The Eagle and the Raven (71 page)

Llyn was lying on his back, fingers laced behind his head and eyes on the puffy clouds sailing slowly high above. He heard her come and sat up, greeting her cheerfully, but when she walked past him without speaking he scrambled to his feet and strode after her, catching her by the shoulder and turning her around. “Did you stamp too hard on the royal toe?” he enquired with a smile, and then he saw her face. His arms went around her, and she suddenly clung to him sobbing. “So the poor old man is an emperor today,” he commented dryly. “Come inside and drink some wine with me, Gladys. Father received some news after you left this morning that will make you feel better.”

“I cannot take it anymore!” she choked. “It is like walking on fields of broken glass. Llyn, what shall I do? He will not allow me to go, I know it.”

“You are a warrior,” he soothed her, putting an arm around her and pushing her toward the house. “You will go on fighting.”

Together they crossed the atrium, while the fish in the glittering pool darted away at the sound of their approach. They entered the reception room, which blazed with midmorning sunlight. Llyn put a goblet into her hand, and filled it full, then lifted his own high before her. “I offer a toast,” he said. “To freedom.”

Tears still trickled down her face. “Are you mocking me, Llyn?” she asked him, and he put a finger to his lips.

“Claudius sent a copy of a dispatch he has just received from Gallus in Albion. The governor arrived and was met with complete confusion. The Twentieth has been smashed. Scapula’s frontier is down. The west is wide open.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed and tense. “Llyn! Ah! What has happened?”

“Someone in the mountains is busy pulling the tribes together again. I wonder who it is? Emrys, perhaps. Will you toast with me?”

She lifted her cup in both hands, her fears forgotten. “I will. To freedom, Llyn, and to hope.” They drank and then stood smiling at each other, and the excitement seemed to leap and sparkle around them. Then Gladys put down her goblet. “Perhaps that is why the emperor was so abrupt,” she said. “Where is Father?”

“Out leaning on the wall, where he always goes when there is news. You go. I will stay here and finish the wine.”

She ran out of the room, flew along the cloister, took the terrace steps three at a time. “Father!” she shouted and he turned, watching her come speeding over the lawn, the emeralds at her throat glittering. He opened his arms and she flung herself upon him. “Is this the time?” she shouted breathlessly. “Is Rome finished in Albion?”

“I don’t know, Gladys. Everything depends on what kind of a man Didius Gallus is. But this will be the summer of hope.”

“Call Caelte! There must be a new song!”

He released her, threw back his head, and laughed, the grim face breaking into youthfulness. “Indeed!” he answered her. “I think we must sing. And drink, and dance. Let the emperor and his minions feast on each other. We will dine on freedom!”

Claudius soon recovered his temper, and Caradoc’s slaves prepared to empty the big house as the weather rapidly heated toward summer. But the emperor remained silent with regard to the situation in Albion. Gladys tried to draw him out but he would not be prodded, and the family left Rome carrying their anxious ignorance with them. The country estate of Aulus Plautius lay two days to the north of Rome, a sprawling stone mansion originally built by Plautius’s great-grandfather and added to cheerfully and haphazardly by the succeeding generations of the Silvanus family, so that now it resembled an airy warren, casual and comfortable yet with an unplanned beauty. A day further north lay Plautius’s farm, and after a week of sleeping in the sun and kicking the dust Llyn took a horse and a slave and went there, reappearing every once in a while, bronzed and acid-tongued as ever, only to vanish again to ride Plautius’s fields, argue with his stewards, and dream of the honor-price he had never seen. Occasionally he accompanied Gladys back to the city, for the emperor insisted on her presence out of some perverse fit of pique, and Gladys made the journey to Rome four times before the season ended. But Llyn always returned to the farm, much to Caradoc’s surprise. They all waited impatiently for news from Albion, but the thick, cloudless days followed one another and it was as if the province of Britannia no longer existed. They ceased to speak of it to one another but it lay there heavy and sad between them, the wondering, the hours in which hope and certainty would alternately become the knowledge that freedom could never return either to them or Albion. Then Plautius came, and Caradoc pressed him for something, some word, some rumor, but Aulus knew nothing other than that Gallus had mobilized the legions.

