The Eagle and the Raven (93 page)

She pushed past the doorskins, ripped off her cloak and tossed it on her bed. She glanced at the dead fire and then sank into her chair and put her head in her hands. Quiet and darkness lapped at her and she exhaled in a long exhausted sigh. Now what do I do? The question had no answer. There was nothing to be done, and the days of hope in revolt were over. The island lay in Roman hands, and soon the long, stubborn resistance of the west would be a thing of memory.

Brigid found her an hour later still slumped in her chair, her long legs flung out before her and her head pillowed on one shoulder. The girl touched her gently.

“Mother, are you asleep?”

Boudicca opened her eyes and smiled faintly. “No, not asleep, just thinking. You wanted to talk to me, didn’t you?” She sat up. “I am sorry, Brigid. This is not the best birthday for you.”

“Oh, but it is! That’s why I must talk to you.” The young voice faltered. “It’s about…about Marcus.”

Now Boudicca was fully aware. “Tell me,” she said, but Brigid found it hard to begin. She stammered, avoided her mother’s eye, blushed, and twisted her fingers together— and Boudicca saw all there was to see in the changing expressions that flitted across the fresh, eager face. At last Brigid found her courage.

“He told me that he loves me. He told me today, on my birthday. He wants us to be wed before he leaves. I know that it is his place to speak to Father on the matter and not mine, but Father is so ill, and anyway…” Her voice trailed off. Anyway, Father no longer rules the Council, she had been about to say, and Boudicca was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of despair. She sat watching the clear, untroubled eyes, the soft hands that had gripped neither sword nor spear, the sweet breathless innocence of the childlike mouth. She thought of herself at that age, already a formidable sword-woman, ready to be blooded like a man. I have betrayed you, Brigid, she thought. Your father insisted on this dangerous sheltering for you and Ethelind, but I could have done something. I could have taught you the lore of your people, betrothed you quickly to a young chieftain, taken you into the woods and shown you the weapons buried deep, against a day that may never come. But I did not trust you, and perhaps what I did was not wrong. You and Ethelind and Marcus.

“Brigid, I want to tell you something.” She spoke evenly, without emotion. “Marcus is very young. He is just beginning a long and arduous career that could take him all over the empire. A wife will only hold him back, and I’m sure Favonius will point that out to him. He has no money. He is not ready to marry yet, not for many years. You have grown up together, and perhaps your father was wrong in allowing you so much freedom. Marcus is a good young man, but he is not for you.”

The violet eyes filled with tears. “Then you are refusing us? Just like that? He loves me, Mother, and I love him more than anyone else!”

“Brigid,” she said deliberately, “he is a Roman.”

A moment of resentful silence hung between them, then Brigid went and sat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t care what he is. Roman, Brigantian, Silurian, why should I care? I love him, and nothing else matters!”

“The survival of this tuath matters,” Boudicca snapped back. “The honor of the people matters. Right now the Romans are stealing our flocks and herds, they are chaining our freemen and taking them away, and while you play in the fields with the son, the father sits in his comfortable office and will not help us. Right now, Brigid, right now while we talk! Can’t you hear the wailing of the people? Rome brought this! And Marcus! They are the conquerors!”

“No,” Brigid faltered. “Marcus is not like that. He would help if he could, I know he would. He loves this tuath. He doesn’t want to go to Rome—Icenia is his home.”

“But he will go to Rome, and there he will remember that he belongs to an empire. He will forget us, Brigid, and his memories of you will be of a simple, pretty little barbarian who amused him when he was too young to know any better.”

“No!” The tears poured down her face but she did not move. “You don’t understand! He has always been a brother to me! We learned to ride together, we snared our first rabbits together, I have never lived without him and oh, Mother, if I have to live without him now I will die!”

Boudicca got up, reached down, and, grasping Brigid’s trembling arms she pulled the girl to her feet and thrust her face close. “Listen, Brigid. If you wed a Roman the tuath will cast you out. Do you know what that means?”

“But those days are gone! Father said so!”

“They are coming back. Every herd driven south, every child torn from his mother and chained to be shipped to Gaul, brings them closer. Your father is dying, Brigid, and when he is dead Favonius and Priscilla will go away. A praetor will come, and a Roman town will spring up here, where we stand. The Iceni will have ceased to be.”

