The Eagle and the Raven (53 page)

Caradoc could not resist a question. “Is there any news of the legions?” he asked. The man looked at him for a long time before replying. Then he nodded. “The arviragus has disappeared,” he said, his eyes lighting for a moment then dying, “and Scapula is taking his revenge on the Silures. He has ordered them wiped out, and already his soldiers range to and fro, killing the children and the old because they cannot find the warriors. Villages and crops are in flames.”

I have done this, Caradoc thought, the meat turning to dust in his mouth. Perhaps the time has come to surrender myself even as Vercingetorix did, throwing myself on the mercy of Claudius in exchange for the safety of the people. But Madoc’s face rose up before his eyes, and Bran’s, and Emrys and Sine stood side by side to watch him with cold resolution. Freedom or death, arviragus. There is no compromise, and the mercy of Rome is like the adder’s sting. He swallowed his mouthful with difficulty and picked up the beer. Where are you, Eurgain? Llyn?

“There was a report of prisoners taken,” the chief went on. “But the news is very fresh and may not be truth. I pity the captives Scapula takes.” Suddenly he leaned forward and spoke in an undertone. “Do me a courtesy, men of the west.”

“We will,” Caradoc replied, “if it is in our power.”

“If you do not find Venutius, if you turn once more to fight in the west, if you should chance to meet the arviragus, will you tell him…” The lips shook, and the man looked down to hide his face. “Tell him that there are those in Brigantia who may be silent but who are not dishonored, and he is not alone.”

“I think he knows that already,” Caradoc said gently, “but if it should chance that he does not, then it will gladden his heart to be brought such words.” He rose, Caelte beside him, thanked the chief, and left the hut. They picked up the swords and shouldered their way roughly through the gathering, walking swiftly to the edge of the village, taking care not to betray their urge to break and run from the hostile eyes fastened like leeches onto their backs.

They paced steadily for an hour, and once they were free of the village they relaxed. While the sun blazed overhead and the afternoon seemed to stretch interminably they traversed the last great forest before the long, gray-grassed horizons of Aricia’s tuath, stopping often to drink from the cool, leaf-hung streams that splashed under the oaks. When the sun began to wester they rested, waiting for darkness to give them the cover the woods could not. They had just settled themselves beside a freshet and had taken off their soft leather sandals in order to soak their tired feet when Caradoc held up a warning hand and Caelte froze. Behind them, under the trees, came a soft rustling. They rose and drew their swords quietly, incredulous that here, at the last, they had been discovered, but it was not a Roman who pushed through the undergrowth with hands raised, it was a Brigantian chief.

“Peace, peace,” he said hastily. “Put up your swords. I am unarmed.”

Caradoc nodded at Caelte and the bard went to the man, removed his cloak, and quickly ran his hands over the short, chunky body. “His hair,” Caradoc snapped, and Caelte felt among the tangled black tresses. Finally he was satisfied and stepped back, and Caradoc sheathed his sword. “So you have been tracking us,” he said briskly. “Why?” He did not like the look of the man. There was something shifty in the face that reminded him of Sholto, and the black eyes would not meet his own.

“My lord set me to follow you,” he explained. “He repented that he had not given you directions, and he asked me to guide you to Venutius.”

Caradoc motioned him nearer. “We do not wish a guide,” he said. “We prefer to travel alone. Go back and thank your lord for us.”

“But without a guide you will not find Venutius before he returns to his lady in the town, and then you will not be able to see him, for the town is full of soldiers and traders.”

“It is truth, Lord,” Caelte said promptly. “We could wander over the trackless hills for days, and miss Venutius.”

Caradoc beckoned him close and whispered, “I do not like the look of him, Caelte. I do not think he is a truth-sayer.”

“Lord,” Caelte hissed back, “we need a Druid to discover whether or not that is right and, besides, many of the people under the thumb of Rome have acquired the same look, for they are often forced into lies. The spies have it, yet they are loyal freemen.”

“Yes, yes, I know, but there is a foul smell here. If I am wrong and yet refuse his aid, we are making a fruitless journey. If I am right and yet we go with him, he may lead us to a dark fate.” He cast himself upon the ground, drew his cloak about him, and sat thinking.

The Brigantian watched him, impatience betrayed in the spasmodic clenching and unclenching of his hands, and Caelte watched the Brigantian with open mistrust.

Finally Caradoc stood. “I am loathe to put myself in your hands,” he said heavily, “yet I must. It seems that time is running out for me, therefore I will go with you. May you guide us well!”

