Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  Oh. The sword felt unbearably heavy. Somewhere fire roared; somewhere men bellowed in rage and agony. Far away in another world, the sword slipped from my hand. Oh.

  The heart of the mirror shone with its own light, like the leaves on the tree of life. Hovering at the edges, smoke and blood and horror, but oh, at the heart, the heart. I started to walk towards the mirror that was no longer a mirror, but the sea, the moon, the memory I had never quite remembered. Just before I could step over the shimmering border, everything went dark and all the worlds disappeared.

  When I came to myself again, I did not know where I was or how I had gotten there. I did not know why the air smelled of smoke or the sky was full of lurid red cloud. I sat up. Someone had covered me with a heavy cloak that was not mine. Someone had bandaged my arms and legs. I had been wounded. I was under the yew trees. Where was Esus? Then I remembered: he was gone. I had taken Dwynwyn’s shape and untied him from the tree. I stood up slowly, my joints aching, my wounds throbbing. I ran my hand over my face, a face soft and withered as an old apple. I must still be in Dwynwyn’s shape. But where was mine? I was about to have a baby. I wanted to have my own baby. I didn’t want Dwynwyn doing it for me.

  “No fear of that, honey lamb, no fear,” Dwynwyn’s voice spoke inside me.

  “Dwynwyn?” I spoke aloud. “Where are you? Give me back my shape.”

  “I don’t have your shape, my little cabbage. I don’t have any shape any more.”

  “But I’m an old woman!” I protested.

  “Yes, sweet cakes,” she agreed. “You are.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, a wail about to rise and loose itself.

  “Hush, my dove,” soothed Dwynwyn in anticipation. “I told you I would come back, if you needed me. Now I’m here. Just take my hand.”

  “But I can’t see you,” I almost whimpered.

  “You don’t need to see me. Just take my hand.”

  Though I could not see her, I did as she said. Her hand felt amazingly warm and comforting. And comfort I needed. She led me from the yew grove down to the sands where Roman soldiers swarmed like ants, some piling up the dead, some pitching tents. The scene was all the more surreal for being cast in the red glow of the burning groves.

  “What is happening?” I dug my nails into Dwynwyn’s incorporeal hand. “What is happening here?”

  Instead of Dwynwyn’s voice, I heard my beloved’s.

  The groves will burn. The heavens will turn black with smoke, and the earth bitter with ash… and the druids will be gone forever from Mona mam Cymru.

  Then the rest of the day came back to me in horrible fragmented images. It had happened; it was happening. The horror before me was no vision, no memory. It was now. I doubled over and bit my other hand to keep from howling.

  Why hadn’t he killed me? Why hadn’t he killed me?

  “Come,” Dwynwyn urged. “There is more.”

  “No more,” I pleaded.

  But I let her lead me along the sands. High tide had come and now ebbed again taking with it some of the gore, but scattered over the sands there remained severed limbs, now and then a whole body. The place reeked of blood and feces. Though night had fallen, the flies were working overtime. If I’d had anything in my stomach, I would have heaved it up.

  I would find him. I would accuse him.

  No one challenged or even noticed my progress down the beach. Maybe I posed no threat or maybe I was a ghost, after all. If so, then I would haunt him. I followed the tug of Dwynwyn’s hand as she led me through the tent city that had sprung up on the Maltreath Sands.

  Outside the largest, most central tent, I saw him sitting on a low stool, writing on a piece of papyrus, no doubt an account of the battle. Neither he nor his sentries saw me where I stood just outside the pool of light cast by his torch.

  “Don’t speak,” said Dwynwyn inside my mind. “Just pay attention.”

  After a while, he put down his quill, rolled up the paper, and tied it with a bit of rawhide. Then he just sat and stared, seemingly at nothing. He did not look like a general who had just triumphed in battle; he looked bone-weary, and sad. And so like my beloved, it hurt to draw a breath.

  Then he turned and looked in my direction, though he still did not see me. He seemed to be straining to see beyond where I stood. Putting his writing away in the tent, he stood and stretched.