Brigid raised puzzled eyes to hers. “Well, what is wrong with that?”

A surge of terror and loss took the power from Boudicca’s limbs and she released her daughter. She went unsteadily to the door. “I want to refuse you,” she said, “but I cannot. It must rest with Favonius. It is too late to undo the harm that has been done, and my ears are full of a suffering far greater than yours, Brigid. You may wed Marcus, if his father agrees.”

Brigid sat looking at her, uncertainty chasing the bewilderment from her face as her mother swept from the room and the doorskins fell closed behind her.

Favonius looked at the glowering, mutinous face of his son.

“You are not being reasonable, Marcus. It is far too soon for you to take a wife. Why, she would be nothing but a millstone around your neck, and at a time when you will need every denarius you can scrape together and all your energies will be going into your work. Besides, she’s a barbarian.”

Marcus flushed hotly. “That has nothing to do with it! In all the years we’ve been friends together the thought has never crossed my mind, and I believed you to be above such prejudice as well. You know, Father, the great Aulus Plautius married a barbarian.”

“He was much older than you when he did so, and he knew his own mind. Can you face the displeasure of your superior? The sniggers of the friends you will make in Rome? Have you considered that it might ruin your career?”

Marcus glanced away and Favonius absently toyed with the stylus in his fingers, a frown on his face. “You are letting sentiment override good sense, Marcus. She’s young and pretty, but Rome is full of young and pretty girls, most of them a good deal more civilized than Brigid. You will forget her as the months go by.”

Marcus folded his arms, a glare of obstinacy in his eyes. “What I feel for her is not sentiment. I don’t give a damn for Rome, not really, and I don’t know what you mean by ‘civilized.’ If you mean well-educated and rich, then I’m not civilized either.”

“That’s not what I mean!”

But it was, Favonius reconsidered. Marcus had spent his childhood running wild over the marshes and forests of Icenia, and his father knew his arguments were so much rubbish to a youth who knew more about the habits of the deer than he did about rhetoric. Marcus didn’t care a fig for philosophy. Favonius felt himself trapped. He himself was a loyal Roman through and through, but he realized with a strange pang of regret that the young man standing before him with his feet planted so sturdily apart was a hybrid, a new breed of frontiersman who was neither Roman nor barbarian, but a little of both. Well, he thought, it could not have been avoided—I did not have the money to send him to Rome for an education.

Favonius dropped the stylus to the desk and ran a bemused hand through his graying, wiry hair. “There’s another consideration, Marcus. Prasutugas won’t last much longer and then the Iceni will come under the direct control of the empire like any other client kingdom. I don’t think Boudicca will stand for it. There will be trouble.”

Marcus grinned insolently. “All the more reason, then, to marry Brigid and take her away. But I think you’re wrong about Boudicca, Father. She grumbles and spits and curses us but she’s not capable of anything else. She’ll settle under direct rule like the rest of the chiefs, and then perhaps one day Brigid and I can come back to Icenia to live.”

“You don’t remember the uprising ten years ago, do you?”

“Only vaguely.”

“Well, if you did you would not dismiss Boudicca so lightly. Oh, Marcus, stop dreaming! They are a dying people and we are their conquerors. No good can come of a marriage such as this! How will you support her? What will you do with her when she’s homesick? I beg you to think again.”

“No.” Marcus stuck out his jaw. “She’s for me as no one else is. If you don’t give your permission I’ll go to the governor.”

Favonius laughed. “Spoken like a true son of mine. Very well, Marcus, you have my permission, but on one condition.”

“Oh?”

“No wedding until you get your first leave.”

“But that might be years away!”

“If she loves you she’ll wait.”

Marcus came up to the desk. “And of course you hope that I will be so wrapped in my work and so entranced by the city that I’ll never give her another thought. You’re wrong, Father. Absolutely wrong.”

“Take it or leave it, Marcus. I won’t change my mind.”

Marcus shrugged ruefully. “Then I suppose we must take it. At least you did not say no.”

