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In the early weeks of his imprisonment, Marius took great care to speak as little as possible and to keep himself ever aloof. He maintained a faint superior smirk always about his lips, as if the feeble antics of Mael and his kinsmen amused him in a juvenile way.
It had not escaped Marius’ notice that this was a unique opportunity for him to study the primitive culture of these barbarians. If he managed to remain objective and unbiased, even unto the very end, he felt sure he would be rewarded with a deeper insight than any scholar before him had known; a deeper understanding than any chicken scratcher of history had ever achieved.
The idea appealed to him, though he knew the futility of it. For he had gathered that he would not leave Barbaria alive, and any knowledge he gained during his stay would die with him. If only he could find parchment, some writing tools, he could begin his life's last work. Maybe he would be able to find a place to secure it: in an earthenware jar, or between two of the stones that made up his prison. Or perhaps bribe a guard with the last of the solidi that were sewn into the lining of his cloak to take it to the nearest Roman town. His work could continue - would continue.
He began formulating methods, concepts, questions, but before he could commit them to memory, the door creaked open. Marius felt a surge of panic, as if he had been caught with his writing implements already spread out around him.
Mael entered, ducking smoothly, as one who has long become accustomed to doorframes being too low. Snow lightly dusted his hair and shoulders, and a gust of cold air followed fast upon his heels. Marius scowled at the intrusion. When he tried to collect his thoughts, he found they had already fled.
“Yes?” he said briskly. “What is it now?”
“I came to start the fire for you,” Mael said. “It’s cold in here.”
“It’s…” He started to protest, but then he realized that Mael was right. All the while he had been engrossed in his schemes, he hadn’t felt the stiffness in his joints or the numbing of his extremities. But with Mael’s entrance, he had been thrown violently back into his body, steward once again to all its various ailments and complaints.
He pushed to his feet, drawing his cloak tightly around himself, and hoped that Mael had not noticed his shivering. Every cough or blemish he’d had since coming here had been an endless source of handwringing and grief for his captors. A persistent headache in the first few days of his imprisonment had reduced these brave and hardy warriors to so many nursemaids clucking about his bedside. God forbid that some unlucky fate befall him before these rogues could kill him properly.
That he would have to pass another five months in this dreary place seemed inconceivable to him. Here it was, already April, and the sky was still gray and oppressive. The clouds spit snow with contemptuous regularity, and a bitter wind like no wind he had felt before blew day and night from the north. Perhaps even this would have been bearable if he hadn’t come so recently from the temperate shores of the Mediterranean.
Marius sighed, turning his back on Mael’s attempts to get the damp wood in the fireplace to light and going to his cell’s single small window. It was just a slit in the stone wall, barely wide enough for a cat to squeeze through. A webbing of bronze bars had been placed across it as if to annoy him personally, mocking him for ever hoping that he might be able to escape. He could see the sky: a solid blanket of unrelenting gray. The clouds were motionless. He knew that he was not far from the ocean, but he suspected that its waters would be just as dull and bereft of color.
Marius did not wish to succumb to sentimentalism, but he longed to see his home again. Where sky and sea were proper shades of blue, where the sun shown and even death made sense. Where he would be appreciated for his contributions, his observations, his rigorous scholarly mind.
A hand came down suddenly on his, and Marius flinched from it. He had not noticed Mael rise from his place by the hearth, had not heard his approach. He could move like a damned ghost when he wanted to. A brick wall of a man, but with a tread like a field mouse’s. It was unnatural, and Marius didn’t like it one bit. He tried to pull away, but Mael only moved closer, pinning Marius between the cold hardness of the stone wall, and the warm hardness of his chest.
“What are you doing?” Marius did not struggle, did not even try to turn so they faced each other. Mael’s strength, his towering height, the powerful crossbeam of his shoulders and the neat tapering down to his waist, all of these things had a disorienting affect on him.
Mael scooped up Marius’ hands between his own, and he saw them disappear entirely, enfolded from fingertip to wrist inside Mael’s grip. It was a curious illusion, and a curious sensation. Marius was not a small man, and he had never had the experience of being utterly engulfed by another before. Though he was loath to admit it, he didn’t find it completely terrible. Under different circumstances… Marius checked himself. No, he must not allow himself to think such things.
“Mind your fingers,” Mael said, chaffing Marius’ hands between his own. “You lose one to the cold, and I don’t know what I’d do. I’d have to start all over, I suppose. Find another you.”
“There is not another man such as myself for a hundred miles,” Marius said.
“Yes, I know. That’s why I really want this to work out with you.”
