“Boudica,” I whispered now as I had whispered then. Victorious one, I had named her, but this was not victory; this was the beginning of some bitter end. “Boudica, not this way. Not this way, Boudica.”
Then without warning Boudica pushed me so forcefully that I fell. Sarah was instantly at my side, helping me up, while Boudica turned to her victims.
“Andraste!” her voice erupted from her body into the deepening twilight. “Andraste! Andraste!”
The warriors took up the chant. At a signal from Boudica, two men sprang forward and held apart the legs of the first woman. Boudica carefully, almost lovingly, positioned her spear in the lips of the woman’s vulva.
“To you, Andraste, I dedicate this revenge for the rape of my daughters, for the rape of the land, for the rape of the combrogos.”
And she thrust her spear straight up and into the woman until it all but disappeared, like the woman’s death cry into a sudden awful stillness broken only by the sound of someone screaming at the edge of the clearing.
Lithben. Oh my goddess. Lithben.
Gwen must have followed us and dragged her sister with her. I launched myself at Boudica, only to be restrained by two warriors.
“You will watch,” Boudica rounded on me. “You will witness. You will learn what it means to be a real mother. You will learn what it means to sacrifice for the combrogos.”
While Boudica’s back was turned, Sarah seized her moment. Before anyone could stop her, she slit the rest of the women’s throats quickly, painlessly. When Boudica returned to her work, she did not seem to notice the blood or did not care if she did. Her victims were still warm. Over and over she thrust her spear into the now silent bodies.
When she was done, she turned toward us again, her face in the waning light as drained of color as the sky, her hands dark with blood. She did not look triumphant, only tired, so tired. I thought of my last glimpse of the general as he sat alone outside his tent, recording the day’s carnage.
“Before you throw the bodies into the pit,” she addressed her warriors. “Cut off their left breasts. Stuff them into their mouths and sew them fast. Thus will Rome choke even as it feeds on itself. Our victory is ensured! We will hold council again in the morning. I must see to my daughters now.”
But before Boudica could reach them, Lithben slipped Gwen’s grasp and fled.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
LOAVES AND FISHES
THIS STORY IS not the one I wanted to be telling.
There’s an understatement, you say. But understand. It is not that I have never known suffering. My story, like everyone’s, is shot through with sorrow—arrows of it, streams of it, a dark defining pattern in this unfinished, unraveling weaving. But I was married to the meaning-maker, the redeemer. I raised him, however briefly and poignantly, from the dead. I triumphed with him. I stood with him under the tree of life. Perhaps I stand there still.
Yet I am also here with my daughter by incest and rape, who has just raped and killed nine women with her spear in front of her own daughters, a daughter who hates me as much as our father did, a daughter I have failed to reach, a daughter who will destroy whatever is in her path. Meanwhile my other daughter atones in whatever way she can for evil she never meant to do, and my granddaughters suffer helplessly, at the mercy of their mother’s fate. Where is redemption here, for her, for me, for any of us? Without it, how can I bear to tell this story?
When we arrived back at our tent, Lithben was nowhere to be found. It was night now, and the drunken victory party of thousands was in full swing. A warrior camp that stretched over more than a mile of countryside was no place for a young girl to wonder alone, dazed and terrified. We had to find her. Sarah, Alyssa, Bele, Gwen and I conferred about how best to comb the territory, but Boudica was eerily calm.
“Why are you all making such a fuss?” she wondered. “She can’t have gone far. She’ll find her way back.”
The rest of us exchanged glances, silently casting lots for who would speak. When it came to confronting Boudica, I always seemed to win, perhaps because I had nothing to lose.
“She’s had a terrible shock,” I said bluntly. “We can’t be sure what she’ll do. The sooner we find her the better.”
“A shock?” Boudica frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Mother,” Gwen stepped up. “It is my fault. Grandmother told me to stay with Lithben here, but I didn’t want to be left behind again. I took Lithben and followed Grandmother to the grove. We were both there. We saw.”
