“Then do not try, Arviragus,” she called to him lightly. “You are lord of my death. Greet Emrys for me.”
Aricia sensed that more than words had been passed between them all, that nothing she might do or say would impinge upon the decisions they had already taken. Once again the invisible wall loomed, threatening and impenetrable, and rage rose in her also.
“This is your last chance to prove your honor,” she yelled at Venutius. “I offer these two lives in exchange for you. Leave your sword and shield with Domnall and come within the gate, and I will release my prisoners. If you refuse and continue the fight I will slay them, and before you can breach my gate the Ninth will be here.”
“Do not listen to her, Lord!” Sine called again. “The price is too high to pay. Even Emrys would not pay it.”
I know, he thought with anguish, I know, Sine, for he said as much to me, out of his grief. Yet I have placed you wantonly in her hands. I need take only ten steps, and my callous selfishness will be washed away. The sun slanted down hot on his back and before his face, so close that he could have touched it, the earthwall exuded an odor of dry soil and warm stone. Without realizing it he placed both palms against the hard-packed earth, as though at his weight it would crumble and bury all his trouble. Caradoc, what would you have done if Eurgain and your son stood under the knife and one word from you would save them? The battered, cruel face of the last arviragus appeared before him for an instant and he groaned aloud. Caradoc would not have hesitated. “Lord,” Sine’s voice floated down to him. “The plans are made, the victory is at hand. You should not have come here. You are needed more than I, more than a thousand men. I fall in battle, that is all, as other women have done before me. Refuse at once, and let the bitch strike!”
But it is not the same, beloved wolf lady, not the same at all! Slowly, he came away from the wall and raised his eyes to his wife. She smiled contemptuously. You still cannot make up your mind, that smile said to him. All your life has been one vacillation after another. The afternoon was so still that he could hear the rough breaths of the men around him. Suddenly he swore, a shout of defiance, a fierce, bestial word that was dredged from the limit of his endurance, and drawing his sword he struck the wall.
“I will not surrender! Farewell, Sine, Manaw. A peaceful journey, a safe journey. Cartimandua, you can harm me no more!”
Aricia nodded to her men. “Hold them. Give me a knife.” It was passed to her and she stroked it reflectively. She had never killed a human being before, but it would be nothing, it would be easy. “This is your last chance, fool!” she screamed down to Venutius, and he shouted back immediately, “No!”
Aricia’s left hand wound itself deep into Sine’s tumbling black hair. “Do you pray, Lady?” she whispered, forcing the chin up, and the graceful brown throat strained. Sine swallowed.
“I do.”
“What for?” Aricia’s arm flew out, then across. A new, deep mouth appeared in the fragile neck. Blood spurted, drenching Aricia to the elbow, and Sine’s body collapsed backward. Aricia dragged it to the lip of the wall and kicked it over, and Venutius stepped back as it rolled loosely, coming to rest against his booted feet. He looked down. The eyes gazed calmly toward the sun. Tendrils of dark hair lay over the bloodied, open mouth. Pain buckled his knees and swelled his own throat and he sank to the ground beside her, then another weight came thudding down. The silence lengthened, deepened. Rebel and Brigantian chieftain alike stood motionless on the field like victims of a Druid’s holding spell, but up on the windy earthwall Andocretus leaned to his mistress.
“Dust, Lady! To the south. Rome is coming.”
Venutius’s force on the perimeter of the engagement had seen it too, and the spell was abruptly broken. Men grasped their weapons again, and Domnall hauled Venutius to his feet. “She has alerted the Ninth!” he hissed. “We cannot fight any more today, we are tired, we must run, Lord.”
Venutius nodded. “Then let us withdraw, quickly. We can surely outrun them on the horses. Send a message to Emrys to leave the forest and meet us immediately.” Domnall sped away, shouting as he went, and the rebels began to leave the field, racing after him. Venutius forced himself to look once more to the top of the wall, but it was empty. Aricia had gone. On an impulse he knelt again and kissed Emrys’s lady and his young kinsman, then he sheathed his sword and broke into a lope, wondering why he did not weep. But the time for weeping had long since past.
