Hero of Rome (18 page)

While she slept, he sent word to Cearan – and waited.

XXIV

When Maeve finally woke two days later Valerius sensed a deep change in her that he didn’t have the wit to understand or the understanding to approach. She emerged from the bedroom pale and exhausted, still wearing the torn blue dress, with dark shadows around both eyes. Her strength visibly returned with each spoonful of the thin soup the militia commander’s wife had recommended, but she would not meet his gaze and spent hours staring into the distance as if she were searching for something.

Valerius fretted at his inability to reach her and in the evening he could bear no more. He took her in his arms and held her, deciding that now was the time to tell her of her father’s death. But as he breathed in the sweet, jasmine scent of her hair, she stiffened and began to struggle in his grasp, squirming and scratching, forcing him to release her. When she was free she backed away with a look of disgust that twisted her beauty into a parody of itself.

‘Maeve,’ he pleaded.

She shook her head wordlessly and a high-pitched keening came from her throat. With a single movement she took the front of her dress in two hands and ripped it to the waist. ‘This is what you want,’ she hissed, finally finding a voice that was as cracked and broken as one of the pots the despoilers had dropped in her father’s
atrium
. ‘You want these.’ She took the twin bounty of her breasts in her hands and offered them to him. ‘You
paid
for them. You
paid
for me.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she spat. ‘You made a slave of me. You bought me from that animal … and … now … you … own … me.’ With the last five words she tore the dress still further and she was naked, her lovely body still bearing the marks of her ordeal, the scratches and the bruises and the invisible stains of Crespo’s assault. ‘So take me. Isn’t that what Romans do with their slaves? Take them whenever it suits them. Rut with them wherever it takes their fancy.’

She was sobbing now, but sobs of life-consuming fury.

‘Your father…’ he tried to say.

‘Is dead or he would have come for me.
He
would have saved me or died in the attempt, not watched as some foul-breathed pig violated and ruined me.’ She shook her head and he knew she was remembering each moment of her shame. ‘When I saw you in the roadway I
knew
I was safe. I knew that you would fight for me and that if you died I would die by your side. I would have been glad. Instead, you watched while my honour was stripped from me.
Coward
,’ she snarled, and she threw herself at him, nails tearing at his eyes. ‘Coward. Coward. Coward.’

Valerius fought her off, grabbing the flailing arms and avoiding the teeth snapping at his face. Her head whipped back and forward as if she were possessed but she was still weak and the savagery of her fury burned out in a few minutes. She went limp in his arms. He picked up her slight body and carried her back to his bed, where he sat in the darkness, listening to the sound of her fractured breathing.

At one point during the night she said quietly: ‘You may sell me again if you wish, for I do not want to be a burden to you. But you must call me by another name. I am no longer Maeve of the Trinovantes. I am a slave.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.

‘You would not understand,’ she replied. ‘You are a Roman.’

Next day, in the misty stillness of the dawn Valerius stood with Falco as the little merchant’s body was carried from the villa to the burial ground beyond Colonia where a square pit, ten paces by ten, had been dug. Maeve was still too weak to attend and did not hear the bard sing his praises or see the things he had loved placed around him by the people he had loved. A few treasures, at least, had survived Crespo’s ravages. Cearan was first, carrying an
amphora
of the Calenian wine Lucullus had often shared with Valerius; then Cearan’s wife, Aenid, with an intricate gold torc discovered behind a loose brick in Lucullus’s storeroom; a slim, dark-haired waif of a girl Valerius didn’t recognize carefully placed a gaming board and pieces beside his body; his finest clothes and favourite stool; and finally his father’s sword, which he had kept hidden for seventeen years.

Once, a priest would have said the sacred words and made the sacrifices, but the druids had all been driven from the east long ago. Instead, an elder from the settlement by Cunobelin’s farm performed the rites, and as he did so Valerius allowed his eyes to wander over the mourners.

Apart from Falco, who was here to represent Colonia’s council, the Roman merchants and traders who had profited from Lucullus had discovered more pressing business today. But the Celt’s Trinovante cousins had gathered to honour his passing to the Otherworld. They stood in a compact mass, with Cearan at their head, tall, sombre figures, broad-chested and proud. Their dark eyes sent Valerius an unmistakable message as he stood, slightly apart, with Falco. It said they may have been long conquered but they still knew how to hate. He remembered Lucullus’s words on the night they were drunk together:
there are men, great men, proud warriors, who live in the ruins of their burned-out huts and watch their children starve, because they once had the temerity to stand up for what was theirs
. Now he was seeing those men with his own eyes. The heirs of Caratacus. Unlike the compliant Celts who frequented Colonia, they wore long belted tunics over tight trews and had thick plaid cloaks draped across their shoulders. He could see how their hands itched for their weapons and their war shields. All they needed to make them an army were their spears and a leader.

