Song for a Dark Queen (7 page)

The man came out of the shadows. ‘Back there behind the fodder store, and the pups are coming.’

‘In this weather? Man, have you not the sense to get her into shelter?’

‘She’ll not come – and I am afraid to rough-handle her –’

‘Is something amiss?’ Prasutagus demanded.

The old slave shook his head. ‘She was well enough with the first two. She is in trouble with this one.’

‘I’ll come,’ Prasutagus said.

When he did not come into Hall with the rest, and Duatha told the Queen what had happened, she looked at the drenched companions steaming by the fire, and sent out his armour-bearer to bid him come into the warmth and get him dry and some hot food inside him. ‘It will not take long, and then he can be going back to Fand,’ she said, as though she were his mother.

But the armour-bearer returned alone. ‘My Lord Prasutagus says that he will come in a while and a while,’ he said.

But it was a long while; and when he came, and the evening meal half over, he was like the ghost of one
long drowned in wintry seas; grey white to the lips, his clothes hanging on him as coldly sodden as sea-wrack. He came to the fire, holding out his hands to the flames; and they had blood on them, and they shook.

Boudicca went to him. ‘Hai Mai! You are the wet one! Let you come now and change those sodden rags.’

‘In a little,’ he said.

And Essylt, close behind her mother, asked him, ‘Father, how is it with Fand?’

‘She’s dead. It will be well enough with the cubs if Baruch can find them a foster mother.’ And he turned from the fire towards the entrance to the Royal Chamber, where his armour-bearer waited for him.

When he came back, in fresh tunic and breeks, his hair standing out in spikes where he had rubbed it dry, he went again to the fire; and Boudicca herself brought him food and wine from the table, that he might eat beside the blaze. But he ate only a few mouthfuls of the food, then pushed it aside and drank the wine. It seemed that he could not stop shivering.

‘This is a cheerless fire that we have tonight,’ he said, and forced a grin. ‘It looks bright enough, but somebody must have cast a spell on it, for it gives out no heat.’

I felt a faint movement against my knee, and when I looked down, Nessan, who was sitting there as she often did in the evenings, was looking up at me, with trouble in those strange rain-grey eyes of hers. ‘Is he sick?’ she asked at half breath.

‘He is chilled to the bone, and he has just lost his favourite hound. If Epona grant it, a night’s rest will see him well again, little bird.’

But next morning did not see Prasutagus well again.
He was flushed as he had been grey the night before, and with a small wracking cough that grew worse as the day went by. And by evening it could be seen that he found it hard to catch his breath.

‘It is the lung fever,’ said the Healer Priest, and shook his head.

‘He is very strong!’ Boudicca said. ‘Stronger than the lung fever.’

And again the Priest shook his head. ‘There is an echo in his heart that should not be there. I first heard it when I listened to the life within his chest, seventeen autumns ago.’

‘If it has been with him so long, it can make no difference now,’ said the Queen, with terror in her voice.

And a third time the Healer Priest shook his head. ‘We will do all that can be done. We will make the Sacrifices. But it is an old friend. Truly every man walks with death from the moment that he is born.’

And Prasutagus lay on the great bedplace, propped high with the coloured pillows, trying to laugh without enough breath to laugh with, and telling the priests that it was only a pain in his chest that would pass by and by, and they were no more than a gaggle of old women.

And all the while, for three days and three nights, the wind blew, howling round the High Hall, and the freezing rain drenched down. But on the third night the rain ceased and the wind died away, and the silence was filled with the faint trickling of waters; and in the air outside was the faint unmistakable smell which is the promise of spring as yet far off. And in the dark heart of that night, Prasutagus died.

Boudicca and Old Nurse had tended him throughout, as they had done that first time, seventeen years before. And at first, Boudicca would not believe that
what had happened that first time would not happen this time also. ‘Pile more rugs on him!’ she said. ‘We must keep him warm for his spirit to come back to!’

And Old Nurse, weeping and clinging to her, said, ‘Hush, hush now, come away. This time his spirit will hot come back.’

