The Eagle and the Raven (30 page)

“Enter,” he said gently and she followed him while the men in the room fell silent and rose to their feet, cups in their hands.

After that night, Plautius allowed her to walk free. He was busy again, closeted night after night with his officers, and soon Gladys stood by the gate and watched the legions march away, the Ninth to the land of the Coritani on the borders of Aricia’s country, Sabinus and Vespasianus’s Second to the southwest to put down the fresh stirrings of revolt among the Durotriges, and the Fourteenth and the proud, independent Twentieth toward the west. Camulodunon emptied but for the members of the commander’s staff, for the soldiers who were left to build more permanent housing for themselves and to defend and maintain the town, and for the Trinovantian peasants and Catuvellaunian freemen who had scattered, only to come creeping back under Adminius’s persuasion. Plautius had them put to work. The legions were moving slowly, conscripting local labor to build roads as they went, and the speculatores and beneficiarii already clattered over the smooth cobbles on their swift horses, carrying dispatches to and from Camulodunon.

The Great Hall was finally burned to the ground. Gladys stood and watched without emotion. All the farewells had been said, all the memories, bitter and sweet, had been felt and dismissed, and she waited now for the hollow places of her soul to be filled with another reality. When the ashes had cooled, Plautius ordered the site immediately cleared and leveled, and the new procurator, the architects come from Rome, and the officers gathered to discuss the erecting and financing of Claudius’s temple. Taxes, both annona and tributum soli, were set and they were harsh, for Claudius had refused to provide funds from his own treasury for the building of his temple. The money and labor had to come from the peasants who were even now threshing and harvesting their crops and preparing their cattle for winter. The peasants were outraged, not so much at the corn tax or the cattle that were driven from their fields as at the slave chains that fell about their necks and the optios who stood over them with whips as they labored over the charred remains of their freedom. Blood was shed, and cries went up, for a slave was less than a man. A slave was without rights, soul, or voice, but Plautius calmly ordered public floggings and executions and the grumbles died. The only resistance left went underground, into the fierce spirits of the naked, sweating peasants and once-free tribesmen. Gladys, walking by them of a morning, was pierced by the smouldering, dumb hatred in their black eyes. Guilt, held at bay in the lull after her capture, returned to torment her, and she again felt dishonored, reading in those suffering eyes a deep contempt. She should have been there beside them, sinews cracking, lungs straining, instead of lunching with Plautius in his tent and discussing the merits of Roman art. But though she was less of a prisoner than they, her hands were tied. I stayed, she told herself again and again. I fought to the end. I held tight to my honor. But she felt the muscles of her sword arm grow limp from disuse and her body soften with too much good food and too much leisure. She despised herself. She requested sword practice from Plautius and he agreed. He came to watch, an amused smile on his face as she circled and slashed at a disgruntled Varius, appointed by his commander to keep the barbarian princess happy. Once or twice she could have killed him but did not. She was not afraid of the immediate, final reprisal that would come, but she remembered her tribal promise to Plautius and something in her was repelled at the idea of betraying his trust in her.

One day, sitting and panting after a stiff bout in the shade of one of the new houses that now fronted the path to the gate, her sword beside her, she felt something in the dirt under her hot hand. She scraped absently at the earth and it dribbled away revealing a leather sling, coiled in a knot, brown with old blood. She quickly tucked it out of sight under her belt, not knowing why she did so. The soldier from the armory, which now squatted sturdily beside the stables, the hospital, the grain storage sheds, and the new barracks where the last circle had sprawled, came for her sword and she handed it over, rising wearily to seek water. A sling was of no earthly use coupled with her self-imposed truce, but she took it to her hut and cleaned it anyway, rubbing it with oils and wondering whose blood had spurted over its soft, brown hide.

