The Eagle and the Raven

by Pauline Gedge

  “One of these days your wound will kill you, my husband, you know that, and then what will happen to the Iceni? Rome’s policy toward its tame kingdoms is quite clear, yet you refuse to see it. When Boduocus died, did his son succeed him? No! In went the procurator and his staff of vultures and stripped the Dobunni of what little wealth they had left, and then they found themselves governed by a praetor. And still poor Boduocus’s son had to pay the inheritance tax, though his inheritance was more taxes!”

  He struggled to sit up, and gave her a resigned smile. “Favonius has assured me that the situation here is quite different. Boduocus had made a mess of ruling the Dobunni and many of his chiefs had become uncontrollable through Caradoc’s influence. Rome had to step in. But here it will be different.”

  “How? By leaving me out of your will you play straight into the emperor’s hands. If you die before the girls are old enough to rule, Rome can quite legitimately march in to rule for them and there will be nothing I can do. The Iceni will have ceased to be a people. Rome will take everything she has not taken already.”

  “She has taken nothing,” he said patiently, knowing that he would get no sleep until she had once more given voice to her anxieties. “We are the richest tuath in the country. Even our freemen wear the softest wool and can afford to hire the artists to make precious things for them. For the first time ever, our energies go into growth. No raids, no wars. We have never been so fortunate.”

  “One day you will die,” she insisted, her throaty voice deep, “and all the money you have borrowed from Seneca in order to turn yourself and the chiefs into Romans will have to be repaid. Can the girls repay it? Only I could soothe the bloodsucker’s worry. By taking from me any power in the event of your death, you leave the tuath open to ruin. Favonius knows this. He laughs at us behind our backs, poor ignorant savages trying to ape our betters; poor blind, innocent barbarians!”

  “You are unjust and suspicious. The times have changed, Boudicca, since your father mixed hatred of Rome with your meat and fed you pride with your bread. Favonius works hard for us. I like him.”

  “I like him too, but I sit in the hall, looking into the past, and what do I see? The Gauls are Roman, the Pannonians are Roman, the Mauretanians are Roman, the whole world is turning into one vast Roman province, ground under by men who speak of cooperation and prosperity in the same breath as atrocitas and extermination. Yes, the times have changed. Honor is giving place to an amused reason. The chiefs no longer wear swords on their belts, when only five years ago to be abroad without a sword was a matter of grave consequence. I am afraid, Prasutugas, and I ache with longing for the times that have been. It will not take long before the Iceni are no more, and people who look like the tribesmen, but are really Romans, will hunt in the woods and paddle their coracles in the marshes. Sometimes I wish I were dead.”

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and slid back beneath the covers, closing his eyes. “The tuath elected me as lord because I offered peace with Rome and protection against the Catuvellauni. I have given them what they wanted. You are alone, Boudicca. You see the tuath the way you want to see it, not the way it is. Now be quiet and let me sleep.”

  She turned and kissed the hot lips, her heart liquid with memories, and he sighed. She felt his body relax against hers, a body so well-known to her, an old, comfortable habit, and she turned on her side away from him, pillowing her face against the palm of her hand and gazing into the quiet, firelit dimness. They had been together for eight years now, through times of disillusionment and despair, great fear, and moments of fragile joy. First love had turned to deep affection. There had been a sweetness about him, a gentleness that had attracted the restless, domineering spirit in her, and though her father had strongly disapproved she had married him. She discovered very soon that under the quiet, mild exterior lay a stubborn will as strong as her own, and all her efforts to rule through him were useless. For the Council elected him ricon, not her, and in spite of her ravings he had quietly given them the security they had wanted. Sometimes she hated him for his refusal to be drawn into the arguments she continually threw at him, when he would answer her with soft words and a noncommittal smile. But he had kept her respect because of it, though he was fast becoming a civilized, genteel figurehead, malleable under the Roman hands that manipulated the tuath behind his thick blond hair and wide, slow smiles. She goaded him frantically, picking away at his dauntless, invincible sureness, beating him with rude words and sometimes even threats, but he would not be roused or driven. He loved his people. He loved the new security that had come with Rome. And he loved her, amused, not offended, by her actions. She was a child to him, tantrum-throwing and spoiled, only daughter of an old madman, and he took her too lightly. The swift uprising of some of his chiefs had shaken him, but not for long. He blamed the rebel of the west, not his wife.

