He and Fornyx
chopped wood until their palms blistered, beat the last of the hazelnuts off
the trees with long staves whilst the girls ran squealing around them, trying
to catch them in with baskets, and dug in the hard clay plot beside the house
for beet and turnip. They threw themselves into the work of the farm with such
gusto that Aise complained the slaves were becoming lazy, but Rictus loved to
come back into the house at dusk, stiff and filthy with the day’s labour, to
find the fire blazing and the girls at the table and Aise baking flatbread on
the griddle. He would seize his wife into his arms and kiss shut her protesting
mouth until she put her flour-whitened hands on his shoulders to push him away.
    More often than
not Rictus and Fornyx would have wine after dinner, and Eunion would sing a
song of his youth, or go over some past campaign from history that the two men
had never heard of.
    He had taught Rian
to read, and was now doing the same for Ona, so every evening after they had
eaten there would be his low singer’s voice in a murmur with Rictus’s youngest
daughter, the two of them heads together in a corner with a single lamp,
puzzling out the words on a scroll.
    And then there
would be bed, Aise and Rictus always the last to go. Sometimes Rictus held back
to stand at the beehive hearth alone in the last red light of the fire,
savouring the warmth of the flagstones under his bare feet, the smell of bread
and wet dogs, the creaking of the roof beams over his head as the wind rushed
down from the mountains to stir the thatch. On still nights he could hear the
river trundling endlessly in its bed, and owls calling from the woods on the
valley sides.
    He did not think
often of the gods as a rule, except when going into battle, but there were
times when he stood there in the quiet house with all the people he loved most
in the world sleeping about him within the broad stone walls, and he would
raise his head to quietly thank Antimone, goddess of pity, for allowing him
this.
    He did not think
on Antimone’s other face, or dwell upon the fact that when she donned her Veil,
she was also the goddess of death.
     
    The first real snows came,
knee-deep in the space of a night, and along the margins of the river the ice
fanned out in brilliant gem-bright pancakes. The goats were now down in the
valley itself, Fornyx,
    Funion and Garin
herding them from the high pastures while the dogs trotted on the flanks of the
flock and sniffed at wolf-tracks in the snow.
    Now the wolf-watch
would have to begin, the menfolk of the farm taking it in turns to stay out at
nights beside the flock, huddled by a fire in the lean-to on the western valley
slope with the dogs for company.
    Rictus and Fornyx
took the first night’s watch together, for while bringing the goats down from
the highland pasture, Fornyx had found the tracks of an entire pack quartering
the hills, and the tracks led south. So the two men set by a store of wood in
the lean-to during the day and as darkness fell they donned their old scarlet
cloaks, took up their spears and shouldered a skin of wine against the
bitterness of the night. Rian’s demand to come along was firmly rebuffed, and
Rictus kissed his womenfolk one by one before shutting the farmhouse door on
them and standing by Fornyx’s side in the chill darkness underneath the stars.
    “You have the most
stupid grin on your face,” Fornyx said. “I can see it even in the dark. Didn’t
I tell you how they would come round?”
    “You’re short and
ugly,” Rictus retorted, “but do you hear me bring it up? Come on, dogs.”
    They crunched
through the frozen snow, the two hounds padding beside them, transformed into
lean,