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The Courier vexed Lucius endlessly each time she made an appearance in the Legion encampment. She was far too alluring, too enigmatic, and most annoyingly to the Praetorian, she was completely silent. Weeks of working with Caesar, and yet Lucius had never heard the woman utter a single word!
He knew that she wasn’t a mute. Caesar often remarked what a clever conversationalist the Courier was in private, but for some reason the profligate woman refrained from speaking to any other members of the Legion, at least that Lucius had seen. How she managed to communicate exclusively using a series of nods, shakes of her heads, and gestures, the Praetorian didn’t know, but she did. Each time the woman’s brows furrowed or her lips pulled down in a grimace, he waited for her to finally make a remark about something, but it never came.
One day whilst the Courier was in camp, Lucius became worried when the woman strayed from Caesar’s tent too long for his liking. If any legionaries were assaulting her, it would be a sin against Caesar himself since the Son of Mars had given her a personal guarantee of protection. So the Praetorian searched for the Courier among the soldiers’ tents, among the slave women around the cooking fire, and even around the arena. She was nowhere to be seen.
Just as he concluded that she must’ve slipped away from The Fort unnoticed, Lucius’s ears honed in on a soft song carrying on the wind. The singer’s voice enchanted Lucius, and he found himself automatically walking toward it. Women rarely even spoke in Legion encampments, much less raised their voices in song. The singer had a smooth, lilting tone that was sweeter than agave nectar, richer than the most fatty cuts of bighorner flesh. Whoever this singing slave was, she was wasted in the military camp. She deserved to be sent to Flagstaff, where she could provide entertainment for the masses with her beguiling voice.
Lucius drew closer to the rocky ridge that served as one of the walls of the brahmin pen as he searched for the singer. He stilled himself for a moment to listen for the voice and quickly realized that it was coming from within the brahmin pen. Lucius looked down and spotted the slave girl that tended to the cattle and noticed that the child was not alone. The Courier sat with the girl on the bare ground, her tawny fingers interwoven in the child’s hair as the woman braided it. The girl began to gently rock back and forth as the Courier continued to sing, drawing a delicate smile from the woman. Seeing the pair like that made Lucius think fondly of his late wife and daughter, both lost to him as a young man when a famine scourged Two Sun. The Praetorian quietly lowered himself down onto the edge of the ridge and listened as the Courier continued to sing. Once the slave child’s braid was completed, the woman slowly teetered her voice off, so much so that by the last word of the song Lucius could only tell that she was singing by the movement of her lips. The little girl spun around and gave the Courier a tight hug, which was easily returned. Lucius noticed, however, that the Courier’s attention was not trained on the child before her, but rather on where he sat on the ridge.
Lucius felt… caught. Not knowing what else to do, he lifted his hand in a half-wave to acknowledge her.
The Courier returned his gesture, an indecipherable expression crossing her face.