Two days later she knew why Camulos, who now stood behind the stables, had given her the weapon. She had taken a coracle and drifted down the river, hugging the bank to avoid the laden barges that plied daily between the coast and Camulodunon, and raising a hand now and then in answer to the shouted greetings of the soldiers who stood beside the piled goods. Half a mile from the estuary she grounded her little craft, pulled it high, and left it, striding toward the lip of the cliff over rolling, grass-covered hills, breathing deeply and gratefully as the fresh landward wind buffeted her. She had given up sailing right to the estuary, for it was now a busy, noisy place where ships came and went, where soldiers gossiped with the inevitable traders and the sands were always full of cargo. Now she walked farther to where the cliff fell sheer to the rocks and the boiling surf below, and already her feet had made a faint track in the long grasses. She would tie up her tunic and clamber down the dusty, crumbling side without fear, coming to rest in silence and peace where only the cry of gulls and the crash of the breakers spoke.

On this day she crested the last humping roll of hill before the land broke off into blue sky, and she saw two men standing on the edge, talking. Immediately she dropped to her stomach, lying still in the dry grass, surprised at the mindless reaction of her body. She had nothing to fear anymore from Romans. All the same she lifted her head with caution, peering through the waving stalks of grass. Then a strange thrill went through her and her fingers clenched. One of the men was a soldier, a centurion, vine stick held languidly in his hand, sun glittering on his iron-stripped skirt, but the other… The other man was Adminius. She craned her neck, eyes straining. There could be no doubt. The light brown hair billowed toward her, the tunic was scarlet and yellow, the long sword clung to his breech-clad leg, and as he turned to say something to the soldier beside him she saw the broad, thick nose and the cleft chin of her father, but here it was a caricature of the features she had loved. Adminius was running to fat. His years in Rome had softened him, and bitter thoughts of treachery and revenge had eaten into the fair face, giving it a surly, crabbed look. Cunobelin’s unrivaled cunning was there, too, as it was in Caradoc, but not tempered by Caradoc’s sensitivity. Gladys felt sick. She knew that Plautius had kept them deliberately apart out of respect for her, but now here he was, alone but for a soldier, here in her hands. She pulled the sling out of her belt, thinking of the last time she had seen him, there in the dim stable harnessing his mount in a furious rage. He had flung his torc at her, grazing her cheek. I should have killed him then, she thought, but I suppose it has made little difference. Claudius would have plotted his invasion anyway, and Plautius would have come, and I would still be carrying with me the fiery brand of my tribe’s dishonor and my own guilt. Sholto died again before her eyes but she blinked the vision away, feeling around her cautiously. A stone, she prayed, eyes closed. Camulos, you put Adminius within my grasp. Now give me a stone. She forgot her new contentment, she forgot her still-nebulous dreams of imprisonment in the circle of Plautius’s strong, inviting arms. She was a sword-woman stalking an enemy, all effort tensed on the kill, and the man gesturing expan sively, laughing as the centurion spoke, was not her brother. Her fingers closed about a stone, round, smooth, too small, but it would have to do. She knew that she was not proficient with the peasant’s weapon and all she could hope to do was topple him over the edge. She shook out the sling and fitted the stone snugly within it. What if I hit the soldier? she thought. Then I must face Adminius with bare hands and die. She shrugged off the consequence. Mother, keep them talking, keep their eyes seaward, she prayed as she rose slowly. She swiftly raised an arm, began to swing the sling, gauged the direction of the strong wind. Die, you miserable wretch, she thought as the sling whizzed faster. No clean slaying for you. Die in shame. She let go and dropped out of sight, but before she began to wriggle back to the covering shelter of the trees along the riverbank she waited to see whether fate had been with her, her lips drawn back, teeth clenched. The stone struck. Adminius cried out, his hand flying to his neck, and even as he flung out an arm to steady himself he lost his balance and his feet slipped. The centurion leaped forward, grabbing at his tunic, but it tore away, and the scream that ripped the sun-drenched summer air was more sweet to Gladys’s ears than the loveliest song Caelte had ever sung.

At last, at last, she exulted, sliding on her belly through the grass as the centurion dropped his pitiful handful and began to run shouting along the clifftop. I am clean, I am avenged. Take heed, Tog, and all you noble dead. She reached the trees and forced herself to walk slowly along the damp turf beside the water until she came to her coracle, got in, and picked up the paddle, dropping the sling into the river. The sun beamed down, dappling the limpid depths, and fish flicked away like cold shadows to hide in the waterweed as her boat moved upstream. She would go back to Camulodunon. She had no need of the ocean’s balm this day.