  Boudicca felt sleep draw away from her, though she willed it peremptorily to come. She could not still her mind. She had lied at dinner tonight when she said that she had seen Caradoc once, for she had seen him again, three years ago, when Claudius’s beautiful white marble temple had been finished and the client lords and chiefs had come from every corner of the province to take part in the dedication.

  Some came unwillingly, like Boudicca herself, for though no pressure had been placed on the tribes it was very clear that their rulers were expected to attend. Some came happily, greedily, like that Brigantian whore Aricia, dragging her miserable husband behind her as she went from celebration to celebration in the streets and houses of Camulodunon. No, it was Colchester now, respectable, bustling Colchester, a town where Rome ruled sunnily and cheerily by day but the ghosts of the mighty hillfort came out by night and drifted in the empty streets, their swords pale under the moon, their mouths and hollow eyes wide with reproach and misery. Prasutugas and Boudicca had stood with the others in the temple, looking with awe at the golden statue of the emperor wreathed in suffocating incense. Plautius had been there, his ascetic face already closed with thoughts of his coming voyage home, his sturdy, arrogant staff ranked behind him.

  The rites seemed foolish and unintelligible to the tribesmen, who whispered and shuffled as the hours crawled interminably by, and Boudicca filed out into brilliant sunlight with a tired relief. A curious crowd had gathered at the foot of the wide, dazzling steps—servants and beggars, artists, peddlers and traveling bards come to watch the solemnities and to fleece the visitors if they had the chance, and Boudicca, looking down at them, was filled with an angry shame. No member of any tuath had ever held honor so lightly before Rome came, but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.

  She held back her sun-fired hair with one hand and prepared to descend the steps, and then she saw him. She was instantly certain that it was he. He was dressed in a shabby brown tunic, belted and covered by an equally disreputable cloak. Its hood was up, half-covering his thin face, but she could not mistake the eyes, and with the shock of it her feet stumbled and she would have fallen if Prasutugas had not caught her with his healthy arm. She moved on down the steps, drawing nearer to him, and he did not move. The crowd began to jostle and she was forced to pause. She lifted her eyes to meet him. A spark of fear glowed and died in his eyes as he saw that she had recognized him, then he pushed back the hood a little and smiled disdainfully, hatefully. She was rooted to the step by that emaciated face. She tried with all her will to put into her eyes a little comfort, to say you are not alone, but he saw only the beautiful, pampered wife of the Romanized Prasutugas and with unutterable contempt he spat deliberately on the ground. She recoiled, shocked, and behind her Prasutugas nudged her.

  “Move on!” he said. “Plautius is coming.” The governor emerged from the columned shadows at the top of the steps, his tall, black-clad Catuvellaunian lover beside him, and for the last time Boudicca looked
into the face of Caradoc. He was no longer watching her. His glance flew to his sister, faltered, then abruptly he turned and was swallowed up by the shouting, pushing people.

  The shame of that encounter still burned and Boudicca turned over. Prasutugas lifted his arm sleepily and she snuggled into his shoulder. You must have forgiven me by now, Arviragus, she thought. You know how many of your spies I have protected in secret, how many weapons I hid from the hunting centurions, how many sacrifices I perform alone, no one but Andrasta and I in the hidden grove. You must think better of me than you think of the black Brigantian witch.

  Aricia had gloried in her few days at Colchester, secure in the favor of the governor, and Boudicca smiled to herself in satisfaction when she thought of Brigantia’s troubles now.

