“Please, Nasica,” she whimpered. “How could I know? Everything went wrong.”
“Everything always goes wrong around you, you greedy, grasping whore!” he spat. “The governor will not be happy when he hears about this, and I shall make sure he hears it all! It is time a praetor was appointed to set things to rights here. Brigantia is too strategically important to leave in your inept hands.”
“My people would not obey a praetor!” she snapped back, rallying out of her desperate shock. “How many men can Rome spare to patrol where my chiefs patrol? You are dreaming, commander.”
“No, you are the dreamer,” he growled between clenched teeth. “Rome is the master of Albion, and every day of your rule is a day of sufferance from the governor. Even your life belongs to Rome. You forget this, Cartimandua. Rome lifted you up. Rome will cast you down. You have drained blood and manpower from the Ninth just once too often in your foolish persecution of your husband. From now on you are on your own.” He turned away, and though she felt as though she would collapse with the humiliation, she called after him.
“Nasica! Venutius…the rebels…”
He stopped and shouted over his shoulder, “They were beaten, but just barely. I left their dead to be picked over by the wolves. Venutius lives. Try your aging charms on Valens next time, Cartimandua. He has been quartered far from female company for a long time and may not be too particular by now. He might even send you soldiers next time you are in trouble, if the price is right. You make me sick!” He vanished into the murk but Aricia could not move. She was trembling with cold and drenched to the bone. Nasica’s scornful words hammered her like the cold needles of the storm, but she could not think of his threats, not yet, nor of how close she had come to annihilation at the hands of the men of the west. She knew the dream would come to her that night.
Emrys, Madoc, and Venutius pulled back into the forest. Without surprise their battle with the Ninth had cost them dear. It had been on ground that was not of their own choosing, and even if the autumn rains had not begun, they knew that the chance for a major thrust against the Twentieth and so into the lowlands had gone by. They knew that they would go back to their old, wearisome tactics that winter—carving up patrols, attacking baggage trains, resisting the attempts of the Twentieth to wrest just a little more of the border lands from their hands, and fighting to regain the Silurian territory and to keep the area too troublesome for the erection of a permanent fort. Emrys had gone to Domnall when they were at last safe around a welcoming fire. The Druids were going from chief to wounded chief in the thin rain that pattered through leaves which had begun to acquire the dry, yellow tinges of autumn, and shield-bearers and freemen sat oblivious of the wetness, cleaning and polishing weapons dulled and mired by death. He did not approach Venutius. He did not trust himself that far. Domnall was sharpening the arviragus’s great sword. It lay across his knees, and the whetstone ground along its edge with a sound that gritted Emrys’s teeth as he greeted the Brigantian and squatted before him.
“No man will tell me of my wife,” Emrys said gently. “I am spoken to with a cloying pity, as though I were a child to be shielded from evil. Domnall, you give me the words.”
Domnall’s hand came away from the whetstone and the grinding ceased. He wiped his fingers on his cloak and turned the sword over. “Your wife is dead, Emrys.”
“I know that. I have reason to believe that you saw her die.”
Domnall glanced up, then back to his lap. The whetstone once more wove its rough circles. “Who gives you reason?”
“No one. Only rumors.”
“Leave it alone, Ordovician chieftain. She died well, and that is all you must remember.”
Emrys rested his elbows on his knees and linked his fingers together carefully. “How well did she die, Brigantian warrior?”
Domnall laid the whetstone aside abruptly and put both palms flat on his master’s sword, but he did not look at Emrys again. “The Lady of Brigantia stood Sine and the young chief on the wall and offered their lives in exchange for the arviragus. He was ready to give himself to her, but Sine forbade him. She said that she would not have the responsibility. The lady cut her throat and threw her over the wall.”
For a long time both men were still. Then Emrys said, “Where is her wolf mask?”
“I do not know. She was not wearing it when I saw her last.”
Emrys rose. “Thank you, Domnall,” he concluded softly and walked away, but Domnall sat on, his task forgotten, his eyes blind to the stained sword under his hands.
