Song for a Dark Queen

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  The Red Crest trumpets were screaming like angry hawks above the battle-roar; the shouted war-cries and the shrieks of horses and the crash of splintering chariots.

  The Queen was away down from her watch place on the hillock. She sprang into her chariot, and screamed something, there was no hearing what, to her charioteer. I saw him jab in the goad, and the horses sprang forward, scattering blood from their pierced haunches. The Queen’s standard-bearer galloped beside her. She was waving up the last reserves of chariots. I saw them hurtling forward like a winter skein of wild geese – to meet the remains of the second chariot charge that were streaming back. I wondered whether she could turn them yet again, and if not, whether she would be caught up and engulfed by them in their flight. But I did not wait to see. I slipped my harp-bag from my shoulder and hung it on a thorn branch, for the time of the harp was past, and dropped down from the hillock, drawing my sword as I ran. A wild-eyed and riderless horse swept by me, and I caught it, and headed after the Queen for the boiling heart of things.

  And then for a while, even as she had said, I knew little more of the battle than the three men nearest me. My throat was full of the smell of blood and sweat and the choking dustcloud out of which men and horses reeled to and fro. I had lost all sight of the Queen, all knowledge of where she was, so that I could no more be following her. The struggle had lost all shape and pattern and sense; but somewhere in the heart of it, driving on and on, I knew was that terrible wedge-shaped beast – in my mind it had become a beast, not a formation of mortal men – that the Red Crests had unleashed against us and gradually, through the dust and the red trampling chaos, I became aware of other things. Fresh waves of the enemy pressing in on us from the wings, cavalry bursting in upon our close-packed foot warriors, hacking their way through so that the tribesmen went down like barley before the reapers.

  Our battle mass was being cut to rags – separate, desperate bands of men gathered about a chieftain or a standard, dying where they fell among the still-threshing legs of wounded chariot ponies. And slowly, relentlessly, the whole shapeless battle beginning to move one way. Between those little cut-off steadfast bands, the lesser men were streaming back. Panic is a strange and terrible thing, and when it strikes it is as catching as the yellow sickness. Suddenly all around me men were running, with wide eyes and open mouths, some even flinging their spears away. I was caught up in the wave and swept backward – backward towards the wagons drawn up in our rear. And then I understood what those wagons would mean; the oxen turned out to graze, so that even if there had been time, they could not be dragged clear. It was not the Red Crests, but we, who were in the trap.

  I had only one thought after that, to reach the Royal Wagon and the Princesses. What good I thought I could do, I would not be knowing. I got my chance-come horse turned about, and drove him towards where I could still see the red horse-tail pennants hanging in the still air above the roof of the Royal Wagon. I was almost there when a flung spear took him in the throat, he reared up, screaming through his own blood, then came crashing to the ground. I managed to fling clear as he fell, and ran on. More than once I think I used my sword on my own kind to clear my way through. And then at last I had gained the place that I made for.

  All along the line the women were making frenzied efforts to drag the wagons round, to make space between them. But it was hopeless, even if there had been time. There would be escape for some on the furthest flanks of the fighting, round the ends of the wagon line; if they had been coming in a thin trickle there would have been a way out under the floorboards and between the wheels. But what was sweeping down on them was a vast wave of men, dense-packed and desperate, with the hunters hard behind.

  Some of the foremost swarmed under and ran free; the rest turned at bay, weaponed or weaponless, there being nothing else to do; men and women, and even the children with a stone or an arrow or a dead man’s dirk.

  And so the Red Crests burst upon us with their short stabbing swords.

  Around the Royal Wagon, a few of us from the Kindred made our last rallying point, the Queen’s women fighting among us. I mind the Princess Essylt clinging to the side of the wagon itself, one foot on a wheel-hub, a dead man’s sword in her hand, her red hair flying about her head, fighting like a wild cat and chanting some savage war-song of her own as she struck, and struck again, until a legionnaire’s sword, stabbing upward, took her beneath the breast-bone, and her song broke into a scream as she tumbled down into the struggling tangle below.

