Song for a Dark Queen (16 page)

So we came in sight of the valley, and our lightnings were answered by the sun-flash on Roman spears and helmets and on the great spread-winged eagle standards that waited for us. We seemed borne along towards them on our own spread-wings of storm; not fast, we could not move fast with the lurching wagons drawn by their straining teams of oxen in the rear. But there was no hurry. We held them penned. Corralled like cattle for the slaughter. And they crowed defiance at us with their silver trumpets as we drew nearer, and our great war-horns boomed hollow in reply.

The morning-shadows of men were still tree tall on the rough grass when we rolled to a halt, and spread out into a vast new-moon curve all across the open ground before the mouth of the valley, the Tribes ranged each under its own chiefs and war-captains; the foot-spears and the horsemen, the chariot columns in the midst, the great wagons drawn up in the rear, and the oxen turned free to graze. There was no hurry. It was close on noon before we were done with our ready-making. And all the while, the Red Crest ranks drawn up in the mouth of the clearing sat on their haunches or stood leaning on their spears, and watched us, their cavalry horses fidgeting and neighing to ours, who fidgeted and neighed back again. They were so few, the men in the
Red Crest lines; so few that it scarce seemed worth unleashing the whole War Host against them, save that those held back would have risen up in fury at being denied their part in the kill.

And all the while, the Queen in her chariot, with the Princesses following in another, drove to and fro, taking the reins herself, and reining in her dancing team to speak to the men of this tribe and that: the Brigantes, the Cats of War, our own Horse People.

‘I would bid you see how few they are,’ she said. ‘But what are their numbers to us? We are a proud people fighting for our own. Think of the freedom they robbed us of, and that will be ours again, and I promise you the fight will be a short one, and before the time comes to kindle this evening’s cooking-fires, we shall have avenged old wrongs and be our own lords again!’

And everywhere the men laughed and shouted for her, ‘Boudicca! Boudicca!’ and brought their spears crashing down across their shields in salute.

Then she came back to the Royal Wagon, and the Princesses got down from their chariot to wait among the Women of the Kindred. They were not to ride with her into the battle, so that, if death came to her in the time of victory, the Royal blood would still be there and the Line of Life unbroken, and the Horse People not left without a Queen.

Chiefs and captains came and went about her; and the sun stood at noon; and the Prince Andragius sent her word, ‘It is time to give the Order.’

And she sent back word, ‘There is time enough before the cooking-fires. They have made us wait long enough; let them sweat a while.’

There was a little hillock to the far right of our battle curve; a few thorn bushes on its crest; and there the
Priest Kind had gathered, with oak garlands on their heads. They stood with arms upraised and made the ritual gestures, chanting in the ancient tongue, their feet never moving, as though they, like the thorn trees, were rooted there. And Boudicca stood there also, looking out towards the enemy, while her red chariot ponies fidgeted and fretted just below, tossing their heads and swishing their tails against the gadflies that hung in stinging swarms above the chariot lines.

And I too was there. I would have been among the fighting men, my harp left safe in the Royal Wagon, but Boudicca said, ‘Na, na, my Harper. If you go down amongst the fighting, you will know nothing of the battle but the three men nearest to you; and like enough a spear in your throat. And how then shall you make me my great Song of a Queen’s Victories that shall be sung round our hearths for a thousand winters? Let you bide here, and see all things as they happen from the beginning to the end.’

And then a thing happened that was strange indeed. Out from the scrub close by broke a hare, just as I have seen them break from the corn before a line of reapers. The hare that is sacred to all the Tribes whether they be Stag People or Horse People or Cats of War. Close before the hillock it checked and sat up on its haunches; and I saw the beauty of it, the full, light-bloomed eye, the sunlight striking through its long quivering ears, that flushed them deeper than a dog-rose and showed every delicate branching vein within. For a breath of time it seemed to be looking at the Queen; then with a thrust of its powerful hind legs it sprang forward and went racing straight along our battle line.

A great roar of triumph went up from the waiting
warriors; and the Queen cried out like a trumpet above the surge of their voices, ‘The Mother is with us! All our gods are with us! Now – forward and break them!’