  Venutius was a tormented man. Two years ago he had repudiated his wife, beaten her lover to a bloody pulp, and fled with his chiefs into the west. For three months he had fought beside Caradoc, but his resolve was short-lived. He was like a man dying of thirst in the desert and she the mirage of cool, endless waters flowing just out of reach. He went back to her and Caradoc had understood, but Venutius had retained enough of his pride not to go crawling. His chiefs had surrounded her hillfort, she had impudently sent her henchmen out to fight, and an irritated Scapula had had to send her two detachments of cavalry and a century of precious legionaries before Venutius gave in. He had sent them both stern warnings but his thoughts were tangled around the treacherous passes of the western mountains and the man who crouched there, weaving brilliant strategies and waiting for him. When a wary peace descended on Brigantia once more he had forgotten Aricia. She and Venutius had been reconciled and the maimed lover was dismissed. Passion had crackled into new life between them but they had nothing in common save the blind cravings of their bodies, and soon the tuath had resounded once more to the curses and recriminations of a disorderly house.

  Boudicca pitied Venutius. He was an honorable man, loving his rapacious and complex wife with the same singlemindedness he brought to his gods and his people. Although he snarled and hurt he could not cut himself free from the net she cast around him with such consummate skill. She needed him. The people still loved and respected him and she doled attention out to him in doses just large enough to keep him hanging to her cloak when her tribesmen grew restive under Rome’s yoke. But as she rose higher in Rome’s favor, holding as she did the vast tracts of country between the tuaths hostile to Rome and thus saving the expense of untold manpower in patrolling the well-nigh unpatrollable border, her native animal caution waned. Her infidelities were notorious, even remarked upon in the dispatches to the emperor. Her love of luxury ate at her. Yet Venutius stayed by her, conscious of a deep well of insecurity within her, turning aside her insults and sparse endearments on the shield of his love for her. As Scapula gradually mobilized the forces of the whole of the lowlands, his conscience gave him no rest. Caradoc needed him but he was powerless, a puppet without volition, and the cries of his beleaguered countrymen went unheeded.

  Boudicca dozed. Outside, the rain stopped. The Roman sentries paced quietly, bored and tired. Under the marshes spring stirred, and the surf broke monotonously upon the empty Icenian beaches.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  LLYN heard them coming first and he dropped to the ground, pressing his ear flat against the grass and closing his eyes. Caradoc waved his men to silence and stood looking down on his son, his arms loose along the rim of his battered shield. They were all tired. The morning was fresh and clear, and the sun climbed slowly in a blue spring sky, but they had spent the night lying high above the narrow path that wound from the fords and bit deep into Madoc’s northern reaches, waiting for the Twentieth Legion. It had come quietly, just after midnight, moonlight glinting from the iron helmets, and the horses’ hoofs muffled on the soft earth. Caradoc and his band had sprung from the trees, leaping upon the advance patrol of auxiliaries and archers and killing swiftly before the main body of the legion came into view. The tussle was fierce though the archers had not had time to draw bow, and the grunts and soft cries soon faded as the warriors melted once more into the night-hung trees, leaving the path deserted except for the bodies that sprawled loosely, stripped of their sword and armor.

  Caradoc had allowed himself a grin of satisfaction as he loped beside the river, his men speeding silently behind him. He could imagine Scapula’s face when he was told of the annihilation of his advance guard—rage held tightly in check, the red flooding of the rugged face, the renewed, sour griping of a stomach that contracted in pain every time the rebel leader’s name was mentioned.

  The war band had settled for another ambush some miles upstream, where trees clung to the sides of broken scree and overhung the path. They wriggled deep into the brush and kept sleep at bay with difficulty. Caradoc had spent the time of waiting with a busy mind, thinking of Emrys, Gervase, and Sine now also lying in some lonely high place, waiting even as he waited, far to the north. For Scapula was beginning his last and greatest effort, and all the west watched, feeling the hunters come. Caradoc knew that slowly but surely the west was slipping through his fingers. Madoc and the Silures had been forced further inland, steadily but irrevocably, away from their coast and their river valleys, fighting night and day, winter and summer, but giving back month by month. An encampment of the Second now lay where Madoc’s town had once been. He had long since withdrawn from it, running to the hills before the dogged swords of the coastal squadrons and the naves longae, which had landed troops at the mouth of his valley. Now his people, men, women, and children, moved back and forth over the mountains with Caradoc’s armies.