“You’re nothing but a pack of beasts…” Marius said, so quietly that it was little more than a whisper.
“I guess it won’t be cold forever,” Mael said. “You’ll feel better then, when you can see the sun. I hope you make some time to appreciate it while you can.”
“If you’re trying to intimidate me, I can promise you it won’t work.”
“Intimidate you?” Mael seemed baffled at first, then he only laughed. “Come on away from the window. There’s nothing to look at out there.”
Marius allowed Mael to lead him. He was no longer daunted by his great strength, no longer repulsed by the touch of his hands. Oh, that he had but one countryman to be his companion; one familiar face that he might get his bearings by it, one familiar voice that would tell him to have courage. Or even a pen and a scrap of paper, that he might write down his thoughts and try to make some sense of them. Then, perhaps, he could feel some of that old revulsion when Mael took him in his arms, when he guided him, as if he were a child, back to the straw mattress that was his bed.
He sank back, leaning against the wall, his eyes half closed, as if just moving about his cell had exhausted him. This terrible loneliness, it tormented him like a fever.
Mael squatted on the stones. Marius tried to face him, to act as if nothing was wrong, if only so Mael wouldn’t subject him to another regiment of potions and poultices and cures.
“Your education must continue,” Mael said. “There’s still much for you to learn, and so little time. Today, I’ll tell you of our sacred celebrations. These are things you have to know.” Marius wasn’t listening.
Mael began a rumbling song, a sound deep in his chest that seemed to pass through the straw mattress and the stone floor and into Marius, shivering his bones. He went slowly over the words, carefully sounding them out as Marius stared at the fire, at Mael's long flanks folded up against his chest, at the light that flickered over Mael's straw-colored hair, tinging it red. It went on like this for some time. Marius, lost in the emptiness that came with the absence of thought; Mael chanting his endless songs, phrase by phrase, as patient and enduring as a rock.
"Are you even listening?"
"Of course," Marius lied.
"Then what did I say?"
Thankfully, the old schoolroom trick always seemed to be there when he needed it, and Marius sang the song back to him, word for word. "There, is that adequate?"
Mael seemed grudgingly impressed. “Very well, then. We’ll continue.”
“What does it mean?”
Mael lifted his head sharply.
“I can’t very well sing it if I don’t know what it means. And besides, I thought you said something about celebrations. All you ever do is come in here and teach me these damned hymns. Well, I feel perfectly ridiculous carrying on like this. And furthermore—“
“This is the way the celebrations are taught,” Mael said calmly, patiently, as if explaining the matter to a particularly slow child. “So the details are kept and not forgotten.”
“In Rome, we write such things down,” Marius sneered, but Mael seemed not to notice the pointed insult.
“A piece of parchment may be burned, or a stone tablet smashed. I’ll trust my own memory before any of that nonsense. The important thing is that you know the songs by heart, but I can explain them plainly, if you like.”
“As you wish,” Marius sighed. He felt his mind again beginning to wander down all the old pathways of his loneliness. But this time, Mael’s voice kept calling him back.
“…before the ground thaws in the spring, we have a festival in honor of Brigid, the goddess of high places and high-reaching things. She sees that the crops will grow, and the animals multiply, and the women bear their children without pain.”
Marius was intrigued, in spite of himself. “You mean Lupercalia, of course. Yes, we have such a thing in Rome, too, though why you barbarians felt like you needed to change the name I’ll never know…”
“It’s called Imbolc,” Mael said. “And it existed before the first stones of your city were laid.”
Marius pressed his lips tight. “You’re mistaken. Or simply a blasphemer. What could you possibly know of the Bacchanalia?”
“About as much as you could know of the great bonfires at night—“
“—the bite of the chilly spring air on your bare skin—“
“—the women with their shoulders bare, and half their bosom all uncovered—“
“—the ladies of good breeding, smiling at you and bending their heads for a touch from your whip—“
“—the little stone goddesses—“
“—the procession with the great stone—“
Marius broke off abruptly. He had become agitated as he spoke, and leaned forward so that he was perched almost on the edge of his shabby bed. Mael had moved too, though considerably less. Still, they were so close now as to nearly be touching. A great frozen cloud passed before Mael’s face with each exhalation, a veil that obscured his expression.
Looking away, Marius leaned back and arranged his cloak around himself once more. Mael was watching him curiously; he seemed to be waiting for something.
“It’s a festival to honor the wolf,” Marius said, more quietly now. “The wolf, and the god.”
Mael laughed abruptly. “Only a city boy would see a wolf as anything but a pest.”