‘Will there be trouble?’ he asked the militia commander.

Falco shook his head. ‘I don’t believe so. Cearan is no fool and he has influence among the Trinovantes as well as the Iceni. They are angry, as they have a right to be, but they are not organized.’

Valerius wondered if that was true, but Falco knew his business.

‘When do you leave for Glevum?’ the wine merchant asked.

‘My orders came through this morning. The First cohort will march in a week and I’ll be with them.’

‘And Rome?’

‘I’ll kick my heels for another month in Londinium. It doesn’t seem to matter so much now.’

‘Have dinner with us on Wednesday, then. Just the old soldiers, Corvinus and the like. No Petronius, on my honour. How is she?’

He thought for a moment. How to describe the indescribable? ‘Changed.’

Falco shook his head. ‘That man is a monster.’

‘He promised me a reckoning and I’ve vowed to fulfil that promise.’

Falco placed a hand on his arm. ‘Do not waste yourself pursuing Crespo. Go back to Rome and make a new life. Forget him.’

Valerius watched the final planks being placed over Lucullus’s grave. Crespo was not the kind of man you could forget. If you did you were likely to end up in a river with a knife in your throat. But perhaps Falco was right. Everything had changed. All the certainties in his life had vanished with Maeve’s love. Her reaction had shocked him, somehow turned him inside out. Since then, he had swung between extremes of pain and anger, shame and regret. How could she believe he was a coward? He was a Roman tribune and he had saved her life. If he had been a Briton they would both be dead now, and Crespo would still be in Londinium with her father’s treasures. In the end he was faced with the certainty that he had lost her. So, yes, he would return to Rome and leave the procurator and Crespo to continue destroying other lives. He shook his head. It was time to go home.

Before he left the burial ground, he sought out Cearan. He knew the Iceni would not want to meet him but also that he was too wellmannered to refuse. He discovered the tall noble talking seriously with a group of Trinovante elders and Valerius again thought how kingly he looked. Cearan needed no golden circlet to prove his lineage; it was written in the aristocratic planes of his face and in the quiet way he wielded his power. If the gods had been kinder here was the true leader of the Iceni.

Cearan caught his eye and frowned, but a few moments later he came to Valerius’s side.

‘You were Lucullus’s friend, but I wish you had not come.’ The Iceni’s voice was taut. ‘It is difficult enough to soothe the passions your people have aroused without the sight of a scarlet cloak to inflame them further.’ He shook his head. ‘Sometimes I wonder if your Emperor truly wants peace. Even as I try to douse the fires, your procurator throws fuel on the flames with his demands for the repayment of subsidies that were accepted in good faith, but he now claims were merely loans. Lucullus was the first, and, yes, perhaps the most foolish, but he will not be the last. These people,’ he nodded towards the Trinovantes, ‘did not need another grievance against the Romans. They look towards the slope yonder and see the land they once farmed being worked by British slaves under Roman masters. Now their leaders, men who beggared themselves to ensure their tribe did not starve and accepted the Roman way because it was the only means to retain their dignity, are to be ruined. Their patience is at an end, tell your governor that.’

Valerius studied his companion. ‘And what of your patience, Cearan? Will you abandon your people because of a single setback?’

The Iceni stiffened. ‘Not a single setback. There have been others. While I counsel peace, men meet in the forest at night and come back with talk of a return to the old ways and the wrath of the goddess. The priests are among us again. Can you persuade the governor to endorse Queen Boudicca as regent and accept her daughters as King Prasutagus’s joint heirs?’

Valerius thought of the report he had written which was still with the clerk. He would deliver it himself and risk Paulinus’s anger. ‘I can try.’

‘You must.’

‘What will become of her?’

For a second Cearan was puzzled by the sudden change of subject. Eventually he said: ‘I will take her north to share our home. She will have a life. It will not be the life she knew, but it will be a life.’

XXV

Gwlym’s first indication that he wasn’t dead was the scent of crushed marigold, accompanied by a bitter liquid that burned in his throat and filled his body with a warm, reviving glow. Warmth. That was the true puzzle. He had thought he would never feel warmth again. The last thing he remembered was the chilly embrace of the river overwhelming his body and his mind, and the sensation of surrendering to an all-consuming, but not unpleasant, numbness.

