The Eagle and the Raven (86 page)

“Lady!” Andocretus shrieked. “No! Order them to the walls with slings! If you do not they will be slaughtered!”

“Why? They are Roman-trained, they will hold together, and Venutius will not be able to so much as touch the gate.”

“But Lady…”

“Be silent, Andocretus!” The tall gates were already inching open and her men were flooding the meadow beyond, shouting and screaming, and the massed roar of an answering host came faintly. “I send forth at least twice their number. Are you afraid? Come up onto the wall and watch.”

Yes, I am afraid, he thought, but so are you, Lady. Your lips are white. He followed her obediently up, while behind them the gates thudded shut once more and the streets lay empty under a blue and white patchworked sky. Her bodyguard straggled behind them, and they squatted beside her where she sat, far out of the reach of stones or spears. Venutius, lifting his eyes above the running, screaming mob of his erstwhile kinsmen who had come spewing out of the gate, saw her there. She looked high and small, her black hair floating around her on the wind, red cloak billowing out, her face a tiny white spot. The surge of love and hate that began in his belly did not have time to burst into his chest. Her henchmen were upon him.

All that morning the little battle raged fiercely. Contrary to Andocretus’s gloomy expectations, Aricia’s warriors were not cut to pieces within the first hour. They were no longer the naive, hot blooded tribesmen who would rush howling into a fray and expect their first charge to win the day. They had rubbed shoulders with Roman discipline for too many years, and some of the caution and coolness of the legionaries had been communicated to them. They stood in loose ranks, fighting shoulder to shoulder and back to back, and Venutius’s men were forced to abandon their horses and do battle on foot. But gradually the long-learned fluid ability of the rebels to change tactics, an instinct born in them under Caradoc’s relentless hammering and Venutius’s own foresight, began to tell. Aricia, still sitting with her stolid bodyguard atop the wall, saw her army gradually lose its cohesive mass and become ragged splinters of men surrounded by an increasing number of dun tunics, and suddenly she realized that the drab tunics were increasing, not because more rebels had come but because her own force was rapidly diminishing.

“Where are the soldiers?” Andocretus said anxiously. “If they do not come soon we are finished.”

“It does not matter,” she replied, her voice quavering, though she tried to keep the fear out of it. “Even if Venutius is victorious he will not be able to breach the gates before our help does arrive.”

“Lady, my brothers are down there!” one of her chiefs reproached her angrily, and the others began to murmur.

She kept her gaze on the plain below her, the tumult of battle pounding against her like ocean waves, and watched and listened to the destruction of her war band. She felt nothing, nothing, as though she sat on the highest mountain in the whole of the world and the wind blew right through her and moaned in her empty cavities, and out of that nothingness came a last terrible idea, a sacrifice to herself, an obeisance to degradation. She turned to Andocretus.

“Bring me a carnyx,” she said slowly, “and have the two prisoners brought up here.” He saw the hungry yellow tongues of power flaming behind her eyes, and he rose without a word and scrambled to the first circle. She turned back to the carnage below her, but now her fingers moved in the folds of her cloak, pleating and clutching, and her mouth worked soundlessly.

The burning noon sun stood overhead and then began to roll west, and just as Venutius paused a moment to lean on his sword and wipe the sweat from his eyes, the high, haunting note of a carnyx tingled in the air around him. He glanced upward, startled, conscious as he did so that the pace of battle was slowing to a halt. One by one the combatants fell apart to stare around them, seeking the source of that wild melody, and then the sword fell from Venutius’s hand. Aricia had risen. She stood above the wall, the carnyx in her outflung hand, and beside her swayed the two tattered figures, their ankles and wrists chained. Behind them the cloaked chieftains of Aricia’s bodyguard were bunched, their swords drawn and glinting in the early afternoon brilliance. Venutius sensed Domnall racing to him and staggering to a halt, but he had eyes only for the hunched, scarecrow pathos of Sine and his young kinsman, and Aricia’s gloating, wide-stretched arms. She tossed the carnyx over the wall and shouted, her rich voice carrying easily over the corpse-littered field.

“Venutius! Do you see what I have up here? Come forward!”