Aricia stood in her house, with Andocretus beside her, holding out red-encrusted hands. “I stink,” she said. “The rebels’ blood has a foul odor. Can you smell it?” He shook his head as she moved to the basin, stripping the tunic from her and reaching for the water. She washed slowly and thoroughly, and carefully explored her inner self. There was no hurt, none at all. When she had finished and was clad in a clean tunic she sat in her chair and pointed to a corner of the room. “Pick up that thing, Andocretus, and try it on. I want to know what you see.” He went and got the mask.
“So you kept it,” he said, turning it over gingerly.
“Yes. Put it on.” She watched him intently as he wrinkled up his nose but dutifully lifted it to his face. His fingers flitted over it uncertainly. “Well? What do you see?” she snapped.
“Nothing,” he complained. “It is as dark as night in here. Perhaps I have not fitted it properly.” His eyes blinked at her out of the wolf’s slanted sockets, then he tore it from his face. “It has a strange smell,” he said. “Wet, rotting blooms, soaked, slimed leaves. I do not know how she could bear to wear it.”
“Take it to the metalworker’s shop and have it melted away,” Aricia said sharply. “And send a chief with Rome, to track the rebels. I want to know what is happening. Then come back quickly, Andocretus. I do not want to be alone.”
He took the mask and went out, but he did not go to the metal worker’s shop. Something about the mask fascinated him and he took it to his own hut and hid it under his bed. Many times in the months that followed he lifted it out of the box where he had placed it and spent hours looking at it, but he never again tried it on. The memory of that pressing blackness within it was too real.
Nasica’s auxiliary cohorts caught up with Venutius at dawn the next day. Venutius and his men and horses had been fatigued. They had eventually stopped to eat and sleep halfway through the night. But the primipilus and his soldiers had not stopped, and they gave battle one hour after the sun had risen. The day promised to be cooler. The clouds had moved in to filter the sunlight and a southerly wind brought the damp promise of the first of the autumn rainstorms, but the rebels spared no more than a glance at the weather. Domnall’s message had reached Emrys and the bulk of the rebel host was already pouring like brown smoke across Brigantia’s hills toward the arviragus, but before they could arrive there were a thousand Romans to take care of.
Venutius gave the order to mount and then spoke to Domnall. “Keep the chiefs on the move and tell them not to fight on foot. Only their officers are mounted. Nasica has sent no cavalry. Encircle them, and we will pick away at their flanks. We are in no hurry, and Emrys will arrive before long to help us finish them off.”
The two forces met in the sweet coolness of the morning, the Romans ranked in orderly squares, the chiefs wheeling freely around them in a loose circle that lazily became tighter and smaller. The primipilus, who had not seen action for some time and who had planned his massacre around an expected, mad frontal charge, was nonplussed. With cavalry his job would have been done in half a day, but without mounted soldiers he was vulnerable. He set his slingers and archers to the fore, ordered them to shoot at the horses, not the men, and waited.
By nightfall the issue was still undecided. The rebels had lost most of their mounts but were not much dismayed. They fought with a new steadiness, and the hard-pressed primipilus, watching the bitter, silent struggle, reflected in surprise that the wildmen seemed to be learning their lessons at last. The legate of the Twentieth had said so to his own commander,
and he of all the fort commanders ought to know, but then the Ninth had never faced the west. When darkness fell both sides retired, staggering with weariness, and toward the end of the third watch a soldier came to the primipilus.
“With your permission, sir, I would like to show you something,” he said. The primipilus immediately got up and followed him, and he led him to the outskirts of their camp and beyond, to the crest of a hill that by daylight would have given them a long view west. The sentry dropped to his stomach and wormed his way to the skyline, a moonless roof of blackness above them torn with the white blaze of the stars, and pointed. “If you fix your eyes over there and wait, you will see it.”
