He paused to drink.
I could not move, nor could I speak. I was frozen, as in ice.
“I met Daniel first, before either Tara or Helene. He was in the city of Sala, at the court of the ghana. He asked if he could travel north with our battalion because he wanted to explore the Barrens. Daniel was terribly entertaining. No man I’ve met before or since could keep a miserably cold and wet huddle of men around a guttering campfire laughing the way he could. He’d heard the Belgae were cannibals. Thought it might be best to investigate from a position of strength, if you will. With an army at his back.”
“Were they cannibals?” I thought of my grandfather, crouching by his cauldron.
He smiled. “He asked in every village we came to if it was true the Belgae were cannibals. And they all said the same thing.”
“What was that?”
“That they themselves weren’t, but the neighboring village, the one they’d been having a feud with for years, was certainly known to eat human flesh.”
I laughed.
He smiled, then sobered. “We fought a skirmish against those cursed Atrebates. Bad, marshy conditions, and low morale. Our cursed colonel turned tail and ran with his entire staff, those who were still alive. So I took over and managed an orderly retreat. We had to escape north because the Atrebates had blocked the road. We couldn’t go overland because the ground was a mire. We ended up in a village next to a mage House, Crescent House.”
I nodded. “Where your wife came from.”
“Yes.” His smile had a bittersweet quality. “And there she was.”
“Helene?”
“Tara. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. I thought she was a boy at first, for she was dressed in men’s clothing. She and her cousin and brother had been out hunting. They had come across remnants of the fighting and run back to warn the village with this mangy dog she kept for years and years—”
“She kept a dog?”
His gaze flashed up. I couldn’t be sure if my outburst had surprised him or if he was gauging the import of my expression before he went on. “As it happened, the village was a client village to Crescent House. The elders insisted I pay my respects to the mansa at Crescent House and explain how I and my troops had come into their territory. Tara accompanied us to give a report on what she had seen. Daniel came, because you could never stop him from doing what he wanted. There we met Helene.”