The Eagle and the Raven

by Pauline Gedge

  She got up and went to look out the window, standing still and gazing to where the fire roared to the sky. He rolled his head to watch her, the red reflection drenching her face and neck and glittering in her eyes, the color of blood. The cheerful sounds of the maelstrom beyond came to him clearly, and for just a moment he missed the strong, distinctive odor of the bonefires of Beltine.

  “They cannot win, my dear,” he said, pulling his legs in under the chair and sitting straight. “They have destroyed one legion, but three more must be faced, and Venutius cannot take them by surprise with a subterfuge as he obviously did the Twentieth. The frontier is down. What does that mean? You know as well as I. A chain of garrisons, but the lowland is littered with garrisons. The most they can do is delude themselves into thinking they have made headway for a while by ranging to and fro unhindered. The governor will come, mobilize the legions, and it will all be over.”

  She swung from the window as though she had been waiting for the signal of his words. “It does not have to be that way! Prasutugas, have you ever seen such bravery, such tenacious love of freedom, such a capacity for suffering? Every time I think of them, my heart is pierced by shame. They forgive us our cowardice! They no longer plead with us for help!” She rushed to him and stood over him, her arms still folded tightly across her dusky blue tunic. “They are so pitifully alone, Prasutugas. Yes, yes, you are right—they will be driven back. But not if we do something. This is the moment, my husband. The time has come. Never again will such luck favor the cause of freedom. A legion gone, no governor, the officials undecided about what to do! Think!” Her arms left her body and spread wide. “We could fire our garrison in one night and sweep out of Icenia. Who would expect it of us? We could be at Camulodunon before the news of our actions had even reached the town…”

  “No.” The word came out sharp and final. His mouth was no longer soft but set into an obstinate line, and his eyes scanned her coldly.

  “Yes! Yes! This time we will have a good chance of success. We have the people, we have the weapons, we…”

  He was on his feet and in a flash she found her wrist imprisoned in a cold iron grip. “Boudicca, what have you done?” he whispered rapidly, harshly. “What weapons? We have no weapons. At least,” he went on grimly, his grip tightening until she gasped, “I have no weapons. Where are they, Boudicca? Where have you hidden them?”

  “I cannot tell you!” she shouted in pain. “If I do you will go running to Favonius.”

  “You know me better than that!”

  “No, I do not! I cannot afford to!” For a long time they glared at one another, she on the verge of tears, caught in his one-armed grip, he with blue eyes blazing.

  He let her go abruptly. “I have been more lenient with you, perhaps, than I ought,” he said, as she rubbed at her wrist. “I have given you everything a ricon’s wife could desire and more. I have been patient with your madness, I have kept your little secrets from Favonius, I have taken your public insults, because there is love between us. I thought there was trust also, Boudicca. It seems that I was wrong. Burying weapons is a treasonable offence, punishable by death, and you know it. Such folly could endanger the whole tuath. You force me to tell you now that if you make any moves to incite the chiefs into rebellion, if you conceive any plans that might endanger the work Favonius and I are doing in Icenia, I will remove you from my bed and from my life.”

  She stared at him aghast, her eyes wide. “Prasutugas! You would do that to me?”

  He nodded. “I would. I have done all I can, Boudicca, I have taken all I can. No more.”

  “Yes,” she said bitterly. “You have indeed done all you can. To you I am nothing but a bad-tempered, seditious child. Yet, Prasutugas, you have not given me all you could. I do not have my freedom.”

  His face hardened. “You are free to leave me whenever you choose.”

  “That is not the kind of freedom I mean!” The cry tore into him but he did not flinch. Her arms encircled herself once more, an embrace of shock and deep fear, and she was bent before him, her magnificent hair tumbling to hide her face. “I feel my chains, Prasutugas; every day they bite into my soul like red-hot iron. You cannot know how I suffer, how my words to you are soft and pleasing compared to the words that scream from my soul. Perhaps I am mad, but if I am, then so is the whole of the west. I hate your sanity.”

  “And do you also hate me?” He spoke quietly but was as appalled as she at the swiftness of this chasm that had finally opened between them and was still widening with terrifying speed. He wanted to leap over it, to take her in his arms and hold her until the rift snapped shut again and they were whole once more, but its cold blackness beat him back.

