Guardian of Rome (#2 in Gladiator Series)

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Frieda stalked the forest.

There was something indescribable about the way noises travelled through the air and yet everything was silent and calm.

Leaves rustled under the early summer sun, animals scurried in the undergrowth as she approached and the trees seemed to sway in the soft wind; as if they were speaking to each other.

Frieda wondered what horrors these trees had seen in their long lives. But she also wondered what delights they had observed as well.

The trees around her village back in Britannia had seen many a joyous day of laughing children but a single night of carnage had torn all of that from their long memory.

The trees, whose bark had turned black from the fire that ravaged her village, seemed to turn from the light in Frieda’s memory.

Frieda had learnt to hunt from her father amongst those trees before his death and her capture, but those memories slipped so easily away that Frieda was forgetting the way he instructed her to hold a bow.

Or the way he showed her how to skin a rabbit beside the river.

It was those memories, full of goodness and purity, that she, and everyone, needed to hold on to.

But the memories of pain and anguish were easier to remember.

Frieda shook her head at the irony of it all; the memories they all worked so hard to forget were the first to spring into their minds when some new horror arose.

Stopping for a moment, Frieda took a small reprieve.

She had been hunting since dawn; the lands near the camp had grown scarce of food and they needed to travel further each day to find fresh game.

Frieda had volunteered for today’s hunt; the camp had changed.

It was no longer a place of prosperity where people could regain their freedom but a place of disease and death.

Every time Frieda stepped out of her tent she could taste the sickness in the air and hear the crying of people in pain. Pain they could not cure because nobody knew what it was they were meant to be curing.

So Frieda had leapt at the chance to breathe in fresh air; air that not been contaminated with illness.

But now that she was here, Frieda oddly missed the wailing of women and the crying of infants.

The forest felt too silent. Too foreign.

Frieda had spent the majority of her life in shackles, surrounded by at least a dozen other people.

She no longer remembered the peace of her seven-year old self running through the forest around her village with her father and sister.

That was a life she could no longer cling to no matter how much she prayed her sister, Agatha, still lived, unharmed.

They had been separated by the slavers; Frieda was taken by the pirates after she fought back against the Roman invaders.

And she never knew what happened to Agatha; Frieda only prayed that her torture, whatever it may be, ended quickly.

Frieda felt her eyes begin to sting as she pondered on the topic of her lost family for too long.

Shaking the thoughts out of her mind, Frieda turned back to task. The people needed to eat and she could not bear another bowl of watered down rabbit stew.