There was a low muttering with the sound of trouble in it, from the crowd. And then one asked, ‘Lady, what does the All Mother say that we shall put in our bellies when there is no grain at harvest time?’
‘Fools!’ said the Queen. ‘We shall be full fed from the Red Crests’ storehouses and the rich granaries of the south!’ She made a wide gesture of dismissal. ‘Go now. We will talk more, much more, at a later time.’
And then the gathering was breaking up, the men to get their tethered horses, the remaining women, with Nessan in their midst, back to the women’s quarters. I did not go with the rest. From within the shadow of the weapon-stone, where she still stood unmoving, the eyes of the Queen were upon me, their command clear as though she had spoken it. I walked towards her; and she held out one hand to me, her father’s sword still in the other, and said, ‘Cadwan of the Harp, it is well that the Red Crests thought you dead, and more than well that they were mistaken; for what should I do without my Harper?’ And, glancing at the battered bag across my shoulder, ‘Your harp is not scathed past the making whole again?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘If I can come by the horsehair to restring her, she will sing as sweet and fierce as ever.’
‘There should be enough horses for that, in our runs, even now,’ she said. And then, ‘You promised that you would make me a great song one day; a song of Queen’s Victories. It is in my heart that the time for you to keep that promise is almost come.’
She spoke gently now, almost like the Boudicca that I have always known. But I was looking into her eyes. They were awake once more, but it was not Boudicca looking out of them; not the Boudicca that I knew at all. They were blue as ever, but the blue was only on the surface, as it might be the reflection of a clear sky, and looking into them was like looking into a dark forest, where strange and terrible things lurked half-seen among the crowding trees. And again the hair stirred on the back of my neck, and I was more afraid than ever I have been before or since. And yet, after the first shock was spent, I knew how simple it was, the thing that had happened. As a coin has two faces and yet both faces are the same coin, so it is with the Great Mother; she who gives all things in life and takes all things back in death. She is in the love of a man and a woman and the child born from it; she is in the corn that ripens to harvest, and in the seed corn that demands blood shed into the furrows before it quickens; she is in the stoop of a falcon on a leveret cowering in the long grass; she is in battle and the deaths of men. She is in all living things, even in the Queen of the Iceni who wears her godhead upon earth.
It was Boudicca looking out of those eyes still, but the other side of Boudicca, that I had never known. The dark side of the moon.
There seemed to be a wailing in the air. Maybe it was the women keening for the dead.
‘I will make you your song of a Queen’s Victories,’ I said.
I was no more afraid. Oh but the grief was on me; and I knew that the song must be a dark one, and woven for a dark Queen, however its end might be.
10
The Hosting
ALL THAT SPRING and into the summer, the Red Crests and the Government tribute-collectors were spread from end to end of the land, like the marsh sickness, like wolf-packs in a famine year. They say the first Romans were suckled by a she-wolf. The Procurator himself did not come again; but his orders came north from Londinium and his men were everywhere about their reivers’ business. They seized the whole of Prasutagus’s flocks and herds; and not his alone, for soon they were carrying off the Queen’s also, and the riches of the chiefs and nobles in gold and herds and matched chariot teams; and free men and women they drove off to the slave markets. The price for murdering a Roman officer, we were told. To pay for Nero’s circuses, we knew. Burning thatch and ruined farms marked their track, showing where any had dared to stand against them. And everywhere was desolation and the lowing of driven cattle, and the only things that thrived were the carrion crows. And the great officials in their purple-bordered mantles, with their bronze and crimson escorts strutted hither and yon about their ordered business of stamping a free state into part of a Roman province. And in and out among the feet of these lordly ones, like dung beetles, scurried the agents of the Roman moneylenders, calling in old debts, from men who had nothing left to pay them with but their heart’s blood and an old sword hidden in the thatch.
One came to Boudicca in her ruined Hall. She was wearing a gold arm-ring that had escaped the looting of the Procurator’s Escort; and she pulled it off and flung it on the ground at his feet, crying out on him, ‘Let you take this for surety; and for the rest, let you ask it of the Procurator, or of the Emperor himself, if he has not already spent it on wild beast shows.’