Favonius went back to his dispatch. “I didn’t need to,” he said lightly. “You will say it yourself.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

S
UMMER
blew away suddenly on a stiff autumn gale, ruthlessly lifting the leaves from the trees, almost before they could wither into crisp, golden sky-boats, while burdened clouds moved slowly and majestically over the now-dreary, deserted marshlands. Suetonius had joined the Fourteenth Legion and begun the march that would take him north and ultimately west, skirting the still-battling Ordovices and on into Deceangli country and so to Mona. The refurbished Twentieth marched with him, ready to quarter at Deva on the coast and there to await his order to advance if it was necessary. Half the fighting force of the province swarmed into the west, twenty-five thousand men, but Paulinus was unconcerned. He had laid his plans well and thoroughly mapped the paths he was now taking. Farther south and west, at Glevum, the Second Augusta carried out lightning raids against the battered but unbowed Silures, and it harried the Ordovices from their vessels, also at Paulinus’s command. A perfect pincer, he congratulated himself, which will nip Mona without once getting entangled in the mountains of the interior. Then a short wait while the rebels starve, and I will have conquered the west. How absurdly simple.

He had remained at Colchester for the last campaigning season and kept in touch with his generals through dispatches, while they oozed slowly up to the passes and along the ugly, rugged coastline. But now, in the second season, he had gone to command in person, calmly and efficiently. This season would see an end to the years of bloody, vicious waste and the beginning of a true and lasting peace.

His predecessors, with the exception of Plautius, had allowed themselves to become either too emotionally involved with the game, like Ostorious Scapula, or too anxious of failure to be decisive, like old Gallus. They lacked objectivity. Paulinus had it in full measure. First and last he was a soldier—cool, brilliant, with the ability of a born general to completely disassociate himself from the human element in warfare and move his legions like pieces on a gaming board. He had no defeats behind him, and looked to none ahead. With an uncharacteristic flash of insight Nero had chosen the perfect man for the task, and confidently, almost impatiently, Paulinus clattered with his cavalry escort around him, and his thousands before and behind, toward the treacherous, mist-clogged northern passes. All his thoughts were bent on Mona. The lowland had lain quiet for ten years and would continue that way for another hundred, and he was about to put the crowning laurels on a long and successful career. He was happy.

Boudicca sensed the growing light around her and was instantly awake. The night was deep and cold. She sat up, drew the blankets around her shoulders, and pushed aside the curtain to see how her fire had sunk to red embers and the snow had silted in long white fingers under her doorskins. The light stopped outside her door, wavered, and a chief bent his head and entered, a lamp in his hand. “What is it?” she whispered, and he came and stood by the bed.

“My lord is sinking,” he said tersely. “He will not live through the night.”

She slid from the warm womb of the bed and reached for her cloak and boots. “Have you sent for the doctor? Does Favonius know?”

“Not yet, Lady. Prasutugas forbade me to bring the Roman doctor. He is tired of being mauled. He wants to die in peace.”

“Then he is conscious.” She pulled on the boots with swift, steady fingers. “Rouse Brigid and Ethelind. Quickly!”

The chief bowed briefly and went out, and she stood, wrapping the cloak tightly around her. A dozen thoughts clamored for her attention and a great shadow of fear reared up at her back, but she raised her hood, pushing the welter of thick hair beneath it, and stepped outside.

It was snowing, a gentle, quiet drift that settled softly on her upturned face as she scanned the night sky, and there was no wind. The air was wet and dense but not cold, only full of a clean winter magic, and she drew in deep breaths of it as she turned and walked past the Council hall to the imposing entrance of Prasutugas’s Roman house. His chiefs had already gathered, squatting in silence under the shelter of the porch, and they murmured a greeting to her as she slipped between them and opened the door to the room where Prasutugas had lain, now, for six unendurable months. Lovernius closed it behind her, his bulbous features haggard, and she went to the big bed and knelt beside it.

He was awake and he lay on his back. His broad jaw was rigid, and his teeth were clamped tightly together. The sweat trickled down his temples to soak his pillow. He was breathing slowly, with great wheezing rasps of air that sounded like the huge, tattered bellows of the ironsmith’s forge, and his naked, wet-slicked chest rose and fell, rose and fell, strained and shuddering. His eyes were wide open, fixed on the ceiling but not seeing it, his gaze turned inward to the labyrinthine disintegration of his body. But when she placed a firm hand on his good arm he slowly turned his head.