“I no longer have the military contacts I once had,” he told Caradoc as they sat under the shade of the cloister one broiling afternoon. “And my friends are like myself, growing old and drifting far from the heart of active service. If I knew anything, I would tell you.”

“I want to know how the Twentieth was defeated,” Caradoc said, “and how the frontier went down so easily. Someone is there in the west, someone with a new authority, and I cannot sleep for wondering who it is.”

“Do you think the Druids have chosen another arviragus?”

“It is possible. But he could not be a western chief, Aulus. The Druithin would fear internal jealousies. I lie in bed, trying to imagine who has left the lowlands.”

“What about Venutius? He and his wife have finally parted, or so Scapula’s last dispatch would have us believe.”

“He has left her before, only to go running back,” Caradoc answered, his voice curiously flat. “And besides, he is not trusted in the west. Yet who else is there? Whoever it is, I am sure that he is not arviragus yet. The time is not right.”

“Could it be a woman?”

Caradoc smiled across at his friend. “No. An arviragus is always male. The Druithin have never yet gambled on a woman, either in Albion or Gaul. No situation of that kind has ever arisen.”

They drank their chilled wine in a companionable silence for a while, looking out from the breeze-stirred shadow to where the high sun beat white upon the garden, then Plautius took out a cloth and wiped his hot face. “Why do the Druids hate the Romans so much, Caradoc? Why do they keep the peoples’ hostilities burning? We are not harsh masters. Indeed, we bring prosperity and stability to all our provinces. It seems to me that they are guilty of all the unnecessary blood that has been shed in Britannia.”

Caradoc watched the listless air stir the topmost branches of the dusty plane trees and his fingers strayed to his throat where the magic egg still lay hidden under his tunic. Once, he thought, I would have vehemently denied that Rome offered anything but terror and death to its conquered nations, but now I must admit that what Plautius speaks is part of a truth. Have I changed? Has that slow death I saw in the emperor’s eyes when I stood before him in the Curia begun to creep on me? I hate the city of Rome. I despise the soldiers, the land and money grabbers, the superior, high-handed officials, yet I have met men of honor, like Plautius himself, and in doing so I have found kin. Are the Druithin relics of an age that should not linger, manipulating simple and guileless people into a different subjection? What do the Druithin fear? What is so precious to them that it must be defended at all costs? But then his memories lifted him out of the sluggish Roman afternoon and he continued to gaze at the garden without seeing it. He remembered the master on Mona with his nightmare eyes, his dark magic. He saw Bran’s face, bearded, alert, laying a certain choice before him in the wet dimness of his own forest, while behind him Camulodunon was consumed by Roman fire. There had always been choice. Freedom meant choice. Rome removed the choices. Freedom could not exist without honor, and honor went hand in hand with freedom. I have not changed, he thought. I have mellowed, I have allowed myself to become a chameleon, but my heart still asks why there is no peace for me here.

Plautius was waiting for his reply, and Caradoc blinked and answered curtly. “With or without the Druithin, the hostilities will never die. The decisions of a Council have always overridden the directives of a Druid, Aulus, and it would be a lie to say that the tribes are under the thumb of the wise men. Rome was not invited into Albion. Rome came like a thief and a murderer, willing to kill in order to snatch land, people, and treasure that was never hers. How would you feel if this country lay under the rule of the tribes who had taken everything, including your values, from you, and then told you that you ought to be grateful? You would like to believe that the Druithin keep the people from peaceful submission, but it is not true. Vercingetorix…” He stopped suddenly, his throat swelling. Vercingetorix. How could I forget you? They encircled you. They starved and flogged you. You flung your sword before Julius Caesar and knelt before him when you could no longer bear to see the people suffer. And for loving the soil that nourished you they put you in a hole without sunlight. I sit here discussing freedom as though it were some abstract idea brought out to pass the time of day, when you felt the longing for it like fire in your sinews and your blood. Seven years you squatted in that darkness, before Caesar remembered you and sent someone to strangle you.

“Yes?” Plautius prompted, and Caradoc turned to him, tasting suddenly the bittersweet blossoming of compromise on his tongue.