‘Can he travel?’ The voice seemed to come from a long distance away and the mumbled answer was unintelligible. Mentally, Gwlym tested the fibres of his limbs and came up with his own answer.

‘Yes.’

It seemed unlikely, but he must have spoken aloud because a presence loomed over him and he opened his eyes to discover a distinguished silver-haired man of early middle age studying him intently, his expression wary and respectful. ‘I am Volisios, lord of the Iceni, keeper of the northern Marches, and I have awaited your coming.’

Gwlym allowed his head to fall back and closed his eyes. He was safe.

In truth, the answer turned out to be premature. It was another day before his legs recovered the strength to allow him to walk, and another still before he felt confident enough to venture beyond the door of the roundhouse whose owner had discovered him beached and freezing whilst collecting stones from the river. Volisios rode ahead to prepare the way, but before he left he provided Gwlym with a pony and an escort of six men. The roundhouse was within the stretch of disputed border land between the Iceni and the Catuvellauni, and though an encounter with a Roman patrol was unlikely it could not be ruled out. Only when they crossed a narrow, muddy stream and he saw the guards relax did Gwlym do the same. But the instinct for self-preservation honed during all the months in hiding had returned, and his eyes constantly roamed the country around him. He found it a depressing, alien place. Low, threatening skies bore down on a flat landscape that seemed more liquid than good solid earth. The ponies squelched their way along soggy paths and through reed beds from one piece of dry ground to the next with a reassuring confidence, but Gwlym sensed the guards were nervous of him. During the few halts he was left alone with a little food and his own thoughts.

The lands of the Iceni had always been his ultimate destination, if he lived long enough, but his relief at reaching his goal was tempered by new concerns. Firstly, Volisios’s apparent foreknowledge of his approach hinted, at best, of over-enthusiasm amongst those he had left tending the smouldering fires of freedom. In one of the villages behind him some Catuvellauni lord had asked the question
Who will lead the rising in the east?
and come up with the name Volisios. From there, it wasn’t difficult to imagine a messenger being sent to advise the Iceni to prepare a proper welcome for the wandering druid. A breach of security and a concern, but not the disaster it might have been.

No, what truly worried him was the assumption of ownership immediately apparent in Volisios’s every word and gesture. It seemed he was to be the Iceni’s druid and no one else’s and these guards were as much to ensure that as for his own security. He had encountered this situation before, of course; many a lord had looked upon him and seen his own advantage. Even after the years of the Great Silence a druid still had the power to awe. Some coveted him as an ornament to enhance their own standing, others as a weapon to strike fear. He had dealt with them all – but here and now the presumption had the potential to destroy everything he had worked for. As he rocked in the saddle he pondered the dilemma of how to trap the hare without losing the rabbit already in the net.

Dusk fell, and with it came a damp, lung-clogging sea fog. At the same time, the land narrowed to a promontory little wider than the path they travelled. Gwlym peered ahead towards a ghostly wasteland of dangerous, shale-dark waters, evil-smelling bogs and stunted, mossgrown trees. Just as the ground was about to vanish beneath his pony’s hooves, a silent figure rose from nowhere to take the reins. Heart thundering, he turned to his escort, but the men were already riding back the way they’d come, apart from one, who gestured for him to dismount and, once he’d done so, led the pony off into the murk.

A druid knows no fear, he had been taught; where a druid walks, the gods walk at his shoulder. Well, if this wasn’t fear it was something perilously close. The man who was now his only human contact in this dank wilderness was one of the ugliest he had ever set eyes on. Short, but very broad, he wore some kind of primitive garment made of half-cured animal skins. His flat, round face had a large upturned nose, with the nostrils facing forward in a way that reminded him of a pig’s, and slanted eyes with irises of an unnatural translucent blue. When he spoke, his words were mere grunts, but Gwlym realized the man wanted him to follow.

The bulky figure moved off quickly and silently, making no provision for any weakness or hesitation. When he reached the darker area that must be the beginning of the true wetlands, Gwlym expected him to halt, but he plunged on without stopping and, surprisingly, without making any kind of splash. Beneath his feet, hidden by the swamp grass but above the water level, Gwlym found himself traversing a narrow walkway made up of short sections of branch as thick as his upper arm. The branches were linked by lengths of plaited reeds which must have been stronger than they looked, because the path wore the marks of frequent use and had obviously been here for some time.

