A Year of Ravens: a novel of Boudica's Rebellion

by E. Knight

  Unaware of this epiphany, this fundamental change in me, Venutius puffed up with effrontery. “A pale imitation of the man I want to be? And just what man do you think I want to be?”

  I smiled a false smile at him, and it felt strange upon my lips, but I would have to endure it. For my people, I could endure anything. “There is only one Caratacus, my dear. Only one Hero of the Britons. There will never be another.”

  But in that, of course, I was wrong.

  Far to the south, a weeping Roman procurator had galloped away from a whipping post as his centurions stormed through roundhouses full of screaming girls, and the ravens were beginning to circle. Far to the south, a queen's back was laid bare, those bloody stripes the first lines to be sung in her legend. The mantle of Caratacus lay on the ravaged ground and, as he hoped, it was about to be taken up by a red-haired lady of iron will.

  But what happened after Catus Decianus rode away on that cold wintry day is now, of course, all part of Boudica’s legend.

  Not mine.

  PART TWO

  “This is a woman's determination; as for men, they may remain alive but enslaved."

  — Tacitus

  THE SLAVE

  Ruth Downie

  B

  lood has to be washed out straightaway in cold water or it stains. That is one of the few things I know that is still safe to say aloud.

  The hundred paces beyond the gates to the river might as well have been a hundred thousand because if the Romans came back, I was not going to let them catch me down there in the reeds on my own. So I smashed the thin ice on the horse trough in the yard instead and dunked the mass of soiled clothing in there. When I saw the pink streaks of the princesses’ blood starting to drift across the floating ice, I began to scrub.

  I scrubbed till my knuckles were raw with the coarseness of the wet linen. While the older women hurried in and out of the Great Hall with salves and washcloths, I scrubbed till I lost the feeling in my hands. Perhaps if I scrubbed long enough, I would lose the feeling everywhere else: the aching head, the jarred limbs, and the shame.

  “Ria?”

  The boy from the cooking-house smelled as if he had run into the cowshed to hide from the Romans, and his pale face was streaked with tears. We had all seen things this afternoon that no one should ever see: I could not imagine how they might seem to a motherless child of seven winters.

  “I don’t know what to do, Ria.”

  Did he think I did? What are you supposed to do when Roman soldiers—soldiers of the people who said we were Friends and Allies—smash your warriors aside, rampage through your houses, steal or trample all that’s precious? When a king’s funeral ends with his widow tied to a post, stripped naked for everyone to see, and flogged raw? When the grieving daughters who should rule half his kingdom are dragged away and violated?

  I stared down at the linen floating in the cold water. I didn’t know what to do any more than the boy did.

  “Ria?”

  Useless to send him to his father; the man was slave to a leatherworker miles away and had never shown much interest in him. I tried, “Go and find the cook.”

  Luci sniffed. “Cook’s boiling up a poultice for the princesses. The healer says the queen might die.”

  I leaned on the trough and willed him to go away. I could not help him. I could not help anybody. My legs weren’t holding me up properly.

  My mind kept running back to the same moment. Not the terrible thing that had happened to Queen Boudica. Not the blow when the soldier knocked me to the floor of the storehouse. The moment when, instead of getting back up to fight, I crawled behind the wicker partition and lay like an animal playing dead. From just a few paces away—and inside my head, still—I could hear the younger princess crying out for help that wasn’t going to come because the Romans had put guards on the door to keep our warriors out. There was no sound from her sister.

  “Don’t scream!” I wanted to call out.

  Don’t scream. It only makes things worse. Close your eyes and leave your body limp and hide away inside yourself until it’s over. It feels like it will never end, but it does. I had found that out for myself not many days before.

  I should have helped the princesses. I should have done something. I was the only one of our people inside the storehouse with them, the only one who could possibly offer them any comfort or support. But I did . . . nothing. All the time it was happening, I lay pressed against the cold mud floor with my eyes shut. Praying that the brute who hit me had forgotten about me. Praying that none of the other soldiers waiting for their turn with the princesses would notice there was a third girl.

  “Ria? Did you hear me?” Little Luci lifted both skinny arms, showing elbows covered in the same muck that was all down his tunic. “I fell over.”

  “Go and wash,” I told him.

  “My clothes are all smelly.”

  I tried very hard to think what to do about this one problem. “Go into the slave-house,” I told him. “Look in the chest behind the door. There might be a clean tunic.” Unless that had been stolen, too.

  “Then what shall I do?”

  I looked around. Afternoon was becoming twilight, but I could still see thick columns of black smoke on the horizon and smell the stink of burning in the air. Inside the royal enclosure, people were moving slowly between the roundhouses, clustering together, staring and pointing, talking in low voices. Where the horses should have stood, there was nothing but a few strands of twine and a half-eaten hay net. A couple of old women were on their knees where the queen had suffered, scrubbing the stones. Someone was trying to restack the logs against the wall of the Great Hall. “I don’t know,” I snapped. “Tidy something up.”

  I was not used to giving orders. I was a slave and the daughter of a slave, and the things I was used to were doing laundry and being invisible.

