Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  “When she left Father, she would not go without me. I saw that Father was sad. He didn’t want anyone to go, but he would never fight with Mother. He tried to get Gwen to go with Mother, too, but she refused, and Mother was so hurt, she wouldn’t even speak to Gwen. I had to go with her.”

  Lithben paused for a moment, a child looking back on what was now her childhood, for better or worse, a childhood utterly lost to her.

  “Did you want to stay with your father?”

  Lithben shook her head, “I wanted her to stay with him. But I wanted her even more. I always slept in her arms at night. For a while after she left Father, she would cry. She would tell me I was her baby. She said I was all she had. She told me she would teach me everything she knew. She said she would make me a strong, beautiful queen.”

  “And what did you say?” I asked.

  Her silence answered. Nothing. Nothing.

  “I didn’t mean to run away,” she said at length.

  “But you ran away for a reason,” I ventured. “Because of what you saw your mother do.”

  She nodded.

  “I am sorry I couldn’t shield you from that,” I told her. “I am sorry you had to see. I am sorry for all you’ve been through. Your mother is, too. She hated that you were hurt, so she wanted to hurt someone back.”

  “You tried to stop her,” Lithben observed. “But you couldn’t. Why does she hate you, Grandmother?”

  Lithben, the baby of the family, didn’t miss anything.

  “I think because I never played hide and seek with her, never picked berries with her, never told her stories, never got to tell her she was my baby.”

  Lithben nodded again.

  “Sarah is your baby,” she stated.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “And I am sorrier than anyone will ever know that your mother couldn’t be.”

  We sat silently for a time, grandmother and granddaughter, two links in a troubled lineage.

  “Lithben,” I said at last. “What do you want to do now? Do you want to go home?”

  Lithben looked at me as if I were speaking a language she was struggling to learn. Of course, no one had ever consulted this child about her wishes. Maybe I shouldn’t now. Maybe it would be easier for me to decide for her, but how could I? What was home? An abandoned village where she and her sister had been raped?

  “I want my mother.”

  I waited a moment, to see if there was more.

  “Are you sure, Lithben? Your mother as she is now in the midst of this war? Your mother as you last saw her?”

  “I want my mother,” she stated firmly. “I know what war is now. Come on, Grandmother. Let’s go.”

  It was not hard to pick up the trail of Boudica’s massive army. We took the fork that led southwest, and I soon realized it was the road Sarah, Bele, Alyssa and I had followed in reverse when we first headed for Iceni country. By the end of the day, we had arrived at the Wyddelian near what had been Verulamium, the town where I’d wanted to stop and treat myself to baths and other decadent luxuries. Now, as Boudica had vowed, it was nothing but rubble and very soon only ash, for some of the fires still burned. It was clear from the condition of the countryside that the army had continued west along the main road. Judging from the rawness of the ruin, I did not think we were far behind. Neither of us wanted to camp near the smoke and desolation of the town. Having stocked up on sleep and with some bread and fish still left, and plenty of water, we decided to ride on through the evening and into the night. The moon, just a few days shy of full, rose behind us and cast our shadows before us on the hard road I had already traveled so many times: east, then west to Mona, then east to Londinium, and now west again... to what?

  The moon traveled with us, then overtook us, leading us on and on to the west until we came to the crest of a hill and saw the army spread out in a valley on either side of the road, campfires a crude echo of the stars, and the stench of so many humans together evident but not as overwhelming in the night’s chill.

  “My mother will be camped near the front,” said Lithben as we paused for a moment to consider our course.

  “Maybe we can skirt around on one side,” I suggested. “Then wait till daylight to find her.”

  We turned from the road and began to ride around the sprawling encampment. We hadn’t gone far when we were challenged by a sentinel.

  “Who are you and where are you going?” the warrior demanded, backing up his words with a poised spear. “I see you wear a Roman cloak. Give an accounting of yourselves or prepare to breathe your last.”