“Boudicca,” he gasped. “I have not fought an enemy in years, and this one is strong. I face him alone, and I am so weak.”

“Say nothing, dear one,” she broke in. “Die in peace. You are not alone, for I am here with you, and beyond my father waits, and your chiefs who fell with honor. Go forward.”

He licked his cracked lips with a dry, trembling tongue. “My sword. I need it.”

She smoothed back the white-streaked, blond hair and looked up at Lovernius. “Bring a sword.”

“But Lady,” he hissed, glancing sideways to the bed. “It is forbidden.”

“If I have to get it myself you will be sorry!” she said in an undertone. “Go quickly. You know where to look.”

He bowed unhappily and went out, and she turned back to her husband, laying her cheek against the frail, heaving chest. “I love you Prasutugas,” she whispered. “I have always loved you.” He could not answer. All his will was bent on keeping silence, and the echoes of another reality were already floating fitfully through the dark confusion of his mind, like harness bells tinkling far away on a scented summer evening. Boudicca sat back on her heels, her arms folded on the edge of the bed where the damp sheets trailed the floor, and all in the room listened, trapped, to that agonized breathing. The girls slipped in, their cloaks clutched under their chins in frightened hands, their sleeping tunics mired with mud and snow brushing the floor, and they came and stood behind her.

“He will recover again, won’t he, Mother?” Ethelind whispered, but she did not answer.

How pitifully old you have become, my husband, she thought, her eyes on the tense, quivering muscles of his face. And how old I feel also. I die with you tonight. My life is over, though I go on moving down the long years. Oh take me with you, Prasutugas, take me with you, don’t leave me here in this terrible coldness! Lovernius approached and she rose, taking the sword from him and laying it carefully beside her husband. It was dull, the blade stained, the hilt encrusted with wet earth, but his hand stroked it and he smiled and closed his eyes.

“Druid,” he muttered, “Druid,” and she leaned over him.

“He will come, Prasutugas.” He shifted then. His back arched suddenly, his eyes rolled, then he lapsed into a stupor. Such a death! she thought in desolation. Such a rude, unlovely passing, with no Druid to ease his going with spells of loosing, and only a blunt, useless sword by his side. And the tuath goes with him, sinking even as he has lain ailing, dying slowly and miserably, limbless and impotent. She sat in the big, comfortable chair where he had often rested with his good arm in his lap, watching her with an amused affection as she paced to and fro by the bed and shouted her frustrations. The girls huddled close together, not daring to speak. The chiefs, Lovernius, and Iain, his shield-bearer, squatted at the foot of the bed and looked at the floor. The lamps burned with an occasional spasmodic flicker, but the shadows, like people frozen into a timeless tableau, were still.

He spoke once more before he died. “Andrasta! Raven of Nightmares!” he called, his voice urgent, then his breathing faltered. Boudicca sprang up. He took another shuddering lungful of air and opened his eyes, fighting to keep it, but then he had to let it go and it sighed from him in a long, quiet wind. He did not breathe again. His chest lay motionless. The pain-marred face relaxed as though with an enormous relief, and a new silence rushed in to capture the little group in its aggressive embrace.

After a long moment, Boudicca turned to Iain. “Go immediately to Favonius,” she said tonelessly. “He will want to send a message to the governor, and to Rome. Tell him that if he wishes to see Prasutugas he must come in the morning. Tell him…” The large, sweeping lines of her face suddenly seemed to crumple inward and she waved him out, striding clumsily back to the chair beside the bed. Prasutugas lay quietly, his head turned toward her, his hand flung out to touch her like the hesitant reaching of a shy child. The other chiefs came crowd ing behind her, murmuring together, and at last Brigid began to cry, but Boudicca put her chin in her palm and watched him.

