The Eagle and the Raven

by Pauline Gedge

  Once outside she ran across the courtyard to her tethered horse, mounted quickly, and whipped the beast into a gallop, disappearing into the woods.

  The legionary closed the door and Favonius and the secretary looked at each other.

  “Decianus is pushing too hard,” the secretary said matter-of-factly. “When Prasutugas dies the estates will come under the imperial seal as a matter of course. Why is he in such a hurry?”

  “He is making his own profit first, as usual,” Favonius replied heavily. “If I protest I will lose my post, but I may have to send some kind of objection if any chiefs are killed.” He shuffled through the papers before him. “I like both Prasutugas and Boudicca, you know, and it angers me when I see our relationship with the barbarians put in jeopardy by the greed of one man. If Decianus knew Boudicca as I know her, he would think twice about such high-handed dealings.” The secretary maintained a polite silence, and Favonius put away his uneasiness. “Well?” he grunted. “What’s next?”

  Boudicca left her horse at the stable and strode to the hall. Lovernius stood waiting, his gambling dice clicking in his restless hands, his harp slung over one shoulder. As she came up to him he ran forward. “What did he say, Lady?”

  “Nothing!” she snapped. “He said nothing, he will do nothing. And we are as defenceless before Decianus as pheasants in a tree. How is Prasutugas?”

  “He is very weak. I sang for him, and Brigid came and told him stories, but he fell asleep.” The scored, homely face turned to her in worry. “What can we do?”

  She was stiff with bitterness. “Nothing, nothing, nothing! It is too late. The chances have passed us by, Lovernius, and we must suffer the fate we chose all those years ago. Prasutugas spoke the words of welcome to Rome, and Rome said thank you, we will take it all, but do not worry, because for your generosity you may share our peace.”

  Boudicca turned and walked to her little hut. Someone had to order the tuath, and while he lived it had to be her. Some months ago she had moved from the house, leaving it to her husband. She could no longer bear his agony, the odor of rotting flesh that surrounded him, and the broken nights and anxious days. Nor could she bear to see him hour after hour, lying tormented in the bed they had shared so joyfully together. Sometimes, when he felt a little stronger, his chiefs would carry him carefully outside to sit in the sun and she would come to him and sit at his feet, her head against his thin knees. But the burden of his dying and the increasingly agonizing problems of the tuath often drove her to her own hut where she paced in silence, struggling to keep one step ahead of death and chaos. She no longer berated him. No hint of the tuath’s distress was allowed to disturb him. Favonius visited him occasionally to talk of hunting. The girls told him jokes. Lovernius played and sang for him. But Boudicca herself came to him with silence, and he was not deceived. Words of apology struggled within him but were suffocated under the weight of his ever present pain, and he could do no more than speak with difficulty of the weather, the feasts, the state of his vast herds. Before the Romans came he would have been killed and a new lord elected, but the Icenian chiefs were no longer devotees of the old ways. They worshipped other gods, the gods of riches and peace, and only Boudicca and a few of her own train still stood regularly in the groves of Andrasta, holding out empty hands to the savage, war-hungry Queen of Victory.

  She pushed past the doorskins, ripped off her cloak and tossed it on her bed. She glanced at the dead fire and then sank into her chair and put her head in her hands. Quiet and darkness lapped at her and she exhaled in a long exhausted sigh. Now what do I do? The question had no answer. There was nothing to be done, and the days of hope in revolt were over. The island lay in Roman hands, and soon the long, stubborn resistance of the west would be a thing of memory.

  Brigid found her an hour later still slumped in her chair, her long legs flung out before her and her head pillowed on one shoulder. The girl touched her gently.

  “Mother, are you asleep?”

  Boudicca opened her eyes and smiled faintly. “No, not asleep, just thinking. You wanted to talk to me, didn’t you?” She sat up. “I am sorry, Brigid. This is not the best birthday for you.”

  “Oh, but it is! That’s why I must talk to you.” The young voice faltered. “It’s about…about Marcus.”

