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

by E. Knight

  Still, I noticed I could see more. The blinding magic was fading. The faces were still a bit blurry, though.

  They dragged me outside the small roundhouse and marched me up to a gusty bluff, singing strange songs that sounded half-dirge, half-supplication. The air at least was bracing, smelling of the sea. We appeared to be on a cliff as the sound of surf crashing against rocks drifted up from far below.

  Gods, were they going to throw me off the cliff? I started fighting then, and more men took rough hold of me. Someone grabbed my head—that hurt, you fucking bastard!—tipped it back, and tried to pour something into my mouth. I shook my head free, cursing and kicking, and spat out the foul-tasting swill. Mars’ cock, were they going to poison me first and then throw me off the cliff? Not without a fight, they weren't.

  Several men gripped me in bear hugs up and down my body. When I stopped struggling to catch my breath, strong fingers pulled my hair back and again poured the strange brew into my mouth, but this time someone pinched my nose at the same time, and I swallowed reflexively. Three times they did this, and a strange yeasty warmth settled into my middle. When they moved me again, I fought as before, but I seemed to move slower, more sluggishly.

  They sat me down on a rock with the surf at my back. Torches lit the bluff, and it was only then I realized it was nighttime. The flickering torches created blurry halos around them, and it felt as if I were staring at the flames and the people around me through fine gauze. The bodies were moving. Dancing. They whirled around me in a circle as people wailed in spine-chilling tones.

  Another surge of fear: Were they going to burn me alive in a wicker cage like the great Caesar had described? Maybe I should throw myself off the cliff first! But when I tried to stand and turn to the surf, callused hands once again held me in place.

  I was panting now as dizziness and frustration surged through me. I’d only been a legionary for less than a year. War was about valor and heroism and becoming a man, and I had only just begun that journey. It couldn’t be ending now! But I was a Roman soldier, and I would not cry out or beg. I imagined Agricola standing before me, and I straightened my shoulders.

  They led me to a seat on a rock. Someone sat beside me, and new hands held my shoulders down. An old woman by the sound of her, but not the one who had tended me in the hovel house.

  “I speak Latin. You will hear the names,” she announced in a creaky voice. “The Druid demands it.”

  The names? The names of what? Was this some sort of spell-casting?

  The singing grew louder, and some people were sobbing. Bodies swayed in some sort of dancing. Then a man stepped into the center, and the voices dropped away. In a heavy baritone, the man sang alone. The woman translated:

  I sing of my son, Llud, he of the raven hair and radiant smile, into the passing to the Other Side.

  Moans and weeping rose with every word. “He was ten years old,” the woman kept translating as the man sang on. “The proudest day of his life was when he was chosen to be the water carrier for the high priest of the Deceangli. The monsters stabbed him in the back as he ran . . .”

  Why did I have to listen to this? I hadn’t killed his boy! But then I wondered if maybe I had. I refused the momentary shame that fell over me like an invisible skin and shook it off. This was the reality of war, wasn’t it?

  I was a Roman soldier. Roman soldiers did not back away from the ugliness of war.

  The man sang of the boy’s charm and of his bravery, of the sweet way he had held his brother before the gods took the newborn. I’d never given any thought to the pain of the savages, and I didn’t like doing so now. I hardened myself against the man’s grief. They had brought it on themselves, hadn’t they? Their priests called for a holy war against us, the governor had said.

  So it was their fault.

  Another grief-racked voice, this time sounding like a young woman. I sing to the ancients for the soul safekeeping of the elder priestess Galena, who sang of the healing plants of the medicines from our ancestors . . .”

  “Despite her bowed back,” came the whisper overlaying the foreign words, “her extraordinary memory preserved the healing remedies handed down by the ancestors. Those precious and sacred memories are all gone now, for her apprentices both old and young were also thrown into the fire.”

  “I sing the song for my sister . . .

  My mother . . .

  My father . . .

  The Bard of All Songs . . .” He who spent forty years learning the songs of all the tribes. No one person knows them all now. Our ancestors weep at the loss of their stories.”

  “For my daughter, who stitched the sacred robes . . .

  For my son, who proudly ferried visitors to the sacred isle every day . . .

  For my brother-in-law, who was trapped on the island as he delivered the fish he’d caught to feed the Holy Ones . . .

  For my daughter and her unborn babe, whose birth was only three moons away . . .

  Of the Druid who knew the names of all the ancient gods, the ones before time, and all of their stories, never to be told again . . .

  Of the Lawgiver, who could recite the laws of the people and of the gods, both from the past and the present . . .”

  On and on the singing went. Whenever I drifted, the old woman shook me, demanding I pay attention and hear the names of those who’d been “slaughtered”—her word—on Mona.

  A familiar voice then. The young Druid who’d taken me. With a broken tone, he sang, too.

