IT WAS A short walk to get to the dens. At the top of the stairs, Verus had quietly conferred with the guards, Max's name came up so Alex guessed he was verifying their story and filling in the men with why the three of them were there. A messenger had been sent off, returning after about fifteen minutes with an announcement. After that, Alex had been allowed to go down into the walkway between the cages to find out why Mark was here in Bonna for Verus, and to find out why exactly he was here in this time for herself.
She'd let her usual stance and posture drop away as she descended, her footsteps turning limping and furtive and her posture hunched by the time she was coming to the bottom of the stairs. Once below, she would hurry for a few steps, then stop and look in at each cage, scanning for Mark. She was about half way into the dens when he saw her first.
"Alex?"
She thanked whatever gods were looking over her that Verus had put her hair down, and hoped they continued watching, then spun around.
"Mark," she smiled as though happy to see him, wincing for real as her lip pulled at the new bruise. "What's going on? What are you doing here? How did Max get here? I couldn't believe it when I saw him last night." She approached the metal cage after noting that he was shackled and couldn't get his hands through the grid.
"It's ok, it's all ok now," he assured her, pushing his fingers through the grid. "Once I knew what had happened, I came back here to find you. What has happened to you?" he asked, eyeing the old bruising from the village and new swelling from Verus.
She squeezed his hands in hers, not letting him wrap his fingers around and grip her in return.
"I don't know what happened!" She ducked her head and leaned toward the grid between them. "I don't understand anything."
Hidden behind her hair, it was easy to manipulate her voice to sound shaky. She didn't have a way of making tears show, though, so she simply hid her face from him.
"It was a jump through time, as you were destined to do. I know all about it. I'm actually from this time, but I came forward for you. I didn't know it at the time, but you are my destiny."
His words about 'destiny' echoed in her mind, shaking loose memories from when she was fourteen. The house in southern Russia, the boy with the limp outside one night, her gigno coming up the walk and the boy stopping him. She had watched at a window, her bag packed in moments, waiting for her gigno to come and take her back from the kind family who had thought they were helping her. The boy had said something about destiny. Her gigno had angered quickly, and beaten the boy bloody.
"How?" she asked, searching his face and seeing the old scars with new eyes through the light layer of dust and dirt; the scars matched the wounds her gigno had given a boy many years before. "How is it possible to go through time?"
"There's a whole section of research about you, don't you know?" He ignored her question. "Written by your own mother, but she wouldn't have known it at the time. She researched you before you were even born. You have a powerful destiny, Alex. One we can share." He touched her face, gently avoiding the prominent bruise at her mouth. "You are the first proven Amazon, Alex. Your future, now, was a distant history when you are from, but it is glorious, and your name is known even two thousand years later! I can shape this destiny with you."
Her mind whirred, whistling through old memories, finding and recalling her momma's research on the warrior woman. The first ever found Roman Amazon, in a lost tomb under what had been Illyria. Her father had made her read it, recite it, every night after sword practice and dinner were complete for nearly the whole year after her momma died. She'd always thought she'd been named after the woman, in honor of her momma's work. The photo of the mummified warrior woman lying in her crypt floated into her mind. She hid her thoughts deeply, seeing Mark for the first time as he was now: angling. She faced him with a look of helpless confusion.
"But how are you here? How am I even here? What is Max doing here?" She ducked her head again, hitching her words. "It's horrible here, Mark."
"It's all desires, Alex, I'm certain of it. Wanting something bad enough makes it so. It's how your father went forward – he dreamt of your mother. I came forward after dreaming of you. We were meant to be together, Alex. I came back looking for you a week ago, knowing I had to find you, to save you from all this." His hand stretched out, fingers unable to touch the new lock at her throat. "I trained Big Man Max to love you – and only you – so that he would come with me. When you quieted him last night, I was telling him to attack, but he listened to you, Alex. I made him for you. Once our combined desires were strong enough, I rode him here to find you. Everything you carry, that is all you can bring, so I got Big Man to carry me!"
Alex kept her head bowed, digesting this new information. Mark had said it was all based on desires. She'd been homesick enough to cry at the work retreat before waking up in this time. She'd missed her gigno fiercely, dreaming of him for the whole night, but that wasn't the first time she'd cried over him. But this time she'd woken up back in his time. And she'd only had what she'd been carrying that night, the things she'd been sleeping in, when she'd woken up.
"You see," Mark continued. "Everything has been to bring you back to this now, to shape history. You have always been a fighter, Alex, but without my help, you would never have been able to come to this time. Without your first kill, Alex, you would still be a lost girl, waiting for your gigno," he preened.