Plautius kept his opinion about the cause of the Catuvellaunian chief’s death to himself. He questioned the centurion briefly, listening to his story with an inward smile, then he sent for the river guards and enquired when the Lady Gladys had taken out a coracle that day. His knowledge of her and his growing intuition about her did the rest. The soldiers were saying that an insect had stung the barbarian in the neck and he had swiped at it, lost his balance, and fallen, and the story was a two-day wonder. Then Vespasianus returned from Rome and the legionaries found other topics of conversation. Plautius let the matter drop. He knew the necessity of using traitors and informers. He had done it many times in the past, but always with an almost physical distaste, and he was not sorry that Adminius was dead. He had outlived his usefulness to Rome in any case. The invasion had been so decisive that he had not even been needed as a puppet king. The act had not been murder. To a Catuvellaunian sword-woman it had been retribution, and Plautius knew that Gladys would not kill again in the same way. From then on he never once referred to Adminius in her presence, and by this she knew that he understood.

He took to accompanying her every evening when she floated to the beach and strolled beside the dark water, the cares and decisions of his day somehow shrinking into a new proportion under the influence of her calmness. Summer was almost over. The early mornings were soaked with a fine, white mist, the evening air held a nip, and day after day the migrating birds rustled overhead in piping black clouds. Preparations for winter were going ahead well. The Ninth had built an encampment on the Marches of Brigantia and were preparing to enter winter quarters, their front secured by Aricia’s promises of cooperation. Vespasianus had rejoined the Second, now in snug temporary barracks, while the Durotriges smarted, cowed after more than a dozen new defeats. Vespasianus had already begun to plan his push northwest in the spring if all went well. The Fourteenth and Twentieth were still moving uneasily through Cornovii country, all too aware of the proximity of the men of the west, but all seemed quiet.

Plautius knew that he must soon begin a tour of his legions, but in the days left to him at Camulodunon he lingered, walking beside Gladys, often in silence. Both would be cloaked against the night chill, watching the moon rise pure and clean to silver the quiet water, and standing by the gray, bubbling foam while the stars came out to shine, netted in the motionless clouds of a tranquil sky. When he finally kissed her, deep under the shadow of a rock that leaned over them and smelled of salt and age, it was with an unselfconscious artlessness, as though he and she, the sand, the cliffs, the ocean, were all linked by ties of a sweet and ancient innocence. Her lips were soft and cool, fitting his easily and naturally, and she tasted of dry wind and herbs. He felt little passion. He wanted only to touch her long hair, feel with his fingers the clean contours of her face, hold her fresh warmth to him under the shelter of his cloak, knowing that with this woman life could be rich and full. He took her cloak and spread it on the gray sand and they sat together, his own cloak enfolding them both, and her hands cool in his. He spoke to her quietly of his estate on the hills outside Rome, and of the marble stillness of his halls in the drugged heat of a midsummer afternoon. He told her of the shady wet greenness of his garden, with the little wrought-iron gate under the spreading plane tree, where one could lean and look out upon his dusty vineyards, and beyond them to the wide reaches of the Tiber and the towers and rearing columns of the city. He told her of the sun lying long in the empty rooms, of his study lined with books and scrolls, of his years governing in Pannonia away from the place he loved. Albion was his last active post. In five years, or six or seven, he could return to Rome with honor, to his grapes and his horses and his beautiful, quiet house. He made no request of her. There were no unspoken questions. In a while he stopped talking and put his arms about her, drawing her to him, and the ocean crashed at their feet, speaking to Gladys of a new freedom.

S
UMMER
, A.D. 43

Chapter Sixteen

A
S
she heard the shouting and cheering begin, Boudicca lifted the sleepy, replete baby away from her breast, wrapped it swiftly, handed it to Hulda, and ran outside. The afternoon was hot and drowsy. Beyond the town the forest stood motionless as if dazed with the weight of stifling air, and the marshes were silent under a high and burning sun. She saw her husband leave the cool shade of the Council hall with his train and begin to move toward the gate, and she hurried to catch up with him, snatching her sword from its resting place before the doorskins and buckling it on. Seeing her coming he stopped and waited for her.

