by Henry Treece
Then Boudicca closed her blue-painted eyelids and said in a strange whisper, ‘And do you trust the promise I gave you with that brooch, so many years ago, Roman? Do you still believe the words I spoke, when you were a boy, and I little more than a girl?’
Marcus sat upright on his horse. He said, ‘Yes, lady, I still trust your promise.’
The shock of the third blow almost toppled him to the ground. This time it was the wooden handle of the whisk that struck him, not the horse-hair. He heard the queen’s voice cry out, ‘Then, the more fool you!’ As he staggered, pulling his mount round to keep from falling, he heard the screech of a bone whistle then Boudicca’s voice almost screaming, ‘Into the wagon with these fools! They will make an evening’s entertainment for us when the ale-cup passes round.’
Marcus heard the swift pattering of bare feet towards him. Hard hands took him by the arms and legs, then suddenly he was down in the dust, held there cruelly by the dancers with the war-streaked faces. He saw Tigidius rein back his pony, so that it reared high above the clustered women, but his freedom only lasted a moment, then he too was down, face to the road, and powerless. Cynwas saw this, then, giving a high shout, swung his mount away and kicked hard at its sides. It seemed that he would break free, along the road that swung southwards among the overhanging boughs. But he had scarcely gone ten paces when a tall man dressed in wolfskins started up from the ditch and flung a heavy stone hammer at him. It caught him hard below the right arm and seemed to sweep him from the pony’s back as a man’s hand can sweep away a troublesome fly.
The frightened pony galloped on without him and disappeared among the dark green trees. The man in the wolfskins went over to the Briton and picked him up, groaning, as though he were a harvest-doll of straw. Then, striding to the wagon, he flung Cynwas down before the queen.
She did not speak to the warrior, and when he had backed away, she turned to the women and said, ‘Bind them with wet hide, at wrist and ankle. I want them to know what being a captive really means. I want them to know, in their bodies, what I have suffered in my heart during these months.’
And when this was done, the captives were thrown into the back of the great wagon like bundles of bracken meant for the fires.
Tigidius screwed up his face in wry humour and said, ‘Well, I have been in some positions, Tribune, but never one like this before.’
Cynwas opened his eyes painfully now and said, ‘Before the day is out, you will look back on this as comfort. She has learned her trade well, Roman. Your own butchers have taught her something.’
Then the wagon began to turn, and rumbled down the road, and Cynwas began to groan from the pain of his hurt ribs.
[12]
Going South
The next days were agony for the prisoners in the black wagon. As they rolled on southwards along the Ermine Street, men and women from the many tribes on either side came in to join the Iceni, and all of them wanted to see the Romans and to taunt them and strike at them. Tigidius said grimly, ‘I think they are taking us to Camulodunum for some reason or other best known to themselves. But if we get half-way there without having our skulls cracked, I shall be surprised.’
Marcus nodded. ‘At least we are still alive,’ he said. ‘And that is more than can be said for half of our Legion. I never thought I would see the Ninth so mauled. It is like the end of the world. My father would have fallen on his sword if he had led his men into such an ambush.’
Cynwas was feeling better than he had done, though the Iceni had not treated his wounded side. He leaned forward smiling bitterly and said, ‘Now we all have something to mourn. I have my sister and you your crippled legion. We are both in the same boat. I am sorry I quarrelled with you. Can we be friends again?’
The Tribune gazed at him emptily for a while then smiled and said, ‘Cynwas, you old fool! Of course we are friends. But I will tell you this, if we are both alive when this affair is over, I shall take you behind the fortress gates somewhere and give you the biggest thrashing you ever had, with bare fists, just to show you how much I like you - and also to knock some sense into your thick British head. Is that a bargain?’
Cynwas nodded. ‘As long as we get Aranrhod back, I will agree to anything,’ he said. ‘Though don’t expect me to fight fairly, as you call it. I shall use my feet as well. I am not one of these Greek fist-fighters.’
