by Manda Scott
The woman sat as quickly as she had risen. On Mona, it would have been hard to keep the rest still and silent. In the forest of the east, nobody took to their feet to challenge what she had said.
In the stretching silence, Breaca looked around at the margins of the circle. Because she was closest, Graine could feel the first stirrings of tension that ran through her mother. The outward appearance of calm took more effort than it had done and for one so used to watching, the small signs were there: the whitening of the knuckles on the hand hidden by her cloak and the way she rubbed her thumb across the tips of her fingers once, testing their feel. Breaca was waiting for something and it had not yet happened. When it did, she was expecting to fight.
None of this showed, except perhaps in her voice as she asked, “Is this the decision of you all?”
She was the Boudica, leader of armies; she could put a sting in a simple question that shamed the best and the least of them.
“No.”
A grizzled man of middle age bearing a beaver pelt across his shoulders rose to his feet. He was broad as a smith but stood unbalanced, as if one hip pained him. “It was the decision of us all before you came but it need not be now you are here and we have seen who and what you are.” He looked around. “We may have been broken, but it is not impossible that we mend. If the gods send us the means to do so, how will we face our children and our children’s children if we do not take what has been offered? The royal line of the Eceni stretches unbroken back to the ancestors. Would we few be the ones to break it now? I take back the word I gave to Lanis of the Crows. Speaking for myself and those of my people whose trust I carry, I say that the Boudica should stay and we should re-arm, that we should unearth our blades and pull our spears from the thatch and make shields that will withstand the stabbing swords of the legions and we should fight, or be proud to die doing so.”
He had been a warrior once, his whole bearing showed it. Graine wanted to hug him. She smiled instead and was glad when he saw her and smiled back. He was respected by the others. It showed in the numbers nodding. Another rose, a woman, younger than the first. “The northerner is right,” she said. “The royal line is the creation of the gods. It is not for us to break it now.”
Like fire in autumn grass, agreement crept outward. Here and there, dampening it, was dissent. In places, pools of men and women argued fiercely against the Boudica’s return. Almost all of these bore scars and, deeper, the dullness of constant pain that said they had lost to Rome those who mattered most, and feared to lose more.
The gathering took on the animation Graine was used to, gaining volume and stridency as measured arguments gave way to unplanned hope, or drowned in fear. One by one, dreamers and warriors rose to support one or other of the first two speakers. They were not used, any longer, to the courtesies of a council. As the night deepened and those waiting to speak became more tired and less patient, order and discipline collapsed. Men and women stood in clusters and shouted at Breaca and each other, or simply shouted, trying to be heard.
At the height of the tumult, Graine saw a lean, redheaded man, balding in front with a scar across the bridge of his nose, as of a sword cut taken in battle, jump onto a fallen log near the edge of the circle. His voice had once crested the tumult of war and did so again.
“You cannot stay! You must not. You will take three days dying when the legions get word that the Boudica is here, and when they come to take you, they will not rest with only your deaths. They will walk through us like wolves through unguarded sheep and our children will bleed their lives out on our thresholds. It was madness even to come this far. How did you ever think you could stay?”
His last words fell into quiet. Even in this place, he had overstepped the mark. He stood swaying on the fallen log, his resentment bright around him, and looked to either side for support, which he was not given. Even those who had argued with him stared at the ground and did not speak.
The Boudica had remained standing throughout, outwardly listening with care to the arguments on both sides. Graine, watching with growing fear, saw that by far the greater part of her mother’s attention was directed past the circle to the forest. The waiting made Breaca’s hand rigid at her side in the place where her blade should have been, but was not.
She was drawing breath to speak when, from the night beyond the torches, a new voice said, “She could stay as my wife. Rome need never know who she is.”
The void into which this fell stank suddenly of bowel-wrenching terror.
The man who stepped between two sputtering torches was not as tall as Luain mac Calma, but taller than most. His hair was like straw in colour and texture and had been cut in the Roman fashion so that it barely reached his shoulders.