  Now Boudicca was fully aware. “Tell me,” she said, but Brigid found it hard to begin. She stammered, avoided her mother’s eye, blushed, and twisted her fingers together— and Boudicca saw all there was to see in the changing expressions that flitted across the fresh, eager face. At last Brigid found her courage.

  “He told me that he loves me. He told me today, on my birthday. He wants us to be wed before he leaves. I know that it is his place to speak to Father on the matter and not mine, but Father is so ill, and anyway…” Her voice trailed off. Anyway, Father no longer rules the Council, she had been about to say, and Boudicca was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of despair. She sat watching the clear, untroubled eyes, the soft hands that had gripped neither sword nor spear, the sweet breathless innocence of the childlike mouth. She thought of herself at that age, already a formidable sword-woman, ready to be blooded like a man. I have betrayed you, Brigid, she thought. Your father insisted on this dangerous sheltering for you and Ethelind, but I could have done something. I could have taught you the lore of your people, betrothed you quickly to a young chieftain, taken you into the woods and shown you the weapons buried deep, against a day that may never come. But I did not trust you, and perhaps what I did was not wrong. You and Ethelind and Marcus.

  “Brigid, I want to tell you something.” She spoke evenly, without emotion. “Marcus is very young. He is just beginning a long and arduous career that could take him all over the empire. A wife will only hold him back, and I’m sure Favonius will point that out to him. He has no money. He is not ready to marry yet, not for many years. You have grown up together, and perhaps your father was wrong in allowing you so much freedom. Marcus is a good young man, but he is not for you.”

  The violet eyes filled with tears. “Then you are refusing us? Just like that? He loves me, Mother, and I love him more than anyone else!”

  “Brigid,” she said deliberately, “he is a Roman.”

  A moment of resentful silence hung between them, then Brigid went and sat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t care what he is. Roman, Brigantian, Silurian, why should I care? I love him, and nothing else matters!”

  “The survival of this tuath matters,” Boudicca snapped back. “The honor of the people matters. Right now the Romans are stealing our flocks and herds, they are chaining our freemen and taking them away, and while you play in the fields with the son, the father sits in his comfortable office and will not help us. Right now, Brigid, right now while we talk! Can’t you hear the wailing of the people? Rome brought this! And Marcus! They are the conquerors!”

  “No,” Brigid faltered. “Marcus is not like that. He would help if he could, I know he would. He loves this tuath. He doesn’t want to go to Rome—Icenia is his home.”

  “But he will go to Rome, and there he will remember that he belongs to an empire. He will forget us, Brigid, and his memories of you will be of a simple, pretty little barbarian who amused him when he was too young to know any better.”

  “No!” The tears poured down her face but she did not move. “You don’t understand! He has always been a brother to me! We learned to ride together, we snared our first rabbits together, I have never lived without him and oh, Mother, if I have to live without him now I will die!”

  Boudicca got up, reached down, and, grasping Brigid’s trembling arms she pulled the girl to her feet and thrust her face close. “Listen, Brigid. If you wed a Roman the tuath will cast you out. Do you know what that means?”

  “But those days are gone! Father said so!”

  “They are coming back. Every herd driven south, every child torn from his mother and chained to be shipped to Gaul, brings them closer. Your father is dying, Brigid, and whe
n he is dead Favonius and Priscilla will go away. A praetor will come, and a Roman town will spring up here, where we stand. The Iceni will have ceased to be.”

  Brigid raised puzzled eyes to hers. “Well, what is wrong with that?”

  A surge of terror and loss took the power from Boudicca’s limbs and she released her daughter. She went unsteadily to the door. “I want to refuse you,” she said, “but I cannot. It must rest with Favonius. It is too late to undo the harm that has been done, and my ears are full of a suffering far greater than yours, Brigid. You may wed Marcus, if his father agrees.”

  Brigid sat looking at her, uncertainty chasing the bewilderment from her face as her mother swept from the room and the doorskins fell closed behind her.

  Favonius looked at the glowering, mutinous face of his son.

