Before too long Venutius came back, his approach as silent and stealthy as a slinking stoat. “It is the Druid,” he said, “and some of the chiefs of this people. The lady can rest here for the night, and there will be hot water for her in which to wash.” As if, thought Aricia dully, all I want, soft southerner that I am, is a bowl of hot water. Venutius, you are a fool. Her horse plodded dejectedly the last few paces and she slid wearily to the ground, throwing the reins to the servant who had come running. She walked into the hut, ducking her head and blinking in the brightness of the fire. A Druid sat there, warming his hands, and for a moment she thought it was Bran, but then he turned his head and greeted her amiably, and she saw that this man was much older, a swarthy, bearded man with twinkling eyes and bronze rings tied into his hair.
The Coritani chiefs rose and greeted her with the words of hospitality and she answered them automatically while her men stood behind her like dark shadows. These chiefs could barely hide their churlish disdain of her, the Catuvellaunian cub, and soon they bowed and went away and she sank onto the skins by the fire, letting her cloak slide from her shoulders.
“Set a watch over my wains,” she called to Venutius. “The Coritani are a thieving people.”
The white-clad figure on the other side of the fire chuckled. “They are no more rapacious than your foster tribe, Lady of Brigantia,” he said. “They are my own people, so watch your words. I am a noble of this tribe, and if you insult them I will vanish in the night and they will come and cut off your pretty head.” He was joking with her, but she was in no mood for jest and she stared into the heart of the fire. Well, let them come, then, and take her head, it would not matter to her.
The Druid rose and stretched, then cracked his knuckles until she winced. “I can see, Lady, that my jokes are out of season,” he remarked. “So I will go to my rest. A servant will come before long, with hot water, for which you will, of course, pay him—in Cunobelin’s coin, if you do not mind. Although the Coritani spit upon his name, they eagerly seek his money. A good night to you.” He went out, the doorskins swishing to behind him, and after a moment she tiptoed to the door and peered out.
“Do you need anything, Lady?” a voice spoke in her ear, and she withdrew hastily muttering, “no, no.” She went back to the fire, and sleep filled her head, driving out the hunger. At least she was well guarded. The servant appeared as she was dozing, propped against the wall, and she asked him for hot meat and warm wine, to be brought in half an hour. “That will cost you two bronze coins, Lady,” he answered promptly.
“I will pay you when you have delivered the things to me!” she snapped at him, and he smirked and went out. She shed the short male tunic and the loose breeches gratefully, tossing them on the floor and then washing herself thoroughly in the scalding water. Then, refreshed, she dressed in the clean clothes she had brought in a leather pouch, and loosened her hair, unbraiding it and combing it in long, slow strokes. The servant came, carrying a tray with hot beef, bread, last year’s apples, wrinkled and tiny, and a jug of cold, frothing mead. He put down the tray and bent to throw more wood on the fire.
“I asked for hot wine,” she said sharply. “Do not tell me that the Coritani drink no wine for I know that they do, and in abundance. Bring me wine!”
He straightened and looked at her insolently. “I have been told that the Brigantians drink only strong mead and barley beer,” he said. “Your pardon if I took you for one of them.” Before she could shriek at him he was gone, returning in a while with a drinking cup full of wine. He went to the fire, picked up the red-hot poker, and thrust it into the cup, and the wine sizzled and began to steam, its rich aroma filling the hut. She almost snatched it from him.
“Now go away. The hospitality of this tuath leaves much to be desired,” she said, flinging two coins at him. He caught them adroitly, bit them, and left grinning, and she sipped the hot wine thankfully, sinking to her cloak beside the crackling fire.