She swung up her father’s sword, and it seemed to me that jagged shards of light broke from the blade in the heat-hazed sunshine, and with a bellowing of war-horns the charge broke forward.

And from the little hillock where she had bidden me wait, I saw, Grief upon me! I saw all things as they happened, from the beginning, far on towards the end.

The Roman trumpets were yelping, and far off in the Red Crests’ lines, the men who had been sitting or leaning on their spears, had straightened to become an unbroken wall of shields. And towards them our chariot line rolled forward, slowly at first, the ponies fighting for their heads, then gathering speed and power and terror. I felt the ground throbbing under my feet with the drum of hooves and the fury of chariot wheels as the great curved line swept on towards that waiting wall of Red Crests. I saw men and horses going down to right and left beneath the first flight of Roman spears, but the rest thundering on to crash into the ranks that stood like a rampart to receive them. I saw great ragged holes suddenly appear in the foremost rampart, and the chariots pouring through to hurl themselves on another that lay behind it. And the dust-cloud began to rise, and I could scarcely hear the roar of the joined battle for the baying of our own foot-spears, like hounds in leash who sight the quarry. In one place, two, maybe more, the chariots broke through again. Then came a check. There must have been a third line, and it must have held; and then out of the turmoil the chariots came again, heading back towards the Tribes. Something over half way, they wheeled about and
hurled forward again, our horsemen flanking them, upon the Roman lines that had scarce had time to reform.

And the bright yelping of the trumpets and the booming of the war-horns rose and flung to and fro above the storm-roar of battle. And this time, I looked to see the chariots break clean through. Nearer and nearer they swept until they seemed almost upon the waiting Red Crests. And then in the last instant before the shock of meeting, their centre seemed to tear wide open like a horrible red wound. Horses were down and threshing, dragging their chariots with them; and the second wave of chariots, too close to pull clear, went crashing headlong into them, making a still more hideous confusion. The air above it was dark and thrumming with spears and sling-stones from the forward surging mass of our own foot warriors; and under the dark hail, suddenly the shape of the enemy was changing. From the straight three-fold rampart that it had been, it was becoming a wedge. A vast, terrible shield-flanked wedge, fanged and taloned with ripping sword-blades, driving into the gap that their spears had torn open for them, and thrusting on – and on. . . .

The Red Crest trumpets were screaming like angry hawks above the battle-roar; the shouted war-cries and the shrieks of horses and the crash of splintering chariots.

The Queen was away down from her watch place on the hillock. She sprang into her chariot, and screamed something, there was no hearing what, to her charioteer. I saw him jab in the goad, and the horses sprang forward, scattering blood from their pierced haunches. The Queen’s standard-bearer galloped beside her. She was waving up the last reserves of chariots. I saw them
hurtling forward like a winter skein of wild geese – to meet the remains of the second chariot charge that were streaming back. I wondered whether she could turn them yet again, and if not, whether she would be caught up and engulfed by them in their flight. But I did not wait to see. I slipped my harp-bag from my shoulder and hung it on a thorn branch, for the time of the harp was past, and dropped down from the hillock, drawing my sword as I ran. A wild-eyed and riderless horse swept by me, and I caught it, and headed after the Queen for the boiling heart of things.

And then for a while, even as she had said, I knew little more of the battle than the three men nearest me. My throat was full of the smell of blood and sweat and the choking dustcloud out of which men and horses reeled to and fro. I had lost all sight of the Queen, all knowledge of where she was, so that I could no more be following her. The struggle had lost all shape and pattern and sense; but somewhere in the heart of it, driving on and on, I knew was that terrible wedge-shaped beast – in my mind it had become a beast, not a formation of mortal men – that the Red Crests had unleashed against us and gradually, through the dust and the red trampling chaos, I became aware of other things. Fresh waves of the enemy pressing in on us from the wings, cavalry bursting in upon our close-packed foot warriors, hacking their way through so that the tribesmen went down like barley before the reapers.

