Song for a Dark Queen

As harper to Queen Boudicca, Cadwan knows the dark queen better than most. Spirited and strong-willed even as a girl, Boudicca makes a powerful queen of the Iceni tribe: proud, determined and passionate with love for her people.

But faced with the ever-increasing pressure from the Roman army and the sudden loss of her husband, Boudicca needs all the strength she can muster. When Emperor Nero rules that the Royal Line of the Iceni is to be brought to an end, Boudicca vows not to be broken and prepares to fight fire with fire – whatever the consequences. Cadwan longs for the day when he can sing victory songs for his queen but even he is unsure if Boudicca has the strength to win this, the greatest of all battles . . .

Song for a Dark Queen
Rosemary Sutcliff

1
Sword Song

I AM CADWAN
of the Harp. I am the Singer of Songs and the Teller of Tales. There are, there were, many harpers among the Iceni; but I am Harper to the Queen herself; to the Lady Boudicca, as I was when I was young, to her mother before her.

That was long ago, before ever the Red Crests came, in the days when the enemy were the Catuvellauni, the Cats of War.

Five lifetimes ago, ever since they hurled their spears against the first Red Crests who came following Julius Caesar, and the Red Crests went away again in a hurry over the Great Water, the Catuvellauni have followed the conqueror’s path. And the names of their kings – Cassivellaunus, Tasciovanus, Cunobelin, have been names that women use to frighten their naughty children. Many tribes, they overcame. Less than one lifetime ago, when Cunobelin was first a king, he overran the Trinovantes whose borders marched with ours in the south, and made his new Strong Place where their old one had been, at Dun Camulus, the Dun of the War God, less than a day’s riding across our frontier line.

So always, from the first that I remember, we have known that one day, soon or late, it would be our turn. We prayed to the Lord of Battle, that our spears might be stronger than the spears of the Catuvellauni when that day came. We watched our borders and built great turf banks where the fens and the forest left us open to
attack; and the women added the names of Cunobelin’s two sons to those they used for frightening naughty children, though they were but cubs themselves as yet. ‘Togodumnos will catch you!’ they said, and ‘If you do that again, Caratacus will creep in and snatch you out of your beds one dark night!’

And always, there was un-quiet along our borders; a small flurrying warfare of slave and cattle raiding at the full of the moon.

A day in hawthorn time came when the Lady Boudicca was six years old, and the King her father had moved down to his summer steading with all his household, as he often did at that time of year, to see how the foals on the southern runs were shaping. And in the lag end of the night, a man on a sweating horse brought word of raiders within our borders, loose in the grazing land between the forest and the fens. Then the King and his sword-companions came out from sleep, calling for spears and horses, and there were flaring torches and the trampling of war-ponies brought from the stables, and a yelping of horns to summon the fighting men from round about, just as I had known it all a score and a score of times before.

But after all was quiet again, when the King and his war-band were away in a green dawn with the marsh birds calling, and the hawthorn blossom showing curd pale in the darkness of the hedge around the Royal Garth, it was found that the Lady Boudicca was not in her bed in the women’s quarters.

Then there began to be another kind of uproar. Maybe there would have been less if the Queen her mother had been alive. But Rhun, her nurse, was ever like a hen with one chick and a hawk hovering over; a thing I have noticed more than once among women
who rear a child some other woman bore, and have no child of their own. And soon, all the women of the household were in full cry, scurrying here and there, crying and calling, ‘Boudicca! Boudicca! – Stop hiding, I can see you! – Come out from there, child of blackness! – Where are you, little bird?’ And the slaves were sent flying to look in this place and that, in the foaling pens, along the fringes of the oak woods, in every pool of marsh water lest she be lying drowned among the reeds.

I knew better than that. I hitched up my harp in its embroidered mare’s-skin bag – no harper worth the name is willingly parted from his harp, nor leaves her unguarded where even a friendly hand may come too near – and I set off along the way that the King and his companions had followed.

The way ran along the rich grazing country between the wide salt marshes, and the tawny wind-shaped oak woods that are the outriders of the dark forest inland. Three times I asked horse herdsmen if they had seen a girl-child go by; and the first two had seen no one since the war-band passed in the dawn: but the third man said, ‘A little while back. She was dripping with mud and water as though she had fallen into a stream.’

‘And you did not think to stop her?’ I said.

He scratched one ear. ‘Na. She would be from one of the villages round, I thought. She seemed to know where she was going, well enough.’