Early the next morning they were on the move again, riding northeast to find the coast. The Druid rode beside Venutius, talking gaily, and Aricia, her spirits renewed, rode behind then, listening and smiling at the give and take. The morning was overcast, and far away, flashes of lightning played about the gloomy marshes of the Iceni territory, but the air, although close and sticky, was not warm, and all the company wore their cloaks. At the end of the day Aricia could detect a new scent all around them—raw, bracing, the tangy smell of the ocean—and when they camped near a circle of rough stones that leaned together as if tired of the hundreds of years they had stood, she fancied she could hear it, the dull booming that made her think of silent, black-clad Gladys and the tall-masted ships of Rome. She took out the serpent brooch and lay holding it in the dark, and whether the talisman did indeed have some soothing power of its own, or whether she was becoming used to the ways of her new chiefs and felt less alone, she slept deeply and awoke with hope, to bird song and another gray morning.
They reached the ocean that day, and left all trees behind them. The country that opened out was barren, a place of rolling, grassy slopes, each folding into the other, on and on without end, a place where the wind never ceased to whisper of loneliness and quietude and of hawks and eagles, hanging, wings outspread, in the cloudy, wind-tormented sky. They drew rein on a cliff, and Aricia got down and walked to the edge, keeping her balance with difficulty as the gale sent her hair whipping behind her and her cloak wrapped itself tight around her knees. Below her, where black and gray rocks lay like the rotting teeth of the land itself, and the sand, wet and cold, hissed malevolently under the ocean’s torturing hands, lay the heaving water, swelling and receding sullenly while the gulls bobbed on the waves and flapped screaming over the beach. Black seaweed lay strewn here and there, shiny and thick, and, through her keen, flared nostrils, she could smell it, too, the scent of life itself. After several deep breaths she turned again, fighting her hair and her cloak, and mounted, and they picked their way back to the track that would run beside the sea until it veered inland, where the river of Brigantia spent itself.
Five days later, in the evening, they came to where the river spread out and mingled with the sea, to a place of marsh and long-legged, long-beaked birds who stepped delicately in the mud and probed for grubs with their sharp bills. The sun had almost gone, and pink shafts of light lay over the surrounding country like the drifting gossamer of spiders’ webs. The men were excited. Aricia could tell by the way they laughed more freely, their voices carrying far in the still, sweet air.
The Druid turned to her and reined in, bringing his horse to walk beside her. “Well, Lady,” he said, “tomorrow you will see your home.”
Already she had seen country she never knew existed, and a curious thrill went through her. She smiled at the man. “Long has it been since I left these parts,” she replied. “I was not yet six when my father took me to Cunobelin.”
“Have you any memories?”
She frowned, tunneling past the bright visions of yesterday to an older time. “I am not sure,” she said slowly. “Sometimes I think I can remember the odor of sheep, and a huge stone house as big as the Great Hall itself, but perhaps these are only dreams.”
“Perhaps.” He watched her closely but saw only cheeks colored by the evening breeze and eyes clearer than the stars. “Tell me, Lady, did the seer of the Catuvellauni tell the omens for you before you left Camulodunon?”
She glanced at him swiftly, shock in her face. “Why, no. The seer at Camulodunon has not been consulted for many a year.”
He sighed. “A pity. I should like to have known what he said about you, but of course the Romans do not encourage such practices.” He spoke without a sneer in his voice and she did not know how to answer him. The hustle and obscenities of the Roman traders seemed so far away here.
“I suppose you will be leaving us soon,” she said, and he nodded.
“We part at the border. I am traveling west, through Cornovii country and on to visit the Ord
ovices for a while.”
“Oh? Who are they?”
He gave her a look of pure amusement, and his eyes sparkled. “They are a very fierce and uncivilized tribe who inhabit a country of snowy mountains,” he said solemnly. “They have no chariots or horses, and they live in stone huts. I do not think you would like them very much.”
Just then Venutius called a halt by a little stream that emerged from the eaves of the wood, and they dismounted and began to make camp. Aricia sat by the river, watching the pink glow turn to gray and then to dusk, excitement reaching her too, carried on the brisk, happy voices of her chiefs and the wind that brought to her the hint of a vast high country waiting for her on the morrow. Soon that smell mingled with the odor of woodsmoke from their cooking fire and she went to join the circle of men who ringed it. One of the chiefs had caught a hare and they ate well, washing down their meat and bean gruel with icy river water. Then they reclined on their cloaks, telling stories, singing snatches of old fighting songs, and listening to the night noises beyond the friendly circle of the fire’s orange light. Aricia fell asleep contentedly on the ground, rolled in her cloak, her head pillowed on Venutius’s horse blanket.