Still chuckling to himself, he pushed to his feet. “I think that’s enough for today,” he said. “I guess we both learned something, though.”
Marius glared up at him. He would not ask Mael to stay a little longer. No, he would allow himself to sink so low. Even though Marius knew that the moment he was gone, all the old lonesomeness, all the familiar dread, would return to plague him.
Mael went out, and Marius flinched at the sound of the bolt sliding into the lock. If only he could resign himself to death like a good soldier, an admirer of Marcus Aurelius… If only he could accept it, then he was certain even this awful waiting would become bearable.
His thoughts were in shambles. He had not the strength to piece them back together.
***
That night, Marius lay awake and listened to the wolves howling out in the forest. They seemed close, deceptively close, as if they crouched just beneath his window, scenting him.
He did not know the time. This far north, the sun rose and set on a strange timetable. He had slept a little, though restlessly, and without dreams. It was full dark now, with the high cloud cover that did not permit the light of moon or stars to shine through. It might have been early evening still, or past midnight, or nearly dawn.
Marius had not the will to puzzle it out. He closed his eyes again, though he no longer hoped for sleep.
When he opened them again, Mael was kneeling over him. He held a candle in one hand, but with the other he so artfully shielded the flame that no light had fallen on Marius’ face to alert him. He had not heard Mael come in, and yet he was unsurprised to see him.
“What is it?” Mael said. “What’s wrong?”
In the firelight, his face seemed curiously strong and defined. Handsome, yes, but in a segmented way. Each feature alone pleased the eye, and yet they seemed reluctant to become a cohesive whole. Most of the men that Marius knew carried the whole of their personality in their eyes or in the lines around their mouths. Mael did not, and so, for all his openness and guileless ways, he was an utter mystery.
“What do you mean?” Marius said. He did not rise from where he lay. Only his eyes moved, and he kept his voice low, as if their encounter was a secret one.
“The god came to me while I slept,” Mael replied. “He said that you were sick, suffering.”
All at once, Mael’s heavy brows drew together, and his face took on the unmistakable expression that all men assume when sneering at religion. “You look fine to me.”
Marius was silent for a long time. It would have been easy to tell Mael that all was well, to send him on his way. He might have been able to maintain the illusion for a little while longer. And yet he did not.
“I do not feel it,” he said quietly.
“What’s wrong?” There was that familiar tone of concern in his voice. “Is it your head again? I’ll boil some willowbark, and—“
Suddenly, Marius was laughing, his laughter interspersed with the most violent of curses. “You really have no imagination, do you? Day after day, you teach me this nonsense, these damn chants. But what am I going to do with them when I’m dead?”
“But you will not die. You will be beyond death, beyond time…”
“So you keep telling me.”
“Because I hope someday you’ll believe it. Why don’t you just try? You’d feel a lot better. You wouldn’t be afraid anymore.”
“I’m not afraid.” Marius looked away. He did not believe the words as he once had. “But it’s monstrous to take a man from his home, from his brothers, and expect him to lay down and die in a land he has never—“
If he had been allowed to, he would have gone on for a long time, but it was at that moment that Mael’s lips descended upon his own.
Marius froze, and the words piled up in his mouth. Mael was leaning over him now, driving the cold air before the wide bulk of his chest. One hand was around Marius’ waist, the other holding the candle well away. The stubble against his jaw, the gentle insistence with which Marius’ lips were parted… Mael did not kiss so differently from other men, and yet there was something fantastical about him, something wild and strange.
He let Mael pull away first, and after he had, Marius reached up and passed a hand slowly over his mouth. His lips felt swollen and raw; he knew they must look very red.
“So you won’t be lonely,” Mael said, and he grinned as if he’d thought of a foolproof plan. “I don’t want you to be sad, Marius.”
It did not occur to Marius until later that he could have protested. He could have rebuked him, and Mael would have gone off a little crestfallen, a little confused perhaps, but there would have been no real harm done. There was little fight left in him, though, and so Marius only nodded.
He let the blanket he held clutched to his throat fall away. Without it, he felt the chill in the air keenly, but Mael’s hands were warm, his embrace like a furnace. Marius surrendered to it, without even a pretense of hesitation. No, no, best to keep things simple; to let reason enter into the matter as little as possible. To remember the lessons of the Athenians and let thought flow into action in a swift and unbroken line.
His fingers tangled in Mael’s hair, and he felt the heft of it, the thickness like the thickness of a woman’s hair. He could not imagine that his own hair, patchy and uneven after being left to grow for weeks, would ever achieve such golden waves.