  Damn the cloak, I thought, as I pondered how best to respond.

  “I am Lithben, Queen of the Iceni, daughter of Queen Boudica, who is the daughter of my grandmother Maeve Rhuad, who has no other cloak to wear, who is the daughter of the warrior witches of Tir na mBan, who are the daughters of the Cailleach, who is the daughter of Bride herself!” Lithben astonished me by reciting her matrilineage. “Take us to my mother.”

  The man did not go into trance or swoon as men from the west were wont to do at the name Tir na mBan, but he seemed properly impressed and asked no further questions.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  We dismounted and led our horses through the maze of the tent city. Just before dawn broke, the sentinel ushered us into Boudica’s camp where he tethered our horses for us.

  “There’s the queen’s tent,” he gestured, but of course we already knew.

  Silently Lithben lifted the flap and went in first, with me following.

  Boudica was awake, sitting over the embers of a dying fire at the center of the tent where the smoke rose and spiraled through a hole. She no longer looked young and feverish as she had when I last saw her. Staring down into the fire, she looked haggard and gaunt, as if she had lost ten pounds and gained ten years in our absence. Then she caught sight of Lithben. When she smiled I realized I had almost never seen her smile; it changed her face entirely and made it beautiful the way sun on a black cloud is beautiful, even though you know it could still storm.

  “I knew you were only hiding,” she said. “I told them you were only hiding.”

  But her voice broke, and when she rose to hold her daughter I could tell she was trembling. Over Lithben’s shoulder, she caught my eye, and nodded so subtly I almost couldn’t be sure she had. But it didn’t matter. This mother had her daughter back. This daughter had her mother. I turned and looked in the dark tent for my own younger daughter.

  Considering we were in the midst of war with rations running short, it was a very jolly breakfast. Gwen shared a bowl of stirabout with Lithben and ate with her arm around her, as if she would never let go of her again. Boudica looked on, her expression uncharacteristically serene. Bele and Alyssa kept up a lively banter. Best of all for me, Sarah seemed herself again. After breakfast, we walked apart from the others beyond the encampment into a sunny glade just off the road.

  “I am so glad you found her so quickly,” Sarah said again.

  “Your father had a hand in it,” I answered, and I told her the story.

  “I wonder why you had to search so long for me,” Sarah said, almost neutrally. “Why didn’t he help then?”

  I had often wondered the same thing.

  “Perhaps he did,” I paused, remembering the dreams that would come to me during our long separation, and the unexpected way we had found each other again—through the agency of my nemesis Paul of Tarsus. “And we had time on our side.”

  Then I stopped, realizing the implication of my words: Boudica does not. I did not want to predict disaster.

  “We saw Verulamium,” I ventured, wanting to give Sarah a chance to speak if she needed to. “I hope there was no…aftermath.”

  “You mean torture and sacrifice,” she said bluntly. “No, I am happy to report. There was no one there at all. Not only that, they took everything of value with them. The people in Londinium were foreigners. I think they kept expecting the cavalry to come charging to their rescue. They didn’t beli
eve a bunch of uppity natives could wipe them out. The people of Verulamium are natives themselves. They know better.”

  We came to an oak tree and sat down among the roots, resting our backs against the trunk. Unbidden, the teaching groves of Mona came into my mind. I hadn’t had time to mourn yet. I had a backwash of grief to release, if I lived so long.

  “What next?” I asked.

  “No more burning empty towns,” said Sarah. “Some people are disgruntled and falling away. Boudica’s got to keep the combrogos fired up. She’s got to make them believe victory is within reach.”

  I closed my eyes. Never far away from my mind were the sounds of metal meeting metal, humans and horses screaming, the stench of blood and shit.

  “Is it?” I asked quietly.

  Sarah didn’t answer right away.