The primipilus did as he was bid. At first he could make out nothing but the dark waves of empty land, but then he saw it, a tiny red flicker, then another some way from the first, and then another, all of them miles away and barely visible. He knew immediately what he was seeing, and his heartbeat quickened. Campfires. Dozens, hundreds of them. Campfires in the west, not in the south where the Brigantian lady’s town lay, nor to the east where villages hugged the banks of the numerous rivers that rose in the higher, wooded country. He left the sentry at his post on the hill, strode back to his tent, and called for his subordinate.
“Take a legionary and ride at once to Lindum,” he said. “Tell the legate that a much larger force than he had supposed is seeking engagement, and he must mobilize the rest of the men. Tell him that if he does not, he may face a siege.” He did not need to spell out the rest of the message. A siege could mean the kind of tragedy that had destroyed the bulk of the now-refurbished Twentieth. The man slipped away south and the primipilus prepared for another day of fatigue and blood.
By noon the next day, a day of intermittent drizzle and gusting winds, the primipilus knew that he must retreat or lose every man he had left. Half the rebel force was dead or wounded but he himself had lost all but two hundred of his auxiliaries, and by nightfall the main bulk of the rebel host would have arrived. A retreat across this barren, open country with no forest to melt into, would be near suicide, but to stay would be certain suicide. He ordered his trumpeter to sound the retreat, and his little band closed ranks and prepared to march. He put the slingers in the rear. He had no archers left.
Nasica heard his centurion out with an ominous silence that he did not break until the man had saluted and withdrawn. Then he rose heavily. “I will make no judgment until I have all the facts,” he said loudly to the tribune who had come at his secretary’s call. “Either the primipilus is an idiot, which I know to be untrue, or that Brigantian fiend has once again bungled it and incited her husband to a full-scale attack on Brigantia.” He snatched up his helmet, and at his bellow his servant came scurrying, breastplate in his arms. “Have the troops prepare to make a forced march, every one of them. Send a speculator to Camulodunon, to the governor. Turn out the cavalry. Get them on the move as an advance guard.” Disgust and anger welled within him. “Ah Hades!” he snarled, and pushed his way out the door.
The cavalry came to the relief of the primipilus and his hundred remaining legionaries a day and a half later. By the time Nasica and the rest of the Ninth caught up to them he had time only to swiftly deploy, for Emrys, Madoc, and the western tribes had reached Venutius and his exhausted war band, and Roman and chief at last clashed in full strength. By accident, for there was no time for design, Nasica had the advantage of a hill placement, and he surrounded his men with his fifteen hundred cavalry. Emrys, Madoc, and Venutius strung out their men and women in loose lines, feeling defenceless without rock beneath their feet and at their backs and a forest’s arms under which to hide and regroup. Venutius did not wait for Nasica to order an attack. He ordered a charge on three fronts and his people responded gallantly. He had the satisfaction of seeing the tight Roman block divide in two, the legionaries turning to right and left as his chiefs speared a passage through their midst and flowed up it. But the cavalry had simply moved outward, keeping their positions, waiting for their order, and though Venutius and his host had divided and surrounded the infantry, they themselves were contained by the lances of the mounted soldiers.
Nasica sat on his horse and watched critically. I could knock these wildmen into the greatest fighting force in the world in a year, he thought. It has taken them a long time to grasp the basic elements of civilized warfare but, by Mithras, now they are on the brink of a military sophistication that would make old Aulus Plautius blink. No wonder the Twentieth went down! But the Twentieth has always been too independent for its own good. Valens is a showy fighter, too many fancy tricks up his sleeve. The Ninth cannot be surpassed for sustained courage and solid obedience.
His senatorial tribune cantered up to him and saluted. “The tenth cohort is hard pressed, sir, and the second and third have become separated from the first but they are holding.”
“Very well. Order one cohort of cavalry to the tenth. Swing the fourth cohort lower down the slope.” The man rode away, the trumpets blared, and the battle swirled to new formation. Nasica hunched deeper into his cloak as a thin rain began to fall. It was going to be a long day.