  Nessan was beside me, with a dirk for her weapon. Even in that moment she cried my name, as though my coming meant rescue, safety, something to be glad for.

  The shouting and screaming rose to tear the skies asunder; the Red Crest cavalry swept in with their long sabres to aid the men of the short swords cutting down every living thing, man, woman, child and horse, that came in their path. They had three cities, and four cohorts of the Ninth Legion to avenge, and the dead began to lie thick, hacked and hideous, piled one upon another.

  A Red Crest with half his shoulder-guard torn away came leaping over the barrier of the dead. I lunged forward to meet and turn his sword; and in the same heartbeat of time a cavalry man crashed by, crouched low in the saddle, his long blade sweeping out and down, and Nessan fell against me and crumpled to my feet. My own sword had found its mark; I wrenched it out, feeling it grate on bone as the Red Crest went over backwards, and when I looked down, Nessan was lying twisted with her face turned to the sky and blood welling from a deep wound between her neck and shoulder.

  I saw that she called out to me, though I could not hear above the tumult. Her eyes clung to my face, and she made as though she would hold her arms out to me as she used to do when she was a very small child.

  And I knew that the battle was lost; and it seemed to me as in a dream, that all I had to do now was to save the child. I slammed home my sword into its sheath, and stooped and heaved aside the bodies that clogged my feet. There was a small clear gap between the wheels of the wagons. If I could get her through it into some kind of shelter, when the slaughtering was over and the darkness came, I might be able to get her away.

  She was very light to lift; but even as I knelt with my arms round her, a moment of blinding pain took me in the left flank, in the soft unguarded part between ribs and hip. I pulled out the light spear-head, and my strength seemed to come with it, like water. I flattened on top of her, and lay still. Somewhere above us in the wagon a woman screamed loud enough to tear through even that turmoil. The taste of blood came into my mouth, and every instant I waited for the death blow, not yet knowing that in truth I had it already. But the Red Crests ploughed on, shouting as they thrust and thrust again. And in the breathing space that followed, I gathered myself and dragged Nessan further in under the wagon, and again lay down over her.

  And from somewhere deep within me rose the half memory of thunder over the marshes, and Prasutagus flinging himself over Boudicca in the path of the stampeding horse-herd. And then for a while everything became like a dream, full of tumult and cries and confusion, that had neither time nor place nor meaning.

  I came back to myself a long while later. The noise of fighting had gone away into a great silence. Only a ragged cry here and there with long gaps between, only the sounds of running and scrambling feet that went and came and went again, and somewhere a man shouting to another in the Roman tongue, as the Red Crests went about their looting. Somewhere a wolf howled; and the day had long since turned to dusk and the dusk deepened into the dark.

  There began to be a new light, red and fitful, and a crackling sound, they were firing the wagons with their piles of dead. Red light slanted through the gaps in the floorboards above me. The Royal Wagon was ablaze, and burning fragments began to fall all round me.

  I thought that I must get the child clear. The fire seemed to reach in at me through the wound in my flank, as I lifted myself off her. But I could move. The ground under my hands was sodden with blood; her’s, or mine
, or a mingling of both. She lay very still. The flame-glare from the next wagon slanted in between the wheels, and warmed the colour of her skin, and her eyes were wide and looking up at me; but she lay exactly as I had set her down, and surely she was very still.

  ‘Come, little bird,’ I whispered stupidly. ‘Wake! It is time to be away!’ I would get her out on the far side of the wagon; and if we could get clear of the flame-light before we were seen, the night would cover us.

  ‘Nessan!’ I said. ‘Nessan! Wake now!’ For my wits were still half gone.

  And then I saw that she was dead.

  I took her by her shoulders and pulled her still further under the burning wagon, so that when it fell in it would cover her and take her with it, beyond the reach of the Red Crests. I laid her straight and seemly as best I could, drawing the heavy braids of her hair down either side of her face and on to her breast, straightening her torn skirts down to her feet. I unsheathed my sword – I still had a knife, and that was all the weapon I should need now – and folded her hands on the hilt. Not because it was a sword; she was not her mother – but for a parting gift, because it was mine. If I had had my harp with me, I would have left her that instead. A timber fell beside us with a shower of sparks, and one side of the wagon settled a little.