When Mael leaned in to kiss him again, Marius tightened his hold, pulling him down. He could feel the cords of muscle under Mael’s tunic, thick as the rigging of a ship; his great strength kept carefully in check. Marius knew that he had begun to grow soft over the course of the past few weeks, and that it was only out of politeness that Mael yielded to his tugging and prodding.
The mattress sank beneath their weight, exhaling the smell of sweet straw. Mael slipped beneath the blankets with him. His hands had been deceptively warm, but the outside of his clothes were stiff with frost. Marius gasped as he settled between his legs. “It’s too damn cold for this…”
Mael’s body quivered with near-silent laughter. His great golden head disappeared beneath the covers; Marius felt a tremor pass through his limbs, but he could not say whether it had started with him or with Mael. With steady hands, Mael lifted Marius’ tunic above his waist, and eased down the wide barbarian trousers he had adopted out of necessity. Not far, just enough to free Marius’ stiffening cock.
Rough fingertips grazed the blades of his hipbones, the insides of his thighs, and Marius was more keenly aware than ever that Mael had the hands, not of a warrior, but of a simple laborer, a tiller of the land. He was crude, so crude, Marius thought, but it did not stop him from plunging his hands into Mael’s hair, taking two fistfuls of it, and forcing Mael’s head down.
The blankets rose as Mael arched his back and bore down on him, and Marius felt his mouth move over him. His tongue making a slow circle around the head of his cock, tracing the vein that ran along its underside, teasing him hard. It was so vulgar, so artless… so good in spite of all that. Marius caught his breath. His hands clutched so tightly in Mael’s hair that he knew he must have been hurting him, but Mael did not flinch. He flicked his tongue over the tip of Marius’ cock, and then his lips parted around him.
“God… Mael…” Marius gasped. He wondered if he might not manage something more erudite, man of letters that he was, but he doubted that he would have a receptive audience. Mael took him in deep, and Marius could feel the twitch and jump of the muscles in the back of his throat, his tongue, his lips, the small sharp blades of his teeth.
Marius writhed beneath him, working his pants down off his hips. The straw scratched the small of his back, his ass. He tried to arch his hips, only to have Mael force them down once more. Mael leaned on him, pinning Marius’ legs beneath his weight.
"Mael...Mael..." It started as a soft, insistent warning, and it built and built as Mael's mouth worked him, as his lips tightened on the base of his shaft, as Mael's rumbling bassy moans shuddered through him. And then he could feel something inside in him snap, and he came with bucking of his hips, and still Mael kept him pinned down hard.
Shaking, breath coming in a wheeze, he felt hot all over, the woolen tunic and the blankets that once seemed barely enough to keep out the chill suddenly felt stifling.
When he opened his eyes, Mael had clambered out from under the covers and was staring down at him with a look of amusement. He passed the back of his hand over his lips. “You didn’t look like the type to make so much noise. But I guess it makes sense when you think about it.”
“I’d like to know what makes you such an expert,” Marius sniffed disdainfully, though he trembled in every limb. When Mael tried to move away, Marius seized him by the front of his tunic and held him. “By the gods, Mael, I…”
He stopped abruptly. He knew that sweet words and flattery would have little effect on Mael, and so he merely glanced away and said, very quietly, “I don’t want you to go yet.”
Mael laughed, very lightly and not at all cruel. “I fear that if I stay much longer I will be abusing the indulgence of the god.”
Marius’ hand moved beneath the blankets, found Mael’s hip, following it around to the sizable bulge in the front of his clothing. “I really don’t want you to go.”
Again, Mael laughed, but this time there was an edge to it. He caught Marius’ wrist, pulling his hand away and pinning it to the mattress. “It’s one thing to bend the rules a little to keep you happy, but he won’t like it if you’re debased.”
“Debased?” Marius snorted. “What do you take me for? Some kind of vestal virgin? Listen, Mael, I’ll have you know that I’ve had men and women so beautiful that if you so much as laid eyes on them you’d go out of your head with desire. I’ve done things your barbarian mind can’t even imagine. So don’t think that because I let you paw at me for a few minutes, you’ve left your stain on anything that wasn’t already soiled long before I met you.”
Mael shifted above him, and Marius had the feeling that the bulge in his pants had just grown more sizable still. “There are the purification rituals, though…” he murmured.
“To hell with them.”
“You mustn’t say that. They’re important. And if he is displeased with you—“
“Fine, they’re important. And I’m telling you, there are ways around such things.” Marius twisted his wrist free of Mael’s grip, and moved it again toward the laces that crossed the front of his breeches. “Trust me.”
