The Eagle and the Raven

by Pauline Gedge

  “L…lean and famished…famished…oh my soul…” she stammered, and Venutius, who was also Caradoc, who was also the ghoulish voice that had once played so consummately on every nerve in her body, took two steps toward her, that sickly odor rising in clouds around him.

  “What have you done to me?” he began to shout, and though his hand stayed invisible under the darkness of the cloak she felt the words strike her, on the face, on the breasts, in the stomach, in stripes of pain. She began to sob, but no tears would come. “What have you done to me, to me, to me? I have loved you!” and the blows lacerated and burned.

  “Burning with lost causes, all lost,” she whimpered, her eyes closed so that she need not look. “I do not know you. Who are you?”

  Then the shouting would stop. She would open her eyes onto ball-less sockets, rotten flesh falling from stained bones, red hair that clung in grotesque tufts to a skinless skull, and as she began to scream it spoke for the last time. Its jaw creaked open. “I…am…” and then she would wake.

  She got off the bed and went to sit, still shivering, in the chair by the embers of the night’s fire. I can bear it no longer, she thought dully. Night after night this torment, I will die of it. Who are you, what are you, that comes to tear me apart? Is it blood you want? I no longer sacrifice to Brigantia. Is it my soul you desire? I no longer plead before Sataida either, for I think my soul is dead. Ah, Great Mother, I am so lonely, so alone.

  Through the thin wooden wall came a stirring. Someone sighed and coughed. Domnall, her shield-bearer, was rising from his pallet on floor of the room she would no longer enter, the room where Caradoc had held out his wrists for the chains and looked at her dumbly out of cavernous eyes, the room where Venutius… She reached down to stir the ashes, finding them cool, then stood and began to patter her fingers lightly along the mantel, back and forth, up and down, anything, anything rather than remember. I do not want you, I never wanted you, you clumsy bear, you great oaf of a man! You cried out in your innocence to be used by me, and I used you! What right did you have to leave me? I am your welcome torturer and you are my habitual victim, and how can you live without that daily potion of pain? Is your life not pale and insipid without it? Venutius! You did not come back. It has been years now, two Samains have come and gone, and where are you? You need me, you cannot live without my scorn, my hatred, my body.

  Her fingers suddenly stilled. Her chest ached. And in spite of her fierce forbidding, the memories were there, they had always been there like the dream, night after night, until she knew that she was slowly going mad. Something else had come, too, when Venutius had smeared her with his blood, something she had never before felt in her life, a cringing deep within her whenever she stepped unwillingly onto the treadmill of that one insupportable memory. At last she was able to name it. It was called shame, and neither the embraces of Andocretus, her bard, nor the gold that finally arrived from Lindum, her reward, her blood money for Caradoc, could soothe the cold despair that always waited to overwhelm her.

  Now she walked across the room and pushed the shutters open. The dawn chorus had begun, with a hundred strident voices raised in praise of an invisible sun, and soft, muted light met her, mingled with cold, damp air that promised sleet. It was a chill, bleak winter morning, still and misty.

  “Andocretus,” she called without turning around. “Get up.” After a moment the bedcovers heaved and he sat up yawning. She continued to stand gazing over the town, down to where fog hung in clouds and mingled with smoke from the huts, up to where an invisible slope rose to an invisible, treeless summit. My town, she thought, my hill. All the hills of Brigantia are mine; I ask for nothing more. Then why should I suffer? Behind her Andocretus got out of bed, pulled on his clothes, reached for his harp. He had sung to her last night, perched cross-legged on her bed, and she had knelt behind him, plaiting their long hair together, black and blond, but when he had laid the harp aside and turned to her, and she had drawn him hungrily, peremptorily inside herself, she had known that it was no longer enough. The dream had still come. The memories were still there, haunting the perimeters of her mind. She turned to him, her fingers going absently to trace the thin, silver scar running down her face.

  “Find something to eat,” she said. “And then find me a Druid.”

  He stared at her through eyes bleared with sleep, his face swollen, then her words penetrated and his eyes cleared. He walked to the basin and broke the ice on the water. Splashing his face and neck, he shuddered, then he knelt before the fire, laying sticks on the ashes of the night.

  “That is not possible, Lady,” he replied. “The Druithin can no longer be found unless they choose to be, and no Druid in his right mind, even if I could find one, would consent to come here. If I travel into the west in search of one, I will be killed.”

  She thought for a while, slowly, watching his supple fingers coax a spark from his flint. “I want a Druid—here. I must speak to one.”

  “Then call Domnall. He will know where to look.” Andocretus looked up at her and they exchanged glances, then she went and squatted beside him, holding out her hands to the crackling new blaze.

  “If I let him go, will he come back to me?”

  “He did not go with Venutius when he had the chance. He is bound to you by his oaths.”

  “Honor, honor,” she muttered. “Tell me, Andocretus, do you love me?”

  He smiled faintly into the fire. “Do you need my love, Ricon?”

  “No. I have all of you that I need, your body and your music.”

  “Then I do not love you.”