  I was—I am—also the daughter of a king.

  Those princesses, the daughters of Boudica, were my half sisters. We grew up in the same royal household, but they wore the fancy linens and delicate wools that I had to wash, and if I was lucky, they might pass something on to me once it needed patching. I cannot say we were fond of each other, but the little mousy one was kind to me sometimes and gentle in a way that reminded me of my father. Even the bossy one—who was older than me, but not much, and a great deal taller and more beautiful—had shown me understanding when I wished to pay my respects to my father’s body. All these things added to my shame.

  I took a slice of willow bark and began to chew on it, silently willing the gods to make it dull not only the ache in my head but the screams echoing through my memory. It was as if my mind kept dragging me back to that moment in the false hope that this time I could make a different choice. That this time I would behave as the person I had believed myself to be: a person who would fight to save someone in need. It was not only my duty as a slave and a sister; it had also been my vow.

  “What are you doing, girl?” I jumped as the slave-master’s hand reached into the trough beside me. He pulled out something sodden and dripping. “Nobody’s going to want these again.”

  I held up the underskirt I was washing. He was right: I could have scrubbed it until the end of time, but it would still be ripped and stained and ruined.

  I was still wondering what to do with it when I saw Duro walking down from the warriors’ house with some of the other men. His limp was worse than usual, and his graying hair was wild and smeared with blood. He ordered little Luci to call everyone to the yard, and the boy hurried off full of his new importance. I had good reason not to be grateful to Duro, but it was a comfort to see him take charge. He was an elder and a warrior, the queen's right-hand man, and this was not the first time he had suffered at the hands of the Romans. Duro would tell us what to do.

  When we were gathered in the cold, he glanced around at the crowd of the disheveled and the battered and the confused: Iceni farm boys and warriors and elde
rs and slaves, old people leaning on sticks and children clinging to their mothers’ skirts. “Is anyone missing?”

  Only the royal family we were all here to serve and those who were tending them.

  When nobody answered, he called, “Take heart, everyone! The queen will live!”

  Someone called out, “Thank the gods!” A couple of people took each other by the arm. It was as much celebration as any of us could manage.

  I knew what my mother would have said if she were still alive, although not loud enough for anyone but me to hear. Of course she’ll live. That Woman won’t die until she’s good and ready. And for once, I was glad that my mother was safely in the next world because this day was bitter enough. Losing the queen would have been too much for any of us to bear.

  “Our princesses . . .” Duro paused, as if he was trying to find a way of saying it that would not cause everyone further pain. “Princess Sorcha and Princess Keena have been cruelly dishonored. The birthing-women and the healers are with them now.” He went on to say that anyone else who was injured should ask for help. Chewing willow bark had not soothed my throbbing head, and I wondered if I should tell someone about the pain. Then I thought, What if they ask what happened and where I was? So I kept silent.

  While Duro was talking, the slave-master had been counting. Now he spoke aloud. “Twenty-two, twenty-three”—that was me—“twenty-four. All here.”

  Duro nodded. He counted the dogs, and everyone called and whistled for the missing ones, but none came. The horse-boys were sent to see if they could round up any animals that had escaped from the Romans. The farm workers had already penned and counted what remained of the stock.

  “The rest of you can best serve the queen by going back to your usual duties.” As he spoke, a gust of wind sent soft feathers drifting across the cobbles. All that was left of the fowls that had been plucked for tonight’s funeral feast. If the day had gone as it should, the feast would just be beginning. Now all the food had been stolen.

  “Ria?” It was the slave-master. For a moment, I thought he was going to ask if I had been hurt. “Go and get the poultice mix from the cook and take it over to the Great Hall. Give it to the healers.”

  And that was it. I was number twenty-three, somewhere just above the dogs. Which was no worse than I deserved.

  It did not take long for the news of the desecration to spread beyond our settlement. By the following afternoon, riders were coming in over the trackways. Elders, healers, messengers. People from miles away bringing words of support and more stories of theft and outrage at Roman hands, not only against wealthy Iceni nobles but against poorer families on ordinary farmsteads. The other houses used by the king had been raided, too. There were small consolations: a horse trader came in with a string of three escaped ponies he had managed to round up and three more as gifts. Windblown strangers delved inside their layers of traveling clothes and pulled out little pots of salve and healing charms to offer the princesses and their mother. Some of the potions went into the Great Hall; the healers used the rest on the bandaged heads and battered bodies of the fighters who had tried to defend us.

  They had no chance. Our warriors had not been allowed proper weapons since I was a baby, when the Romans decided we weren’t to be trusted to bear arms. It was an insult that our people were quick to avenge in rebellion, but the gods did not grant us victory. My mother said there were injured Iceni fighters laid out in all the houses for weeks afterward, and I am almost sure I remember pale figures lying in the beds around our own. Not content with dispatching many of our greatest warriors to the next world, the Romans took Duro’s only son and sent him as a hostage to Londinium. Then they sent extra troops to finish stealing our weapons and to build roads and forts across our territory, and my father, the king, had to find a way to make peace in a land filled with enemy soldiers.

