Daughters of Fire (59 page)

She couldn’t breathe. Shrinking back against the pillows she heard herself give a small whimper of fear. There was a sword in his hand. Short, stubby, sharp. Vicious.

‘No. Please.’ Her voice came out as a husky whisper.

He took a step towards her. ‘You can’t escape me! I will follow you wherever you go and I will kill you!’

With a cry of terror she raised her arm to ward off the blow as he lifted his arm, but his face changed. The man had gone. In his place stood a woman in a white gown - her hair veiled and her eyes as hard as granite.

Medb.

Viv woke up with a gasp and lay, her heart pumping adrenaline around her body, staring round the room. There was no one there.

‘I’m sorry I can’t walk with you.’ The Reverend James Oakley dropped Hugh off in a lay-by at the foot of the hill. He had given him a map, a walking stick and copious instructions. ‘My rheumatism plays up dreadfully in the damp. You’ll enjoy the walk, though. It is the most wonderful view. Well worth it. As a Celtic scholar you’ll be interested, whatever your views of the Setantii. And just for a moment if you can bring yourself to do it,’ the rector gave an almost mischievous smile, ‘imagine Our Lord striding with just such a staff in his hand, across hills much like this one - if not these very moors.’

Chuckling, Hugh had raised his hand in farewell and set off up the track.

His host was right. It was a wonderful, exhilarating walk. He stopped often, leaning on the stick, looking across to admire the view. There were other walkers around, straggling up the track, but he managed to avoid most of them, preferring to keep to himself. Near the top he sat down, panting, on a limestone knuckle protruding from the grass, staring into the distance.

Venutios was there at once. There was no carnyx this time. No warning at all.

In the interests of the Brigantian federation Carta had wooed him back to her bed. ‘We have quarrelled enough, husband.’ She lay on her elbow, staring into his eyes. ‘It is time for us to form a new alliance. We have to be seen to be united by our tribesmen.’

She reached out and touched his face gently and she smiled. ‘Why do we always fight?’

Hugh nodded grimly. Why indeed?

Venutios closed his eyes with a groan. His passion for this wife of his was as intense as ever. ‘Because you try me sorely, woman.’ He grabbed her hand and put her fingers between his teeth. ‘You cannot see how your determination to ally with Rome damages you; damages all of us. It is insane.’

‘It is the sensible route to follow. For our people’s safety and prosperity.’ She repeated the words yet again.

‘Can you not think of anything else?’ He sat up, infuriated. ‘What about our freedom. Our pride!’

‘Our future and our very existence.’ She smiled and pushed him back on the pillows. ‘That is what I think about.’ Bending over him, she pressed her lips against his. The kiss was long and deep.

Their love-making was passionate but it held an edge of anger and it was short-lived. Rolling away from her, spent, Venutios rose to don his clothes. He did not turn back to the bed with any words of endearment.

Carta stood up and pulled a bed robe around her shoulders. ‘Are you going hunting later?’

He nodded. He reached for his mantle and began to pin it at the shoulder. ‘Wait. Let me help you.’ She did not want them to part angrily again. It had become too much of a habit. She reached for the pin and took it from him. ‘This is very beautiful.’

‘It is indeed.’ He put out his hand for it.

‘It would go well with my best cloak.’ She managed a wheedling note.

He frowned. ‘You have many brooches, Carta. You do not need this one.’

‘I shall swap one of my own for it.’ She went to the coffer on the table near the door and opened it. ‘Here. This is larger; more beautiful, more befitting a warrior.’ She picked one out which was worked from solid gold. He hesitated. She was right. It was larger and contained a heavier weight of metal. Already the enamelled bird had been stowed away in her coffer. She turned with the gold brooch and pinned it on his shoulder. Then she reached up and gave him a quick kiss on the lips. ‘There, Venutios. An exchange of gifts. An exchange of kisses. A pledge of our love.’ For a moment she paused and looked at him closely, then she turned away. Her
kiss did not, he realised, contain any warmth. He shivered. His wife did not frighten him nearly as much as the thought of what Medb would say when she found her gift had been so easily spirited away.

Pat was waiting for her in the kitchen when Viv appeared at last. Looking remarkably cheerful in a scarlet cotton sweater and dark blue jeans she was boiling the kettle. ‘Peggy’s out and Steve’s still not back, so we’ve got to make our own breakfast!’ She reached for the coffee jar. ‘ Shall we go out again this morning?’ She was enthusiastic. Her old, bubbly self. There was no sign of Medb. ‘The re-enactors might be back. I would like to get some more of their sound effects. They were brilliant.’

Viv sat down heavily at the table. Her head was aching and she felt exhausted. It was a relief that Peggy wasn’t there. ‘Pat, when you went to the sacred well with Peggy, did she seem OK about it?’

‘Fine. Why?’ Pat sawed a couple of slices off the loaf of bread which was sitting on the table.

‘I just wondered. We talked about it last night.’ She hesitated. ‘Did you see the grotesque head in there?’