  I crawled out between the wheels on the far side, the side away from the day’s battle; and left her to the flames.

  It is all over. And I can’t quite believe it, Mother.

  We have pulled back to the old transit camp; and I suppose we shall be here for a day or two, while we bury our dead – we have surprisingly few – and get our wounded sorted out, and see to all the things that have to be seen to after a battle.

  Paulinus drew up the line-of-battle troops in three ranks, one behind the other, across the mouth of the valley, with the auxiliaries and cavalry on the wings. Our spears took a fairly heavy toll of the first chariot charge; but they managed to break clear through the front rank, even so, and tear a few holes in the second, before the third flung them back. But when the second charge came on, our men had orders to hold until the last moment, and then make their throw all towards the centre of the enemy line. They carried out their orders splendidly, and tore a great gap in the centre; and we formed a wedge and drove through it into the very heart of the British battle-mass; after which the auxiliaries and cavalry closed in from the wings. It was hot work for a while, but eventually we got them on the run. – Only they couldn’t even run; they had parked their wagon train straight across their line of retreat. Jupiter! They must have been sure of victory! – And we cut them to pieces against their own wagons.

  The troops spent most of the night looting. They killed everything that moved; man, woman, child, war-pony, even the draught oxen from the wagons, and then fired the ruins. Paulinus doesn’t usually allow that kind of thing, I’m told; but he made no attempt to stop them.

  Boadicea seems to have escaped; but there’s no more she can do; no danger to the Province any more. We had a terrific victory. They’re beginning to say that we killed eighty thousand British for the loss of only four hundred of our own men. But I’d take that with a grain of salt. I very much doubt if there were eighty thousand in the whole War Host; and we took prisoners enough to flood the slave market, this winter. And of course, despite the wagon line, quite a lot must have got away.

  Everything feels a bit flat, now. But I imagine that we shall have plenty to do later. Paulinus sacrificed on the Altar of Vengeance when he had made the more orthodox offerings after the battle; and intends to make a thorough job of seeing that nothing like this ever happens again, if he has to wipe out what remains of the Iceni and about six other tribes, and burn down half the Province to do it.

  If ever I am Governor of Britain, I hope I never have anything like this to handle!

  Mother dear, I’ve kept my promise to write, after a fashion. But I have suddenly decided I shan’t send this letter. There are things in it better not written lest the wrong eyes should read them. And things that will make you worried and sad. It’s dirty, too. I’ve carried it in my saddle-bag all this while, and there’s blood on it. I’ll write you a nice clean letter with no blood on it, when I have more time. Or maybe I’ll wait till I get leave and can tell you the story myself.

  There’s a good fire burning in front of the Governor’s pavilion. Sylvanus – another of the Staff Tribunes, and normally rather an exquisite young man – is trying to roast a hare over it on the point of a spear. I shall drop this into the hottest part of it, and watch the papyrus crumbled away.

  Your loving, tired, dirty and hungry son

  Gneus Julius Agricola

  16

  ‘Sleep Now, You and I’

  I LOOKED BACK once, and saw the ragged fringe of flame leaping up from the burning wagons. The horsetail pennants of the Royal Wagon had become tassels of flame, and there was a woman hanging head-down over the side, among blazing rags of embroidered horsehide. And my ears were full of the sounds of sack and pillage. Somewhere the wolf howled again. I half ran, crouching low, for a patch of thorn scrub, and lay full length in the shelter of it, until I had snatched back enough breath to go on. There were moving shadows in the night, running, lurching, crawling on hands and knees. I joined them, making for the dark refuge of the forest.

  Away at the end of the wrecked wagon line, I passed close by the little hillock with its crest of thorn trees, and left it to its dead priests. I did not go seeking my harp hanging from its thorn branch. There would be no more harp-song.