And the man saw what looked out of her eyes, and bade his scribe slave take up the arm-ring and went away, promising to be back for the rest, but in a voice that shook a little.
With the Royal Dun half in ruins, and the Royal Women, so they deemed, robbed of their Royalty, the Romans left Boudicca alone, save for a visit now and then from a passing patrol, as though she were of no more account. That was the Romans’ mistake, made in an ill hour.
For in the dark, beneath the surface of things, by the old secret ways, by the sunken drove-roads and the tunnelled forest tracks and the winding fen waterways, the messengers were going out, even as the Queen had said. And by the same secret ways, the chiefs and war-captains were coming in. They did not come to the Royal Dun, where the Queen abode still among the patched-up ruins of her home, lest any Roman eye should note the coming and going, but to certain forest clearings of the Priest Kind; or to a certain island among the fens, reed-fringed and alder-fringed like many others, but circled at its heart with a ring of nine ancient thorn trees.
And there, the Lady Boudicca would go to meet them. I also, most times. For where the Queen goes, there goes the Queen’s Harper, that he may see and hear the things that must be passed on in song to the tribe as yet unborn.
So we would ride through the neck of the forest, and down to the black skin boats waiting among the reeds. The Queen wrapped in an old wolfskin cloak against the chill of the water-mists, and no spund as we journeyed but the stealthy lap and suckle of the water among the sedges, and somewhere a bittern booming in the night. And then we would come to an island, and go up through the reeds and the alder scrub, past the black horsehide tents pitched outside the thorn circle. There would be a fire burning at the heart of the circle, for at a Council gathering there must be light for a man to see the face of the man he speaks with; a fire of driftwood brought in from the sea coast, that its colour might not stand out too fiercely from the cold blue spirit flames that wander among those reedbeds and waterways. And around the fire, there would be the chieftains waiting; the mist catching the firelight and making a silvery smoke that swirled about their heads. About the Queen’s head, too, when she put back the hood of her cloak; but no firelight seemed able to touch her eyes.
First to come were the chiefs of our own horse-runs, saying, ‘I can bring three hundred men, half with swords, the rest spears.’ – ‘I can bring six score men to the Hosting, and fourteen chariots, each with a fighting man beside the driver.’ – ‘I have four hundred and a handful, young braves, who have taken to the forest to be out of the Red Crests’ path until I call them forth, but for the most part no arms save hunting-spears and slings. . . .’
And then came chiefs from further off; foremost among them, leaders of the Trinovantes hot for Roman blood to wipe out years of bondage. ‘Eighteen years,’ said Vortrix the Bear, acting as spokesman for the rest, ‘eighteen years, we have been treated by the Romans as a conquered people. Our Royal Dun – for remember, Lady, that Dun Camulus was ours before the Catuvellauni set up their High Place there – our Royal Dun they have crushed down beneath a Roman city that has stolen even its name; a city with Roman baths and theatres and circuses, and a great temple to their Emperor Claudius. And in the temple, we, the chiefs and nobles of the Trinovantes, and our wo
men with us must take our turns to serve as priests and priestesses to this Emperor God who is not ours, so that our own gods turn their faces from us – because, forsooth, that is the way of the great men and the noble ladies in Rome! And we must pay out of our own dwindling store-kists for the festivals in the temple and the plays in the theatre and the games in the circus, when ever our masters call for them, while at the same time our land is stripped from us and handed over to Roman settlers, and our lesser folk are set to working for those same settlers – old Red Crests who treat all men not of their own kind as slaves.’
‘That is a tale all men know,’ said the Queen when he had grumbled on long enough, like the bear of his name. ‘Tell me now, what fighting strength you can yet raise?’
And he spoke the number, in horsemen and foot-spears and chariot-warriors. And the Oak Priest who kept the tally wrote them all down on his peeled willow-rods. And when that was done, Vortrix said, ‘There is another thing that we can give to the strength of the War Host, though it may not be numbered in the tally.’