Then Tigidius broke in, staring over the side of the wagon. ‘Look at the fields,’ he said. ‘They are trampled flat. No grain has been sown down here. What will the tribes feed on this year?’
Marcus looked across the rolling wilderness of dust and burned trees. He said, ‘This can mean only one thing. If the tribes have not planted their fields, it is because they hope to eat elsewhere. You are as good at guessing as I am, centurion.’
Tigidius said slowly, ‘There are Roman grain supplies and cattle at Camulodunum, but they are mainly for the veterans who have retired to live out their days there.’ Marcus said grimly, ‘Guess again, friend.’
The centurion said, ‘Do you mean Verulamium? That is off the track, isn’t it?’
Marcus said, ‘I do mean Verulamium, and it is not off the track if you consider how this revolt is spreading. If you listen to the folk about us you will hear that there are Catuvellauni and even Atrebates marching beside the wagons.’
They listened for a time. Then Tigidius said suddenly, ‘By Mithras, but the Atrebates come from south of Londinium. Can it have spread so far?’
Marcus lowered his head. ‘I think they mean to take the supply base at Londinium itself. If they do, then Rome is finished here. The legions will starve. What can they do to help themselves? Suetonius is at the other side of the Province with the Fourteenth and Twentieth. They have their hands full, dealing with the Ordovices. The Second, at Glevum, is pinned down by the Silures and daren’t take their eyes off the hills for an hour. They depend on being supplied from Londinium. If the Iceni take that base, the legions will starve.’
Tigidius said shortly, ‘Once hunger begins to grip them, Marcus, they will move. You can depend on that. They will cross the country to see what has happened to their food rations. They are soldiers.’
The Tribune laughed emptily. ‘They would need to be more than soldiers,’ he said. ‘They would need to be birds, and big birds at that, eagles, you could say, to cross the woodland and mountains so as to reach Londinium before the Iceni could. They have over two hundred miles to march, while the tribes have less than half that distance and a good road that we have built them to travel down.’
Cynwas yawned and said, ‘You Romans - always supply bases, roads, marching! You consider life as though it was a matter of measuring everything. But you forget one important thing.’
Marcus said, ‘Go on, tell us - I am sure you mean to, in any case. So get it over.’
Cynwas said calmly, ‘You forget that the tribes do not measure everything. For them, distance and time mean nothing. If they find a place they like, they will stay there until they are tired of it.’
Tigidius said, ‘Or until they have burned it to the ground and cannot live there any longer because of the stench of charred houses and dead bodies.’
Cynwas shrugged his shoulders. ‘You may put it in the Roman way if you wish, centurion,’ he said. ‘But, I tell you, this habit of the tribes might be your only salvation.
I do not say that you deserve it, after what was done at Venta Icenorum, but it could happen that the legions reached Londinium in time - if only the Iceni delay a little while at Camulodunum, eating up the veterans’ corn and breaking down those fine houses and temples and theatres that you folk took so much trouble to set up there.’
Marcus shut his eyes. His lips moved in a prayer, but those in the wagon beside him could not hear what he was saying, or to which god he addressed his words.
[13]
The White Garlands
On the fourth day of their journey the tall tribesman in a coat of wolfskins climbed into the wagon and
cut their leg-thongs. He smiled as he did this, his blue-streaked face twisting savagely. When they looked up at him he said, ‘Out! Walk like the others. Why should you ride?’
Cynwas said, ‘The queen, where is she? We have not seen her for days.’
The man raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you so glad to see her?’ he asked. ‘You should be happy not to see her. She has gone riding among other tribes to raise them. When she comes back she will have you dropped from a tree on to pointed stakes set in the ground. I tell you this so that you will look forward to her return.’
Then he jumped from the black wagon and went up the line laughing to other wagons with his bronze knife.
Cynwas said, ‘He is not jesting. He speaks the truth. It is one of their customs.’