  “I do not know!” she sobbed. “Ah, help me, Prasutugas, I do not know! I only know that I have taken all I can as well as you, and I can think of nothing but those poor, bloodied people carrying the weight of freedom on their dying backs for all of us!” Her head came up and he saw her face, disfigured by tears. “How long has it been since you wept, Prasutugas? How long?”

  He put out his hand but could not reply, and after a moment she straightened and stumbled out the door, her hands moving blindly, uncertainly, before her. Prasutugas could not move. He stood there in the dimness, surrounded by the flickering orange shadows, his heart leaping and falling erratically, the tears trickling slowly down his cheeks.

  She waited in the shadow of the porch for a moment, leaning against the lintel and wiping her face on the hem of her tunic. She could not think. For ten years they had slashed and parried with each other, their loyalties deeply and irrevocably divided, and all the tuath knew it and wondered at such unity in diversity. She shouted, he yawned. She threatened, he smiled and did not shift one jot from the course that he, as ricon, had chosen. Their arguments had acquired a formula, a stately, invisible dance of words, and each of them had followed the steps because to break the pattern would have been hurtful. But this time he said new things, she thought, tears flowing fresh and hot once more. This time he broke the rules, he did not play fair, and what had become a game between them after so many quarrels was shown to be a matter of life or death after all. What did he say? Shock had driven the words from her mind. She remembered only his face, hard and strange, showing her a depth of resolve she had not believed possible in him. The door of the adjoining room opened and Hulda came out onto the porch.

  “Where have you been?” she scolded loudly. “This is no night for you to be wandering about on your own. Your father would be angry if he knew. Come inside!” For a moment Boudicca thought the servant was addressing her, but then she saw Ethelind and Brigid wandering slowly up to the house. Boudicca shrank back into the shadow and the girls brushed by without seeing her.

  “I would have pushed him out of the tree,” Ethelind was saying stoutly. “Everyone knows that if Father didn’t want the Romans here he would send them away. But I feel sorry for him, having someone like Priscilla for a mother. She can’t even ride.” The two disheveled girls disappeared into their room, oblivious to Hulda’s admonitory words. The door closed, and the lamplight was cut off.

  Boudicca stood in the darkness a moment longer. The big fire was dying, its flames a gentle glow, and fewer freemen and chiefs ambled back and forth, silhouetted against it. Night had fallen, full and soft, but as yet the moon had not risen, nor had the stars become wholly visible. There was no sound from the room behind her where Prasutugas lay on the bed, stiff and unsleeping, and she did not consider going back to talk with him. As yet, there was nothing more to say. The night air was still chilled with the fading ghost of winter and she shivered, but her cloak lay inside that fast-shut door and not for anything would she have gone to pick it up. She stepped off the porch and walked alone through her town, flitting past huts full of chatter and laughter, feeling like a being from somewhere else, from a star perhaps—not human, not wanted, not of the earth but of the night and the wind. I did not know, she thought as the gray paths glided by under her b
are feet. I did not know that more than half of me is Prasutugas and without that half I am a wraith, gibbering helplessly in the cold. Is any cause worth this terrible self-destruction? If there is a choice between my husband and freedom—if it has come to that—is one worth anything without the other? Has it come to that? She stopped outside her bard’s doorskins and rapped softly on the lintel. “Lovernius, are you there?” she called, and presently the skins were pushed back and he greeted her and ushered her in. His hut was bare of hangings or fripperies. He had only his bed, a table for his lamp, and his harp. Yet his home was warm and welcoming, as though its walls had absorbed something of the music that he made, sitting by himself in the evening, forming an invisible blanket of sweetness. He stepped with her into the room, his quick eyes on her tear-swollen face.

  “Have you come to gamble, Lady?” he enquired. She sat on his cot and folded her arms yet again, groping for an assurance of substance. She felt fragile and empty.

  “I have given up gambling with you, Lovernius. You either cheat or have become too expert for me, I don’t know which,” she said with an attempted humor. Her arms clutched tighter. “I have spoken with Prasutugas. He got the news from Favonius. As usual, he will do nothing.”