  “You are not being reasonable, Marcus. It is far too soon for you to take a wife. Why, she would be nothing but a millstone around your neck, and at a time when you will need every denarius you can scrape together and all your energies will be going into your work. Besides, she’s a barbarian.”

  Marcus flushed hotly. “That has nothing to do with it! In all the years we’ve been friends together the thought has never crossed my mind, and I believed you to be above such prejudice as well. You know, Father, the great Aulus Plautius married a barbarian.”

  “He was much older than you when he did so, and he knew his own mind. Can you face the displeasure of your superior? The sniggers of the friends you will make in Rome? Have you considered that it might ruin your career?”

  Marcus glanced away and Favonius absently toyed with the stylus in his fingers, a frown on his face. “You are letting sentiment override good sense, Marcus. She’s young and pretty, but Rome is full of young and pretty girls, most of them a good deal more civilized than Brigid. You will forget her as the months go by.”

  Marcus folded his arms, a glare of obstinacy in his eyes. “What I feel for her is not sentiment. I don’t give a damn for Rome, not really, and I don’t know what you mean by ‘civilized.’ If you mean well-educated and rich, then I’m not civilized either.”

  “That’s not what I mean!”

  But it was, Favonius reconsidered. Marcus had spent his childhood running wild over the marshes and forests of Icenia, and his father knew his arguments were so much rubbish to a youth who knew more about the habits of the deer than he did about rhetoric. Marcus didn’t care a fig for philosophy. Favonius felt himself trapped. He himself was a loyal Roman through and through, but he realized with a strange pang of regret that the young man standing before him with his feet planted so sturdily apart was a hybrid, a new breed of frontiersman who was neither Roman nor barbarian, but a little of both. Well, he thought, it could not have been avoided—I did not have the money to send him to Rome for an education.

  Favonius dropped the stylus to the desk and ran a bemused hand through his graying, wiry hair. “There’s another consideration, Marcus. Prasutugas won’t last much longer and then the Iceni will come under the direct control of the empire like any other client kingdom. I don’t think Boudicca will stand for it. There will be trouble.”

  Marcus grinned insolently. “All the more reason, then, to marry Brigid and take her away. But I think you’re wrong about Boudicca, Father. She grumbles and spits and curses us but she’s not capable of anything else. She’ll settle under direct rule like the rest of the chiefs, and then perhaps one day Brigid and I can come back to Icenia to live.”

  “You don’t remember the uprising ten years ago, do you?”

  “Only vaguely.”

  “Well, if you did you would not dismiss Boudicca so lightly. Oh, Marcus, stop dreaming! They are a dying people and we are their conquerors. No good can come of a marriage such as this! How will you support her? What will you do with her when she’s homesick? I beg you to think again.”

  “No.” Marcus stuck out his jaw. “She’s for me as no one else is. If you don’t give your permission I’ll go to the governor.”

  Favonius laughed. “Spoken like a true son of mine. Very well, Marcus, you have my permission, but on one condition.”

  “Oh?”

  “No wedding until you get your first leave.”

  “But that might be years away!”

  “If she loves you she’ll wait.”

  Marcus came up to the desk. “And of course you hope that I will be so wrapped in my work and so entranced by the city that I’ll never give her another thought. You’re wrong, Father. Absolutely wrong.”

  “Take it or leave it, Marcus. I won’t change my mind.”

  Marcus shrugged ruefully. “Then I suppose we must take it. At least you did not say no.”

  Favonius went back to his dispatch. “I didn’t need to,” he said lightly. “You will say it yourself.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  SUMMER blew away suddenly on a stiff autumn gale, ruthlessly lifting the leaves from the trees, almost before they could wither into crisp, golden sky-boats, while burdened clouds moved slowly and majestically over the now-dreary, deserted marshlands. Suetonius had joined the Fourteenth Legion and begun the march that would take him north and ultimately west, skirting the still-battling Ordovices and on into Deceangli country and so to Mona. The refurbished Twentieth marched with him, ready to quarter at Deva on the coast and there to await his order to advance if it was necessary. Half the fighting force of the province swarmed into the west, twenty-five thousand men, but Paulinus was unconcerned. He had laid his plans well and thoroughly mapped the paths he was now taking. Farther south and west, at Glevum, the Second Augusta carried out lightning raids against the battered but unbowed Silures, and it harried the Ordovices from their vessels, also at Paulinus’s command. A perfect pincer, he congratulated himself, which will nip Mona without once getting entangled in the mountains of the interior. Then a short wait while the rebels starve, and I will have conquered the west. How absurdly simple.