But Boudicca lay rigid along the bedplace, holding him in her arms, not seeming to feel the old woman pulling at her, calling and calling for more rugs to keep him warm.

Essylt had stolen away somewhere, to Duatha, I am thinking, for what ever comfort he could be giving her. Aiee! The pair of children! But Nessan had come to me, just beyond the threshold, and I held her close while she shivered in my arms. ‘I wish she would not – Oh I wish she would not! Cannot someone stop her?’

‘Maybe you could stop her,’ I said. ‘Let you go and try.’

And she went in, the little one, into the chamber where the Priests had begun the journey rituals, and the King lay dead; and I do not think that she spoke at all. But her arms did what Old Nurse’s could not do; and in a while the Queen got up and allowed them to lead her away.

Most dear Mother, When I came away, you bade me promise to write as often as might be. See now what a dutiful son I am! You also bade Marcipor to look after me as a good body-slave should do; but in truth, I seem to have done little but look after him, for he developed saddle boils on the way up through Gaul, and was direly seasick during the crossing. Anyhow, here we are, safe and sound, having landed at Rhutupiae, and come on to Londinium riding post. Tomorrow I shall buy a couple of horses and baggage beasts – they tell me the horse market here is good – and then join the next mounted party heading for Deva, where I learn the Governor now is.

Meanwhile, I am lodged in the house of Decianus Catus, the Procurator, which is better than the Government resthouse. Catus is in fact the soul of hospitality; but only, I should judge, to those he thinks may be in a position to repay him in one way or another in the future. He is, after all, a business man, even though a business man in Government service. Dearest Mother, you are perfectly right, it is ungentlemanly to be rude about one’s host. But you brought me up to be truthful, and the truth is that I do not like the man, and I do not think Father would have liked him either. It is strange, considering that Father was killed in the summer that I was born, how well I seem to know him. That must be because you brought me up knowing him; and since I never thought to thank you for that
before, I will thank you now. He was clearly so well worth knowing. But to return to Decianus Catus; it is really very good of him to give me guestroom, for he is especially busy at the moment: one of the native rulers, Prasutagus, King of a free state somewhere north of here, is dead this past month or more, and the Emperor has given orders for the state to be abolished, and the tribe and its territory absorbed into the ordinary pattern of provincial government. He is doing that all over the Empire, of course; and I suppose that since this Prasutagus has no son to follow him, and the royal line is at an end, this is the obvious time for it to happen to the Iceni also. So says Decianus Catus, at all events. It seems hard; but no one thinks there will be trouble. For one thing, the Iceni are unarmed – after trouble some years ago – and have no one to lead them. But apparently the money-lenders who have been busy among them are calling in the debts to be on the safe side; Seneca foremost among them. How odd that a philosopher preaching the virtues of the simple life should turn to that particular trade.

Forgive me. I started this letter by criticizing my host, and now I am criticizing a friend of Father’s, and one to whose good offices, at least in part, I owe my place as a tribune on the Governor’s Staff – you must blame it on the weather. Here we are into the first days of March; and at home the almond trees will be in flower and the vines sprouting. But here there is no sign of spring at all; at least, none that my southern-bred eyes can make out. Admittedly, we were blind with wind and rain all the way from Rhutupiae, and so I have seen little but this town. It’s something of a shanty town still, lacking in roots. Well of course none of it is more than eighteen years old, even the army
depot, and you can’t expect many roots in that time. But it seems prosperous enough; lots of shipping below the bridge; so there should be a few reasonable wine shops around.

And even as I write, a wing of blue sky has appeared behind the roofof the shiny new temple everybody is so proud of I think I shall go out and explore. . . .

SO THE DEATH-FIRES
blazed for King Prasutagus, and his ashes were laid in the Royal House of Sleep, his shield – the Romans had left us our shields – and his best wolf spear made fine with a war collar of fierce blue-black heron’s feathers, for his journey. But no sword. Even for the King, the Horse People could not spare a sword. And the moon that had been new when he died, waxed full and waned into the dark, and was new again.