When she could look past that, and the naked hunger in his eyes, Graine saw that his right arm stopped at the elbow and that the sleeves of his tunic were especially long to cover it. Thus, sickeningly, she knew who he was: ’Tagos, who called himself Prasutagos to carry more weight with the governor, the damaged warrior who had treated Silla as a brood mare, getting child after sickly child on her until she died leaving no living children; the self-styled “king of the Eceni” who had thrown in his lot with the Emperor Claudius and then Nero. If Efnís’ messenger was right, this was a man who would see them all dead in the worst possible ways.
Belatedly, Graine thought to glance up at her mother. Breaca stood quite still. The tensions of earlier were gone. The waiting was over. She seemed, if anything, to be gathering herself in the way other warriors did before battle but she had never needed to do.
“Do you come with Rome’s legions behind you?” she asked, quietly.
“No.”
’Tagos frowned, sharply. All his movements were too fast, too sharp. He did not take the time to think or to ask the gods before he acted. Graine was ashamed for him that it was so.
He said, “I am sorry that you would think it of me. I come with an answer to conflict. I have listened to the elders of our people in their discord. They could argue through the night and three nights after and be no closer to a resolution. Half of them want you here to keep the royal line unbroken, half are afraid that the arrival of the Boudica will draw down the vengeance of Rome on them and their kin. Whichever side prevails, the other half will hate them. The Eceni nation, already broken, will be further split. We cannot afford such a rift and I would not wish to rule over a people so divided. I offer a way for you and your family to live in safety under the eyes of the governor without his knowing who you are. And I bring you this …”
All eyes were on him. With the skill of a trained singer, he drew out from under his maimed arm a torc of age-worn gold, woven in the old style of many-threaded wires. It looked a small thing compared to the red-gold worn by the Boudica but in a gathering of dreamers, it drew their attention as a haunch of bloody meat would draw a pack of hounds.
On the side nearest Graine, away from Prasutagos, Breaca’s hand clenched and unclenched, once. “You would offer me the torc of my mother?” Her voice was rough, like rock. Stone turned his head at the sound of it, rigidly.
“No. I offer it to the one who can be seen to bear it and not die as a result.”
The man who had eaten and drunk as a guest of Rome walked forward. Cygfa stood nearest him. She flinched at his approach but did not back away. When he raised his arms over her head and dropped them behind her neck, her hand moved to her belt-knife. When he drew the circle of gold forward so that the two open ends lay in a pool of warm light on her collarbones, she relaxed and her arm fell to her side, forgotten. It was said no-one could wear the torc of the Eceni and feel themselves anything but royal. Cygfa was no more immune than Silla had been, however foreign her breeding. She smiled, and was dazzling.
’Tagos stepped back. To Breaca, he said, “If you took the torc, and with it the leadership, the new governor would ask questions that we do not wish anyone to answer. Under Roman law, your daughters become mine on the day that you become m
y wife. I offer the torc, therefore, to Cygfa, who is your daughter in name, to hold until Graine, who is of the blood, comes of age. If we have daughters, they will come after her in line of inheritance. On my death, rule will pass to whichever of them is best able to hold it.”
“And until then?” They could have been alone, just Breaca and ’Tagos. They spoke as if they had known each other lifetimes and never lived apart.
“Until then, I rule as Rome would have me rule, with Breaca of the Eceni as my wife. They will accept you as Silla’s replacement. Women are of little account in their eyes and they would not be so discourteous as to question a king’s choice of woman.”
“How long before a member of your household betrays us?”
’Tagos shrugged. “I would say never but if I am wrong, I will die with you. The governor will not be inclined to leniency if he believes himself to have been betrayed. Those who have prospered under my rule would become destitute with my death. Those who hate me will put their hope in you, and your survival will be their deepest concern.” He smiled. “A man would have to hate us both very deeply, and have no care for his people, to choose such a course of action, and whereas there are many who hate me and some who will fear your presence, I cannot think of a single one who would willingly draw on the Eceni such bloodshed. While we both live, we are safe. This is our guarantee to each other.”