“Forgive me, but I do not want to talk about it anymore.”

Plautius nodded equably, seeing the hurt and quietly saluting the pride that buried it almost instantaneously. “I should not have brought up the subject. But it would have pleased me, Caradoc, to see your religion become fashionable in Rome as it might have but for the Druids implacability. The emperor had no choice but to proscribe it as treasonous. The Jews could also have worshipped in peace but for their constant intriguing. Now the followers of The Way must die as well. Religion should never be mixed with politics.”

“Religion is politics. Religion is life. It will survive after the empire has collapsed into chaos. I would rather see every Druid wiped from the face of the earth than see the empress with oak leaves and bronze rings in her hair, or the Greek freemen sniggering as they try to fathom a spell or enliven their boredom bandying truths about. Speak of something else!”

“Very well. I am expecting a guest this evening. I think you will like him. He is anxious to meet you, but the last time he saw you the earthwalls of Camulodunon stood between you.”

“Who is it?”

“Allow me to surprise you, Caradoc. Are you expecting Gladys?”

Caradoc glanced at him uneasily. “Yes, and Llyn will be with her. Claudius knows full well how he is putting her in danger, yet he has not gone to his summer residence and Gladys has been back and forth to Rome three times.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“No. Gladys wants to accomplish this thing on her own.”

“She is no longer a budding warrior, Caradoc, though perhaps she thinks she is. She has softened, as your other daughter has softened, since you settled on the Palatine.

She should not be too confident of repulsing any attack.”

“She may have softened in body, but not in heart,” Caradoc retorted. “And it is for her heart that I fear. Britannicus is an old man with the charming face of a child, and Nero…”

Eurgain and Gladys appeared, still out of earshot, striding side by side and deep in conversation, and Caradoc watched them come with a lightening gladness. He did not know his children as well as he knew wife and sister. Llyn, Gladys, and the younger Eurgain brought to him only the loneliness of change, but the two older women made him remember who he was. Plautius also saw them, but made no move to rise.

“Nero has the seeds of both greatness and corruption in him,” he said. “When he was born his father Gnaeus commented in public that the son could not help but grow to be a monster considering the depravity of both his parents. Did you know that?” Caradoc shook his head. “But he is still in the hands of his tutors, Seneca and Bhurrus, both struggling to counteract his mother’s pernicious influence. So far they have done well. Nero did a good job as praetor while Claudius was away last year. There is ability in him.”

“It will not last long,” Caradoc snapped back. “One day he will tire of his tutors, and then Rome will get the kind of emperor she deserves.”

“Britannicus will rule.”

Caradoc looked around and had to smile at Plautius’s cynical face, though his thoughts were dark. “You know he will not live long enough to wear a toga, let alone govern the empire.”

The women were pacing the cloister now, their sandals patting the cool paving. Both were dressed in short, sleeveless tunics, their hair bound high, their brown arms clicking with bracelets, and they came up to the men and sank onto their heels.

“Give me your wine, Caradoc, it is so hot,” Eurgain said, and he passed it to her. She drank thirstily.

“Gladys is back,” the girl’s aunt said, sitting down and leaning against her husband’s legs. “I saw Llyn going down through the vineyard.” As she spoke the words the young Gladys herself appeared, coming slowly down the long pillared walk with her slave behind her, black hair loose, and Caradoc thought how it could have been his sister nearly ten years ago, fighting to hold to the love that had been more to her than kin or honor, alone here with her Roman husband in this lovely foreign house. He looked at her. Plautius had a hand on her shoulder, with a touch of protective concern, a reminder to whom she belonged, and as his daughter bent to kiss him Caradoc stilled the moment of annoyance. In some subtle, quiet way, Gladys did not belong to the House Catuvellaun anymore. There was often a faint strain about her as she sought to be Roman wife and barbarian’s sister, and this more than anything else convinced Caradoc that he was old. His years were not many, thirty-eight, and Eurgain still had the face that had meant sanity to him in the mountains, but he knew that he was as used up and useless as Cunobelin had been in his last years. The younger Gladys looked drawn, and she murmured a few words of greeting to them and went into the house. She did not reappear until the evening meal.