  The Silures had suffered. With the ordering of a pitiless atrocitas they were hunted like animals, and often soldiers who became frustrated in their efforts to come to grips with an elusive, ephemeral enemy slaughtered the stragglers instead. Many of the Silurian children lay unburied under the forest’s spreading arms, and the mothers who had ringed them in defence left their bones beside them. Eurgain and Vida with their war band guarded the flanks of each exodus, and the young women under them hardened swiftly to callousness. The sacrifices of each year were no longer slaves or criminal freemen.

  Eurgain and her sword-women provided Roman captives and stood coldly by while the Druids chanted and Madoc wielded the sacred knife. Blood was cheap. It flowed without cease and Eurgain, looking back to the first night of Samain she had spent among the Silures, laughed now at the unease she had felt then. They were inured to death, all of them. Death was no longer a matter of honor or sorrow. One body was like another. The only importance lay in how many and who. Even Llyn gave no more thought to the men he slew than he did to the freewomen he made love to, women who went willingly into the strong young arms of the arviragus’s son. Survival was all that counted, and survival meant killing. Only Caelte seemed unchanged, holding to his sunny, gentle world of music and poetry, singing all the old songs to himself and the forest, for Caradoc no longer called for the lays of his youth, and the songs sung around the campfires were all of death, and the freedom to come.

  Now Llyn got up. “Perhaps two hundred men, with the wains, a mile away,” he said crisply. “They are very late. I wonder why?”

  Caradoc hitched his cloak impatiently, his eyes on his son’s face. At sixteen, the soul of Togodumnus looked out from the brown, darting eyes, and the swift-sweeping, clean bones and cleft chin were all his uncle’s. But Llyn had his father’s cool ability to command without Togodumnus’s impulsiveness, and the thin mouth was Cunobelin’s, cruel and cunning. Women were drawn to him as they had been to Togodumnus, and like Togodumnus, Llyn did not allow them to become an enervating preoccupation. Caradoc, remembering his agonizing over the dishonoring of himself with Aricia, marveled sadly at Llyn’s callous disregard for his conquests. But the times had changed, and honor now meant only the number of Roman heads one swung from the trees. There were no longer any youths among the western tribes. There were only warriors, or children.
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  “It does not matter,” he replied brusquely. “They play into our hands. Off the path!” he called back, and the war band scrambled up the slope and disappeared under the trees. Caradoc and Llyn followed, and Cinnamus came and worked himself down beside them, digging deep into the leaf mold. Long ago Caradoc had forbidden the wearing of bright colors, and now the brown and gray cloaks of his men and women blended with the forest’s subtle shades.

  “Eurgain?” he snapped, and Cinnamus turned cool green eyes upon him.

  “She and Vida are hidden farther along, to finish off any that escape us.” He lay quietly for a moment, then he said, “Lord, we must leave this country. This is our fourth ambush in a week and we have lost too many men. If we wait for the Twentieth to close with the Fourteenth we will be encircled.”

  “I know. But I hate to do it, Cin. If we go north we leave the Silurian territory to Scapula, and we may never be able to get it back.”

  “Emrys is holding them well,” Llyn interposed, “even though the Deceangli are well-nigh finished. We can afford another season here Cin.”

  But Cinnamus objected vehemently. “If we are cut off we must die. Let us join forces with Emrys and fight in mountains that Scapula cannot penetrate. Mother! I have no liking for the Ordovices, but at least they still command their territory untouched and, besides, there are the passes there, out of the west and into Cornovii country and Brigantia beyond. If things go ill we can always demand immunity from Venutius.”