Caelte, his eyes on the man’s round face, thought he saw a flash of satisfaction that was almost greed, then the chief nodded.

“I will guide you well, in exchange for your protection as long as I am with you. Will you share food and favor with me?”

“I will.”

“And I.”

“Then we will wait together for the night.” He sat down in the grass and laced his naked fingers together, and Caradoc and Caelte put on their sandals. Their feet no longer ached as heavily as their hearts.

Chapter Twenty-Three

F
OR
another three nights they journeyed, leaving the safe, dense woodland far behind. The two Catuvellauni hated the open country they now trudged across like wingless moths, exposed to the sweeping hot winds that flowed over the long grass and made it undulate like sea waves, and when they camped under the knots of stunted trees that sheltered in the valleys they were always reluctant to leave. Night after night the waxing moon hung fat and bloated above a vast, clean horizon, watching them complacently as they inched over the hills. The Brigantian urged them on. Hurry, he said, we will be too late, but they did not need his anxious whines to whip them on. With every step they were conscious that their fate lay waiting ahead of them. If they delayed it would contemptuously leave the meeting place and they would find only the impotent shreds of its capricious passing. They were oppressed by the landscape, by the long days of tension, by the silence that lay unfilled by any sound save the high calling of hawks. Sataida, Brigantia’s Goddess of Grief, seemed to permeate the very earth beneath them, and Caradoc began to see the miles behind him as huge stones, jagged and cruel, over which his wife tried to clamber after him, calling him with parched tongue. Once or twice they lay prone in the grass while a cavalry patrol cantered past, but they were not spotted and finally, toward midnight on their fourth day from the forest, they crested a long, slow-rising spur of land and saw lights below them.

The chief pointed. “Venutius should be there.”

“But that is a town!” Caradoc objected. “Venutius will be in an encampment.”

The man clucked impatiently. “Why? When Brigantia is strewn with villages, why should he make a camp? I tell you he is there. We will go down.”

Some sixth sense whispered a warning to Caradoc. Some old, long-forgotten memory stirred as he gazed down on the peaceful town. Was that the bulk of an earthwork in the center? The Brigantians did not erect earthwalls. But the man had already started down, Caelte after him, and Caradoc followed, his mind in confusion and his feet lagging. It was wrong, all wrong, it had been wrong ever since the accursed man had stepped out of the bush. He should have trusted his head, but it was too late. And really, he thought, I am almost too tired to care anymore.

Although the hour was late, the town bustled cheerfully. Traders carrying torches strolled to and fro, freemen sat before their doorskins and gambled or told tales, and here and there a soldier moved, bent on some business of their own. No one took any notice of the travelers as they passed through the gate sunk in the small defence wall, and there was no gateguard to challenge them. They began to climb the smooth, well-laid path that circled the town, rising in lazy spirals. To right and left of them the huts were built, well-spaced, neat, almost regimental in their placement, and Caradoc, rounding the bend that took them to the third circle, felt a wind that was laden with the pungent, rich tang of the sea. He stopped dead.

“We cannot have been moving north,” he said. “The ocean must be very close, and Brigantia’s coasts lie to the east.” He took one stride and grasped the chief by the neck of his tunic, shaking him. “I closed the eye of my mind and trusted my safety to you, vermin!” he ground out. “Now tell me where we are or I will slice you in two.” The man’s eyes darted this way and that like a cornered rat and his teeth chat tered under Caradoc’s tossing.

“You swore me protection!” he bleated, and suddenly Caradoc let him go. He shrugged down his tunic, ran a hand around his neck, and looked at Caradoc reproachfully. “I have led you well,” he sniffed, “and Venutius is here, as I said. Yes, we veered east, and we were almost too late, for the lady’s town lies not far away, half a day’s journey to the southeast, and tomorrow Venutius would have been with her again. Waste no time in foolishness, but follow me.”

Caradoc and Caelte glanced at each other. Having once relinquished their instinct for direction to this man they had not carefully noted the way they had come. Now they were lost and they knew it. If they killed him and left the town they might never find Venutius. They were trapped.

Caradoc turned angrily. “Lead on then,” he snarled, the tart, fresh sea-wind still buffeting him with doubt as they walked on together.

