Ravens of Avalon (20 page)

By the time she reined her mount off the road and into a wood where a spring offered water and grass grew thickly among the trees, they had covered nearly twenty miles. She rubbed down the horse and used her belt to fashion hobbles so that the animal could graze, then laid the saddle cloth on the ground for a bed and rolled up in her cloak to rest, wondering how long it would take Prasutagos to come.

When she woke, it was well past noon and she was regretting having eaten so little of the wedding feast. The mare, on the other hand, had made the most of the rich grass, and was very willing to be off once more.

The land here was gently rolling, a mixture of woodland and heath broken by scattered farmsteads surrounded by long rectangular fields. By this time Boudica no longer feared to leave a clue for anyone who followed, and ventured to stop at one of the farms and trade some of the ribands from her hair for a meal and a bed by the fire. She had dreaded having to find answers for their questions, but the folk here were slow-speaking and patient, keeping their own counsel and seemingly willing for her to keep her own. It was only later that she remembered the gestures of warding she had been too tired to notice at the time, and realized they must have thought her some creature strayed from Faerie.

Boudica was surprised to wake the next morning and see no sign of the king. At this rate, she thought in exasperation, she would reach his dun before he caught up with her and be waiting to welcome him—if they would admit her. To be captured in the wilderness might be romantic, to greet him as a beggar at his gate would be embarassing.

She set out with enough apples and bannocks in the fold of her gown to last a day or more, letting the red mare go at her own pace along the road. This was a wider and more open land than the country around Antedios’s dun, and to judge by the many stubbled fields, better drained and more bountiful. The anxieties and resentments that had plagued Boudica at the wedding seemed very far away. This was a new land, and as she had done on Mona, she would have to learn its ways.

Unless, of course, Prasutagos repudiated the marriage and sent her home to her father in disgrace. The thought was enough to plunge Boudica into glum contemplation for most of the afternoon. That evening she had no heart to seek shelter at another farmstead and lay once more in the woodland, gazing through a net of branches at the starry path across the heavens that seemed to be pointing the way.

She was awakened by the smell of roasting sausage. For a few moments she thought it was part of a dream, but now she could hear the crackling of a fire. She frowned and turned over, rubbing her eyes. Morning light turned the smoke to a golden haze in which she could make out only the shape of the man who knelt by the fire. But she knew his height and breadth of shoulder. A rush of emotion brought her to full awareness, composed equally of relief, exasperation, and dismay.

“Two days …” she said, sitting up. Her brothers had always told her that attack was the best defense. “You took your time, my lord.”

“There was no hurry. The land is at peace, and I knew where the mare would go.” Prasutagos turned the sausages and looked back at her. Hair and mustache were neatly combed, even the silver strands glinting gold in the morning sun. He was dressed in sturdy trews and a tunic of dull green, appropriate for the road. And he was clean.

“I should hope so.” She picked a wisp of grass from her hair.

“You were not difficult to follow. The countryside is full of rumors of a red woman on a red horse, though report disagrees as to whether she is one of the goddesses or some refugee from the Roman wars, and whether this is a good omen or a portent of doom.”

Boudica could feel the blush heating her skin beneath the dust and grime. She cleared her throat.

“And which view is yours?”

“I think she is an autumnal deity,” he answered dryly. “I promised to find her, and assured them that the magic of the king was sufficient to counter any spell.” He lifted the sausages from the fire and stuck the ends of the sticks on which they had been toasting into the soft ground.

“Excuse me,” she said with what dignity she could muster. “I am going to the stream to wash.”

“Excellent idea. In the pack by the willow tree you will find clean clothes,” he said gravely. “Don’t run from me again. I don’t think my reputation could survive losing my bride a second time …”

oudica followed her new husband through the golden autumn afternoon. In the pack he had brought for her she had found a sleeved tunic of a light wool the color of the harvested fields. She suspected it would be a long time before she dared to wear crimson again in Pra-sutagos’s land. He had also brought the trews she wore for riding, very welcome to her chafed legs after two days with no protection but the folds of the linen gown.

The king’s big bay had a longer pace than the mare’s, and she found herself always a little behind him. She wondered how he had managed to escape from his household. But then, as a younger son he had never expected to inherit a war band, and perhaps he was accustomed to riding about this countryside alone. Certainly the folk at the steading where they paused for a rest and a drink of milk fresh from the cow did not seem surprised to see their king wandering the roads with his new bride.

Prasutagos was accustomed to being alone, she thought as the miles passed. Despite the morning’s embarassment, she had hoped that the constraint between them would disappear. But she suspected now that at the feast he had been quiet from habit, not from inhibition.

If Coventa had been here, she would have filled the emptiness with her chattering. Boudica had never needed to do that, and just now she hardly dared.

“Where will we spend the night?” she asked after an hour without a word had gone by. “Or do you mean to ride straight on to your dun?”

“The horses need rest,” he said, reining in to answer her. “A little up the road there is a holy well where folk come to pray to the Goddess for healing and the granting of desires. I give the people at the farmstead some support so that they may feed travelers. We will stay there.”

hey came to the Lady’s well just as the first stars were kindling in the sky. The water that flowed from the spring chuckled through a shallow valley between wooded hills. But the path was well marked, the area below the spring had been cleared, and the grass was still green. Thatched shelters used by earlier pilgrims stood among the trees. No one else was here so late in the year, but clearly this was a popul ar shrine.

Prasutagos left Boudica to arrange their bedding while he went up to the farm for food. She wondered if that division of labor had been tact, to allow her to choose whether or not to consummate their marriage now. If he had pressed her, she thought wryly, she might have resisted, but she had to face the fact that his remoteness was a challenge, and the binding that had been set upon them in the sacred circle demanded completion. She laid out both sets of blankets full width, one atop the other.