‘Grotesque?’ Pat paused for a moment and considered the word. ‘The old stone head?’

Viv nodded. ‘That is the real thing. Thousands of years old.’

‘Wow.’ Pat carried the slices over, sandwiched them in the hinged wire Aga toaster and shoved it on the hob.

‘Did it seem powerful to you?’

Pat nodded. ‘Gordon hates it, apparently. You know he threatened to fill in the well?’

‘What?’

‘That’s what the row was about before he walked out. That’s where Steve has gone. To try and find him.’

‘Why would Gordon want to fill it in?’

‘Scared of it?’ Pat shrugged. ‘It’s a bit too much of a woman thing.
Goddess stuff.’ She seemed uninvolved. Distanced. She reached for some butter out of the fridge.

Viv grimaced. ‘The Goddess as such wasn’t really a Celtic thing you know; they had dozens of gods and goddesses. Carta worshipped Brigantia, the goddess of these hills. Britannia, if you like. Or Brighid. All versions of the same goddess probably, but not ‘‘The Goddess’’ of the feminists.’

‘And Vivienne.’ Pat raised an eyebrow.

Viv laughed uncomfortably.

‘I don’t see Peggy as a feminist,’ Pat went on. ‘But I do see her as a worshipper of the old gods and keeper of the shrine. I reckon she’s been following on in an ancient tradition.’

Viv nodded. ‘You’re right about that. It scares me.’

Pat took the toaster off the hob and handed her a slice. ‘Why?’

‘It’s too powerful. Too single-minded.’

‘I wonder where she’s gone,’ Pat said thoughtfully. She reached for Peggy’s homemade marmalade.

‘So do I.’ Viv glanced at her. They were both silent for a minute or two. It was as if Peggy’s presence was suddenly in the room with them.

In her private chamber, Medb was staring down into the bronze bowl of vervain purified water, eyes narrowed with fury. She had seen it all. Venutios in the arms of his wife. Their sparring; their rising; their dressing. And she had seen Cartimandua standing holding the brooch in triumph as her husband walked out of the chamber, his mantle pinned with a great wheel of gold.

Cursing, she dashed the bowl to the ground and watched the water seep between the floorboards into the earth beneath. She had imbued that brooch with special powers; it held the owner in thrall to her every whim. It had been configured especially for Venutios, to keep him enslaved as long as she needed him but something had gone wrong. He had escaped its entanglement; worse, Cartimandua had tucked it away in her jewellery casket
with a smile of triumph which could only mean she knew what it could do and that she had somehow found a way to use it to her own advantage.

Medb let out a scream of fury and stamped her foot. Outside two women, spinning in the sunlight, glanced at each other and shivered. They made the sign against the evil eye and of one accord stood up and moved away.

Venutios had left his wife’s presence and gone at once to the practice ground, where he found some of his warriors idly competing with their slings as to who could decapitate a straw figure set upon a wagon at the far end of the field. With a shout of greeting he took a sling from one of the men, picked up a stone and hurled it at the figure. The head spun off to a yell of triumph from the men. He grinned. He wasn’t going to tell them the name he had given his target.

Medb knew. Her eyes narrowed like a cat watching a rat in the granary. He would pay for that. And so would his wife. She would see to it that the whole of Brigantia paid for what she had suffered and history for all time would know it.

‘Does Venutios not require you to drive his chariot today?’ Carta looked at Vellocatus enquiringly. ‘I don’t want you to make him angry.’

The voice came to Hugh indistinctly from the other side of the rocks, then as he began to listen more carefully, more and more clearly. It was a woman’s voice, at once familiar and at the same time alien. When at last he began to make out the words what he heard stunned him.

‘He is hunting on foot, my queen, with his brother, Brucetos and his brother’s son and a few chosen companions.’ If Vellocatus was hurt not to have been selected as one of those companions he didn’t show it. ‘I know one of your team is lame. I wondered whether you would enjoy a drive in the king’s chariot.’

Carta looked at him thoughtfully. She had a dozen charioteers
and a hundred war chariots at her command. Why should this one be so special?

For an instant she looked inside, deep within her soul, to seek for an inner warning, an instruction that this might be a trap. There was none. She held his gaze and saw only an eagerness to please, to make amends for her husband’s boorishness. ‘Very well, that would indeed be a pleasure.’ She called for a cloak and watched as he harnessed two of Venutios’s best ponies, a matched team of black stallions, then allowed him to hand her up onto the driving platform beside him. She did not use Venutios’s bird brooch.

They trotted down the long trackway away from the township, then gaining the more even valley bottom he whipped the horses into a canter and then into a gallop. Carta clutched the side rail of the chariot as it thundered over the ground, keeping her balance with difficulty as she was thrown back and forth against Vellocatus as he braced himself to hold the reins.

At last he slowed the horses, turning them off the moorland and onto a trail which led into the forest, beginning to circle round towards home. The horses were walking now, steam rising from their flanks, tossing their heads with a jangle of bits and harness.