The rains did not let up. Autumn came in sodden and sulky, and the leaves dropped still half-green from the trees to mix with the mud at their feet. Rain turned to sleet and then to snow, heavy and thick, and in the mountains nothing stirred. It was impossible campaigning weather even for the rebels, who kept to their little tents and slept. In the forts the soldiers gambled and gossiped, bored and quarrelsome. Madoc nursed his stiffening joints, drank as much sour beer as he could get apportioned to him, and spent hours telling stories to his sons. Venutius sat in his tent, listening critically to the few spies who brought stale news to him and sharing with Domnall, in an unspoken empathy, his self-reproach and the bitterness of his failures. If it had not been for his mad hunger to see his wife, to kill her, to make her suffer at the expense of all else, they might now be knocking at the governor’s door in Camulodunon. He had served his people ill, he had betrayed them cruelly, and that knowledge etched new lines of harshness into his face. Only Emrys ranged abroad, roaming the silent, winter-shrouded hills, seeking, in the tumbled rise and fall of the cliffs and the ragged grayness of the forests, a way to be whole again. But the soaring of the glistening peaks belonged to Sine, and the blinding sparkle of new sun on ice was hers also. The deep tracks of deer and wolf, the cold chatter of water over stones, even the air itself, chill and unflavored, told him only that she and he together had formed memories in these mountains that would stay on his tongue, in his nostrils, before his eyes, for as long as he was forced to wander among them. He wept with the streams, he called her name with the knifing winter wind. At night the wolves howled for her, the moon sought her, but though she spoke to him from the depths of each precipitous valley he walked, she did not come to him. The days were days of the most devastating aloneness. The nights were hours out of a past long gone. When the sun began to warm again he stopped his ramblings. He had come to terms once more with his arviragus, discovering, in his own agony, a tolerance for Venutius’s pain, and the two men were together again when a spy squatted before them in the mud, his breath steaming and his legs caked with rotting snow and old leaves, from ankle to thigh.
“The passes are open, Lords,” he said, “and there is news.”
“Say on,” Venutius urged him.
“The governor is to return to Rome before another winter. The emperor has made up his mind. There will be no withdrawal from Albion. Gallus knows that he will be recalled because he is no longer vigorous enough for active campaigning, and his replacement will be a younger military man.” The spy grinned. “Word is that the emperor wants us dealt with once and for all.”
Venutius stared at him. So there were to be no more chances. He had been given the greatest promise of success the west had had, his luck had blazed more brightly even than Caradoc’s, but he had thrown it away and it would never come again. The west was no longer an incidental nuisance. The west had become the focus of the emperor’s attention, and the emperor would not look away until there was nothing left in the west to see. Emrys did not help him. He sat beside him, saying nothing, but Venutius felt his accusation, his insulting, insupportable pity. So Nero, in a fit of pettish adolescent obstinacy, had made a bid for independence, dismissed his advisors, and… No withdrawal. No more hope. The metal fingers would squeeze tighter, feeling nothing, until the iron fist had curled in on itself and Albion was crushed.
“Is there anything more?” Venutius croaked.
“One scrap of interes
ting speculation. There is talk that Caesius Nasica will go with Gallus, and give the command of the Ninth to another man. He, too, has had enough of Albion.”
Venutius’s red head went down. New men, new enemies, untried, unknown, fresh, eager dogs snarling at his people’s blistered, stumbling heels. He got up, went into his tent, and wept.
Chapter Thirty-Four
THE day was crisp and sunny as Boudicca, Prasutugas, and their train of brightly-cloaked chieftains crossed the border that separated Icenia from the northern reaches of what had been Catuvellaun territory to find a military escort waiting for them. Camulodunon and the new governor lay three days away, two if they rode in haste, but they were in no hurry. The governor had invited them to meet him, dine with him, and see the town. The invitation, brought to them by special messenger, had been most polite, but when Boudicca stood in the Council hut and listened to it, she knew that their attendance was not a matter of choice, and that this Suetonius Paulinus, who had been in Albion scarcely a month, wanted to look them over.