  Suddenly she enfolded his fair head in both her arms, drawing him to her, and kissed him softly on the forehead. He drew away wonderingly, for she was many things but she was not gentle. “Go and send Domnall to me. He is up, I heard him leave the house.”

  He rose, stretched, and went out quietly, and she banged the shutters closed and began to dress herself, not waiting for her freewoman.

  When her shield-bearer came she was standing with her back to the fire, in her thick green tunic, belted with jet and falling to the floor. A yellow cloak enfolded her, and jet nestled also in her long braids, the color of darkness, the color of her hair. She looked at him for a long time. His straggling black hair met a bushing beard. The dark eyes were cold, and the orange cloak that he always wore concealed wide, solid shoulders. Many times she would like to have taken him to her bed, but something about him forbade her invitation. He was too self-contained, too unapproachable. She held him only by his oaths, and she knew it.

  “Domnall,” she said quietly. “Chieftain of Brigantia. I need your help, and only yours. I would not ask you this if there were any other way.”

  He did not reply. He just stood there, waiting. His very stillness upset her and her hands came up, twined together. “I have a…a dream, that must be interpreted,” she went on hurriedly. “If it is not taken from me I shall go mad! It is sucking the life from me, Domnall, and I cannot bear it anymore. Bring me a Druid!” She had not meant to tell him all those things. His eyes narrowed, but he made no other movement.

  “And where, Lady, am I supposed to find you a Druid?” he said sharply. “Most have withdrawn to Mona, and the rest travel with Madoc and the others in the west. If you order me to do this on pain of oath-breaking I will go, but I am not ready to die just yet.”

  Her fingers writhed about one another. “If you will bring a Druid to me, I swear that I will release you from your oaths to me, and you will be free to go into the west, to Venutius, where your heart is. Ah Domnall, do this thing for me, this hard thing! I am desperate! I am tormented! I know you can find one. You know where to search. Talk to the spies that wander through Brigantia. I know they are there, and so do you. Please!”

  Your promises, Lady, can last a thousand days or a thousand moments, according to your whim, he thought cynically, but looking into her face he saw something he had not seen there before, a defencelessness, a poignant, lost hopelessness, and hi
s chest tightened with pity for her. He inclined his head. “I will go,” he said, “but do not count the days, Lady. My search will be long and difficult. I must have your oath that when and if I return with a Druid you will not molest him or give him to Rome to be slaughtered, and you will let me go from Brigantia with honor.”

  The fingers were stilled. She smiled without warmth. “I swear by the High One, on the grave of my father. And I thank you, Domnall.”

  His eyes widened in surprise and he smiled back briefly, hesitantly. Then he was gone and she turned again to the fire. Venutius, she thought, I miss you. When will you come back to me? But even as she said the words a loathing rose up to choke her, and she saw him weaponless and chained, even as Caradoc had been, and the bewilderment in his eyes brought a taste like honey into her mouth.

  Winter deepened, sat on the land like a stiff, bitter woman, upright and unmoving, and Aricia fought a lonely battle. The dream came to her, fresh in terror each night, and she took to spending the hours of darkness talking to Andocretus and snatching sleep sitting up in the Council hall during the day. It did no good. Sitting or lying, by day or night, the thing came to her, accusing, clouded in the stink that seemed now to assail her nostrils even in her waking moments as though it rose from her own body, or from the earth under her feet.

  Another nightmare was added to the first, constant terror. No progress was being made in the west. Scapula’s successor, Aulus Didius Gallus, had moved swiftly and recklessly during his first month as governor, and the mountain men had once more withdrawn to lick their familiar wounds beside the secret, snow-fed waterfalls. Gallus himself had seen better days. He was well on in years, looked back to a lifetime of dedicated service to the empire, and resented another active post. He had come to Albion with Claudius, bringing the Moesian Eighth Legion with him, and hated the new province on sight. Claudius had soon sent him back to Moesia and later he had become governor of that infinitely preferable country. He had looked forward to serving his time there and then retiring back in Rome. He had seen action against that mystical and wealthy Prince Mithridates, received his surrender, and then gone on to defeat the Moesian Prince Zorzines. He had done his duty, he expected reward. Albion was no reward. It was a sickly, strife-torn, magic-muddled, wet hole that seemed to devour governors like a hungry beast. He had been greeted with frantic relief by his new legates, and before he could wash the salt from his face he had been informed that one of his legions was well-nigh finished and the western tribes were gleefully riding wherever they chose. Wearily, he had called for his maps, pinpointed his strengths and awesome weaknesses on it, and in two months the Fourteenth, the Ninth, and the Second were mopping up the lowlands and the rebels had hurried back to their miserable mountains. There was no reason why the Twentieth should have been defeated, no good reason why the remaining thousands of men should have huddled in their forts like frightened children. No good reason for any of the mess that he resignedly set about to untangle. It was just Albion, a province with a curse on it, a province that had never paid its way and probably never would. He had restored order along his predecessor’s western frontier and doubled the number of troops patrolling it. He had talked to the procurator and looked at his ledgers—red, always red—and had decided that if over the next year or two the situation did not improve and stabilize he would recommend a complete withdrawal from Albion. Failure, costly and futile, and the emperor would not like it, but, still, he looked gloomily at the maps, tracing with a fatalistic finger the thin, snaking lines of his borders. So much country was still in the hands of the natives, almost the whole of the west, and the far north had not yet even been explored. For ten years Rome had fought for Albion, and yet so far it had not even been necessary to produce new maps. He had flooded Siluria with men, cleaning out pockets of resistance with distaste and boredom as though he were sweeping a house that might always be filthy, but he himself had not left Camulodunon. He had spent his time in his office, brooding, counting off the days of his bondage like a school child waiting for his holiday.