She looked hard at him, studying his features, seeing a familiarity in his face and shoulders. His hair was darker, eyes lighter, skin more mottled, different nose, but the resemblance was there in the jaw and eyes. He mistook her study of him as seeking further reassurance.
"That's right, Alex. I arranged for Paul Gibson to be in your group eight months ago. I put you in that danger, because I believed that you would be the survivor. I've always believed in you Alex, always known it was your destiny to be great. I knew you needed one final push to send you back here, where I could bring you Big Man Max and secure your name in history for all time. You only needed your first kill. And now, here we are. Together. As we were meant to be."
He stood there, caged and shackled, awaiting her to collapse in grateful terms upon him. She took a step back from the grid, head down, allowing her thoughts to settle before attempting a reply.
"You arranged for Paul Gibson?" she asked, quietly, not looking up. That jerk had been the latest client she'd offed, tossing him off a cliff and claiming a fatal accident. She'd gone for firewood and come back to the campsite, finding him attempting to molest the son of the other client in that group, who had been drugged into sleep. Paul had gone over the cliff with a broken arm and neck, but the rapids and rocks below had neatly erased any sign of her having been involved. The boy had been unafraid of her after, she'd been pleased about that, and she had given her phone number to the father in case the boy mentioned anything that worried his parents. Dealing with death could be difficult, she'd told them, even accidental deaths like this.
"Of course." Mark grinned at her, she could hear it in his voice even though she wasn't looking at him. "You needed to know you could kill. He was an asshole that needed killing. It was a good first kill, Alex, and well covered."
"And, of course, the thought never once entered your head that this mere female standing in front of you may have had an entire life prior to your entry into it?" She lifted her head to study him, watching the uncertainty creep into his features under her hard stare. "Although I do agree that Paul Gibson needed killing, and I did kill him, he was well removed from being my first kill. It is helpful to know how the time jumps work, though, and for that I do thank you. It's good to know that things can be carried across the span. Also, I should thank you for bringing me Max, he was actually the only thing I really missed." She started pulling her hair back into a braid, stepping backwards until she was in the middle of the alleyway.
"What are you doing?" he asked, his posture slowly shifting from cocky confidence to careful confusion.
"I'd forgotten about my momma's research, as well. Interesting that you'd bring it up, as the published information was less than half of what was actually found and didn't have the photos. My gigno made me memorize her entire paper as a child, and I used her notes as reference for learning to translate between English and Russian." She half smiled, mostly to herself. "He always used to tell me how much I looked like his mother when I was studying," she said, wrapping the finished braid back into the same hunting bun her momma had worn, hearing the slaves in the pens behind her shifting away from where she stood.
"What are you saying?" He was starting to panic now. "I made you, Alex!"
"No, we just fucked a few times. I was made long before you ever showed up." She let her hands drop, her shoulders squared again and the furtive stance gone. "What are you doing here, Mark?"
"I gave you your first kill," he uttered, wrapping his hands around the grid of the cage between them. "I came here to find you, to help bring you to your destiny, to help you carve your name in immortal stone. It's not something you can do alone, you're just a woman," he scoffed. "But with me beside you, together we can forge a name that resounds beyond stone!"
"A few corrections in that thinking, Mark. You gave me my last kill in that distant future time. One more in a string of many, which has now extended further in this time. I was thirteen years old for my first kill."
She posed strikingly, proudly, grateful for the cage that held him so she didn't have to prove the strength she was fronting at having. He angered further as she suddenly seemed to be glaring down at him.
"In my momma's research, there was another in my tomb with me: my husband. And he isn't you. My destiny," she added air quotes with her fingers, "as you put it, has already been set in motion."
Alex turned the collar she was wearing, bringing the bronze plate to the front, showing the name that rested alongside her own in the published article of her ancient tomb. The only other name in the publication.
"No. No!" he shouted as she turned away. "Wait!"
She stopped, turning back. She scoffed at him.
"Why? Do you have something that's actually important to tell me?"
"I can still help you." His voice had regained the tenor tones he had used when she first came to him down here.
"With what?" she laughed. "Are you going to teach me Latin so I can speak to the masses? Or train up another horse for me that hates Legionnaires so marching with the cavalry is completely impossible? What could you possibly do for me? Limp around after me and hurl insults until someone beats you?"
"I have family here, connections—"
"Yes, I've seen. You only bear a resemblance to Valerius Celsus Caecus, though, so I'm assuming your relation is to Valerius with no blood tie to Verus Celsus Calix – who is by far the better of the two."