  “I hate what has happened,” she said at last. “I hate what Boudica has done. What I have done. But she might, we might just win this war. The Roman procurator has fled, and the Roman governor has only a legion and a half left, we figure maybe ten thousand men. Even with the losses to our ranks, we outnumber them almost ten to one. Unless they flee the island altogether, they’ll have to face us in battle. If we defeat the governor’s troops, Rome will have no real presence here. They would have to conquer all over again. They might decide it’s not worth the trouble.”

  I waited for a moment.

  “Sarah, you are saying ‘we.’ Are you going to fight? Is this your cause?”

  “Isn’t it yours, Mother? After what you saw on Mona, isn’t it yours? After what they did to Lithben and Gwen, isn’t it your cause, too? Don’t you want the Romans to leave the Holy Isles forever?”

  I did not know how to answer. I could not think. The noise of battle was so loud in my head.

  “I don’t know, Sarah,” I said. “I don’t know if I believe in causes. It is hard for me to know a cause, to love a cause, the way I love a person.”

  That had been my original crime, loving Esus more than the idea of the combrogos. And so I meddled, as the old archdruid put it, in high mysteries.

  “I’m not claiming it as a virtue,” I added. “It’s just my nature.”

  There was another silence. High above us, a faint breeze stirred in the canopy.

  “And it is my nature to fight,” Sarah said. “To do that, I have to take a stand. I have to choose a side.”

  “You are also a healer, Sarah,” I put in, aware that I was on tricky ground. “Can you reconcile the two?”

  “I may be wrong,” she acknowledged. “It may be that you have to choose, like the druids, like my father. It may be that a healer shouldn’t hold a weapon. But I believe the power to heal and the power to kill come from the same place.”

  Who else had said that? With a shock, I realized it was the general.

  “I have thought hard about it. I have prayed. I will never again attack or kill an unarmed, unprepared person. But I will fight against the Roman army. I will fight this battle.”

  “Wars are never just between armies,” I said carefully. “The innocent always get hurt.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “The innocent always get hurt. War or no war, the innocent always get hurt. Someone has to fight for the innocent. I have to fight, even if I am no longer innocent myself—because I am not innocent. Do you judge me for my nature, Mother?”

  She looked at me, turning the full force of her golden gaze on me.

  “Oh, cariad,” I reached for her hand. “I don’t judge you. I only love you.”

  And I don’t want to lose you, I added silently.

  “You can’t lose me,” she spoke to my thought. “Didn’t you learn anything from my father?”

  I pondered which lesson she meant. Love is as strong as death? I am with you always? But before I could answer, she got to her feet and helped me to mine.

  “We’d better be getting back,” she said. “It will be a long march today.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  FOR THIS SHE WAS BORN

  AND IT WAS a long march. That day and the next and the next, along that hard road. Each evening, Boudica toured our whole camp, and by the end of each night, she was hoarse from exhorting the multitudes, firing them up, as Sarah had said she must. She was persuasive. Sometimes she almost persuaded me.

  Late in the afternoon of the third day, we made camp on the plain near the fort where I had twice spent the night with the general, the plain that Sarah, Bele, Alyssa and I had galloped across so that the general would not know we were heading east. Our camp spread out across the plain almost all the way to the trees where we had rested our horses while Sarah and I had had it out. From the watch towers of the fort, our army would be a daunting, dismaying sight.

  Except, as it turned out, the fort was deserted, or, more accurately, had been abandoned.

  “It looks as though they might have left as recently as this morning,” Alyssa said to Boudica when she, Bele and Sarah returned to our camp from reconnaissance.

  “The cook fires are still smoldering,” added Bele. “The latrines are full of fresh shit.”

  Boudica nodded, listening intently. An important detail.

  “Fresh horseshit in the stables, too, and mud around the troughs and wells,” put in Sarah. “It almost seems too obvious. Why didn’t they take more trouble to cover their tracks?”