Noon of the next day brought them to the border. A light drizzle was falling, not enough to soak them, but enough to make them fasten their cloaks tightly around their necks and draw up their hoods. Although Aricia could see no sign that Brigantia lay before her, the men drew their swords and flung them into the air, catching them by the hilts and swinging them around their heads. “Brigantia! Brigantia!” they shouted, and when Aricia looked about for the Druid she found that he had left them, had melted away somewhere into the trees.
It was said that the Druithin had no fear of wooded places, but Aricia shuddered, imagining him riding alone and unprotected under the hostile eyes of all the spirits there who had no love for humans and who lived only for Samain, when they could carry a person off, never to be seen by mortal eye again. Something else took her, too, a sudden fear and foreboding. She felt somehow that if she crossed the border of her land she would immediately change and become something alien even to herself. And though men would see and speak to Aricia, Queen, yet she would no longer be Aricia but some dark, evil thing that lived in Aricia’s body, which no one would ever know, not even herself. She shivered again, but the men had started to move and her horse followed them, crossing over some strange invisible line that marked the marches of Brigantia.
The rain thickened as the afternoon wore on, but the men still sang, and at last, when they could no longer see where they were going, they stopped at a peasant’s hovel, pegging their horses and squeezing inside. The hut stank, and a cold wind whistled through the neglected wattle walls. Venutius coaxed the fire into new life, and the lengthening flames revealed an old man and a young woman, sitting with big, dark eyes fixed on them all, their bare feet tucked under rude sacking and their faces all but hidden by tangled masses of black hair. Aricia went to them and tried to talk, but they stared at her in dumb fear and at length she left them and took off her cloak and held it to the fire. It began to steam, and a picture of Caradoc stole unbidden into her mind. He was standing before her fire in the cozy room at Camulodunon, his eyes black and glazed over with desire, his hair stuck to his forehead and his shoulders, and his breeches steaming. She wrenched her mind away after one agonized flash of longing and turned to hold a pot steady while one of her chiefs poured the water that was to be heated for soup. Rain trickled through the moss-choked thatch above them and it soon made cold pools under their feet. They ate uncomfortably, sharing what they had with the pair, who suddenly sprang to life, snatching the bowls held out to them and eating like famished wolves.
“Are all your peasants this poverty-stricken?” Aricia whispered to Venutius.
He was galled at the way the word “your” slid off her tongue. “No, Lady. Only here, close to the border, where the Coritani often raid and the people are parted from their sheep and their goats. They suffer grievously but will not leave their land to move farther in.”
The night was spent in damp, cold misery and they were astir early, in a fever to pack up and be gone. They left a bag of dried beans, a ham, and two cheap knives with the peasants, who did not thank them but stood staring into the drab dawn as they rode quickly way.
The river began to narrow and soon they left it, striking out into the knee-high grass. The land was dotted here and there with small copses, but for the most part it was bare, and in the slanting rain Aricia thought that she had never seen a more desolate place. She shivered and sneezed throughout the rest of the journey, never dry, never warm, dreaming more and more of the huge warm stone house of her childhood, praying that it existed.