  “I am going to take a turn around the camp,” he told the sentinels.

  Whether he intended to go look for me, I will never know. At that moment, a rider careened into the camp, his horse soaked from crossing the straits. The rider dismounted and saluted the general.

  “I’ve come from the ninth legion. Permission to speak, Sir.”

  “Granted.”

  “We were ambushed, sir, on our way to defend Camulodunum,” the soldier said, still breathless. “Had to retreat.”

  “Camulodunum? Who is attacking Camulodunum?”

  “The Iceni queen is leading an uprising, sir. The Trinovantes have joined her. That’s who ambushed us. We lost more than fifteen hundred infantry and cavalry. My commander Petilius Cerealis sent me to urge you to come at once, or the whole southeast may be lost.”

  “What about the procurator?” demanded the General. “What is he doing to safeguard Londinium?”

  “The procurator?” the soldier made a strange barking laugh. “He’s gone. He sent two hundred troops to Camulodunum and slipped away by night. It is believed he has fled to Gaul, sir.”

  Perhaps no one noticed the general’s hands begin to tremble. No one else knew why.

  “And Camulodunum?”

  “Burnt to the ground. No one left alive.”

  It didn’t seem to occur to either of them that the Romans had just done the same here.

  “When I left, the rebels appeared to be heading for Londinium. They may already be there.”

  In a low, expressionless voice, the general began to curse. He went on cursing until he had run out of words, almost as if the cursing were a formula that must be chanted.

  “An advance contingent will be ready to accompany me by daybreak,” he said when he was done. “The rest will follow.”

  As the general rose and began to issue orders, Dwynwyn spoke in my mind one last time.

  “I have called your horse. If you go now, you can catch the tide.”

  I would reach Boudica first. That much I could do for my daughter.

  Casting my eyes one last time on my enemy, my lover, I slipped away unseen.

  PART FOUR

  Air

  Born From The Wound

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  AWAY TO THE EAST AGAIN

  I CAN HEAR the sound of a horse’s hooves pounding, of someone’s heart pounding. Mine. I am on that hard road. I am riding for dear life, but not just my life. I have to bring a message, I have to warn her.

  It may have been a strange mercy, all the foreseeing of events that I was helpless to prevent, for sometimes I felt as though I were still in a dream or a vision, that none of this nightmare was real. Certainly I rode in a trance state or I don’t know how I could have managed to keep going without sleep, without food, stopping only to water myself and Macha, to rest for a few stunned moments while she fed on the fortunately ample wild spring grasses. She did not protest the relentless pace. Maybe it made sense to her to flee as far as she could from fire, smoke, and death. Maybe she didn’t know that we were heading for the same.

  I stayed on the Wyddelian Road all the way to Londinium, a place I had never been before and yet seemed so familiar to one who had frequented pretty much every Roman port in the Mediterranean. Streets of square houses laid on a grid pattern, with shops in the front. There was a market forum, wharves full of warehouses redolent with fish and spice. Walking along the streets, you could hear half a dozen languages and dialects from all over the Empire. Port towns—and Londinium, though small, was up and coming—attracted ambitious immigrants whose own lives had been disrupted by the machinatio
ns of the Empire. Everything about Londinium was unremarkable, except the mood: panic.

  Business was not going on as usual. From the houses you could hear children crying, frightened by their mothers’ fear or short temper. Men argued with each other in the taverns and on the corners. Some people appeared to be packing their belongings into carts. Other people held tight to makeshift weapons, blacksmiths tools, fishing spears, butchers knives. I had dismounted from Macha and was proceeding cautiously, aware that some people might find a horse useful, wishing I had a sword that I could at least brandish. I walked as if I had some purpose, listening to snatches of conversation, hoping I could find someone whose dialect I understood, someone who seemed approachable. Then someone called out to me.

  “Domina, you with the grey mare.”

  The woman who hailed me spoke Latin but with a heavy native Celtic accent. She was about Boudica’s age, standing in the doorway of a fairly prosperous looking house.