“Saw what?” Boudica’s voice was not cold exactly, but closed, stiff, like a door rusted on its hinges.
“We saw what you did to those women. We saw you kill them.”
By the firelight, I could see that Gwen was trembling, but she stood her ground. She had become a queen in her own right.
“Those were not women, Gwen. They were Roman whores,” Boudica said, her voice bizarrely mild. “And I did not kill them. I sacrificed them, to Andraste. I avenged you, you and Lithben. Now you are virgins again. Now you will be queens. Don’t you see? Everything is all right now.”
“But Lithben is too young to understand, Mother. She was frightened.”
Boudica seemed to consider for a moment
“She always was more timid than you,” she said at length. “But she’s a good girl. She’s always stayed close to me. She’s here now. We just can’t see her. I never had to worry about where she was. She never went away from me, not like you, Gwen. You always hated me. You only wanted your father. But now you see that he was wrong, now you’ve come back to me. You won’t leave me again. Now you know, everything I’ve ever done I did for you, for you and for Lithben.”
Boudica spoke in a childlike voice that contrasted oddly with her deep pitch. She did not look at any of us but gazed intently into her lap as she sat cross-legged on the ground. It was hard to imagine that she was the same woman who had just split nine women end to end—except for the blood staining her hands and arms up to her elbows.
“You can come out now, Lithben,” coaxed Boudica. “Come out, come out wherever you are. I’ll sing you to sleep.”
And she began to croon, a tuneless tune with words I could not catch.
Gwen turned to me, clearly shaken by her mother’s strange behavior.
“I think I should stay with her,” she said in a low voice. “The rest of you, go.”
“But she’s gone round the bend,” Alyssa whispered what we were all thinking. “One of us should stay and help you.”
“I’ll stay,” said Sarah, and I knew what she was thinking. Maybe she could find a way to drive out Boudica’s demons.
“No!” Gwen was proud, vehement. “I can manage. I’ll clean her up and put her to bed. Just please, please find my sister.”
Sarah and I exchanged a glance. Gwen was no stranger to caretaking, and Sarah knew better than anyone how fast and far a young girl could run.
“All right,” agreed Sarah. “Everyone meet back here by dawn, no matter what.”
All night we walked from fire to fire in the vast camp. We had agreed to describe her but not to identify her as Boudica’s daughter for fear of creating alarm or motivating someone to hold her for ransom. The old tribal feuds were in temporary abeyance only. I also looked in every tree and behind every rock outcropping, every dip and fold in the land. By dawn a cold summer drizzle had begun to fall. I headed back, exhausted and chilled, hoping against hope that one of the others had found her.
When I reached Boudica’s camp, it was crowded with warriors and chieftains in council with Boudica, all seated cross-legged on the ground. Gwen sat beside her mother, and she had indeed cleaned her up. Boudica wore a fresh plaid tunic; in the dismal light her hair glowed brighter than ever, so did her eyes, almost feverishly. She looked strangely young, more like a bride than a battle-weary war leader. There was not a trace of the frantic mother about her. Lithben must be back safe and sound. Then Gwen caught sight of me, and sent her silent ques
tion over the lime-spiked hair of the warriors.
No, I answered silently. One by one, Sarah, Bele, and Alyssa returned. No, no, and no.
“Verulamium is next,” Boudica was saying. “We can get there in two day’s march.”
“By then it will be deserted,” objected one of the warriors. “After Londinium, no one will stay around for a massacre. Why waste our time? It’s the Roman army we have to destroy. Some people—not mine, mind you—are getting restless. There are crops back home to be taken care of. How long do you think you can hold all these tribes together?”
“The Roman army is on the run,” declared Boudica. “And Verulamium is right in our path. It is a vile city, viler than Camulodunum and Londinium, cities built by Romans and foreigners. The people of Verulamium were once our combrogos; now they curry favor with the Romans, flattering them with imitation, looking down at the rest of us, flaunting their baths, their theatres, their toilets. Collaborators, traitors. Their city and any like it we will turn to rubble and ash.”