He waited. They all waited. Graine watched the sudden relaxation of her mother’s hand. Neither her face nor her bearing had changed, but the battle for which Breaca had been girding herself was over, and she had not lost.
CHAPTER 8
“DID YOU THINK SHE WOULD MAKE THEM SEND YOU HOME?” ’Tagos, sister’s son to Sinochos, closed but did not bar the door to his bedchamber. It was not a large room and a scattering of stoneware lamps made the dark spaces darker and did little to light the rest. They had been lit before ’Tagos—Prasutagos, she really must remember that—had opened the door and ushered Breaca in. This fact alone meant that there were servants who had known he was going to the gathering and that he would be back before dawn and would wish his cold, damp hut within a hut lit for his guest.
He called the hut a palace, after the Roman fashion, and found pride in it, not shame. True to the ancestor’s vision, there was no roundhouse in Prasutagos’ fiefdom, although this one had not been broken apart for firewood, but for political gain. As did the Romans, each family lived separately in the steading that was the centre of the “King’s” power. Already, others were settling into the rooms on either side. Breaca heard “Gaius” and “Titus”, ’Tagos’ two bodyguards who had taken on Roman names, and had introduced themselves, grinning. She did not hear her children, nor Airmid.
“Lanis,” asked ’Tagos a second time. His colour was high. He was not accustomed to being ignored. “Did you think she would send you back to Mona with your honour intact and your dignity undented?”
He had changed so much. Her abiding memory of him was of a reckless, eager youth, running at her heels like a sapling hound, desperate in his enthusiasm and yet lacking the courage to act. Later, she remembered him lying wounded after the battle against Amminios nursing an arm broken beyond mending, but her father had died in the same battle and she had taken little notice of ’Tagos. She had held him while Airmid had cut away the dead portion of his arm but he had been delirious and she thought he would not remember it. Later still, he had ruined his honour trying to fight in a battle for which he was not fit. Good warriors had died in his defence. Breaca remembered their names and their families and, standing within the pooled pallor of his lamps, she saw reflected in his eyes the moment when the memory showed on her face.
He was about to ask his question a third time, and was not happy about having to do so. His temper had never been certain even before he lost his arm. After it, he had become prone to sudden violence. She had not forgotten that about him. To fight here and now would help no-one.
She said, “It was always possible Lanis might have sent us home. She was trained by Airmid and has travelled to Mona since and she carries herself before the gods with as much integrity as any dreamer I have known. Her passion, her driving care, is for the welfare of the people. If she thought the danger of my being here outweighed the good, she would have seen to it that the gathering sent us back, whatever you and I decided.”
He had believed that. She had seen the panic in his face. Now, feigning calm, he asked, “And would you have gone?”
“Of course. If I am here, it is with the aid of the dreamers or not at all.”
That much was true. Her only lie was that, walking into the circle, she had doubted the outcome. She had not believed she would be turned away; too much had been sacrificed by others to see her this far. She had seen the understanding of that in Lanis’ eyes before the dreamer had risen to speak, and the pity that followed. Neither of them expected the path forward to be easy but it was unthinkable to turn aside. The challenge now was to learn to live in this travesty of a half-Roman village, with this man, among the remnants of her people. Nothing was impossible.
“Would you like wine?”
’Tagos hovered at her side. The beaker in his hand was glazed a deep red. He placed it with precision on the lid of an oak chest that it might sit level and not tip while he poured the wine one-handed. Everything about the act was almost, but not quite, Roman, like the setting in which he stood.
The wall behind him was plastered but the image painted on it in Eceni blue was of a running mare that had been old long before Rome became a city. Beneath it, on the lid of the chest, a constellation of silver coins winked with the brilliance of fresh casting.