  “It is not usual for him to reduce you to tears, Lady,” he answered forthrightly.

  Her tears began again with his refusal to circle her distress. “He is afraid that I will incite rebellion here in Icenia,” she said brokenly. “He will put me away from him if I do. He said so. He has never threatened me thus before, Lovernius. He does not say it, but he means that if he must choose between me and Rome then he will choose Rome.”

  Lovernius squatted before her, looking up into her face. “I do not think so. He is simply begging you not to force him to the point where that choice must be made. He must consider all of Icenia, Boudicca, not just his family. And in his eyes, Rome is good for Icenia. You must never force that choice upon him, for he will indeed choose Rome, and then die of a broken heart. If the choice between your husband and freedom for Albion was put before you, what would you do?”

  “I do not know!”

  “And neither does he. You must trust each other, for if you cease to trust then your marriage is finished.”

  Trust. She loosened her arms. Yes, that was the heart of the matter. Not Rome or freedom or love or hate, but trust. He did not trust her anymore. She should have told him about the weapons, she should have assured him that it meant little. But she had not told him because it did not mean little. It meant much, it meant everything, and she could not lie to him. Sometimes, living is worse than dying, she thought bitterly. To die is simple. To live is too hard. She rose abruptly. “Lovernius,” she said. “I want to hunt tonight.”

  He nodded. “If you like. I don’t know what game we can flush though, Lady. The wolves have gone away now that spring has come but we should be able to find a boar, even in the dark.”

  “I do not want a wolf,” she went on quietly, “or a boar. I want to hunt the Annis.”

  He felt the blood leave his face. “What?”

  She turned swiftly to him, and in her eyes he saw such anger, such pain, that for a moment he was afraid of her. Then he understood. Like her father before her, her wounds could only be healed under the balm of furious action. She was a creature of movement, not contemplation. I hurt, those big eyes told him. I have never hurt like this in all my life before, and I must hit back or die of my pain.

  Nevertheless he tried to dissuade her. “An Annis has not been set loose since your father’s time,” he objected. “If we are caught, Favonius will have us executed immediately. Besides, there is no time for the ceremonies of choosing.”

  “There will be no choosing.”

  “The season is not right,” he went on desperately. “Winter has gone and spring is well advanced.”

  “I do not want to kill winter,” she shot back. “We will kill Rome. Rome is our eternal winter. Rome is our Annis. No choosing, Lovernius. Get me a Roman. Turn out the hounds.”

  “Lady,” he pleaded, “think again. It is a terrible thing, to hunt the Annis. It will reawaken the demons.”

  “Yes it is a terrible thing,” she agreed, “but the times are terrible also, Lovernius. I will direct the powers of the forest toward Rome.”

  “If they do not turn to rend us instead. I am afraid, Lady.”

  “Then I will hunt on my own. I don’t care. Have there been any foxes snared lately?”

  “Ethelind brought one in yesterday,” he admitted reluctantly. “She cut off the brush for Marcus, but the carcass hangs outside the Council hut.”

  “Are there chiefs to hunt with us?”

  “There are chiefs who are loyal to the cause of freedom, Lady, but none whom I would dare approach to hunt an Annis.”

  “Then it is you and me.” She was still crying, but Lovernius saw that she was unaware of the tears that had already soaked the neck of her blue tunic. “There is always a soldier sent to the river from the garrison, to draw water for the morning. We will take him.”

  “He will be missed.”

  “Of course he will be missed!” she shouted. “But if he is found, Favonius will believe that the wolves got him.”

  “In the spring?”

  “What other explanation will there be? A Roman Annis, Lovernius. It is right. It is just. Now go and leash the hounds. I will bring the fox and meet you by the river, where it flows closest to the garrison.”