For a mile they did not speak again, but stumbled on along the dusty road among the tribesmen, being jostled and prodded with lance points. Sometimes women and even children pushed up to them and struck them across the face with sticks or thong-whips. But it was all done light-heartedly and with laughter, as though the Iceni now bore them little ill-will. Once a party of young girls brought garlands of white flowers and set them on the heads of the prisoners, singing as they did so. Now the two
Romans had lost all their armour and, like Cynwas, shuffled barefooted, dressed only in their ragged shirts.
And once an old woman with a clay pot in her hand reached out and daubed their faces with blue dye as she passed them. Marcus said, ‘I think they have elected us to their tribe. In this war-paint and wearing this garland, I almost feel like one of them.’
Cynwas said in a hoarse voice, ‘They put garlands on the necks of their cattle and daub them with paint, before they sacrifice them, Tribune. They think that the gods will only accept those who go happily to their death.’
Tigidius snorted and flung off his garland then; but a warrior ran forward and put it back on the centurion’s head roughly, then thumped him hard in the back with a spear-shaft. Tigidius said, ‘Well, that is one lesson I have learned. They are a civil folk, these Iceni.’
By midday they passed through a burned-out village where the reed huts still smouldered. Cattle lay dead in the compound, their hooves stuck up in the air, swarms of black flies buzzing over them. Near to the roadside was a small house built of stone, but now so toppled and blackened by fire that it was hard to believe a Roman had built it. In the small courtyard three folk lay stretched out - a woman and a small boy with yellow hair, and a few paces from them a dark-haired man still wearing a legionary’s breastplate. Between them lay a smashed keg from which oysters were scattered across the tiles.
Marcus said, ‘It must have come on them quickly. That is the one consolation.’
Tigidius looked beyond that stark little place and whispered in camp Latin, ‘At least they had a little time together, the Roman and his British wife. They are beyond our pity now. Think to the future. Look, four hundred paces down the road there is a stretch of woodland that comes right to the road-edge. If we broke away from this column, we might get among the trees and he away, with luck. ”
Cynwas heard him and said, ‘There would be others waiting for us, when the wood ended. And these Iceni can run like stags. We should die within half a mile.’
Marcus frowned. ‘At least we should know the worst then,’ he said. ‘That would be better than waiting for the other thing we have been promised.’
But Cynwas shook his head. ‘If I go with you, I shall never find my sister,’ he whispered. ‘At least, if I stay with them I might see her again before I die. I might be able to beg mercy for her. I cannot go with you.’
Marcus looked back up the long road. It was black with folk for as far as the eye could see. The dust that rose from their shuffling feet threw up a haze, and above that haze black birds flew squawking, following the great column. He thought that half Britain must be on the move. It came to him that if, by some jest of the gods, he could get away from this sickening army, he might even be given the luck to press on to Londinium and warn the garrison there. It was a small chance but suddenly he knew that it was his duty to take it. He thought sadly that this was what his father would have done; so he leaned sideways and took the hand of Cynwas and gripped it hard. ‘Stay, brother,’ he said. ‘This is your place. May Mithras smile down on you and the little sister.’
Then, singing and laughing like the tribesmen about him, he began to push towards the side of the road, slapping shoulders and jostling like anybody else. The warriors slapped in return but did not stop him from edging away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Tigidius was beside him, shouting out and joking in very poor Celtic. The centurion had never learned more than a few words of the language, but he bawled them out as though he was on the parade ground at Lindum again, training auxiliaries.
Marcus half-turned once and said in a low voice, ‘Don’t try to do too much, old one. A little is enough with a voice like yours. We do not want them to notice us too much.’
But the tribesmen did not seem to be thinking of their prisoners now. They were singing a strange song in a deep droning tone, about a god who was shut inside an oak tree and called out to be fed with blue-eyed children. The Iceni were a dark-eyed folk in the main and Marcus shuddered to hear this old enmity coming out. He wondered what colour Aranrhod’s eyes were. He had forgotten in all the things that had happened since he last saw the little girl. Then, by some queer shift of the mind he suddenly pictured his own sister, Livia, with her funny light-coloured eyes, and her little baby-girl, Drusilla. Had Drusilla got blue eyes, he wondered?