“What is it?” she called to him. “Why are the people so excited?” She came up to him flushed, the sun drenching her bare, bronzed arms, her copper-colored hair, her brown, freckle-flecked face. “Is the sky about to fall on us?”

Prasutugas smiled at her fiery, unkempt anxiety, and Lovernius the bard acknowledged the old, proud joke with a rattle of his gaming dice and a shrill, tuneful whistle. “Some would say yes and some no,” Lovernius answered her. “It depends in what light you see the return of our embassy from Camulodunon. Of course, it depends also on how you see the embassy itself. You, Lady, may expect the sky to come crashing down at any moment, while you, Lord, are full of joy at how high and clear it is.”

“Save your wit for the Council fire, Lovernius!” she said rudely. “Prasutugas, is it the embassy?”

“I think so.”

They turned and walked toward the gate where a growing crowd had gathered, eyes fastened on the figures of three horsemen that wavered and danced in the heat haze to the south, and Prasutugas was cheered as he shouldered his way through them, bard, charioteer, and wife behind him.

“Peace for us all, Prasutugas!” someone called gaily. He nodded and waved, carefully keeping his eyes from Boudicca, who had come to stand beside him and was gripping his naked forearm.

“Are there any Romans with them?” she breathed. “If they have brought the enemy back with them I shall shut myself away, I shall refuse them hospitality, I shall…”

“How is my daughter today?” he cut in gently, pointedly, and she let go of him, her hand dropping to the hilt of her sword. “Does she suckle well?”

“Sometimes, Prasutugas,” she replied tartly, “I think I hate you, for you have no intuition and certainly no intelligence.”

He planted a swift kiss on the tip of her small nose. “Good, good,” he teased her. “I shall enjoy being hated by you, for then you will leave me alone. I am the most wife-ridden, nagged man in the tuath, and everyone knows it!”

She looked across at him, meeting his blue, smiling eyes, and then suddenly leaned her tousled head against him. But before she could speak a roar went up from the people and she straightened to see that the flickering shapes had become cantering riders approaching the gate, their blue, yellow and scarlet tunics pasted wet to their chests, their breeches fluttering from their hanging legs. When they had come within earshot they drew their swords and held them high, and in a moment they had drawn rein and the crowd flowed swiftly around them. The nearest chief flung his sword at Prasutugas’s feet and the tip of it thudded into the dry earth.

“Success, Lord!” he panted, sliding from his mount’s back. “We have much news, all of it good, and the Iceni are safe!”

“Peace?”

“Peace!”

The cry was taken up. Peace, peace, the people shouted as Prasutugas, his train and the members of the embassy began to move into the town. Only Boudicca walked with a stiff back and a glowering face.

“Did the sky hurt your head when it splintered around you?” Lovernius whispered in her ear. She swung around to strike him but then did not dare. His eyes were full of sympathy.

“From now on, shut your mouth, Lovernius,” she murmured. “If you have felt the sky cracking around your own ears, keep it to yourself.”

The hall was blessedly cool and dim, a shadow place with its huge shields frowning from the walls, its ancient swords that in winter reflected the light of Council fires, its massive chains from which the cauldron hung. Men and women pressed excitedly through the doorway to sit on the skins or stand, and Prasutugas, Boudicca, the embassy, and the others went down near the now-cold hearth. Beer was brought and they drank thirstily, the travelers gulping down two and three mugsful. The leader of the embassy wiped his mouth carefully on his tunic and relaxed with a sigh, while a servant threaded his way through the packed bodies bearing cheese and bread, and fresh, steamed fish.

“Well?” Prasutugas demanded. “Did you speak with the emperor? What did he say? Does he accept our offer of cooperation?” There was a hush throughout the hall as the people strained to catch the conversation.