He was lain on a bier in the Council hall and for three days the Icenian chieftains sat around it on the floor, speaking to one another of his virtues. Boudicca, seated on a chair at the far end of the room with Brigid and Ethelind silent at her feet, listened impassively to the soft, respectful murmur. No chief rose to proclaim Prasutugas’s might in battle or his bravery in raids. No one acted out his fights in single combat with the champions of other tribes. She drank her golden mead slowly and reflectively, hugging such memories to herself. He had been a peacemaker, her gentle husband, and perhaps it was right that the chiefs should bring to mind his careful wooing of Rome, yet she felt ashamed that in all the long history of the Iceni, Prasutugas should be the only lord remembered for his agility of mind rather than of body. He lay quietly in their midst, braided hair on his green breast and a silver helm on his head, with his great blue-enameled ceremonial shield beside him. But no sword rested under his limp hand, and the soft songs Lovernius sang now and then were as plaintive and tender as the lays of love.

The snow continued to fall. Sometimes it thinned and slowed as if tired of its duty but no wind came up to move the burdened gray clouds, and Prasutugas was carried to his mound through a thick, white curtain that hurried to cover him like a Druid’s pall. Inside the barrow it was dark and cold but somehow welcoming—a safe, secret room where he could sleep undisturbed, far from the turmoil of living—and his chiefs put him reverently on the ground and began the last solemn rites. The spokes of his chariot gleamed in the torchlight. His richly chased silver plate, his golden brooches and bracelets, stored up the full, hot light against the long darkness to come and glowed in the shadowed corners of the little room. His men delivered eulogies, but with an embarrassed reluctance, and the words were all of gratitude and amity. Boudicca did not speak. She wanted to praise him for his sweetness, his tolerance, the steady, comforting years of loving he had shared with her, not for his peace, but these things were private and she could find no public deeds to glorify. When the ceremony was over she left the mound and went to her hut. Ethelind drifted to the stable, led out her unwilling horse from its oats and warm straw, and vanished under the snow-laden branches of the forest. But Brigid saw Marcus hovering beyond the cluster of men and she ran to him. He wore Icenian breeches against the cold and his long native cloak made him look like a young chieftain, but his thin, almost pinched face was Roman and his black, short hair, sprinkled with snowflakes, curled around his ears.

“I’m sorry, Brigid,” he said. “We all knew it was coming but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. I feel I’ve lost an uncle, or even a father. He was always so good to me.”

“It’s all right,” she replied. “I think he is happier in death. It was strange, Marcus, watching him die. I was terrified when Lovernius came to fetch me but somehow his dying was so…so small, as if it really wasn’t important at all. Do you understand me? I expected something shattering to happen—time to stop for a moment, or the lamps to go out, something to mark death, but nothing has changed.”

“I suppose death is a going away, just as birth is a coming in,” he said awkwardly. “It is only people who change, Brigid.” She brushed the persistent, gathering humps of snow from her shoulders and pulled her cloak more tightly around her. “Are you cold?”

“No.”

“Good. Then let’s take a boat and go downriver. The countryside will be deserted today and we can build a fire later on. Would you like that?”

Swift words of teasing mockery rose to her lips but for the first time in their long relationship she had no desire to utter them. He was smiling, his eyebrows raised, and without a trace of awkwardness she leaned forward and kissed him on his cheek.

“Thank you,” she said. “I would like that very much.”

They went to the river, picked their way through the upending fishing coracles cluttering the pier, and cast off in a small boat belonging to the garrison. Marcus took the paddle and expertly guided them to the center, where they drifted, the sleepy current bearing them toward the sea. It was warmer on the water, though in the shallows to either side of them the still, forgotten pools were rimmed with ice and the thick brown rushes and waterweeds stood clogged with silted snow. There was no sign of life in the shrouded marshland that stretched away from them on either hand, only an occasional water rat splashed into the murky darkness and then swam strongly and was lost in the choked white riverbank.

The snow was turning to flurries mixed with sleet, and Brigid lifted her face to the low sky. “The weather is warming,” she said. “Soon it will rain.” He did not reply and they floated on, swathed in silence and pale coldness. They sat for an hour, sunk in their own lazy thoughts, secure in a mute companionship, then Marcus took up the paddle and deftly steered them toward a dim, tree-hung backwash. They climbed out, pulling the little craft high, then set about collecting dead twigs and branches, their blood slowly heating to tingle in their toes and fingers as they worked. Before long they had kindled a fire and sat staring into it, their shoulders hunched over knees drawn up against the damp. The stately sobriety of the day hung with calm wings above them and they gazed into the flames for many contented minutes without speaking. Then Marcus stirred.