  He had remained at Colchester for the last campaigning season and kept in touch with his generals through dispatches, while they oozed slowly up to the passes and along the ugly, rugged coastline. But now, in the second season, he had gone to command in person, calmly and efficiently. This season would see an end to the years of bloody, vicious waste and the beginning of a true and lasting peace.

  His predecessors, with the exception of Plautius, had allowed themselves to become either too emotionally involved with the game, like Ostorious Scapula, or too anxious of failure to be decisive, like old Gallus. They lacked objectivity. Paulinus had it in full measure. First and last he was a soldier—cool, brilliant, with the ability of a born general to completely disassociate himself from the human element in warfare and move his legions like pieces on a gaming board. He had no defeats behind him, and looked to none ahead. With an uncharacteristic flash of insight Nero had chosen the perfect man for the task, and confidently, almost impatiently, Paulinus clattered with his cavalry escort around him, and his thousands before and behind, toward the treacherous, mist-clogged northern passes. All his thoughts were bent on Mona. The lowland had lain quiet for ten years and would continue that way for another hundred, and he was about to put the crowning laurels on a long and successful career. He was happy.

  Boudicca sensed the growing light around her and was instantly awake. The night was deep and cold. She sat up, drew the blankets around her shoulders, and pushed aside the curtain to see how her fire had sunk to red embers and the snow had silted in long white fingers under her doorskins. The light stopped outside her door, wavered, and a chief bent his head and entered, a lamp in his hand. “What is it?” she whispered, and he came and stood by the bed.

  “My lord is sinking,” he said tersely. “He will not live through the night.”

  She slid from the warm womb of the bed and reached for her cloak and boots. “Have you sent for the doctor? Does Favonius know?”

  “Not yet, Lady. Prasutugas forbade me to bring the Roman doctor. He is tired of being mauled. He wants to
die in peace.”

  “Then he is conscious.” She pulled on the boots with swift, steady fingers. “Rouse Brigid and Ethelind. Quickly!”

  The chief bowed briefly and went out, and she stood, wrapping the cloak tightly around her. A dozen thoughts clamored for her attention and a great shadow of fear reared up at her back, but she raised her hood, pushing the welter of thick hair beneath it, and stepped outside.

  It was snowing, a gentle, quiet drift that settled softly on her upturned face as she scanned the night sky, and there was no wind. The air was wet and dense but not cold, only full of a clean winter magic, and she drew in deep breaths of it as she turned and walked past the Council hall to the imposing entrance of Prasutugas’s Roman house. His chiefs had already gathered, squatting in silence under the shelter of the porch, and they murmured a greeting to her as she slipped between them and opened the door to the room where Prasutugas had lain, now, for six unendurable months. Lovernius closed it behind her, his bulbous features haggard, and she went to the big bed and knelt beside it.

  He was awake and he lay on his back. His broad jaw was rigid, and his teeth were clamped tightly together. The sweat trickled down his temples to soak his pillow. He was breathing slowly, with great wheezing rasps of air that sounded like the huge, tattered bellows of the ironsmith’s forge, and his naked, wet-slicked chest rose and fell, rose and fell, strained and shuddering. His eyes were wide open, fixed on the ceiling but not seeing it, his gaze turned inward to the labyrinthine disintegration of his body. But when she placed a firm hand on his good arm he slowly turned his head.

  “Boudicca,” he gasped. “I have not fought an enemy in years, and this one is strong. I face him alone, and I am so weak.”

  “Say nothing, dear one,” she broke in. “Die in peace. You are not alone, for I am here with you, and beyond my father waits, and your chiefs who fell with honor. Go forward.”