Breaca lifted one and read the word: Ecen. Others in the same pile showed the head of boy-emperor Nero in profile, a portly youth with an excess of chins.
“Not the most beautiful of men, but by far the most powerful. It pays to be his friend. He grants great wealth to those in his favour, as his uncle did before him.”
’Tagos stood just behind her. The smell of the wine on his breath mixed with the other smells of him: the faint sourness of milk and cheese that had been turning her stomach since the door-flap closed.
Sifting the coins through her fingers, she said, “Does it pay the people that you have Roman wealth? Can their children grind silver to make bread when the winter corn runs scarce? I hear the legions claim all the produce of the fields for their own and the people starve for lack of what they themselves have grown.”
’Tagos’ mind was on other things. Breaca saw him pull up short and force himself to think. He said, “The people may not eat silver, but it can be used to buy corn when we need it.”
“Eceni corn, grown in Eceni fields, bought back at a higher price than they paid for it.” She was angry, when she had promised herself she would not be. She played with the silver and made herself calm.
’Tagos said, “Of course, the governor must be seen to make a profit. He must pay his army and his staff and still send money back to the emperor. As must we. See …” With his one hand, he swept the chiming silver from the chest and opened the lid. Beneath, lambent in the torchlight, was a fortune in unused, undulled coins. The chest was only half full but none the less, if one counted one’s wealth in silver, Prasutagos was an exceedingly wealthy man.
Breaca rinsed her hands in coins, watching the faces fall. The name of her people did not appear on these, nor the running mare. Claudius was there and Tiberius and the mad Gaius. Once, she saw Augustus. All of Rome was there, forming the riches of the Eceni.
“You take the gift of Roman coin?” she asked.
The man to whom she was now bound stared at her a long moment, forgetting the wine and the bed in the corner. In that look, she thought she saw the beginnings of the real ’Tagos, who was neither the diplomat nor the over-eager youth, but the one-armed man who had fought and lost too many battles and was not prepared to lose one more.
His nostrils pinched and the skin blotched on his face. Almost silently, he sa
id, “Not a gift. Never that. Seneca does not give gifts. I have accepted a loan of ten million sesterces on which I pay one tenth per annum interest. From the rest, I pay taxes and bribes, buy grain in winter and grazing rights in summer, buy gifts for the governor and his wife that they might believe themselves flattered by royalty. I set up trading routes by sea and land and am permitted to tax those who bring us the wine and olives and figs that allow us to appear more Roman.”
On the word, a wall-lamp guttered and went out. It had been filled with sheep’s fat, made liquid with other oils. Lacking Efnís’ pine resins, the smoke that rose from the wick was black and stank of late-season rams.
The gods pass comment in many ways. ’Tagos stopped and stared and then, defensively, “I do this because these are my people, in my care and I would not see them reduced to the abject servitude of the Trinovantes. Rome respects two things: force of arms, and wealth. If we do not have the first—which manifestly we do not, and never will have, whatever you may think—then we must have the second or become less than cattle.” He paused a moment, thinking, then turned on his heel. “If you are to stay here, there are things you must understand. Watch and learn.”
He walked past her, slamming open three other chests that stood against the wall opposite the bed. Trinkets that had sat atop them fell to the floor and broke or scattered: a small green bowl with a gilded rim, a horse made by a child in rough clay, a long-handled comb with an angular pattern painted in blue on the handle.
Ignoring them, he said, “Nero is a child, he has no more control of Rome than I do. But two men rule through him and of those, Seneca is the one who has wealth to spare. He uses it to create greater riches. This”—he hurled the first of the chests on its side—“was once full. And this. And this.”
Out of eight chests, three lay on their sides, empty. ’Tagos stood at the very edge of the lamplight, shaking as if in battle. His empty sleeve had come unpinned and he pushed it back over the stump of his arm. The flesh was purpled where Airmid had sewn it over the stump of the bone. Above, the skin was the colour of any man’s arm, but pale for lack of sunlight.