In the center of the first cycle, high above the town, they came at last to a house ringed by a high stone wall. Here the gate in the wall was guarded by a tall, black-visaged chieftain who was fully armed. His spear rested in his hand, his shield hung from one arm, and his sword hung from his belt. Beyond him, in the dimness of the court, more chiefs gathered silently, a bodyguard, and even before the three men had covered the last approach the gateguard had spoken a swift word and they came pouring to cover the gate. “Wait here,” their guide whispered, and left them, going forward to speak with the chiefs.

Caelte leaned closer to Caradoc. “Now is the time to flee,” he hissed. “I smell treachery, Lord, and I am sorry now that I swayed your judgment. Venutius is not here. He would never quarter in a place like this. The stench of Rome is overpowering.”

Caradoc put an arm around his friend’s shoulder. “All my decisions have gone amiss since I bowed my authority to the Council and thus angered Camulos and the Dagda,” he replied wearily. “I am sorry, Caelte. I fear you are right, but it is too late to run anymore.”

The man was beckoning them and the chiefs had drawn back, their black eyes full of a thinly veiled excitement. Caradoc and Caelte walked slowly through the group of men and on past the gate, which swung to behind them with a rude suddenness. The man made them wait once more and hurried away into the shadow, and Caradoc looked around him. Torches hung around the wall, casting a leaping, red light onto flagstones, fitfully revealing a large, wooden house built in the Roman style with four rooms all opening onto a raised covered porch. One of the doors stood open and candlelight gently warmed the gloom in a long yellow tongue. The feeling of treachery was claustrophobic, a suffocating pressure of deceit that filled the empty courtyard and turned the Catuvellaunians’ blood to water. Caradoc looked behind him to the bolted gate and the chiefs clustered behind it. He looked to the walls, high, smooth, too high to leap, too smooth to scramble up. He looked to the open door, where even now the man was walking back to them, smiling. Fool! Fool! his mind shrieked at him. Trapped like an unblooded boy! His hand flew to the magic egg and clutched it tightly, but no calming emanation of Druithin spells warmed his fingers and he could only follow the Brigantian, who led them to the farther door, opened it, and bowed them through.

Caelte, brushing past him, noticed a new, bulging pouch hanging from his leather belt, but there was no time to wonder.

The man smirked. “A safe journey, Arviragus,” he remarked sarcastically.

The door thudded shut behind him and they were alone.

They dismally surveyed their surroundings. A small fire crackled brightly in the hearth set into the wall. White sheepskins were scattered about, the walls were neatly plastered and painted in yellow and purple, and three wicker chairs were placed haphazardly. There were three niches set in one wall. One held a likeness of some goddess. Brigantia the High One, Caradoc guessed by the carved profusion of wild hair, the half-closed, glutted eyes, but the other two were strange to him. He turned to Caelte, but before he could speak the door opened again and the goddess herself glided to stand before him, flanked by four armed chiefs. He sensed Caelte move to stand to his left. He saw a Brigantian chief softly close the door and the others range in front of it, but the woman’s face sucked all reality from the stuffy, foreign room and left only a whirl of shifting images, a fire-shadowed fantasy.

The black hair, now slashed with long tendrils of gray, still fell in an almost lewd profusion down her straight back, and the pale skin was even whiter than he had remembered, but it was tinged with an unhealthy hue that was somehow slack, as though the flesh beneath had been sucked inward. Some mysterious black stone ringed her high brow and her tall neck, and glinted sullenly from the belt that clasped her full, soft, red tunic to her, and imprisoned her naked arms. But it was her eyes that commanded the summoning of his will. They were still blacker than night but the impudent liveliness he had remembered with such a spasm of sick longing over the years, the hot imperiousness that had challenged him, had swelled to become the festering disease of devious selfishness. Caradoc stared with steady concentration, feeling the unslaked appetite of a deep self-hate come flowing to him from under lids that were swollen, folded at the edges into pouches of aging flesh, but he was oblivious to all save the thunderous crashing of the waves of memory and old desires washing within him. Aricia. Then, with a queer shifting of perspective that he felt almost to his bones, the room and the persons in it regained solidarity and she changed also. The fogs of that childhood obsession blew away and he found himself looking at a body that had once fascinated him, that had held a complex, tempestuous girl who had been left behind in the mirage of the past, and the well-remembered shell now held someone he did not know. The witch of his young lusts called once, a faint, dying echo, and he took a deep, free breath and spoke quietly. “Aricia.”