“I wonder if he will be dead before we get there,” she had said maliciously that evening to her husband, and Prasutugas had smiled at her in spite of himself.
“Why should he be? Do you think that Venutius’s spies have become so expert that they can murder a governor in his own town? Since the execution of that man who had been a trusted servant of the administration for years, the one who heard the secrets of every secretary employed in Camulodunon, the Romans have tightened their security.
What a blow to the rebels his death must have been!”
“A blow to Rome as well. How shaken they were to discover sedition even within the sacred precincts of the praetorium! But I was not thinking of murder, Prasutugas.” She sat on the bed and picked up her comb. “Look what happened to Nepos. The emperor selects him with the greatest care and he promises Nero complete success in Albion within three years. He is young, able, the darling of the Roman populace, full of ambition, and he comes bouncing ashore at Londinium to replace Gallus with all the confidence in the world.” She began to tug the comb through her obstinate, curling tresses. “Then Albion takes him. A year later he is as dead as mutton. Such frantic scurryings at Camulodunon! Such tuttings in Rome! With any luck the new governor will take a fever also.”
“But not before we have had the pleasure of being observed by him.”
She shook back her hair, put down the comb, and grinned at his tone of voice. “Prasutugas! Don’t tell me you want to stay home!”
To her surprise, he nodded. “Yes, I do,” and at his calm admission a shadow fell between them, bringing up the familiar anxiety to erase Boudicca’s smile.
“It’s your wound, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes I think that I cannot bear the pain,” he said. “It used to trouble me only in cold or wet weather but now it seems to ache all the time, like a rotten tooth. I can’t remember the days when I was able to hunt or run with the dogs. Boudicca, I must face it. I think that I will die of this wound.”
I faced it long ago, she thought as she sat with downcast eyes, not knowing what to say to him. There was a time when I used that knowledge to berate you, but no longer. Only someone without pity would be so cruel, for I see death stalking you every day. “Shall I go alone, and carry your apologies to this Paulinus?” she said aloud to him.
“Thank you,” he replied softly. “Thank you, my dearest. How impossible it is for you to disguise your feelings! You would hate nothing more than to go to Camulodunon on your own, yet I know you would do it, for me. No, Boudicca, I must make the journey. I do not want the governor to be able to say that my allegiance to Rome sits lightly on my shoulders.” She had said nothing more, but now, looking across at him, pale and stooped on his horse, his eyes on the approaching Roman escort, she cursed herself for not insisting that he stay in the sunny comfort of his town. He already looked close to collapse but she knew better than to interfere until he asked for her aid.
The officer and cavalry cantered up and saluted. “I am Julius Agricola, the governor’s second-in-command,” he said cheerily. “The governor extends his greeting to you and so do I.” He allowed his eyes to hold theirs for a moment but he knew better than to stare as he would have liked to do. He had stood by Paulinus as Catus Decianus, the procurator, had shown the governor the figures that told of Icenia’s security and wealth. No other tuath paid such monstrous taxes each year, but then no other tuath could boast that its freemen lived like chieftains and that even its peasants could afford the pleasures of imported wine and pottery. He had read the reports on Icenia’s ruling house. A ricon who was wise, gentle, and totally committed to peace, and his wife who was impetuous, rude, and openly hostile to everything from Roman wine to Roman coin. Yet the marriage had worked for sixteen years, and Agricola found his interest aroused. He had welcomed his commander’s suggestion that it would do no harm to have the pair come to Colchester, and he wondered whether Paulinus had also been titillated by the odd match, but then he rejected the notion. Speculation, unless it took the form of productive military musing, was not one of the governor’s pastimes.