A breathless quiet had fallen over the whole arena of battle. All eyes were turned to the sun-limned figures on the wall. Domnall gasped Venutius’s arm convulsively. “Lord, do not stir! She cannot see you yet. She…” But Venutius was already threading his way over the blood-soaked grass like a sleepwalker, his movements sluggish, his frozen face upturned. Domnall walked with him. She saw him coming and gave a cry of triumph like a hawk’s hunting croak, harsh and full of anticipation, then she lowered her arms and bent forward. He came to a halt at the foot of the wall, and at last his eyes left her and found the others. Sine looked down at him calmly, her head somehow small and foreign without her wolf-mask. Manaw stood with a stillness on him that was not the apathy of despair but an acceptance of his fate. “My wife, Arviragus?” he called down, and then Venutius shook off the webs of past memories and present horror and squared his shoulders, nailing down with ruthless purpose the fact that the mad woman leering at him was his wife, and placing on the coffin every cruelty he had suffered at her hands. Emrys had been right. She was not even worth killing, and he had sacrificed two people in order to prove it to himself. He answered his kinsman in a level voice. “She is safe, Manaw.” He turned toward Sine. “Lady, I am sorry. I can say nothing more.”

“Then do not try, Arviragus,” she called to him lightly. “You are lord of my death. Greet Emrys for me.”

Aricia sensed that more than words had been passed between them all, that nothing she might do or say would impinge upon the decisions they had already taken. Once again the invisible wall loomed, threatening and impenetrable, and rage rose in her also.

“This is your last chance to prove your honor,” she yelled at Venutius. “I offer these two lives in exchange for you. Leave your sword and shield with Domnall and come within the gate, and I will release my prisoners. If you refuse and continue the fight I will slay them, and before you can breach my gate the Ninth will be here.”

“Do not listen to her, Lord!” Sine called again. “The price is too high to pay. Even Emrys would not pay it.”

I know, he thought with anguish, I know, Sine, for he said as much to me, out of his grief. Yet I have placed you wantonly in her hands. I need take only ten steps, and my callous selfishness will be washed away. The sun slanted down hot on his back and before his face, so close that he could have touched it, the earthwall exuded an odor of dry soil and warm stone. Without realizing it he placed both palms against the hard-packed earth, as though at his weight it would crumble and bury all his trouble. Caradoc, what would you have done if Eurgain and your son stood under the knife and one word from you would save them? The battered, cruel face of the last arviragus appeared before him for an instant and he groaned aloud. Caradoc would not have hesitated. “Lord,” Sine’s voice floated down to him. “The plans are made, the victory is at hand. You should not have come here. You are needed more than I, more than a thousand men. I fall in battle, that is all, as other women have done before me. Refuse at once, and let the bitch strike!”

But it is not the same, beloved wolf lady, not the same at all! Slowly, he came away from the wall and raised his eyes to his wife. She smiled contemptuously. You still cannot make up your mind, that smile said to him. All your life has been one vacillation after another. The afternoon was so still that he could hear the rough breaths of the men around him. Suddenly he swore, a shout of defiance, a fierce, bestial word that was dredged from the limit of his endurance, and drawing his sword he struck the wall.

“I will not surrender! Farewell, Sine, Manaw. A peaceful journey, a safe journey. Cartimandua, you can harm me no more!”

Aricia nodded to her men. “Hold them. Give me a knife.” It was passed to her and she stroked it reflectively. She had never killed a human being before, but it would be nothing, it would be easy. “This is your last chance, fool!” she screamed down to Venutius, and he shouted back immediately, “No!”

Aricia’s left hand wound itself deep into Sine’s tumbling black hair. “Do you pray, Lady?” she whispered, forcing the chin up, and the graceful brown throat strained. Sine swallowed.

“I do.”

“What for?” Aricia’s arm flew out, then across. A new, deep mouth appeared in the fragile neck. Blood spurted, drenching Aricia to the elbow, and Sine’s body collapsed backward. Aricia dragged it to the lip of the wall and kicked it over, and Venutius stepped back as it rolled loosely, coming to rest against his booted feet. He looked down. The eyes gazed calmly toward the sun. Tendrils of dark hair lay over the bloodied, open mouth. Pain buckled his knees and swelled his own throat and he sank to the ground beside her, then another weight came thudding down. The silence lengthened, deepened. Rebel and Brigantian chieftain alike stood motionless on the field like victims of a Druid’s holding spell, but up on the windy earthwall Andocretus leaned to his mistress.