He stiffened at the names, his lip curling back from his teeth at the familiar way she used them.
"You can't know them." His fingers turned white where they gripped the grid.
"Verus Celsus Calix, I know him. And what of Quintus Abelardus? Could I not know him, as well?" She cocked a single eyebrow at him, mocking his current impotence, and his face fell ashen under her steady gaze at the mention of Quintus. "What are you doing here, Mark." It wasn't a question this time.
"I came to help you. To give you my connections, my knowledge. To tie our names together for all of history. To –"
"To tie our names together," she interrupted. "That would be the ringer, wouldn't it? As for knowledge, I've got a university minor in history, with this time period being a large portion." She watched him coldly, saw him mentally scrambling to gain the upper hand. "Why train a horse to hate the army that he would have to march with? How would that serve you in helping me to see my name in a history that's already written in blood belonging to Rome?"
"History can be changed, Alex," he said quietly, hopefully. "We could do it together! I've done the research, the Battle of Teutoburg Forest; it's going to happen soon. With you and Max against Rome, we could crush the Legions out of Germania Inferior, send them running back to—"
"You were banished, weren't you," she interrupted again.
He gasped and then slammed his mouth shut, realizing too late the fullness of the deceit.
"You can't return to Rome, not in this time, and the one you knew is gone in my time. So you came here to make a new world, to try and own a hero, betting on a battle in a center of power where a woman would have even less sway than in the Rome that you can't have, forcing me to stay tied to you or die so you can try and gain a spot in a history book as, what, my footnote?"
He was shuddering, his face spotting from the anger boiling inside him. Alex noted with a touch of disgust that a small line of spit drooled over his bottom lip.
"You would rather stay with a bludgeoning fool than someone who sees the glory of what you really are?" he threw out at her.
"What, this?" She pointed to her face. "This is called getting into the role. I took drama in high school, aced it every semester, didn't I ever tell you that? Right. I didn't fuck you for your conversation, it was the convenience of not having to look for a dick. These bruises," she pointed at the fading splotches of green on the left side of her face, "are from being held prisoner in a shit village three days out from Bonna for a month, inflicted after gutting a wannabe rapist a couple weeks ago. The 6th and 4th of Minerva's 1st pulled me out of there and brought me back here, I've been nursed to health by the Legion. One Centurion specifically. And this," she touched the swelling at the left corner of her mouth, "Verus Celsus Calix, he was good enough to provide on our walk over here after an early lunch to help ensure authenticity."
"You lie," he whispered, and then, trying to shake the grid, he yelled it: "You lie!"
"Do I?" Alex looked around at the full cages.
The slaves had all pulled back from where she stood the instant she'd put up her hair and bared the collar, but she saw a familiar face among the crowd. A woman from the village where she'd been imprisoned who had been fond of kicking. She'd also been present when Alex had killed Hiltraud and the warrior.
"You want to know about me, ask her," Alex said, pointing.
The woman screamed, burying her face in her hands at being identified and not knowing why. The people around her drew away, crowding closer together in the small cell so that they were no longer touching the woman that Alex had singled out.
"There's no way. You haven't been here that long..." His voice trailed off, his breath rising and falling in shallow gasps as he finally looked past Alex and saw how the rest of the slaves were reacting to her.
"Do the math, Mark. You made the jump with Max a week ago, maybe? I would have just arrived in Bonna. It would have taken time for you to get ready to make the jump, say about a week?" His eyes bugged at her guess, confirming it. "So nobody even knew I was really gone until I was scheduled to come back to work from the three weeks off I'd booked after the retreat." Alex smiled and traced her fingers across the bronze plate at her throat, arching her neck as if the collar was kissing her. "I've been here plenty long enough."
"You chose me," he stated flatly, it was his last play, she could see it. "I didn't have to collar you. You chose me!"
She let a touch of pity crawl into her smile.
"You were there, Mark, and I needed to fuck."
That dropped him to his knees. He didn't have anything else. Knowing that Verus was going to stay and continue the interrogation, and had asked if she thought she could find out why Mark was in Bonna and then unsettle him so it would go easier for Verus, when Alex turned and started to walk away she called back over her shoulder.
"Did you dream of me, Mark, or just of my immortality?"
"You bitch!" he shouted, slamming his shackles against the grid of the cage as he leapt back to his feet. "You fucking whore! You don't leave me here, Alex! You need me! Alex! You fucking bitch!"