Here was something he could handle, something he understood. He had been off-balance, but now he was finding his bearings again. Offering up a prayer of thanks to Eros that some things never changed much, no matter how far from the civilized world he strayed, Marius tugged at the front of Mael’s breeches. The laces slipped their eyelets, and his erection sprung free.
Mael gasped as Marius’ hand wrapped around his shaft, stroking it slowly. “You mustn’t…”
“Calm down,” Marius said. “We’ll make love as the Greeks do with their young boys. That way you may keep my precious tender virtue intact.”
“How do the Greeks do it?” Mael asked cautiously.
Marius was gripping him tightly enough that he could feel every leap and flutter of Mael’s pulse. He flexed his fist and Mael gasped, a shudder passing through him. Marius was intrigued, just as he always was when he began unlocking the secrets of another person’s body. He guided Mael’s cock to the tops of his thighs, where the skin was slick with sweat and come, and Mael arched his hips forward, sliding between his legs.
“Move…” Marius whispered. He tensed the muscles in his legs, giving Mael a squeeze that he knew from experience was not unlike being inside the body of another.
Mael’s hips snapped forward with such savage desperation that Marius was thrown back against the bed. A thin cry broke from his lips – surprise and pleasure and pain all at once. He clutched at Mael’s shoulders, his nails carving eight red crescents into his pale flesh.
Mael seemed not to notice at all. He was thrusting fiercely, recklessly into the cusp between Marius’ thighs. His hipbones struck against Marius’ belly, raising first welts, then bruises. The tip of his cock nudged against Marius’ balls. He felt them drawing up taut against his body, felt his cock growing rigid a second time. Not bad, he thought with some measure of pride. Not bad for a man his age…
Still clinging to Mael’s neck with one arm, Marius slipped the other down between their bodies. He closed his hand around the shaft of his cock and began to stroke it. Mael’s great mane of golden hair parted down the middle and fell in waves over both sides of his face, swinging wildly with each jerk of his body, slapping against Marius’ shoulders, his cheeks, catching in the corners of his mouth so he could taste the beads of sweat in it. Mael panted and gasped, and occasionally muttered something in his own tongue. The accents were harsh and strange, and Marius could not say if they were curses or praise, though it didn’t matter much either way.
Marius came with a yelp, splashing Mael’s stomach with his seed. Startled, Mael’s eyes fluttered open. It was an oddly intimate moment, oddly tender, and Marius reached up to draw Mael’s hair away from his face so he could see his expression when he climaxed.
It happened a moment later. Mael’s lips peeled back from his teeth; his eyes showed only white. And then there was a spreading warmth between Marius’ thighs, and it was over.
Mael kept still above him, his chest heaving as he caught his breath. Marius relaxed, hand falling from Mael’s hair, legs parting to release the grip on his cock. Already he was trying to plan how he’d clean them up without getting out from under the blankets.
Gently, Mael kissed him. It was barely a feathering of lips against his own, and after all the rough treatment he’d just endured Marius could have laughed. He didn’t, though. He didn’t think Mael would understand the joke.
“Is that what the Greeks do?” Mael asked.
“Something like that.”
He seemed to be giving the matter some thought. Marius squirmed beneath him, a gentle reminder that the stain Mael had left on the insides of his thighs was quickly turning cold.
“Sorry.” Mael got to his feet, but when Marius tried to rise and follow him he pushed him back. “Keep under the blankets. I don’t want you taking a chill.”
Marius pursed his lips in irritation, but stayed put. Mael wiped them both off with the edge of his heavy cloak, and then helped Marius rearrange the bed into some semblance of order. He kept his eyes lowered, and Marius found himself wondering if Mael was feeling guilty now, or ashamed. If he was, then he could keep it to himself, because this was the best Marius had felt since arriving in this godforsaken place.
Mael picked up the candle. It had gone out at some point, but Marius could not say when, or how, only that the wick was entirely cold by now. He went to the door, but paused before pulling it open. “I think we ought to keep this a secret,” he said.
“Certainly,” Marius replied.
“And not tell anyone.”
“I have no one to tell.”
“And maybe not even think about it too hard, or too often.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“But maybe… I can come back sometimes. If you’re ever feeling bad again.”
“Yes, of course. If I need you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
This seemed to satisfy Mael. He went out without another word, opening the door only enough to squeeze his body through sideways so that the wind could not sneak past. Once he was outside, Marius heard him pull the bar across the door and slide the latch into place. And then he alone was the captive.