  Boudica shrugged. “They probably sent out a scout and saw how close we were. They panicked. They know they can’t hold that fort against our numbers. We’d kill them like rats in their own hole, just as we did at Camulodunum. Did they leave any supplies worth looting?”

  Sarah didn’t answer; she had turned her face away so none of us could see her struggle at the mention of slaughter at the temple.

  “Not so much as a grain or a straw,” said Alyssa. “Should we torch the place?”

  Boudica considered for a moment.

  “Not yet,” she decided. “There’s a good water supply there, shelter, and towers to keep a lookout. We may want to use the fort for tending our wounded or sick—or for holding prisoners. The Roman army can’t be far away now. They are not few enough or skilled enough to disappear into the landscape. You three, gather all the scouts and send them out. Find their trail. We’ll hunt them down and overwhelm them—perhaps as soon as tomorrow. I will gather the chieftains. Gwen, come with me. They need to see their queen.”

  All the weariness had fallen away from Boudica, like a cloak discarded and forgotten in the heat of the day. Her face was naked with excitement. Gwen could not hide her own excitement or her pride. So much slighter and darker than her mother, she seemed shinier than I’d ever seen her. Lithben watched them silently. Boudica, feeling her glance, came over to where her younger daughter was sitting and bent to caress her cheek.

  “I won’t be long, cariad,” she said.

  “Mother, Lithben should come with us,” insisted Gwen. “She is queen, too.”

  “It’s all right,” said Lithben quickly. “I would rather stay with Grandmother.”

  While Boudica and Gwen made the rounds, visiting various important contingents in the camp, Lithben and I tended the fire, adding what we had to an increasingly watery soup. Ever since her encounter with “the man,” as she called my beloved, Lithben had been much calmer, even peaceful. I found it restful to be with her, like sitting beside a still lake. Neither of us felt much need to speak. In our relative quiet, with the noise of the camp all around us, I could not shake the sense that we were being watched. Of course an army the size of ours can never be a secret. The Romans were no doubt aware of our presence, probably had their scouts watching our scouts. Now and then, I looked up from the cauldron to the ridge in the distance. As dusk fell, I could see no signs of life there, no smoke, no fire. Just a heavy darkness, a suspended wave, the spine of a sleeping serpent.

  “We know where they are,” announced Bele when the three of them rejoined us for our meager meal.

  “Such as they are,” added Alyssa. “It looks as though the troops tha
t were supposed to join the general from Mona never made it. Are you sure that was their order, Mother of Sarah? Maybe they had to stay to hold the island.”

  All eyes turned to me. The look in Boudica’s was hard to read. Wariness at this strange role I had turned up so unexpectedly to play? Sadness at the loss of the place that held our most intimate and broken connection?

  “I’m sure,” I answered. “There was no one left on Mona to subdue. All but a small contingent was supposed to follow the cavalry.”

  “The infantry could have been ambushed in the mountains,” said Boudica. “After the sacrilege the Romans committed on Mona, the western resistance would have rallied, despite their losses. Our victory here will bring them more balm. Where is this raggle taggle remnant of the imperial Roman army?”

  “Less than an hour’s ride just off the road to the southwest,” said Alyssa. “They may be intending to make a run for the nearest coast.”

  How long would Boudica pursue them? How long could she hold together so massive an army? Maybe the general was betting that she couldn’t, that with their smaller numbers, his remaining forces would escape. For a moment, I let myself hope against hope: the Romans gone from the land without more bloodshed. But General Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Pretannia, would not see it that way. For him, escape would be utter, impossible humiliation. How could he return to Rome having lost Pretannia to a barbarian queen?

  “Do you think they intend to move by night?” Boudica was asking.

  “They seem to have pitched camp. They’ve got fires going,” said Sarah. “We posted a watch in case they make any sudden moves. But…there’s something wrong about this whole thing.”

  “What is that?” Boudica demanded.

  Sarah pondered for a moment, searching for words to express the uneasiness I felt in my own gut.