  “Domina,” I answered in return, coming to stand before her, polite but wary, not wanting to give away my own origins or allegiances.

  “You’re not from here,” she stated.

  “No,” I agreed, not offering more, and scrambling in my mind for a story I had forgotten I might need.

  “You’re wearing a soldier’s cloak,” she informed me.

  And it suddenly dawned on me that I was. I had woken on Mona covered with this cloak and had taken it with me without thinking. Underneath was the red robe, bloodstained but still intact.

  “Where did you get it?” she demanded.

  “From a soldier,” I answered, and then thinking more might be required, “He gave it to me to keep me from the cold. I am an old woman, you see.”

  But she did not see; she had no interest in me. She grabbed my cloak and held onto me, but she was looking past me.

  “Are there soldiers near?” she asked. “All our soldiers are gone. The procurator sent them off to fight the rebels. Then he did a bunk. My husband was with them, with the soldiers. He hasn’t come back. He’s part of the home garrison. But he hasn’t come back, no one has come back.”

  I began to get the picture. This woman was a native who had married a Roman, lived in a Roman town, enjoyed Roman luxuries. Someone Boudica would view as a collaborator, a traitor.

  “He told me not to worry. He told me it was just a handful of rebels. He said the retired soldiers in the Colonia would know a thing or two about how to put down an uprising. He said they were just going as backup. But he hasn’t come back. I’m here on my own with my children. We heard Camulodunum was burnt to the ground. It can’t be true. Is it true?”

  She was almost shaking me now, her eyes wide and wild as she teetered between denial and desperation.

  “I have heard the same, domina,” I said, and then, abandoning caution, I went on. “I am coming from the west. The governor and his troops are a day or less behind me. They are heading for Londinium, because they believe the rebels are, too. It’s anyone’s guess who will arrive first.”

  All at once my exhaustion caught up with me; my head swam. I could hear the sound of screaming, the roar of fire. I could smell the smoke.

  “Domina, domina!” the woman caught me under the arms. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” I said, as the vision—or memory—receded. “Just hungry. If you have a bit of bread or an oatcake to spare, I must be on my way.”

  “Domina, I will give you what I can. But where are you going?”

  To meet up with the rebel forces, I did not say.

  “Away from here,” I said aloud. “Domina, listen to me. Don’t wait for your husband, don’t wait for the general. Even if he arrives first, there will be a terrible battle.”

  “Don’t wait for my husband, don’t wait for my husband!” she began to wail. “But I have no life without him. I left my tribe to marry my husband, to live among Romans. I have nowhere to go without him.”

  I looked at the woman and another vision rose, a place to the west riddled with waterways only the priestesses knew how to navigate.

  “Go to the southwest,” I spoke to her in Celtic, and saw her startle; she had not guessed I was a native. “Take as many women and children as you can. Go to the priestesses of Avalon. Tell them Maeve Rhuad sent you.”

  Fortified by the bread and cheese the woman gave me, I left the Wyddelian Road and followed a smaller track northeast towards Camulodunum. Before I had gone very far, I heard a sound like distant thunder behind me. Seeing a small hill off to the side of the road, I turned and rode to the top. Below me I could see Londinium sprawling along the river. Racing toward the town on the road I had so recently traveled, their helmets glinting in the sun, rode the cavalry, the advance guard with the general somewhere in the ranks. They had all but closed the lead I’d had on them. Though they’d had to cross the country, they’d arrived in Londinium before Boudica’s army. It was scarcely to be credited. I wondered if Boudica had reckoned on such a swift return by the governor. There wasn’t a moment to spare. I turned Macha back to the track and urged her to a gallop.

  I had no idea how far from Londinium the ruins of Camulodunum lay or where Boudica and her troops would be massing. I wondered if they might have dispersed over a wider area, the better to forage or hide. I fretted that I might not be able to find them.