“Dust, Lady! To the south. Rome is coming.”

Venutius’s force on the perimeter of the engagement had seen it too, and the spell was abruptly broken. Men grasped their weapons again, and Domnall hauled Venutius to his feet. “She has alerted the Ninth!” he hissed. “We cannot fight any more today, we are tired, we must run, Lord.”

Venutius nodded. “Then let us withdraw, quickly. We can surely outrun them on the horses. Send a message to Emrys to leave the forest and meet us immediately.” Domnall sped away, shouting as he went, and the rebels began to leave the field, racing after him. Venutius forced himself to look once more to the top of the wall, but it was empty. Aricia had gone. On an impulse he knelt again and kissed Emrys’s lady and his young kinsman, then he sheathed his sword and broke into a lope, wondering why he did not weep. But the time for weeping had long since past.

Aricia stood in her house, with Andocretus beside her, holding out red-encrusted hands. “I stink,” she said. “The rebels’ blood has a foul odor. Can you smell it?” He shook his head as she moved to the basin, stripping the tunic from her and reaching for the water. She washed slowly and thoroughly, and carefully explored her inner self. There was no hurt, none at all. When she had finished and was clad in a clean tunic she sat in her chair and pointed to a corner of the room. “Pick up that thing, Andocretus, and try it on. I want to know what you see.” He went and got the mask.

“So you kept it,” he said, turning it over gingerly.

“Yes. Put it on.” She watched him intently as he wrinkled up his nose but dutifully lifted it to his face. His fingers flitted over it uncertainly. “Well? What do you see?” she snapped.

“Nothing,” he complained. “It is as dark as night in here. Perhaps I have not fitted it properly.” His eyes blinked at her out of the wolf’s slanted sockets, then he tore it from his face. “It has a strange smell,” he said. “Wet, rotting blooms, soaked, slimed leaves. I do not know how she could bear to wear it.”

“Take it to the metalworker’s shop and have it melted away,” Aricia said sharply. “And send a chief with Rome, to track the rebels. I want to know what is happening. Then come back quickly, Andocretus. I do not want to be alone.”

He took the mask and went out, but he did not go to the metal worker’s shop. Something about the mask fascinated him and he took it to his own hut and hid it under his bed. Many times in the months that followed he lifted it out of the box where he had placed it and spent hours looking at it, but he never again tried it on. The memory of that pressing blackness within it was too real.

Nasica’s auxiliary cohorts caught up with Venutius at dawn the next day. Venutius and his men and horses had been fatigued. They had eventually stopped to eat and sleep halfway through the night. But the primipilus and his soldiers had not stopped, and they gave battle one hour after the sun had risen. The day promised to be cooler. The clouds had moved in to filter the sunlight and a southerly wind brought the damp promise of the first of the autumn rainstorms, but the rebels spared no more than a glance at the weather. Domnall’s message had reached Emrys and the bulk of the rebel host was already pouring like brown smoke across Brigantia’s hills toward the arviragus, but before they could arrive there were a thousand Romans to take care of.

Venutius gave the order to mount and then spoke to Domnall. “Keep the chiefs on the move and tell them not to fight on foot. Only their officers are mounted. Nasica has sent no cavalry. Encircle them, and we will pick away at their flanks. We are in no hurry, and Emrys will arrive before long to help us finish them off.”

The two forces met in the sweet coolness of the morning, the Romans ranked in orderly squares, the chiefs wheeling freely around them in a loose circle that lazily became tighter and smaller. The primipilus, who had not seen action for some time and who had planned his massacre around an expected, mad frontal charge, was nonplussed. With cavalry his job would have been done in half a day, but without mounted soldiers he was vulnerable. He set his slingers and archers to the fore, ordered them to shoot at the horses, not the men, and waited.

By nightfall the issue was still undecided. The rebels had lost most of their mounts but were not much dismayed. They fought with a new steadiness, and the hard-pressed primipilus, watching the bitter, silent struggle, reflected in surprise that the wildmen seemed to be learning their lessons at last. The legate of the Twentieth had said so to his own commander, and he of all the fort commanders ought to know, but then the Ninth had never faced the west. When darkness fell both sides retired, staggering with weariness, and toward the end of the third watch a soldier came to the primipilus.