His yells echoed up the stairs, leaving the guards eyeing her warily as Verus looked on in amusement. Ixillius immediately set to checking her person, ensuring that she was actually all right, frowning at her hair now being up and the way the collar was turned. Verus gave her a questioning glance, and she started looking around for the best way to draw what she could tell them.
Ixillius and Verus both frowned suddenly at the entrance to the underground cages, Mark having switched from English to Latin. Alex guessed the shouts were essentially the same as what Mark had been saying in English when Verus turned to her with amused admiration. The two guardsmen shifted uncomfortably and shot sidelong glances to each other.
"Verus dicere," she told Verus with a shrug, pointing back down the stairs, and he chuckled and shook his head at her.
"Carus una, valde bona." He smiled at her through his lashes.
She wanted to tell him about the resemblance, but didn't have the words. She traced a finger over his brow and down his jaw and said his ex-brother's name. The smile grew hard, giving confirmation of what she had already guessed between the cages below.
"Mark male," she said.
Verus nodded, and continued to watch her expectantly. Ixillius wrapped an arm around her waist, pinning her to his side, his gaze still locked in the direction where the yelling was coming from, and obviously not liking what he was hearing.
***
"Alex is," she tried to begin. "I is," she tried again, then started her hands working to make a large circle around herself, outside herself, bigger than herself.
"Yes, you are," Verus winked at her.
She blushed fetchingly, catching the praise in the meaning if not the actual words. He thought for a moment, tapping his knuckle against his lips.
"If I'm to believe what I'm hearing shouted from below, Mark owns Max, and Mark wants Alex, but Alex wants Ixillius. Alex does not want Mark."
"Wants?" she asked, her brow furrowed.
With a wicked grin, Verus stepped close and ground his crotch into the side of her hip.
"Wants," he repeated, nipping at her ear before Ixillius pushed him away.
She laughed aloud, her hand going quickly to her injured rib.
"Wants. Good." She smiled at him as the laughter faded. "No, Mark no wants Alex," she laid her hand flat against her chest, just below her throat, "Mark wants..." Her voice trailed off and she made the circle motion again for being bigger than Alex. She paused for a moment, then made the circular motion and said "Alex. But Alex and Max," she stated, making the motion in greater exaggeration and using both hands. "Mark wants Alex and Max," she shrugged, her hands still out wide. "Mark wants no Rome. Mark wants Alex and Max wants no Rome. Mark wants Alex and Max the sword Rome." She made a few fighting gestures with an empty hand, watching Verus closely to see if he understood.
He gave no indication that he had so that he could see what she would do. She started looking around again with a frustrated glare, he supposed for another way to try and tell him what she was saying, dropping her gaze to the ground after a few moments with an aggravated sigh.
Verus reached out to his full arm's length, from where Ixillius had pushed him to, and touched her chin. He lifted her face so her eyes came back to his. He wanted to see her face clearly, to watch her eyes. She was very good at plying her voice and changing her posture, but Ixillius had told him that her eyes always remained true to what was behind them. He'd understood well what she had just said, and had one more question. He needed to be very certain of what her next reply was going to be.
"Mark is here, in Bonna, for Alex?" Verus asked, separating the words clearly for her. "Mark in Bonna. Mark wants Alex and Max to fight against Rome with Mark?"
He used the same swordplay gestures that she had for the word 'sword'. He watched the understanding come into her eyes. She nodded in agreement with him.
"Alex and Max to fight against Rome with Mark. Mark wants. Mark is bad."
"So where does that leave you, dear one? What does Alex want? Alex wants...?" he asked her quietly, his mind jumping ahead to the many answers she may provide, and the meanings that could be behind any and all of them.
She pried out of the protective circle of her man's arm and kissed Verus on the cheek. Her brown eyes softened towards him.
"Verus owns Max. Ixillius owns Alex," she said, looking back down the stairs where the shortlist of sins she'd supposedly committed against this 'Mark' still poured forth over and over again, and then brought her gaze back to Verus. "Bonna owns Mark. Alex wants good Rome with Ixillius and Verus," she answered, patting Verus's chest piece and smiling back toward Ixillius.
For the first time since the yelling had switched to something he understood, Ixillius turned away from the entrance and faced Alex.
"Alex wants Rome?" he asked, tentatively smiling down at her.
She stepped back to Ixillius, Verus noticing the loss of her nearness more than he cared to acknowledge, and she pressed her fingers between the fastenings of Ixillius's armor.
"Only Rome?" he asked, quietly.
"Alex wants Ixillius," she replied, her voice growing husky.