And all that time, Boudicca was like one bound by a spell. Some spell of the old Earthling magic such as the Dark People know how to cast. She did all that was needed of a Priest-Queen, as surely as she had always done it. She walked from place to place about the Dun, braced and erect as though always, now, she carried the weight of the moon headdress upon her head. She sat listening in her place at the Council Fire, and answered any who spoke to her. She even ate a little, sitting in her High Place at the evening meal. But when you looked at her, nothing looked back out of her eyes, and the glow of warmth and life that had always come from her came no more. It was Old Nurse and the other women who did what they could to comfort the young ones, and maybe Duatha and myself, a little, too, in our different ways. And maybe in some sort they comforted each other. It was as though Boudicca their mother was not there at all; as though, having left her outer shape to move and speak for her in the world of the living, she herself had gone to lie in the Place of Sleep with Prasutagus, along with his shield and spear.
And there were times, as the new moon began to wax once more, when I wondered, and I think not I alone, whether she would ever wake again.

And then at the full moon of Corn Sowing, the Romans came.

We were well used to the visits of the tax-collectors and their kind; but this was another thing. This was Decianus Catus the Procurator himself. He who had been only a name and a grasping shadow to us until that day; and with him more Government officials than ever we had seen in the same place at the same time before, and an escort of Red Crests more than two hundred strong.

Word of their coming had raced ahead of them to reach us in the usual way. But it was the time of the full moon offering; the little offering of grain and mares’ milk which every woman makes for her household, and the Queen for all her tribe. And so at the moment of their coming, she was elsewhere, and they must wait in the Hall, the Red Crests drawn up and leaning on their spears in the forecourt. And they did not like to wait. You could see them chafing under their Roman calm.

She came soon enough, the Princesses behind her, and the Moon Mark still chalk-drawn on her forehead. To us, it is a thing of great beauty, the Moon Mark, three-winged like an iris flower, springing from between the brows. But they looked at it as though it were the ploy of some foolish child. And the Procurator began without greeting, ‘Did your people not tell you who was in your hall? I am a busy man, and do not like to be kept waiting.’

‘They told me,’ Boudicca said, ‘but the Lady, also, does not like to be kept waiting.’

And she took the Guest Cup from Essylt, and held it out to him.

‘Drink and be welcome.’

And when he had drunk, she sat herself in the High Place; I in my usual place at her feet – that is the fine thing, being a harper, that when your harp is silent you can be as little noticed as a hound under the table – and rug-covered stools and more wine were brought for the Procurator and his officers.

A man stood by to turn Roman and British speech to and fro between the speakers, but there was little need of him, for the Procurator spoke the tongue of the Tribes after a fashion, and with the passing of the years, we have come to know something of the Latin tongue also.

Then Decianus Catus took a scroll from the young man who stood beside him, and gave it to the Queen.

She took it and unrolled it and looked at the written words, then let it spring back, and handed it again to the Procurator. ‘Your tongue, I can speak a little, but I cannot read it when it is written down. Let you tell me what this writing says.’

The Procurator took the scroll, and once more unrolled it. But his eyes never moved along the lines of written words. I could see that he knew by heart what was in the scroll, and that what was in it pleased him well, though he took care to keep a grave official face.

‘Lady, this writing says that now your husband Prasutagus is dead, leaving no sons, and the Royal Line of the Iceni at an end, the Divine Emperor Nero has decided upon doing away with the free state over which he ruled, and absorbing the people and territory of the Iceni into the Province of Britain, under the
same form of government as any other part of the Empire. He bids you to accept his will in this matter, and obey the commands of his officers sent to carry it out.’

He spoke loudly and clearly, and his words reached the companions gathered at the lower end of the Hall. I saw the sudden movement among them, the quickly raised heads, the in-caught breath. But I thought for a moment that they had not reached Boudicca at all. Then she said, almost dreamily, ‘I am the Queen. Here beside me are my daughters, the Royal Line of the Iceni is not at an end.’