At sunset on the third day since they had crossed the border, Venutius grunted, reined in, and pointed. “The heart of Brigantia,” he said, and she looked, her heart sinking. No gates, no defences, no neat, tree-lined paths, no people visible, only a collection of poor, miserable wattle huts, smoke curling slowly and sullenly from their thatched roofs, and a few half-starved curs that slunk amid the old bones and offal of feasts long past. Shock swelled her tongue, and she could not even cry out. Venutius rode forward and she followed him blindly, every nerve in her shouting negation, and they dismounted for the last time. He put his hands to his mouth and called out. Slowly, silently, as if they were wraiths of the mist taking concrete form in answer to Venutius’s voice, the doorskins of the huts parted and men began to flow toward them, tall men, spare, with beards that hung upon their thick tunics and eyes that seemed to gather together and fly to her, holding her in a vise. They came soundlessly, but she stood her ground, knowing instinctively that if she stepped back she would lose a kingdom. Behind them the women glided, tall also, dark-haired and pale-skinned, dressed in wild-patterned tunics that covered their leather-shod feet. Their eyes, too, held the latent ferocity of the barren hills, and they looked at her without respect and without fear. They all came to a halt and there was a deep, pregnant silence, broken only by the pattering of the rain.
Aricia flung back her cloak so that they could see the sword at her belt. “What ails you, all of you, that you stand gazing at me as if I were the Raven of Panic in human form? Do you not know a Brigantian flaith when you see one?” she said haughtily, though she was shaking with fever and her head swam. Suddenly smiles broke out and the people surrounded her, touching her cloak, her hair, bidding her welcome, speaking the words of hospitality one by one until Venutius turned and addressed them.
“Prepare fire and food, and go about your business. The lady must see her father, and then she must rest.” The crowd scattered, but Aricia was not too sick to notice their instant response to his bidding. She wondered whether Venutius had brought her all this way only to challenge her right to rule. She and Venutius walked on through the huts, the chiefs behind them, leading the horses, she swaying a little, sweat breaking out on her forehead. Venutius stopped by a house built, she saw with unutterable relief, of stone. It stood in the center of the village, surrounded by a palisade of tall wooden stakes, and six chiefs lounged at the entrance, leaning on their shields and talking, impervious to the rain. They straightened and saluted Aricia, and Venutius gestured with one brawny arm. “Lady, your father awaits you within. He is very weak and may not even know you, but I think the expectation of your coming has kept him alive, and now he will not linger long. I will see that you get dry clothes and food in a little while.” She smiled wanly up at him and he saw the sweat on the white forehead, the fever-glazed eyes, the trembling hands. A pang of concern went through him but he did not show it, and turned on his heel to go inside.
It was warm and dry within. A fire burned at the central hearth, and sheepskins covered the dirt floor. As she bent her head and entered, a woman rose from a stool at the bedside, but Aricia saw her only through a fog of sickness. She heard her own voice greet the woman but it seemed to come from someone else far away, and the woman’s polite reply reached he
r tired brain as mere gibberish. She shed her heavy cloak and the woman took it, putting it over one arm and going out. Aricia turned to the low bed with a growing sense of unreality, her heart beating faintly and rapidly.
She lowered herself onto the stool and leaned forward, but it was not Cunobelin who lay there sinking into his last sleep. It was a wizened, gnomelike little man with a thin, drooping mouth and wispy gray hair like a baby’s. He was scarcely breathing, and she thought for a moment that he was already dead, but then the blue-veined hands lying inert on the blanket quivered and she leaned closer, feeling the fever begin to gnaw at her back. “Father?” she said loudly, feeling the terrible, ridiculous nonsense in the word, and he opened his eyes with effort and turned his head. They were brown eyes, rheumy and vague, and they searched the room for her. She stood and bent closer. “Father, it is I, Aricia. I have come.” He saw her then and his eyes wandered over her face. The hands lifted, fell back, and she reached out and clasped them with her own. It was the hardest, most distasteful thing she had ever done in her life, but she took the brittle fingers, feeling the coldness of death in them, and he smiled very faintly.
“Aricia,” he whispered. “Home at last. You have not changed at all, little one.”
She felt a tremor pass from his hands to hers and he closed his eyes for a moment, marshaling his strength. “The chiefs are like children,” he went on slowly. “Swift to anger, loyal to death. Treat them as children. Leave the Carvetii alone. We have a treaty with them, and with the Parisii. Ride against the Coritani and teach them a lesson. Listen to the Druithin. Observe the sacrifices.”
The Eagle and the Raven Page 9