The man took a loaf from the proffered tray and tore it apart. “We met with the emperor,” he said slowly, proudly. “He is a very great ricon and his hospitality is boundless. He fed us strange dishes and gave us sweet wine to drink, and talked very fair, but his words were of all the fine things that would come to us and we quickly understood that our business was not with him but with the man who beat the Catuvellauni. There were many other embassies present, who also ate at the emperor’s table, and he was so polite that we felt no stain upon our honor at any time.”

Boudicca snorted and began to speak, but Prasutugas said quickly, “Tell me what has happened at Camulodunon. Were there many soldiers? What of the Catuvellauni? What has become of them?”

The chief stopped chewing. “There are soldiers everywhere, but they treated us with respect. They have leveled the earthwalls, and most of the town was burned. As for the people, they are already hard at work for their masters, and very fitting it looked. How pleased I was to see those sons of dogs sweating with picks and spades in their hands instead of swords!”

“And Caradoc?” Boudicca could contain herself no longer. “Is he dead? Taken? What?” Prasutugas looked at her curiously, wondering at the catch of plaintiveness in the deep voice, and those in the crowd who had lost members of their kin in the wars against Cunobelin’s sons craned nearer. The chief signaled for more beer.

“Caradoc and many of his closest chiefs ran away. Some say that the god of the Catuvellauni carried them over the walls to safety in the forest, but the strongest rumor is that he has gone into the west. He left his peasants to be slaughtered and his sister to be taken prisoner, coward that he is. But what else can one expect from a Catuvellaunian?”

The eager crowd murmured their assent but Boudicca sat very still, remembering the brown-eyed, tall young man who had set her on his horse and galloped with her through the shedding trees in the crisp, sparkling winter air. She had felt his kindness as an impersonal, indifferent thing then, with the swift knowing of a child, and her pride had been stung at his loud laughter, his disdain of her father. That disdain had fueled her anger when she had taken to the field with Subidasto against the two arrogant young Catuvellauni brothers. But now, as she felt the air in the hall grow warm and stuffy, and listened to the chief speak so easily and glibly of the end of her tuath’s freedom, she remembered Caradoc’s impatient, sure grip on the reins that had kept her secure and the way a path had opened before him so smoothly through the excited, seething cattle owners by the river. So he had gone, he had escaped. A thrill of gladness ran through her. He had not capitulated to Rome after all. In the end his honor had been worth more than the honor of her own husband and her tuath, and the once-corrupt Catuvellaunian had been through the fire and had emerged—as what? Why had he gone west? What spell had caused him to sacrifice blood kin? She did not believe for a moment that he had run away.

“I saw his sister,” the chief was continuing. “She was walking about the town with her guard and talking to other chiefs, but she did not approach us. No one knows why the Romans have not executed her.” His lip curled in spite. “Perhaps she will be sent to Rome and torn to pieces in the arena.”

Prasutugas felt his wife begin to fidget, her annoyance mounting. “So Caradoc has left the lowlands,” he said. “Well, what of Plautius? What agreements did you make? Will he leave us alone in exchange for our submission?”

“He will not molest us as long as we make no war on him, but we must allow roads through our land if he sees fit, and perhaps a garrison. The emperor is offering a gift of gold to all the tuaths that desire peace with him, and with the gift goes his most honorable word that we will be left alone.”

Boudicca sprang to her feet, her hair flying. “Bribery!” she yelled. “Call it by its proper name and do not tiptoe around it with such reverent awe in your voice! This so-called gift of gold is nothing but a bribe and comes without the sealing of the pact of friendship. Do you really believe that Claudius gives gold and promises in return for nothing more than smiles? What chief could offer these things and ask for nothing and not be thought a fool or criminal? You make me ashamed, all of you,” she glared at Prasutugas, “and afraid, also. What seeds of ruin are you sowing?”

“Sit down, Boudicca!” someone shouted. Another voice boomed out, “No more war!” The call was taken up. “No more war!” the chiefs and their women began to chant, and after one sweeping glance over their stubborn, determined faces she stamped her foot, shook her fist at Prasutugas, and marched outside.