  There are people who say that King Prasutagus wasted his life. That nobody can ride two horses at once. They say—and they said it then, too—that he handed over his dignity and betrayed his people just so he could enjoy the riches that Rome could offer. But as my mother said, many of them hadn’t seen the aftermath of that battle: the sufferings of the wounded and the grief of bereaved Iceni families across the land. If you cannot defeat Rome, he told the elders, for the sake of our people, do not provoke her. Instead, he tried to calm her with soft whispers.

  Agreements were made, and we were Friends and Allies of Rome once more. So whenever a gang of their soldiers beat up some of our traders or set light to somebody’s hayrick or stole our livestock, the governor always told my father how shocked he was. It seemed some men had disobeyed orders and would be disciplined, and usually we never saw them again. If you ask me, I think the soldiers were just moved away or even promoted, but that was the story, and my mother said that my father pretended to believe it because there was no point in picking a fight. Then later on, when some mysterious fire destroyed a Roman staging post on the road, he was all surprise and sympathy, offering condolences, asking if there was anything his people could do to help rebuild.

  It was a pretense that suited both sides, or so it seemed, and my father worked hard at it.

  I used to run to watch when the royal family arrived back from their visits to the Roman governor at Camulodunum. The sisters were usually asleep under furs in the carriage by the time it rolled into the yard, but the queen never slept. She never seemed tired, either. My father always looked gray and exhausted and glad to be home from the endless parades and sacrifices to the emperor.

  Once, two summers ago, I was in the cooking-house when they came back from some Roman festival or other. I was cleaning a pan by tipping ash into the hot fat when I heard the rumble of wheels, so I went to the door with the pan still in my hand. The cook looked out over my shoulder and said, “You know, the king’s looking older.”

  Some man who had no right to speak at all—he was only there to deliver cabbages—said, “It’s all that lolling about in the governor’s bathhouse. Makes the lazy old fart’s skin go crinkly.”

  I felt my fists tighten, but the daughter of a peacemaker should not lower herself to punch a cabbage man in the eye. “He goes to Camulodunum to keep the Romans off our backs,” I told him. “Would you rather they came to us?”

  He said, “Who asked you?”

  The cook laughed. “Don’t mind her. She thinks the king is her father.”

  I aimed for royal dignity, but I could not prevent my voice from rising. “He is my father!”

  The deliveryman said, “Then why are you here washing pots?”

  So I tipped the fat and ash over his bald patch. It didn’t shut him up, but I like to think he learned something.

  After that, the slave-master put Luci to work in the cooking-house instead of me, which was a shame because it was always warm in there no matter what the season. To be fair, the cook did tell the slave-master that I attacked the man because he had insulted the king. So I just got a not-very-serious beating and a never-ending supply of dirty clothes and blankets to wash. I had hoped my father might thank me for defending him, but I suppose nobody told him.

  Anyway, even after all my father’s efforts to keep the peace as a Friend and Ally of Rome, our warriors were still allowed no weapons. They looked the part, with the scowls and the muscles and the striding about with helmets on, but when you looked closely, you saw only wooden clubs and sharpened sticks and the soft leather bundles of slingshots. They might frighten a few Trinovante sheep-stealers, and they frightened me, but they were never going to strike terror into the hearts of the men in the fort only half a day’s march from us: men who came with bright swords in their hands, metal plates strapped around their chests, and orders from Rome.

  The men with clubs and sticks were back at the gates now, letting in visitors and patrolling the raised banks of the royal enclosure, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers to keep warm and trying to act as if they had some dignity left.

&
nbsp; I gathered up a couple of sheepskins and hung them on the rack outside the cooking-house to beat the dust out of them because I needed to hit something.

  Smack.

  A jolt of pain shot through my head. The fleece jumped out of the way and then swung back for more.

  Smack.

  One or two slaves who’d arrived with their owners wandered across to ask for news about the queen. I told them she probably wasn’t going to die after all and was glad my mother was not here to hear how relieved I sounded.

  Smack.

  My mother had good reason to resent That Woman. It was not my mother’s fault that my father sometimes sought respite from the royal bed in the arms of a house slave. His flame-haired queen was passionate and beautiful, but—like her eldest daughter—she was full of opinions, and people with opinions can be very tiring. When That Woman found out my mother was pregnant, and whose child it was, it was her opinion that my mother should be sold with me still unborn inside her. The slave-master had already been given the order when my father put a stop to it.

  Somehow his soft whispers persuaded the queen that instead of being sold, my mother should be moved from the job of personal slave in the Great Hall to grinding wheat and scraping vegetables in the house just across the courtyard. That was where most of the royal food was prepared because nobody wanted the Great Hall to smell of boiled cabbage.

  My mother said we should be grateful to him that we were in the royal household at all instead of huddled in rags in a field somewhere digging parsnips. But it didn’t help me understand why, if my father had the powers of a king, two of his daughters were princesses while the other was expected to be invisible.

  Smack.

  “And the princesses?” someone asked.