Then Tigidius tapped him on the arm and said quite stiffly, ‘Watch out, sir. The wood is coming up. We should get ready to go, within five paces.’
Marcus felt his heart leap up. He felt the old twitching of his fingers and toes. The tribesmen were all in a lost dream with their savage song. On the slope towards the left of the road a score of Icenian boys had run out, swinging bone bull-roarers that buzzed like gigantic bees in time to the song. Before them pranced an old man wearing a stag’s mask, the stiff face grinning, the long antlers nodding, the teeth all yellow, sticking out from the drawn-back leather. Marcus noticed, almost without any disgust, that the old man swung two heads by their brown hair, knocking them together to keep time to the dance.
Then he saw the first of the trees coming beside him and said, ‘Now!’
He plunged to his right, sensed that the centurion was with him, felt that he had knocked a man down, then a woman, and with the coarse grasses up to his waist, he was free.
He felt a slight thud on his left shoulder but kept running. Dimly behind him he heard Tigidius shout, ‘Pull it out, you fool. Pull it out.’
He did not look round, but felt with his right hand towards his shoulder and grasped the arrow. It had not gone in far, but it was quite sharp as the barbed flinthead came clear again.
He called out, ‘That wouldn’t have knocked a hare down, friend. We can still teach them something, old lad!’
Then he began to feel rather sick, but his heart was galloping like a front-line courser now and his legs wouldn’t stop. He saw trees slanting to left and right of him. As though they were being thrown at him. He wondered who was throwing them, and laughed. He was very hungry, he suddenly remembered. He thought that a runner must need good food to keep running.
In a way he wished his father could see him now, running among the oaks with half Britain howling for his blood.
Then all at once he heard a great silence. He heard that the Iceni were not howling at all. Even the bull-roarers had stopped. And at the same time he was aware that the thudding footsteps of Tigidius had stopped also. Marcus wondered if he had died from the arrow. He had listened to many old soldiers, from Germany and Palestine, who had described what it was like to die. Not that they had died, naturally, but they had seen many of their friends in that state and had told how men seemed to go off. Some of them went very quietly, as though they were leaving the feast-board after a good meal; oth
ers were still in the middle of their howling when they grew still and let their heads bump on the earth.
Marcus ran through a low thorn-bush just then and the thorns hurt him far more than the arrow did, so he knew that he was alive. Indeed, he almost stopped to rub his shins.
But he didn’t stop then. He went on another ten paces before he stopped. And when he did, there was no doubt about it, he had to stop. No one, not even Hercules, could have gone on.
And a voice that he knew almost better than any voice was calling out to him, ‘How pretty you look, Tribune, in that white garland. Yes, how comely. They did not tell me you Romans wore such things. And that blue war-paint. What war are you going to, my friend, in such a hurry?’
[14]
The Queen on the Cart
In a broad glade, under the oversweeping boughs. Queen Boudicca sat staring before her at the running Romans. Behind her in the woodland, yawning and laughing, leaning on their long spears, waited five hundred tribesmen. Some of them were Silures from the distant west, wearing their cat-skin bonnets and their eagle plumes.
Boudicca said, high on a war-cart, pulling in the reins, ‘What war are you going to, in such great haste?’
Marcus stopped then, a man coming out of a dream. He saw Tigidius beside him, bending double and coughing, suddenly grown old. He said in a vacant voice, ‘A man runs, woman. Sometimes he runs towards victory, sometimes towards gold. Sometimes towards the sun, the dawn, towards freedom, or towards nothing. He runs. That is why they call him a man, because he moves through life and does not lie down and die like a beaten animal.’
She was sitting on a heap of Roman gear, helmets and cuirasses and shields. She settled herself then and flung some of them over the side of the war-cart. She said, smiling thinly, ‘Today, in this green oak grove, I am the goddess in the cart. I am Nerthus of the dark woodland. I am that She of the Germani-tribes, the Kindred of the Forests. Are you not ashamed to speak of what a man is to me, when you see before you the greatest of women?’