“After we’ve picked it clean!” put in another warrior.
“I’ll lay odds they’ve taken everything they can carry,” the first man said. “I tell you again it’s a waste of time.”
“It won’t take much time to put it to the torch,” another spoke up.
As the debate went on, I caught Gwen’s eye again and signaled to her. No one seemed to notice when she stood up, not even her mother. Gwen was beautiful in her own right, strong, and I would never have called her self-effacing, but she knew how not to be noticed. Or maybe it was just that Boudica took up any space that Gwen might have filled on her own. I beckoned to the others as well and we went apart to a cluster of yew trees that gave us shelter against the rain and some privacy.
“No word from her, no sign?” we all asked at once, all of us already knowing the answer.
“Gwen, your mother must be worried now,” said Bele. “How can she march until Lithben is found?”
Gwen’s composure suddenly gave way and she covered her face with her hands and wept. She stiffened at first when Sarah and Alyssa put their arms around her, and then she let go and finally turned to Sarah and wept onto her shoulder. My heart broke for her. She was so young, so young to have lost and suffered so much. After a moment she pulled away and stood up straight again.
“Mother insists Lithben is not lost,” Gwen told us. “One moment I think she’s mad, and another I think she might be right. Lithben could be hiding close by. She used to do that when we were little. Just hide, almost in plain sight. After a while, Mother stopped worrying when she disappeared. So her saying Lithben is hiding may not be as crazy as it sounds.”
That was some reassurance, but not much.
“And if she’s not hiding,” I said after a moment, “do you think she would try to go home? And if she did, would she know which way to go?”
I don’t want to be a queen. I want to go home, she’d said only yesterday.
“She might know,” said Gwen. “And if she took her pony, her pony might know.”
“We should have thought of that last night!” exclaimed Alyssa, smacking her forehead. “Well, it’s easy enough to find out now. All our horses are pastured together.”
“And if she did take her horse that would explain why we couldn’t find her in camp,” added Sarah.
“If we can’t find her soon, one of us should ride north to look for her, even if her pony is here,” said Bele, and then she added. “Maybe all of us should go.”
No one spoke, each of us pondering Bele’s implication. Leave Boudica, abandon her cause.
“I can’t,” Gwen spoke first. “Whether my mother is right or wrong in what she’s done, what she did last night, I can’t leave her now. And whether the combrogos are fighting for my sister and me, or are just out for themselves, I am still the queen of the Iceni. If my mother really is mad, I must be the one to lead.”
I crossed our small circle and took Gwen’s face in my hands, kissing first one cheek, then the other before gathering her into an embrace, the first one she’d ever fully returned.
“I’ll go,” I told her. “I’ll go alone.”
“Mother!” Sarah’s voice held all the anguish of all our partings.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
Though it was hard to put into words what I knew: that Sarah had to see it through, that she had to go on doing her work as a healer, as a mercy killer.
“Mother of Sarah!” Bele and Alyssa both cried out, also not saying what I knew, that they would never leave Sarah.
“It’s best this way,” I assured them. “I made a promise to Lithben not to leave her. Now I promise I will find her. I am used to looking for runaway daughters.”
I smiled at Sarah, hoping she knew, hoping she could see and, if we never met again, always remember how much I loved her. She smiled back, and I realized I had not seen her smile since I left for Mona. In the light of her smile, in the light of her eyes, for a moment there was no rain, no war, no horror. We stood in the shelter of the great golden tree.
“What will you do when you find her?” asked Gwen, calling me back from eternity to the present.
And I knew she was asking, will I see ever see my sister again?
“I will do all I can to protect her,” I said. “When this war is over, we will all be together.”
I spoke as if it were a simple statement of fact. We all chose to believe my words would come true.