  Yet was on my forehead that I was the Queen’s Harper still; for on the forest verge, in the shelter of a jagged earth hollow under the roots of a tree that had been blown down in some past gale, I stumbled among a little knot of men. One of them had me by the hair, his knife cold at my throat before I well knew it; but another caught his arm and cursed him for a fool who could not tell a Red Crest from another of themselves. And he let me go. And I knew from the sound of the tongue that I was among my own tribe.

  There were four of them, black shapes in the lesser dark. And a fifth lay still in their midst, muffled in a cloak. A woman’s shape I thought, even then; her face a pale blur like something floating under the surface of dark water; and bending close, I knew the truth even before one of them said, ‘It is the Queen.’

  I put my hand under the breast folds of her cloak, thinking to feel the stillness of death, but the life in her was still beating.

  ‘We found her against the northern flank,’ said another, ‘lying across the wreck of her chariot. The charioteer must have been killed and the horses bolted. She had bound the reins round her waist, to have her hands free for her sword. There’s no mark on her save a broken place – here – running out of her hair.’

  ‘The Mother of Foals turned the eyes of the Red Crests away, and we were able to bring her off, round the end of the wagon line,’ said the third.

  And the fourth said, broodingly, ‘She promised us the victory.’

  There were a few ponies who must have escaped the same way, running loose among the scrub; for the Red Crests, though they had butchered every living thing among the wagons, had not given chase. Maybe they thought too few had escaped to make it worth their while. We managed to catch two, and got the Queen up on to one of them. She lay heavy in my arms as one newly dead, and when I would have lifted her up, the wound under my ribs pulled me back as with ropes. Two other men took her from me, and lifted her up and over, while I crouched coughing on the ground.

  ‘How sore is the hurt? Can you travel?’ someone asked.

  I knew what that meant. If I could not get away with them, they would kill me to save me from a slow death or falling into Roman hands, according to the custom of the Tribes. But I was not done with my life yet. Not while Boudicca lived and might have need of me. I shook my head, my breath coming back. ‘A spear-hole under the ribs. It’s not deep. I’ll do well enough if I can stop the bleeding.’

  The Queen fell forward along the pon
y’s mane, and they bound her hands together under its neck with broad strips torn from her cloak, to help keep her from falling off, while I made shift to lash myself tight about the middle with a strip torn from my own. Then we dragged ourselves into weary movement, and straggled off along the woodshore, until in the first grey light of dawn we found a deer track leading northward into the depths of the trees. So we set out to carry the Queen home.

  Two of us walked all the while beside the pony to steady her on its back, the other three straggling behind with the second pony. At most times I was one of those who walked beside the Queen; the others accepted that it was my right when I told them that I was of her household; and in steadying her, I could steady myself against my own weakness that made all things hazy and my feet seem very, far away. Once or twice I rode the second pony for a while, but he was a chariot beast, and not good for riding, and for the most part we tried to keep him fresh in case of a greater need.

  Somewhere about the Trinovantes’ border, we came on a deserted farm, and killed a half-starved pig. We made a little fire, though we dared not raise much smoke for fear of who or what might come to it, and feasted on scorched flesh, and even contrived to get a little blood-broth down the Queen’s throat. She seemed able to swallow though she gave no sign of being aware. And questing through the small turf-roofed huddle of buildings, we found other things that were of use to us; among them an old cloak to replace the Queen’s that, though ragged now, was all too brightly scarlet. And for me, more rags to bind over the hole in my flank that oozed redly all the while. If I could stop the bleeding, I thought through a haze, I could maybe hold back the growing weakness until we got the Queen home to her own place again.

  But the best thing we found in the place was a farm sledge, old and rickety; no more than a shallow hurdlework box on clumsy runners; but we piled bracken into it and harnessed up the chariot pony as best we could, and laid the Queen within. And after that we had better travelling, save when the sledge got bogged down in soft places or once when it was nearly swept away at a river ford.