Our battle mass was being cut to rags – separate, desperate bands of men gathered about a chieftain or a standard, dying where they fell among the still-threshing legs of wounded chariot ponies. And slowly, relentlessly, the whole shapeless battle beginning to
move one way. Between those little cut-off steadfast bands, the lesser men were streaming back. Panic is a strange and terrible thing, and when it strikes it is as catching as the yellow sickness. Suddenly all around me men were running, with wide eyes and open mouths, some even flinging their spears away. I was caught up in the wave and swept backward – backward towards the wagons drawn up in our rear. And then I understood what those wagons would mean; the oxen turned out to graze, so that even if there had been time, they could not be dragged clear. It was not the Red Crests, but we, who were in the trap.

I had only one thought after that, to reach the Royal Wagon and the Princesses. What good I thought I could do, I would not be knowing. I got my chance-come horse turned about, and drove him towards where I could still see the red horse-tail pennants hanging in the still air above the roof of the Royal Wagon. I was almost there when a flung spear took him in the throat, he reared up, screaming through his own blood, then came crashing to the ground. I managed to fling clear as he fell, and ran on. More than once I think I used my sword on my own kind to clear my way through. And then at last I had gained the place that I made for.

All along the line the women were making frenzied efforts to drag the wagons round, to make space between them. But it was hopeless, even if there had been time. There would be escape for some on the furthest flanks of the fighting, round the ends of the wagon line; if they had been coming in a thin trickle there would have been a way out under the floorboards and between the wheels. But what was sweeping down on them was a vast wave of men,
dense-packed and desperate, with the hunters hard behind.

Some of the foremost swarmed under and ran free; the rest turned at bay, weaponed or weaponless, there being nothing else to do; men and women, and even the children with a stone or an arrow or a dead man’s dirk.

And so the Red Crests burst upon us with their short stabbing swords.

Around the Royal Wagon, a few of us from the Kindred made our last rallying point, the Queen’s women fighting among us. I mind the Princess Essylt clinging to the side of the wagon itself, one foot on a wheel-hub, a dead man’s sword in her hand, her red hair flying about her head, fighting like a wild cat and chanting some savage war-song of her own as she struck, and struck again, until a legionnaire’s sword, stabbing upward, took her beneath the breast-bone, and her song broke into a scream as she tumbled down into the struggling tangle below.

Nessan was beside me, with a dirk for her weapon. Even in that moment she cried my name, as though my coming meant rescue, safety, something to be glad for.

The shouting and screaming rose to tear the skies asunder; the Red Crest cavalry swept in with their long sabres to aid the men of the short swords cutting down every living thing, man, woman, child and horse, that came in their path. They had three cities, and four cohorts of the Ninth Legion to avenge, and the dead began to lie thick, hacked and hideous, piled one upon another.

A Red Crest with half his shoulder-guard torn away came leaping over the barrier of the dead. I lunged forward to meet and turn his sword; and in the same
heartbeat of time a cavalry man crashed by, crouched low in the saddle, his long blade sweeping out and down, and Nessan fell against me and crumpled to my feet. My own sword had found its mark; I wrenched it out, feeling it grate on bone as the Red Crest went over backwards, and when I looked down, Nessan was lying twisted with her face turned to the sky and blood welling from a deep wound between her neck and shoulder.

I saw that she called out to me, though I could not hear above the tumult. Her eyes clung to my face, and she made as though she would hold her arms out to me as she used to do when she was a very small child.

And I knew that the battle was lost; and it seemed to me as in a dream, that all I had to do now was to save the child. I slammed home my sword into its sheath, and stooped and heaved aside the bodies that clogged my feet. There was a small clear gap between the wheels of the wagons. If I could get her through it into some kind of shelter, when the slaughtering was over and the darkness came, I might be able to get her away.

She was very light to lift; but even as I knelt with my arms round her, a moment of blinding pain took me in the left flank, in the soft unguarded part between ribs and hip. I pulled out the light spear-head, and my strength seemed to come with it, like water. I flattened on top of her, and lay still. Somewhere above us in the wagon a woman screamed loud enough to tear through even that turmoil. The taste of blood came into my mouth, and every instant I waited for the death blow, not yet knowing that in truth I had it already. But the Red Crests ploughed on, shouting as they thrust and thrust again. And in the breathing space that followed,
I gathered myself and dragged Nessan further in under the wagon, and again lay down over her.