“Caradoc.” She smiled, a tiny twitch of pain and puzzlement, and then slid toward him, still with that easy, tempting swing. “But for the cleft in your chin and your way of holding your head I would never have recognized you. I left a brash, impulsive Catuvellaunian whelp to find a king wolf.” She came closer and her hand trembled as she lightly touched his arm. “You do look like a wolf, you know. Lean and gray, lined and famished, burning with lost causes. It hurts me somehow, to see you like this. I have thought of you often over the years but my memories played me false, it seems.”

He could not return her smile, and he took her fingers sadly. “Mine also, Aricia. I did not think that I had changed so much within myself until I saw you come into the room. It hurts me also, to have to bury my childhood at last.”

“I buried mine long ago,” she said, bitterness creeping into her voice. “On the day I left Camulodunon. You are lucky to have clung to yours for so long. I hated you, Caradoc, did you know that? For years I hated you. But now…” She shrugged. “Now I have no reason to hate any man. Love and hate belong to ignorant youth and grand dreams, and I have conquered both.”

“Then you must truly be at peace,” he said, wondering whether she knew that she was lying.

She shot him a dark glare and drew away a little. “I am content, which is more than you can say. I have followed your doomed path for years, Caradoc, ever since you deserted Gladys at Camulodunon. I have pitied you.”

“Why?” He was still standing calmly but she had begun to fidget, the thin fingers pulling at each other.

All at once she turned from him and paced agitatedly by the fire. “Because the times have changed and left you behind,” she replied in a high, hurried voice. “You and those deluded savages in the west. There must be change, Caradoc, men must change, or wither and die. The day of the tribes is over. Honor is a Roman word too, and it does not mean bloodshed.” She suddenly stopped pacing and cried out to him, “Oh Caradoc! Why did you not accept, just accept, and be at peace?”

“Is that how you justify your own position?” he retorted, anger uncurling in him. “What has happened to you, Aricia?”

Her face hardened into a mask and the irrational rages that always simmered just below the surface of her control burst forth. “You dare to stand there in your stinking rags and ask what has happened to me? To me? What of yourself? All the blood in the west has not quenched the old dreams of conquest in you. Like your father and crazy Togodumnus you want to battle the world. You have used the poor, simple western chiefs without compunction, you have fed on their tender sheep’s flesh, and they have gone down into death because you will not admit that you are wrong!” She almost ran to him, holding both quivering, outflung hands before his face. “You are only a man, only a man, you have faults and you fail and you hide shameful secrets, like everyone else! What gives you the right to destroy a people?”

He took her wrists in both his hands, feeling the anguished deluge of self-destruction pounding through her rigid body. “I cannot give you what you want of me,” he ground out. “Do you want me to say that I am selfish, cruel, and unyielding? I know that I am those things. Did you offer money for my capture in order to hear me say that I wronged you all those years ago and that I admit it? I do admit it, Aricia, I treated you despicably, but do not lay the source of your torment at my door. Seek elsewhere.” She wrenched herself free and he could see in her eyes the urge to strike him. “Nor will I say that I have donned the cloak of arviragus unworthily and led the tribes for my own ends. But you cannot deny this charge. You have ruined your people and your husband for no reason at all.”

“Leave Venutius out of this,” she snarled, walking to the fire, her red tunic swirling and her hair swinging with it. “You do not understand, Caradoc. You are an ignorant man.” She turned from him and rested one limp arm along the mantel of the hearth and watched the embers glow.

All at once, in the moment of silence, he felt very weary. Fatigue scratched at his eyeballs and ached in his limbs and he wanted to sit down, but she looked suddenly across at him and smiled, and this time he saw her again, his fey, eager partner in the driving needs of youth.

“Ah Caradoc,” she said. “It is a good thing that you no longer resemble that handsome son of Cunobelin or I might be tempted to keep you here with me. Tell me, is Eurgain well?”

“I do not know.”

The black eyebrows shot up. “And your children?”

“I do not know.”

“Where is Cinnamus Ironhand?”

“Dead.”

Her lips parted in a sneer. “Brigantia, how ruthless you have become. The Druithin chose you well, didn’t they? I do not think that even I pity you anymore.” Her hands went to her temples and she massaged them briefly, then she nodded coolly in the direction of her chiefs. “Domnall, fetch the centurion.” When he had gone, closing the door behind him, she walked to Caradoc. “The bloodshed ends here, Arviragus. Vercingetorix went to Rome in chains and so will you. Then perhaps there will be peace. I could have cut off your head, you know, and sent that to Scapula, but I decided that it would be better to send a living man to circle the forum. The tribesmen will not like to be shamed by an arviragus who has become a slave.”