He found her an hour later, sitting moodily on the bank of the river with the shadow of the copse at her back and her bare legs dangling in the cool water. He quietly took off his sandals and his sword and lowered himself beside her, gasping as his sweating feet touched the slow-washing shallows, but she kept her head averted.

“In two days a Roman called Rufus Pudens will be here,” he said after a moment, “with his escort. He is bringing us the gold, and papers of agreement to sign.”

“Can you read Latin?” she shot back at him, her gaze still fixed on the white sparking of sun on bright water.

He put his hand to her cheek and forced her to look at him. “Boudicca,” he said softly. “Do you remember how the chiefs carried the headless body of your father home, and we walked through the night crying and wailing beside his bier while the rain pelted down out of the blackness? Do you remember how Iain slew the tall Catuvellaunian warrior who had hacked off my arm and was waving it about his head and roaring with laughter? Can you forget how you screamed and raged at Lovernius because he told you that I was going to die? Such agonies, such raw, searing memories! Do you want those things to go on happening all your life?”

She pulled away from him, stood up in the water, and stepped out until the current swirled frothing about her brown knees. Bending, she scooped up the water and splashed it on her face, then folded her arms and looked at him. So young, so serious, the open, guileless vulnerability of him pierced straight to her heart.

“We fought the Catuvellauni as a free people,” she said harshly. “In the end we may have lost, we may have won, we may have made a peace and then turned on the Coritani and made war again. This is how it has always been. But then the Romans came, and Caradoc begged help from us, and out of maliciousness we refused, because the people could not see past revenge to the deeper danger beyond.”

“That is not the only reason,” he reminded her. “The people had grown tired.”

“You persuaded them that they were tired!” she shouted. “You spoke to them of peace forevermore, and they elected you ricon over me in exchange for this peace, but the price, Prasutugas, the price! For the dishonor of the Catuvellauni, for Roman gold, for peace, you have secretly taken their souls away from them!”

“What nonsense you talk! We want change, all of us. Are you glad that your father lies buried without his head? Are you happy that the sleeve of my tunic hangs empty and my wound still drags me to the earth with pain? I do not understand you, Boudicca. What do you fear?”

She pushed back her red hair with both wet hands and then gazed past him to where fat cattle grazed in the long, lush grass and the grain was ripening to a heavy gold in the fields. “I do not fear Rome for herself,” she replied slowly. “Nor do I fight you, my dear one, because I am ignorant and mean of mind. The people want change, but they do not realize that the change will not be outside themselves but within. Something will be lost to the Iceni, Prasutugas, something precious, and though I myself do not yet know what it is, I feel it, feel it deeply, and know that once gone it can never be replaced.” She flung out her arms. “Already the Druids have gone away, and soon the gods will no longer speak to us. It is death that comes to the Iceni. Can’t you feel it sliding closer?”

“No,” he offered calmly. “No, I can’t. You are carried away with your own sense of doom, and how you love the sound of your own voice! I think that if you had no one and nothing to battle, you would hold up your mirror and scream at yourself instead.”

“Idiot!” she said hotly. “My father was right, the invoker was right. I should never have married you. This year has been a trial for me, and I think that now I shall take another husband.”

He burst out laughing. “Any other man would have beaten you into silence by now, and then slit his own throat out of boredom.”

“Well, I would rather face fists than your endless humoring and cowlike acceptance!”

He bent his head and made as if to rise, but then suddenly threw himself forward, still laughing, and caught her unprepared. His good arm shot out, catching her around her neck. She lost her balance, and together they fell into the deeper water with a splash and a shower of spray. He swiftly changed his grip, pushed her to the gravel bottom, and held her there while she kicked and clawed at his breeches, then reluctantly he released her and flung himself just out of reach, grinning while she floundered and gasped. “Boudicca,” he called, while she found her breath.

“What what what!” she shouted in a rage, still coughing. “Andrasta, how can a one-armed man pinch in so many places at once?”

“I love you very much. Give me your hand.” He gripped her fingers tightly and for a moment they stood, clothes plastered to their strong bodies, red and blond hair matted on their cheeks, water shining on their faces and arms.