  I need not have worried. I heard them before I saw them. That many human beings in one place, some hundred thousand, sound like surf from a distance. I had heard the sound of huge crowds in Rome, contained and amplified in Circus Maximus. But the sound of this crowd was wilder, vaster. I crested a hill and gazed down at a camp, if you could call it that, spreading out for miles in the open and under the trees. Campfires like a field of stars, pipes playing, drums tapping out a rhythm. People had erected makeshift tents and shelters. They’d brought carts and chariots, cattle and chickens. I heard children shrieking, babies wailing. This wasn’t some disciplined troop of warriors. This was the combrogos on the move, whole villages, whole tribes, a gathering far greater than any festival crowd on Mona. No wonder they hadn’t gotten to Londinium yet. What must it take to move a mass of people like that? And how in the three worlds would I find Boudica in this roiling human sea?

  I soon discovered that Boudica’s camp was not without organization. As I rode toward it in the dusky half light, Macha suddenly balked. She saw before I did the six men who jumped out at us, blocking our way with spears. Before I knew what was happening, I was unhorsed, bound and gagged. With a spear at my back and armed men on either side, I was led (or jerked along) by another warrior who held the rope in one hand, his shield in the other.

  Thus I entered the camp of Queen Boudica.

  As I lay, still trussed, against the trunk of a large tree in the company of a half dozen others who shared my accommodations, I couldn’t help but contrast this reception with the one I had received at the Roman fort. Of course, there an impressive bit of shape-shifting had secured my entrée to the general’s quarters. Now I was too tired to shape-shift even if it would have done any good. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some rest before Queen Boudica’s tour of inspection when she would decide whether I would be “interrogated, pounded into the pit, or offered as a sacrifice.” I wondered briefly how the commander of such a massive army could have time to concern herself with the fate of a few captives, but I supposed the goddess (Andraste in this case) was in the details.

  “This one.” Someone nudged my bound feet, interrupting a blissful dreamless sleep. “Untie her and bring her to my tent. I will return there later.”

  It felt like torture to become conscious again. Every bone, every muscle, every tendon protested. I had to be half-carried, half-dragged by a warrior on either side of me.

  “Where are you taking me? Where’s my horse?” I demanded, remembering that I’d been forcibly parted from Macha.

  “Don’t worry about the old mare,” said one man. “She’ll be put to good use. Now you, you’re the lucky one, or m
aybe not. The queen wants to interrogate you. Privately.”

  And she could have just pounded me into the pit? How many angry daughters get that chance?

  I closed my eyes again and stumbled along with the men until I was roused by shrieking followed by ululation. Bele and Alyssa sprang forward and scooped me into their embrace.

  “Oh, Mother of Sarah, Mother of Sarah,” they laughed and wept. “We thought we’d never see you again.”

  “You know this woman?” asked one of the warriors.

  “Of course we do!” said Alyssa. “She’s the queen’s—”

  “Shh!” I hissed, for it wasn’t clear to me that Boudica wanted the connection known.

  “Well, anyway, she’s the mother of our friend, Sarah.”

  “Sarah?” repeated the warrior. “You mean the dark-faced one, the healer woman?”

  I felt a shock at hearing the title the Galatians had given me, the name I’d been called by all during Sarah’s childhood. I looked in some confusion to Bele and Alyssa.

  “That’s right,” confirmed Bele. “Our Sarah’s become a famous healer. She’s on her rounds now, hardly ever rests, that one.”

  So in the midst of war, Sarah was claiming her gift. As a little girl, she had brought home wounded animals and birds. When a man, near dead, was delivered to our door, she had helped me tend him, just before everything had gone so horribly wrong. She had been the one to restore his sight. Since then, so far as I knew, she had never acknowledged her powers as a healer.

  “I’ll attest to that,” said the man. “She healed a break in my shield arm with her touch alone. If you are her mother, I beg your pardon for any rough handling. I’ll see to it that your horse is fed and watered and I’ll bring her to you here.”

  “Not only is she the mother of the healer woman,” Bele put in. “She is a famous healer herself. But before we put her to work, she needs some healing. She’s practically fainting on her feet.”