‘That would be her,’ I said, and pressed on.

There are many winding waters, poplar and willow fringed, among the horse-runs, and soon the way would turn inland; and I did not care to think of her once she came among the trees. The forest is good for a hunting party that knows its way, but not for one
small girl-child alone. So I pushed on as fast as might be. But I had to stop and search as I went, and the sun was far to the west of noon, when I found her at last, not far short of the forest verge. She was sitting among the roots of an ancient willow tree beside one of the slow-flowing streams that vein and dapple all this countryside with winding brightness and sky-reflecting pools. And she forlorn as a fledgeling thrush new-fallen from the nest.

She had walked until she could walk no more. There was blood on one of her feet, and her hair was matted with mud; and the mud had dried into a mask on her face, save where the tracks of tears cut through it. At first I thought that she was asleep; but when I drew near, she turned, showing her teeth like a small wild thing at the nearing of danger. Then, seeing that it was I, she loosened with a little sigh; and squatting down beside her, I saw that the tear tracks were still wet.

‘This is a long way that you are from home,’ I said, ‘and you with a cut foot.’

And she said, ‘They would not take me. Still my father says I am too young. I thought maybe they would take me this time – now that I am nearly seven.’

‘And so you followed them.’

‘I thought if I followed them all the way, they would not send me back alone.’

‘But they rode swift as the wind on their war-ponies, and you have walked the soles off your feet,’ I said. ‘And one of them is cut and bleeding. So we will bathe it here in the stream, and then we will go home for this time. Truly the world is full of sorrow.’

She tipped up her head and looked at me, proud as any brave in his first warpaint, and let another tear run into her mouth rather than wipe it away.

‘I am not crying,’ she said.

‘Surely you are not crying. It is just the wind that has got into your eyes.’

‘I never cry. I am the Royal Daughter of the Iceni, and one day I shall be Queen!’

I lifted her down the bank, where the sun-streaks dappled through the willow leaves, and began to bathe her foot. ‘I shall hurt you,’ I said, ‘but you will not be minding that.’

She shook her head; and looking up, I saw that her grief was grown smaller: a little.

‘Now we will go home. See, I will carry you; and I will make you a song to shorten the way.’

‘Make me a sword,’ she said. ‘Old Nurse made me a sword out of two sticks, but she bound it together with wool, and it broke. Make me a sword, and then we will go home.’

I thought of the hunting and calling that would still be going on, and the rings of search spreading wider and wider. And I was thinking it would do small harm to let them spread a little wider yet. It would not take long. I have always been a man of my hands, as well as a harper. I made her a sword of thick white willow rod split with my dagger, with a short piece laid crosswise to give it shoulders and mark off the hilt from the blade. But with what should I bind it? It must not break as Rhun’s had done. I pulled round the harp-bag from my shoulder and drew out a spare harpstring of red horsehair, the thickest string that yields the deepest note. Good harpstrings are not easily come by; but it was passably strong. She was watching me, her chin almost resting on my arm, as I cut the length I needed. ‘See,’ I said, ‘I am binding your sword with harp-song, so that it will never break. Let you give me
three hairs from your head to use also, that it may be like your father’s great sword that has goldwork in the hilt.’

She pulled me out three hairs and gave them to me, and I dipped them in the water to rid them of mud, and twisted them together with the harpstring, and bound her sword, and gave it to her.

She looked at it, and sighed. She had known that it could only be a toy sword made of willow wood; but her heart had hoped for something more. ‘One day I shall have a real sword,’ she said; and then, ‘You could make me a real song, now.’

She was growing a little sleepy, even then.

‘Surely I will make you a real song,’ I told her, and picked her up, muffling my cloak about her, for a small mean wind was blowing up off the marshes, and a silvery haze dimming the westering sun. And I set out, back the way that we had come. ‘I will make you the song I promised you for home-going. And one day, when you have a great sword like the King your father’s, I will make you a great song of the Victories of a Queen. But now, I will make you only a little song, to match with your little sword.’

And I sang to her as we went along, taking the words as they came into my head:

‘Listen now, for your sword is singing,

“I am the proud one, I that am sword to a Queen.

The sun flames not more brightly than my hilt,

The night cannot outshine my blade’s dark sheen.

The earth shall tremble at our passing;

We will make the warhosts scatter, she and I.”

But now the light fades

And the wild duck home are winging;

And sleep falls like dew from the quiet sky.

“Sleep now,” says your sword,

“Sleep now, you and I.’”