  Since then, like some unholy, demon-filled body that has been stabbed again and again and yet refuses to die, the western tribes had fought on. A garrison fell here, a posting station burned there, an unwary cohort was never seen again, and though Roman reprisals were swift, it seemed to Aricia that the soldiers themselves, like her, watched almost paralyzed as the shadow of freedom for the west loomed steadily larger. She had heard all this from Caesius Nasica, Legate of the Ninth. She ordered men to her borders and spent much time wondering what Madoc and Emrys, and Venutius also, would do with her if they fought their way to her door. Perhaps they would give her a choice. Burning, drowning, or the swift blessing of a clean sword to end every dream, every pricking symptom of insanity. She saw them, the people she had never seen, in her imagination, slithering toward her over her snowy white hills, their eyes fixed greedily on her.

  Andocretus laughed at her fears, sitting opposite her by the fire, clad only in his breeches. “When have the tribes ever held an inch they have gained?” he said cheerfully.

  “They feed on lost causes, dreaming, sucking strength from them. But Rome has no cause. Romans inhabit this world only, and so they will triumph.”

  Burning with lost causes… Ah Sataida. Will no one save me? Rescue me from this pit into which I have fallen? “You are wrong,” she said harshly. “Nothing is so potent a force as a dying cause. If Rome wants peace in Albion she will have to execute every western man, woman, and child.”

  “In that case she will. What ails you, Lady?”

  “I want to die.”

  He sat watching her shrewdly, then he reached down beside him and lifted his harp. “A new song came to me this morning,” he said lightly. “Would you like to hear it? There will always be music, Aricia, and good mead, and white teeth gleaming in laughter, and black hair swinging under the sun. Let those without music or love fight the wars.”

  “You are a bard to your very bones,” she said dully. “Help me, Andocretus. “

  He sang to her with his smiling eyes fixed on her, his rich tenor lilting with the lift and fall of the shadows, plucking the strings of his little harp with delicate fingers. But when he had finished she knelt before him, gripping his legs fiercely, her face buried in the red cloth of his breeches. “It is not enough anymore,” she whispered, and he laid the harp aside and took her in his arms.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  SPRING came to Aricia like a jaded old whore, draped in false beauty to hide rampant decay. Domnall came also, grim and tired, plodding through the blinding wall of cold rain. He squatted before her in her house, too weary to stand, and water ran from him like tears.

  “I have brought the Druid,” he said tersely. “She waits on the porch.”

  “She? You have brought me a woman?”

  He smiled. “I have brought you a Druid. I have sought long, and faced many dangers, and I came upon this Druid with the Silurian women and children.”

  “Did you see…did you see…?”

  He rose at last. “No, I did not. Do you think I am mad, Lady? And now let me remind you of your oath. This Druid came because I gave her my word that she would not be harmed.”

  “I need no reminding! But I ask you, Domnall, to stay with me as my shield-bearer for a little while longer.”

  “I will for as long as the Druid stays. No longer.”

  Resignation, fatigue, a stubborn uncomplaining stoicism, all these things she heard in his words and read in his face. With a gesture she ordered him out, feeling as though she were trying to shout to him over a high wall. “Very well. If the Druid has eaten, send her in.”

  “She has eaten.” He nodded and went out, leaving the door open. Rain gusted in, soaking her fine sheepskin rugs, and she became aware of it thrumming on her Roman roof like the hoofs of war, or the thunderous sweep of the Raven of Battle. Then a shadow darkened the doorway, divided the streaming water, came forward closing the door behind it, and turned. Qui
et reigned once more.

  Aricia held out her hand. “Welcome to Brigantia,” she said. “Rest and peace.”

  Before her was a thin, brown face, round eyes like black pebbles, and brown, wet-slicked hair. The Druid’s coarse-spun cloak, caked about the hem with black mud, seemed too full and heavy for such a slight, short body. The feet were bare.

  “Not for me,” she replied, refusing the hand, her voice high and light like a child’s. “I serve the master and the Raven of Battle, in that order. Neither one offers me rest or peace.” She took off her cloak and laid it on the bed. The white tunic beneath was spotless. Spindly wrists jutted from the voluminous sleeves, and with a horrified fascination Aricia saw the thick silver bracelet, the silver ring on the brown hand. Snakes writhed there, silver fangs and forked tongues, in the same twisting, convoluted patterns of the brooch Gladys had given her long ago. The beginning and the end, she thought, paralyzed, the beginning… the end. Let me out!