Druids Sword

ARP: Air Raid Precaution (i.e. ARP wardens, stations or shelters)

BBC: British Broadcasting Commission

GPO: General Post Office

IB: Incendiary bomb

IRA: Irish Republican Army mph: miles per hour

PM: Prime Minister

RAF: Royal Air Force

UXB: Unexploded bomb

T
he woman knelt keening in the sacred glade. She was strikingly handsome despite her griefstricken face smeared with thick lines of blue woad war paint. She wore a chest plate of metal over a robe of sweat- and blood-stained tartan wool. A red woollen cape lay on the ground just behind her. Her dark hair, laced here and there with silver, was twisted into a plait that hung over one shoulder, and her bare arms glittered with metal armbands.

A sword lay discarded to her right, a gourd beside it.

Before the woman lay the bodies of two adolescent girls, one of whom was heavily pregnant. Their bodies were still warm, the tears on their cheeks still fresh, but whatever beauty they may have possessed was disguised by their twisted limbs and faces, a legacy of the poison they had ingested a little time earlier.

The clearing was encircled by two score of warriors, most of them wounded, all of them droopshouldered with despair and bitterness. Some leaned on spears thrust into the ground, others on the shoulders of comrades.

They were the remaining remnants of the woman’s army. Twelve hours ago that army had been more than sixty thousand strong. Now it was reduced to a few desperate score, and even they would not survive much longer.

The sound of the Roman centurions could be heard to the east as they fought their way through the forest towards the sacred glade.

Her army had not been able to stop them, but Boudicca—the mother who wept over her daughters and the sad loss of her country to the invader—knew that the forest would keep them at bay long enough for her to do what she needed.

A year ago all had been well. True, her beloved land had been invaded by the Romans, but Boudicca and her husband, Prasutagus, who ruled over the Iceni, had spent months in careful negotiation with the Romans trying to come to a mutually agreeable settlement. Then, ten months ago, a terrible wasting sickness struck Prasutagus and reduced his tall, strong frame to a skeletal, shaking weakness in a few short weeks. He died, leaving a desolate Boudicca regent of the Iceni and guardian of her daughters’ inheritance.

For no reason that Boudicca could understand, the Romans attacked as soon as they heard Prasutagus was interred in his hill grave. They ravaged the lands of the Iceni, whipped Boudicca, and raped her daughters.

They took all night over those rapes, and so far as Boudicca knew most of the Roman soldiers within twenty miles had enjoyed her daughters during that time.

The child that her eldest had been carrying was a Roman bastard.

Boudicca had been so devastated by their unwarranted attacks on her, her daughters and her people, that for weeks she had been incapable of doing anything.

Then anger took over and, backed by the Iceni and many of their neighbouring tribes, Boudicca raised a mighty army of over sixty thousand warriors, both men and women, and attacked the Romans.

She had stunning success. Death abounded. With Boudicca at their head, the Iceni decimated Camulodunum Colonia, and then Londinium, slaughtering any they found in their path. Boudicca took particular care with Londinium, causing it to be razed to the ground. For some reason which she could not articulate, but which she felt in every fibre of her being, she blamed the city for all her troubles. Perhaps if she razed London all might be well.

Over a hundred thousand died in the resulting conflagration.

From Londinium, Boudicca hardly paused for breath as she drove her army towards Verulamium, where more than seventy thousand died.

The Romans were stunned by the success of Boudicca’s advance and appalled by her savagery. One of them wrote back to Rome that the pagan queen appeared bent, not on taking prisoners or on amassing booty, but on slaughter, the gibbet, the fire and the cross. All she wanted, he wrote, was to create a wasteland of death.

Boudicca had ravaged south aided by surprise and a lack of any substantial Roman force to stand in her way. But eventually the Romans rallied, and the previous day the two forces had met in battle atop an ancient fort in the centre of Epping Forest.

The Romans had the better of the battle, and routed the Iceni during a desperate struggle which took the entire day.

As the Iceni fell about her, Boudicca retreated a mile or two away, to this sacred glade. Whatever else, Boudicca was determined that the Romans should take neither her nor her daughters alive.

Her daughters had willingly taken the poison—the night of their rape was still violently fresh in their minds.

Now Boudicca raised her face to the men and women who surrounded her.

“I will drink of the gourd now,” she said. “Witness my death, and burn my body and that of my daughters. Then flee, if you wish. You do not need to follow me into death.”

She reached for the gourd, and none of the warriors moved or spoke to stop her. But as Boudicca raised it to her lips, a murmur of surprise and fear rustled about the circle, and Boudicca lowered the gourd to see what had disturbed them.

Pray to the gods that the Romans had not arrived yet!

A pillar of light—faint and hazy, almost a thin fog—had appeared to one side of Boudicca.

She gasped and, along with every one of the warriors, bent forward in honour before the apparition.

Was it one of the gods, come to save them?

“Nay,” said the apparition, now forming itself into the recognisable form of a man, “only me, your beloved husband, come to guide you.”

“Prasutagus!” said Boudicca, setting the gourd aside and holding out her arms towards the ghost. Now her initial shock had passed, Boudicca was not surprised to see him. Prasutagus had been a great king, but he had been a far more powerful druid. How like him, she thought, to oversee her journey to the Otherworld.

He drifted close to her, his insubstantial hand caressing her cheek, then he looked at the bodies of their daughters. “They have passed gracefully, Boudicca, and are now happy in the Otherworld.”

Boudicca’s eyes filled with gratitude. “Prasutagus, will you oversee my own—”

“Boudicca,” he said, interrupting her. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Name it.”

“In death,” Prasutagus said, “I have become aware of many things. Terrible things.”

Boudicca’s eyes widened in distress, but she did not otherwise respond.

“Evil besets our land,” he said.

“The Romans,” Boudicca said, glancing behind her as she spoke, as if expecting the centurions to burst through the shrubbery at any moment.

“No,” her husband said. “They are evil enough, true, but there is a far deeper evil which has spoiled this land.”

“What?” Boudicca said.

“A foreign corruption,” Prasutagus said. “Something brought here many lifetimes ago, which has taken root in the soil of our land and infected it with utter malevolence.”

About them the circle of warriors shifted and muttered.

“It is like a great poisonous spider,” said Prasutagus, “ensnaring the entire land in its web. This spider seeks fulfilment, and we must do everything in our power to stop it, for if it achieves its goal, then, oh, then the sky itself will fall, and the land will be buried under a mountain of tears.”

“What can we do?” Boudicca said. “What do you need
me
to do?”

“In death,” said her husband, “I have met a strange little girl. She has black curly hair and dark blue eyes, and rustles about in silken garments the colour of night. Her face…” He hesitated. “Her face is cold, and she has an icicle for a heart.”

Boudicca stared up at her husband. She knew him so well, and could see the doubts that beset him.

“You don’t trust her,” she said.

“She is our only hope,” Prasutagus said. “She has agreed to aid us. She says she will be our sword, the
land’s
sword.”

“You don’t trust her,” Boudicca said again.

Prasutagus sighed. “No. I don’t. But if we don’t accept her offer, I am afraid that the land will wither and die under this evil. It grows stronger every day. It is…vile.”

“Who is this girl?”

Prasutagus took a long time to answer. “The spirits call her the White Queen for the coldness that besets her. Who is she? I don’t know. But she is powerful and she loathes this evil and wants it gone.”

Boudicca wondered about that. Every instinct within her screamed to not accept what her husband said. But she trusted his judgement so greatly that if he said this strange girl was their only hope, perhaps she should believe him.

“If this White Queen is so powerful,” said Boudicca, “and wants this evil gone, then why does she need us?”