‘What thing is that?’ said the Queen.
‘Men, women too within the city, who are no friends to Rome, who can tell of evil omens, and set unchancy whispers running, and spread confusion in men’s minds.’
And the Queen smiled. ‘A few such men within an enemy stronghold may be worth many chariots outside the gates. We will talk more of this at another time.’
From the Coritani of the mid-country to our west, chiefs came; and from the Cornovi, whose runs are towards the high hills westward of that again. The Chariot Lords of the Parisi, and Princes of the Brigantes from over beyond Ostorius Scapula’s old frontier, the Bearers of the Blue War-shields, proudest of the proud.
Captains of the Catuvellauni too, promising war-bands. Aye, war-bands from the Cats of War, who had counted themselves Lords of the World, and our enemies, before the Romans came! Boudicca looked at them when they stood before her; and the memory was in us all, of old menace and old border raids, of how they had slain the King her father, and how we had taken the friendship oath with Rome, that the Roman yoke might be the more surely clamped upon their necks. And the Catuvellauni and the Brigantes looked at each other, remembering that when Caratacus had gone for refuge to the Brigantian Queen, she had handed him over for a gift to Rome.
So many memories lying dark behind men’s eyes. And I thought, ‘This is a team that will take some driving.’ And I looked at Boudicca in her wolfskin cloak, with her father’s sword in her hands, and the sea-coloured firelight shining in her hair but never reaching her eyes; and I thought ‘But this is the driver who can handle them if any can.’
Men came and went again; and the Council Fires burned in the nights. And by chains of watchers and riders all across the tribes between, came word of Suetonius Paulinus the Governor, with his legions on the far western coast, making ready for his attack on Mon. We must unleash our own attack before he was done, with his and his hands free once more; yet we must wait as far as we could into the summer, that there might be grass enough for the horses, so many horses all together. And the rising, when it came, must be swift, with small time for Hosting beforehand, to give warning to our enemies of what was to come.
So the war-pattern was worked out, for secrecy at the start of things, and speed when the time came. And all the while as the curlew came up from the marshes to nest on the higher ground, and lambing time came and went, and the mares dropped their foals, and the whitethorn flowered and scattered its petals to the wind, men took their bird-bows into the marshes, hunting the heron for their hackle feathers to furbish long-hidden war-spears, and old swords were brought out, aye, mine among them, from their hiding places. And in secret clearings in the oak woods, where the best of the horses had been hidden already, and the best of the warriors, too, the smiths and armourers mended old weapons and forged new ones; and new war-chariots were built, and hunting chariots strengthened with dappled oxhides lashed over their wicker sides; and the great wagons for the baggage and the women and the children who could not be left behind. We had never had baggage wagons before. The Romans, but not us. But we had not fought this kind of war before; and now we should need them.
Through all the lands of the Horse People, it seemed to me, was a quivering in the air, a low muttering in the ground itself, a menacing hum like the distant voice of swarming bees. But the Red Crests, strutting to and fro in the daylight, did not hear what sounded in the dark beneath their feet. Even the cornland lying brown and fallow, that should have been green with springing barley told them nothing, for they thought their harrying had made us overpass this year’s seed time. No more.
And I, I made a new wolfskin sheath for my sword, and when that was done, I mended my harp and restrung it, and made for it a fresh bag of well-cured mare’s skin. And there were evenings when the day’s spear practice was over, when Nessan would leave her sister to polishing and repolishing her blade, and come to be with me, as I coaxed the wracked frame back into shape, and twisted the horsehair for new strings. But she never sang any more, and when the mending was done, and I would have had her to pluck the strings (there is no other, even her mother, who I would have let to touch them) she shook her head. ‘There is no music in me, any more. I lost it along with the rest. I could never be a Queen’s Harper now.’