The Brigantian ricon, Cartimandua, had already been the governor’s guest, and Agricola, fresh from Aricia’s double-talk and endless innuendoes, was looking forward to what was reputed to be the Icenian lady’s abrasive and mannish wit. His glance brought him disappointment, and her response to his greeting a deeper disappointment. She did not look like a man in woman’s dress. She was tall, certainly, and well-built, but the turn of her wrists was graceful and the waving curls of red hair escaping from her four braids stirred against a face that was neither cragged nor harsh. The brown eyes, fanned at the corners by age, regarded him politely but indifferently and the large mouth smiled cordially as she thanked him for his words. Her husband seemed ill. His handsome, tranquil features were gray and the lines around his mouth had been placed there by pain. He looked much older than she, though Agricola knew that he was not, and the loose blond hair was too heavy with silver for a man only just approaching middle age. You have had a hard life, Agricola thought in surprise. The years have brought more sorrow to you than to your wife. How strange.
They rode on together for several hours, stopped and ate under the trees, then pressed forward again, talking of inconsequential things. Agricola’s initial disappointment in Boudicca began to fade. Holding a conversation with her was like cautiously testing cooking water—one never knew whether one’s fingers would be burnt. She answered every question decisively and frankly, her deep voice purring or scraping, and she spoke her mind with no attempt at evasion or feminine subterfuge. He began to see why she was always described as mannish. So she was, but not unpleasantly so. He was not charmed, and she was not the kind of woman to charm a man. But he was vividly impressed. He noticed that she rode close to her husband, and both her eyes and the eyes of their silent chiefs were on him constantly. Prasutugas himself said little. Words seemed to cost him an effort, and once, when his horse tripped and jolted him, he gasped.
Agricola decided to stop for the night, and he ordered out the tents. Autumn was soon to become winter, and though the days were warm at noon, the mornings and evenings turned breath to steam and reddened noses and knuckles. A big fire was kindled. Servants prepared hot food and heated the wine, but though Prasutugas drank it gratefully, his eyes closed, Boudicca brusquely refused it and sat with breech-clad legs crossed on the naked earth, quaffing cold mead with an evident relish that bordered on impudence. When darkness fell and the company went to their tents, Agricola stayed by the fire, his orderly beside him, watching the sliver of light from the Icenian couple’s lamp steal out under the tent’s flap.
At midmorning they came upon a work detail. The road had dwindled at the foot of a heavily wooded hill, but now half-naked Trinovantian slaves with iron collars around their necks groaned under the weight of great slabs of rock, while their overseer stood by them, whip in hand.
“The original track went over the
hill,” Agricola told them, “and our road ceased at the foot and continued on the other side. But as you can see, we have decided to link the road by scouting the foot. The trees have been felled and cleared away, the embankment raised, and the ditches dug. We must detour, I am afraid, but not far.”
He turned his horse in under the trees that had lined the road and Prasutugas followed him, but Boudicca and Lovernius sat on, unable to move, watching the perspiring brown backs bend under loads no freeman would touch. The slaves staggered up the embankment, two by two, the dusty slabs dragged, pushed, and carried between them, the muscles of the naked legs bulging under the strain, and the sinews of the broad shoulders standing out like living cords. Black matted hair hid each face. The Trinovantian heads were as bowed as their lacerated backs, and Boudicca, looking over them slowly, saw three or four Catuvellaunians among them, their blond and brown hair tied back clumsily, their skin honey golden. Pity and anger budded in her stomach, and she could not have ridden on even if she had wanted to. At last the two silent, mounted watchers were noticed. One of the slaves lifted his head to wipe his face and saw them. He stood still immediately, and his companion looked up also. Soon, five or six of them were looking steadily at the green-clad lady and her bard, with eyes that held such hatred, such hot contempt, that Boudicca was paralyzed. The centurion was on them in a moment and the whip whistled and fell, but the men still stood there, and dumb, smoulder ing bitterness reached out from them to sting the Iceni. Boudicca finally found her voice.
“Tell me, centurion,” she called. “Did these men dig the ditches and raise the embankment?”
“They did,” he growled unwillingly.
“And what are they doing with the rocks?”
The Eagle and the Raven Page 80