  “A girl named Gara, betrothed to the Druid apprentice Yorath,” hissed the translator, as if this particular death made her angry and not just saddened. “Betrothed . . . beloved . . . singer of songs . . . devoted to Bel, the goddess of animals who healed not just beasts but men as well with a mere touch of the hand . . .”

  Whether it was the potion they gave me or the heartbreak with which the villagers and Druid boy sang, I couldn’t tell, but soon images began to swim before me—ghostly shadows of the dead lining up to stare at me, their shades growing brighter with the telling of their names, tribes, accomplishments, and stories.

  The shade of a handsome older woman in a black robe appeared, her mouth moving with words I could not hear. “Midwife priestess . . . knew the spells and practices of safekeeping for those sent by the gods. Her secrets of healing midwifery died with her . . .”

  An impish little boy with shining eyes danced a little jig up to me, and I groaned. He looked so much like my nephew—the same little grin, the same small, fat feet. “Son of Ban . . . four years old . . .”

  A blind old priest. A young priest not much older than myself. A laundress. An herb grower. A bent Druid with a flowing white beard and unseeing, filmed eyes. They all appeared and stared at me, then disappeared to make room for more and more as the singers continued. “You did this,” the woman hissed in Latin. Bile inched up to the back of my mouth.

  “No,” I moaned. “I was just following orders.”

  “Wife, whose beauty outshone the sun . . .” The shade of a beautiful woman appeared. Her hair shone copper, and her breasts were full. She smiled at me, and I thought fuzzily, “No, not you. You are too beautiful.” To my amazement, she stepped out of her robe and stood before me shining with moonlight, more breathtaking than any statue of Venus I’d ever seen.

  Suddenly, the unearthly beauty of the woman changed. Her eyes became bruised and swollen, her nose began to bleed. Teeth flew out. She screamed and fought an invisible assailant as she was battered down. “Nooooooo,” I moaned, shutting my eyes and rocking, but the images did not disappear. They danced inside my head, forcing me to see the once-beautiful woman’s broken, twisted body being thrown into the fire. “You did this,” the translator whispered.

  “No, not me!” I tried to scream, but as if in a bad dream sent by Pluto’s black bats, I could not move a muscle.

  This was Druid magic of the most revolting kind. I had to harden myself against it. I was a Roman sol
dier. Again, I thought of Agricola and tried to straighten.

  Eventually, the images of the shades of those killed on Mona began to disappear, and the songs came to a close just as the light of dawn washed the sky with purple clouds.

  I looked around at the villagers who’d stayed up all night to sing of their losses and grieve as one. Some of the women still rocked, holding their stomachs as if breathing was hard, others had cried themselves to sleep where they lay.

  Blinking hard, I realized I was actually seeing things more clearly. The craggy coast. The disappearing stars. The ravaged faces of those around me. The Druid boy must have lifted the spell.

  Even as the images of the shades danced in memory, I reminded myself of a simple truth: Roman soldiers do not weep for their enemies.

  YORATH

  After the ceremony of the Songs of Passing, I set out. The sun was just beginning to peek over the hills, lighting the carpet of dewy green that glimmered, seemingly, with all of the tears shed throughout the ceremony.

  Never in all the stories and songs had I heard of one ceremony going as long as this one had, but then never in anyone’s memory had so many innocents been killed all at once in one place. The shock of it would reverberate through the land and my people for a long, long time.

  Villagers surrounded the main roundhouse, waiting for me to pass. As I came close, I felt the weight of everyone’s pain and sadness crash over me like a rogue wave. Maintain your dignity, my old master seemed to whisper in my ear as I caught my breath. Let it wash over you; you must be the rock that emerges from the churning foam, slick but unmoved.

  I may not have completed all the years of teaching, but some of it stuck. I gave thanks to the spirits of the murdered priests for allowing their essence to speak to me and give their loved ones ease. As if acknowledging my gratitude, a cat suddenly darted in front of me, charging to my right side after a tiny vole. An excellent sign! Had the animal crossed to the left, it would have been terrible. The small blessing gave me the strength to square my shoulders and lift my chin.

  The villagers all touched the back and top of my head—the seat of the soul and connection to the gods—in blessing as I passed. Despite my fatigue, I was glad I made it out of sight without faltering or tripping.

  I walked in a daze, seeking the path toward the nemeton, the sacred grove of the locals, where a cluster of oaks stood among a smattering of hawthorns and ancient poplars.

  The old woman had told me to follow the flying rowans.

  Twisted and pushed down by the strong gusting winds from the headland, the rowan trees pointed to the sacred oaks like gnarled fingers of the gods themselves. The sight of them made my heart ache, for while they were majestic to the extreme, they still came nowhere close to the size and age of the destroyed oak grove on Mona. Our gods had been born in those mist-shrouded woods. There they’d held the heart of our faith and our people. There they’d protected the knowledge that pulsed through the earth and into our elders. And now they were gone. As were all the people who honored and served them.