Two days later Aricia stood in the doorway of the Council hall, snuggled deep into her blue cloak, looking out over a gray landscape. The rain had begun to fall in earnest the day before and now it sheeted down, turning the paths of the town into sticky yellow quagmires, and dancing off the dripping thatch of the huts. Sullen water filled all the potholes and dribbled past doorskins. Now the wind was rising, making the streams of rain quiver and undulate and blow wet against her. She hardly felt the new, chilling cold that spoke to her of the approaching autumn. She was anxious. The messenger she had sent to march with the troops that pursued Venutius had not returned. Her eyes vainly quested the northern trackway and encountered only the misted shadow of the gate and beyond it the wreaths of greasy smoke where her dead chieftains were becoming sodden black ashes. They are coming for me, she thought. They have defeated Rome and now they will rise out of the fog like gods. I will see them creeping slowly out of this pall of water, and they will stand me on the wall and cut my throat.
The town was quiet. Freemen squatted by their fires, women mourned dead kinsmen, and out on the hills the shepherds sheltered in the hollows with their dripping sheep, but though a fire crackled brightly in the dry coziness of her Roman house, and Andocretus and his songs were as close as a word from her lips, she had stood hour upon hour with the gloom of the Council hall behind her and her terror gathering ahead.
Andocretus left the shadows and spoke to her. “Come and get warm, Lady,” he said, shivering as the wind sought the undefended door and found him. “Nothing is moving out there, and you will get no news until the rain stops and the ground dries up a little.”
“He is coming for me,” she said dully, her eyes still on the gray day. He laughed shortly, wishing that she would leave the hall and go to her house so that he could run to his own hearth and drink wine and sleep.
“It is simply not possible that the Romans have been defeated and you know it. You are allowing your foolish fancies to make you ill, Aricia.”
She slumped, and her gaze fell to her mud-caked boots. “I suppose you are right. I will go to the house. But bring me men, Andocretus, for I want to be guarded.” She raised her hood and left the frail shelter of the door. He snatched up his cloak and followed her, and together they picked their way toward her private gate and the wet-slicked stone wall. She had almost reached it when a shout spun her on her heel, and she saw a chief toiling to her. Andocretus cursed under his breath, his cloak already heavy with water, as the man came up to them.
“The legate of the Ninth is behind me,” he panted. “He shouted until we opened the gates to him.”
“Well, why are you telling me this?” Aricia yelled at him, relief dissolving the fear. “Of course you let him in! Why did you make him wait?”
“Because you told us not to open for anyone and because he is in a rage.”
She thanked him brusquely and sent him away, and was turning to her gate once more when Andocretus took her arm. “Lady, I think I will wait for you in your house,” he whispered. “Nasica is coming.” He was through the gate before she could answer and she turned and stood still, watching the tall, thick-set commander splash bare-legged through the mud. His short cloak was plastered to his body, and his helmet and breastplate were shining with moisture. His face was grim. He did not look at her as he came up, nor did he greet her, and the fear was back. His men had been defeated, as the Twentieth had been defeated, he was alone, he sought help from her, he…
Then he was facing her, breathing heavily, the round pocks on his face standing out livid against the angry red of his skin. His eyes were cold, as cold as the icy rain that trickled down her throat and soaked the neck of her tunic, and she stepped back, felt the wall behind her, and could go no farther.
“I have lost a thousand men,” he said quietly, and his low tone was more menacing than if he had screamed at her. “A thousand good fighting men dead, do you hear me, Cartimandua? And half that number are wounded. I had to drag out the whole damn legion and march it halfway across your accursed territory and fight every madman out of the west, because of you.”
“I… I do not understand,” she whispered, seeing his lips curve in a brutal smile and the spittle gather in the corners of his mouth. “Surely you did not take the whole legion after Venutius and his war band, you…”
He came closer to her, water coursing down his blunt face, his jaw thrust forward. “I sent you help as you requested, seeing that you could not handle your own petty quarrels, but you did not know that the whole of the west was coming for you, did you? I will fight no more of your wars!” he roared, and she shrank back, the hood falling from her black braids, the rain sticking the hair in tendrils against her scarred cheek, her chin. So it was true. All of them after her, all of them bent on destroying her. Nasica would desert her, it was not her fault.
The Eagle and the Raven Page 79