As far as he could tell, it led east towards the sea, but it turned sharply here and there to avoid deeper pools and the odd stand of skeletal trees, and occasionally a fork would veer off to right or left. They walked in silence, the short man through choice, Gwlym concentrating all his being on the next few paces of precariously narrow pathway to avoid falling into the ooze below. He was sweating heavily now, despite the chill of the night. The air was unnaturally still and the stink of the mud foul. A man careless enough to lose his footing here would drown in minutes. His body would never be found and his soul would wander this dank and desperate place for the rest of time.

They had been travelling for an hour, as near as Gwlym could guess, when the guide halted. He listened carefully, then cupped his hands to his mouth and gave what sounded like the call of a marsh harrier. After the count of five he repeated the call, a harsh screech, followed by a less shrill ‘yick, yick, yick’, which this time brought an immediate echo from the darkness.

As they continued, Gwlym noticed a mysterious muted glow in the mist ahead and the unmistakable sharp clang of metal upon metal. The glow appeared to hang in the air and he assumed it must be on some elevated platform. But, as he approached, he saw they were nearing a low island in the the centre of a sea of fog and that the light was emerging from behind a plaited reed screen erected around the perimeter. Volisios waited where the walkway met the island, a torch in his left hand and a broad smile on his face.

‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘And my apologies for your inconvenience. As you see, we have prepared for your arrival.’

‘Most ingenious,’ Gwlym acknowledged.

Volisios dismissed the guide and led Gwlym through a gap in the screens to where a dozen forges blazed, each with a smith hammering enthusiastically at a glowing piece of weaponry, either a long, crude sword or a socketed iron spear point. In another area a group of men gathered the completed blades and dipped them into cisterns, where they hissed and spluttered until they cooled; still more fixed the spearheads to shafts or bound leather strips round sword hilts to create crude handgrips.

‘We are safe here, but the Romans patrol the coast and we must be careful not to provoke their interest. In this,’ Volisios fluttered a hand at the fog, ‘you can see nothing beyond a hundred paces. But if we want to work in daylight we have to light the forges before dawn. When the fires reach their heat there’s no smoke, but until then it would betray our position from ten miles away. See here.’ He ushered Gwlym towards one of the huts. Hundreds of swords lay stacked against the walls in bundles of twenty or thirty. ‘I can arm five thousand men with swords and another ten thousand with spears. With you by my side and the validation of the gods I will lead the Iceni against Colonia, tear down the Temple of Claudius stone by stone and slaughter every Roman there.’

The florid red of Volisios’s face grew deeper with each word he spoke and in the orange light of the forges his skin looked almost black. Gwlym could see beads of sweat on his forehead. He understood that Volisios had been manoeuvring for months to replace Prasutagus and had seen a way to strengthen his cause by allying himself with the forces of rebellion. But was that enough?

‘You have done well, Volisios. Better than I could ever have hoped,’ he said artlessly. ‘And when you have burned Colonia, what then? Londinium?’

The Iceni hesitated. It was clear he had not planned beyond the destruction of the Roman colony. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Londinium.’

‘And you will take the city with fifteen thousand men? Londinium is no Colonia. The walls are high and unbroken. The main Roman strength is in the west, but the city’s garrison is still large. And what of the legion at Lindum? Will your men face a full legion?’

‘The tribes of the south will rally to my banner.’

Gwlym blinked. Could the man truly believe that the proud war chieftains of Britain would follow some lord of a trackless swamp? Still, for the moment Volisios was all he had. He allowed himself a show of enthusiasm. ‘You can lead them? The Trinovantes and the Catuvellauni, the Parisi and the Cornovii? I must be sure.’ He stretched out his hands and laid the palms against the sides of the Iceni’s head, at the same time closing his eyes and allowing a deep, bass murmur to resonate from his chest. ‘Yes, I see it. You have the ambition, Lord Volisios, but do you have the fire? Only one with the fire can unleash the wrath of Andraste.’

He removed his hands and stared into the nobleman’s eyes, which were wide with fright. But Volisios had not held the northern Marches of the Iceni for twenty years without a wellspring of courage and resolve.

‘Yes, I have the fire,’ he declared, recovering some of his earlier bluster. ‘I have the fire to ignite the wrath of Andraste.’

Gwlym nodded sternly as if he had no doubt Volisios spoke the truth. ‘When the time comes,’ he said, ‘you and only you will know. Until then, Gwlym druid of Mona will be at your side to advise you.’

Volisios’s eyes shone. Gwlym knew the Iceni was seeing not just Colonia and Londinium, but all of south Britain under his thrall. The new Caratacus.

He had sown the seeds of doubt as he intended and he would nurture those seeds as the opportunity arose. But how to bring the hare to the trap?