When her husband still had not returned by the time she was finished, she picked up their waterskins and one of her remaining ribands and took the path to the sacred spring. A pool had been dug out to catch the water that welled from the slope of a little hill. The fading light was just enough for her to see the fluttering bits of fabric tied to the hazel tree whose branches shaded it. At its base a piece of wood had been thrust into the ground, carved with staring eyes and the hollow of a woman’s vulva below. Smiling, she tied her own ribbon to a twig with the rest and knelt at the edge.

“Lady,” she whispered, “by whatever name you favor in this land I honor you. Help me to be a good wife to Prasutagos and bear him children …” And then, more softly, “Help me to win his love …” She scooped up water in her hands and drank, then set the waterskins at the edge to fill.

She sat back on her heels, sweeping the distracting thoughts from her mind one by one as she had been taught on the Druids’ Isle, until presently there was only the sweet music of the spring. But from that simple melody came an awareness that remained in her memory as words.

“You may call me Holy Mother, for the milk from my breasts is always welling, always flowing, always poured out for my children in eternal love. Go in peace. In your joy and in your sorrow, I am here …”

Boudica dipped up more water and touched it to the hollow in the image, feeling an answering throb of anticipation between her own thighs.

In peace she rose and took the skins she had filled. When she returned to the shelter Prasutagos had a fire going, and by the hearth there was fruit and new bread. Still entranced by the stillness of the spring, Boudica found herself at ease with his silence. When he excused himself after the meal she stripped off her clothes and slid between the blankets.

He was gone for what seemed a long time, and when he returned he brought with him the cool breath of the holy well. She wondered if they had both prayed for the same thing. But it was a condition of such miracles that they never be spoken aloud.

The fire had burned low, and once more she saw him as a dark shape outlined in gold. She tensed as he inserted himself into the blankets beside her. He raised himself on one elbow and with his other hand lifted a lock of her hair and he murmured something soothing that she could not quite make out.

She wanted to tell him she was not afraid, but he was still whispering, still stroking her hair, and she could not find the words. She remembered how he had gentled the white stallion at the offering pool. It was horse magic, she thought, to tame the red mare …

Prasutagos bent to kiss her, and this time his lips were warm. His hands moved across her body, caressing, commanding, until she lay open and accepting, her whole being flowing to enfold him, welcoming as the waters of the sacred spring.

oudica!” Nessa’s voice came from across the yard. “Come now, lovey—your lord has said you must not lift anything so heavy—do come away!”

Boudica sighed and set down the armful of wood she had been about to bring into the roundhouse. Soon after she and Prasutagos reached Eponadunon, a caravan of wagons bearing all the gifts from the wedding had arrived and with them old Nessa, sent by her mother to be her servant in her new home. Or perhaps her guardian—by the beginning of the new year it was clear that Boudica was pregnant, and since then Nessa and Prasutagos had conspired to treat her as if she were made of Roman glass. That had been all very well during the winter, when freezing rain kept everyone inside the roundhouses, but the Turning of Spring was nigh, and the fair weather urged everyone outdoors. In retrospect, she supposed she ought to be grateful her mother had not sent the old woman with her to Mona, although the image of Nessa facing off against Lhiannon made her smile.

She
missed
Lhiannon, whose calm good sense would have been so helpful as she settled into her new home. Eponadunon lay in a bend of a small river half a day’s ride from the sea, or rather the marshes, for the northern coast edged out gradually in bands of salt marsh and mudflat, with a narrow channel where boats might come in to shore. To the south, another half day of riding would take them to the sacred spring, though since she arrived she had been too busy to visit it again. She would have liked to show it to Lhiannon.

“Come in now, dearie, into the house.” Nessa appeared at her elbow.

Boudica turned on her. “I am young, healthy, and I never felt better in my life! Nor will I melt in the spring sun!”

“One of the lads who watch the cattle has come in. He saw riders on the road—you had better change out of that old gown.”

As Boudica sighed defeat and followed Nessa into the largest of the three roundhouses she was aware of a prickle of excitement. Eponadu-non was nearly as remote as Mona, and Prasutagos did not have the Arch-Druid’s network of informants to keep him apprised of the news, although now that the first shock of the Roman conquest was over, peddlers and tradesmen were beginning to reappear.

And from time to time there was gossip. When Claudius returned to Rome, it was boasted that he had received the submission of eleven kings. Of course they said that his Triumph had also portrayed the conquest of Camulodunon as the capture of a walled city. Closer to home, men said that the legion left to hold down the Trinovantes was building a fortress on the hill above the ruins of the dun.

But the newcomers were no tradesmen. As Boudica was pinning her tunica, one of the girls who had been washing clothes at the stream came rushing up to inform them that a party of Romans was coming up the road.

“The king rode off to the new dun on the shore this morning—we can send one of the lads to find him, but we’ll have to entertain these people until he arrives,” she told the girl. “Our bread is still baking. Girl, when you’ve sent the message run over to the nearest farmsteads to see what they have on hand. In the meantime our guests will have to be content with meat and cheese.”

As the dun exploded into activity around her, she reached for her jewel box to add necklace and bracelets to her attire. The king lived simply here, and the dun would not impress their visitors, but at least she could look like a queen.

By the time the strangers rode through the wooden gate, the house had been swept and the worst of the clutter tidied away. Boudica stood waiting with a drinking horn filled with last of the wine from the wedding in her hands. In times of peace Prasutagos kept no more than a half-dozen warriors at the dun. Calgac, a lanky young warrior who had been assigned her escort, stood with the three who had not gone with the king as the Romans rode in.