  They left the hut and parted, Lovernius creeping unseen to the kennels and Boudicca to the Council hut, now quiet and empty but for the few chiefs who had been too drunk to find their own hearths and had curled up on the warm sheepskins on the floor. The night held the town under a wide, star-splattered sky, and the wind was drowsy and fitful. The huts no longer showed light under their doorskins or spilled the warmth of human commerce into her ears. They humped solid and black like tombs, the now-risen moon giving them streaming dark shadows through which she waded silently. The fox was not hard to find. Boudicca’s questing fingers brushed its cold, soft pelt, and she drew her knife and cut the rope that held it to the eaves of the hut. She slung it over her shoulder and began to make her way to the low stone wall that surrounded the town, and then to the silver and soft blackness of the meadow beyond.

  Lovernius was waiting for her, six hounds leashed and muzzled beside him, and as she ran in under the darkness of the trees they smelled the fox she carried and began to whine. She dropped the dead beast with a thud onto the grass and Lovernius hauled back the dogs.

  “You wait here,” she whispered. “There are four sentries standing watch tonight instead of two—I suppose because of the alert—and if they hear the dogs they will come and investigate. I will waylay the water carrier.”

  “No need,” he whispered back. “I nearly ran into a sentry in the woods to the west of the town. Favonius must be taking his orders seriously and has placed men under the trees, but singly, not in twos. He is not very clever, our commander. Take one of them, Boudicca and I will go deeper into the forest, north, away from the river.” She thought for a moment, then nodded, and he picked up the fox, kicked at the dogs, and was gone.

  With a steady, purposeful silence Boudicca worked her way through the trees until the garrison lay between her and the river and she had counted three soldiers standing uneasily just within the eaves of the forest, their backs to the garrison’s squat security and their faces to the slow-shifting night shades of the trees. They were out of sight of each other and out of earshot, also, Boudicca thought, but she would take no chances. She chose the fourth man after watching him carefully for some time. He was nervous, changing his weight from one sandal-clad foot to the other, turning to face the garrison, peering to right and left, his hand never leaving the hilt of his gladius. She wriggled closer to him, blending with the ever fluid shadows, came around to his back, then stood and stepped to his side, clamping one strong hand over his mouth and hissing in his ear.

  “D
o not be alarmed, soldier. It is only I, Boudicca. Do not cry out.”

  His fingers clawed at her arm and his eyes rolled toward her. Before he could drag her hand from his face she whispered again. “The men of the west are coming. My bard and I have caught one of their scouts but we dare not march him to the garrison alone. Please come. Do not disturb your friends. They should stay where they are in the event that more scouts have broken through into Icenia.”

  He was bewildered, she could see his doubt. Taking a chance, she released him and tugged at the short sleeve of his tunic. “Follow me,” she called softly, moving away from him. “Hurry!” She did not look back, but after a while she could hear him trotting after her, breathing heavily. Smiling, she quickened her pace until he began to pant. Annis, her feet rustled to her, blind Annis, black Annis, even if you wanted to turn back now you could not.

  Already the spells have begun to coil around you, already Andrasta has turned her gaze upon you. She led him north for two miles and then veered west, slowing so that he could catch up with her.

  “What were you doing so far from the town?” he asked her, now into his second wind and jogging by her side.

  She glanced across at him and grinned. “Hunting” was all she said, yet there was something in the way she said the word that caused him to look over his shoulder. He was not sure where he was. Each dusky tree resembled the one next to it and the one after that, an infinity of night-painted trees, and suddenly all the stories he had heard about Icenia’s chameleon, blood-drinking goddess came back to him. He had laughed at this primitive deity who could transform herself into a raven and go flapping about in the forests. His commander had instilled in him a scorn for her, together with a distaste for the Druids who served her, but now, deep into the vast oak groves that even in daylight seemed to trap some dark essence of night, her presence sprang into life. The Icenian lady did not seem afraid. She half-ran, half-loped in the natives’ awkward gait that nevertheless covered the ground without tiring the runner, her eyes ahead, her hair tangled on her shoulders, her limbs moving in a weird, complex rhythme. She did not look as she usually did. There was something foreign in her face. Her eyes were swollen, as though she had been weeping, and as she ran her lips moved. They had come farther than he had imagined they would and she showed no signs of stopping. He wanted to rest, to grasp her arm, drag her to a halt and demand from her a new explanation, but the impulse seemed to die before it reached his body, and the sense of unreality grew around him. They hurried on.