And my heart wept blood for her, and I would have given my own gift of song to have my hands round the throat of the man who had driven hers away. And I snapped the twisted horsehair under my fingers, cutting my hand so that the red sprang out in a thin line.
That was within a moon of midsummer, when the nights grow short, and after sunset the light lingers in the north like the echo of the sea in a shell, until it turns toward sunrise again. And before midsummer, two things came to pass at the same time. The watchers in the west sent word that Suetonius Paulinus had had his victory against Mon and was already making to leave his war-camp beyond the mountains and march his legions back to the great base fortress they call Glevum. That was the one thing; and for the other: the Red Crests who came each year about that time for their muster of young men for the auxiliaries, came again, just as though it were last year or any year before that, but demanding a greater number because we were part of the Province, and no longer a free state.
But we had other need of our young braves. And the grass was tall enough for grazing horses. So then we knew that the time was come to be sending out the Cran-Tara.
The hazel tree was felled; and rods cut from it, as many as were needed. And while one end of each rod was charred in the fire, the black goat was brought for slaying, to the threshold of the Hall, where the Queen stood waiting with a long knife in her hand, that caught and mingled the red of the fire and the white of the young moon on its blade. Two men dragged it forward by the horns, bleating wildly, for it smelled its own death. But when it was close before her, Boudicca bent forward and set her empty hand on its forehead between the horns, and spoke softly, looking into its eyes; and the bleating stopped. Then she cut its throat. Blood spurted out over her hand. She looked at her hand and smiled; the first time that I had seen her smile in many moons; and drew her hand across her forehead, leaving a great dark smear behind, and touched her cheeks and even her lips with her fingers. Then while the goat still lay twitching, she took the hazel rods and dipped the uncharred end of each into the hole in its throat, and gave each to the man waiting for it.
So the Cran-Tara went out; the summons that speaks of death by fire and sword.
And that night, every Roman in Icenian territory died. That would give us silence for a few days. And before the Romans beyond our borders began to wonder, and think of sending to ask questions, we should have no more need of silence.
Before dawn, the first and nearest of the war-bands had come in.
For three days the Hosting went on. On foot and on horseback and behind their chariot teams, the warriors came in, leading spare horses but half-broken, even mares whose foals had been killed to set
them free for war. Men bearing old weapons or new ones hastily forged in those forest clearings, the war-patterns already daubed red and yellow on their cheeks and foreheads. Women, too, and boys not yet come to manhood, carrying their fathers’ heaviest hunting-spears.
The Royal Dun became the centre of a vast camp, and the horses grazed under guard all across the countryside; and the smoke of a hundred cooking-fires rose on the evening air. And men brought their swords to the tall black stone in the Weapon Court to whet the blades that were already keen beyond any need of whetting. And at dusk, when the light of the cooking-fires brightened from red to gold, the young braves made their war dances, whirling and crouching and leaping to the rhythm of their own stamping heels and the clash of spear on shield and the throbbing of the wolfskin drums. And in the secret places of the forest, the Priest Kind wove their own hidden ceremonies for victory.
And on the second day came the Parisi, their chariot columns raising a summer dust-storm behind them; and watching them come, I was thinking that Prasutagus would have been proud of his kindred.
And throughout the third day and far into that night, in small bands already drunk with the promise of war, came the Brigantes, with their blue painted war-shields and their great spears crying out for blood.
Then the first part of the Hosting was complete. And at daybreak, with a great braying and booming of horns, we swept south on the war trail.
Boudicca led the swarm in her chariot covered with red and white bulls’ hides; the horses of her team bay-coloured, and so dark that there seemed a bloom on their hides like the bloom on a thunder-cloud. And for driver, Brockmail who had been Prasutagus’s charioteer. Her hair was bound back in a single braid thicker than a warrior’s wrist, to keep it out of her way, but her cloak, a warrior’s cloak, flowed back from her, red as flame on the wind of our going. And we followed the flame-flicker of that cloak, more than the stallion-skull standard with its streaming saffron tassels that a mounted chieftain carried beside her.
Song for a Dark Queen Page 8