It was strange to travel through land trampled by an army. The earth itself is also a victim of war, and in the rain it seemed the ground bled mud in deep grooves left by wheels, and the countless hooves and feet. Birds and animals that lived in meadow, swamp, or thicket had fled before the army, and so the countryside was eerily silent. Farmsteads were mostly deserted, storehouses emptied to feed a whole people on the move. Macha and I slogged north, my eyes always peeled for some sign of a pony’s hooves heading in the opposite direction from the horde. But the muddy ground was hard to read. I could only hope that Gwen was right and that the pony, which had indeed disappeared with Lithben, would lead her home.
By afternoon, the clouds thinned, and then a fresh wind blew them away, leaving the sky a soft, delicate blue. The sun slanted from the west, each clod of disturbed earth casting a shadow over the ground. Yet despite the devastation all around me, I could not help feeling cheered by the sun, which shone, as always, on good and evil alike, just as the rain fell on the righteous and the unrighteous. How could you even tell one from the other? I couldn’t any more. Love your neighbor, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, my beloved had said. Why all the words, why all the distinctions? Love. Pray. That was all, no matter what good it did or didn’t do. I did not pray with words, but simply let people come to my mind, brought them here with me to this benign light where I could just see them, without any pressure to judge them or myself.
At dusk, I found Lithben, standing with her pony under an oak tree at a fork in the road. I slipped from Macha’s back and rushed to embrace her. She let me hold her, but did not cling to me. In fact she was strangely calm, and I wondered for a moment if she had gone mad, like her mother.
“I knew you would come,” she said, as if sensing my fear. “He told me to wait for you here.”
“Who did?”
“The man,” she answered simply. “And he said if we take this path we’ll come to a hut and a well with good water.”
“Who is this man?” I asked. “How did he know I was coming?”
She shrugged, as if it were a stupid question and she had expected more sense from me.
“He’s still here,” she said. “You just can’t see him. He says he’s always here. I just never needed him before.”
“Oh,” I said, light, so to speak, dawning. “Him. Well, let’s find this hut then.”
We walked on, leading our horses and holding hands, neither of us feeling a need to speak. We soon found the hut, so welcoming that it seemed whoever lived there
had just stepped out. The water in the well was indeed good, so sweet and refreshing that we hardly needed the loaf of bread and the dried fishes we found waiting for us inside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MATRILINEAGE
I THOUGHT I might dream of my beloved that night. He seemed so close, so tangible, as Lithben and I bedded down in the hut that was fleetingly ours. I felt his warmth enfold me, and I settled into the first deep sleep I’d had since I slept in Sarah’s arms the night of my return. I was too tired to dream. So was Lithben. We slept round the clock, woke briefly to eat and drink and relieve ourselves, and, discovering it was night again, went back to bed. Perhaps we could just sleep through all the horror, wake up when it was over, wake up and find it had all been a bad dream. Then, the next morning, I opened my eyes to find Lithben sitting watching me, waiting for me.
“My mother wants me,” she stated.
I was struck by her phrasing.
“Do you want your mother?”
She stared at me for a moment as if she couldn’t comprehend the question. Then her eyes filled and her lip trembled. Part of me wanted to gather her into my arms and rock her, but I heeded an instinct to wait.
“Yes,” she whispered, and then the tears started to fall, the silent tears that always seem to have their own life and will. “I want her the way she was.”
“Tell me,” I asked her, sensing that she needed to talk but also wanting to know, to know my strange, estranged daughter in another way. From what I had seen, Lithben had always been afraid of her mother. Yet when I thought back to my first sight of both, I remembered that Lithben had leaned against her mother as if she were a great sheltering tree.
“She wasn’t always angry, not with us,” Lithben began. “When we were little she used to play with us, games like hide and seek. She would take us out on rides and walks and teach us the names of birds and animals, how to recognize their calls, how to follow their tracks. We would pick berries and gather nuts together. And in the winter, she told us stories, all the stories she learned at school.
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