  How could I possibly be the only one left to carry their memories? How?

  Once inside the grove, I prayed beside an ancient stone altar near a small spring. And then I found the biggest, oldest tree in the grove and crawled up its gnarled, bulbous roots and sides until I found a bowl-like crossing of limbs that spoke to me as being right. Like a babe crawling back into the womb, I curled into a ball, waiting for the spirit of the gods to pulse through the arms of the tree and give me guidance.

  I slept without dreaming, though my face was wet when I woke. Perhaps the gods themselves were too racked with grief to hear the pleas of one such as me. Were they disappointed that I was the only one to survive? Was that why they hadn’t spoken?

  Still, the old woman’s words echoed in my mind: You must discover what the gods want of you in order to regain their protection. You must heal our rift with the gods . . .

  Once fully awake, I crawled out of the tree and prepared the woad from the dried plant. I stripped and spread the paste over my entire body, and I knew the magic was beginning to work because my skin warmed and tingled despite the wet coolness of the wood. I drank the herbal tincture the old woman had prepared for me, settled myself near the roots of the biggest tree, and waited.

  Owls hooted. Small animals scurried through the underbrush. A slow-moving insect crawled over my knee. Still, I waited. The limbs of the great oak under me began to sway with the wind as if dancing underwater.

  Images began to appear and disappear before me, and I was flooded with gratitude that finally, finally, the gods were speaking to me. Time seemed to stretch and condense as a tall woman of great power emerged from a dream mist. Her hair gleamed like dark blood, and a quiet strength emanated from her. When she appeared, the haze swirled away in tiny eddies as if a great sword had rent the air to allow her to pass. A warrior with iron-gray hair stepped out of the darkness to stand beside her. “Duro, champion to the Queen Boudica of the Iceni,” the man said, bowing his head to the high priest. Beside him, Boudica made a bow of her own, tall as any goddess.

  So the gods had sent me a memory. A memory of the queen who had, from what the villagers claimed, launched the rebellion that had sent the legions scurrying away from Mona. When had Boudica come to the sacred isle—last winter? The one before? Tribal chieftains often came to the sacred isle to consult with the Druid of All the Tribes. It had been my turn to serve in the elder priest’s house when the Iceni delegation arrived. The queen and her gray-haired warrior had stood before the blind priest, and I had served them sacred mead. The queen’s voice rang clear and strong in my memory dream as she spoke to the high priest: There are signs . . . portents . . . we must fight and defeat Rome . . .

  Something about what she was saying agitated the great white-bearded priest. He pounded his staff on the earthen floor and made a strange growling sound. I hadn’t been the only one to jump. The queen and her warrior paled.

  “You dare claim to interpret the language of the gods,” he thundered. “Tell me, Queen, how many hundreds of moons have you spent studying the sacred arts?”

  “I am a priestess of Andraste,” Boudica countered. “Surely that—”

  “Means only that you have been sworn to serve her and know some of her rites,” he snapped, standing up. His filmy eyes seemed to glow with outrage. “That doesn’t mean she speaks to you directly!”

  “The gods speak to those not of Mona, too.”

  “There is great danger in thinking so,” the old Druid continued. “The unworthy and the uninitiated cannot separate the ‘signs’ they think they see from their deepest desires or their greatest fears.”

  The queen did not flinch. “But the gods gave us the means to observe the signs. Doesn’t that mean they want us to use those faculties?”

  I had to admit to being impressed with the queen. Few had the spine to argue with the head Druid of All the Tribes, but she had done so without quaking, let alone skipping a beat, despite the anguished warning looks from her gray-haired champion.

  “But not,” the blind priest insisted, “if what they ‘see’ tells them only what they wish to hear.”

  The queen and her warrior exchanged a look. The priest cocked his head as if listening to a whispered message. “Assistant!” he suddenly bellowed, and I scrambled to his side. “Take us to the triskelion.”

  I took his elbow and led him out of his roundhouse and deep into the eastern side of the holiest section of the sacred grove, with the queen and her warrior following. At the worn rock bearing the ancient weathered image of three interlocked spirals of the oldest of our ancestors, I stopped and removed my arm from the elder’s elbow to let him know we’d arrived. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and I shivered, as I always did, at the power of this place. Gooseflesh rippled up and down the queen’s lean-muscled arms. Good. She was feeling the power of the wood also.

  Finally, the priest spoke. “Tell me wh
at you notice,” he ordered.

  “I see trees,” the queen whispered. “Oak and alders and some pine over there.” Her eyes scanned the ground and then moved upward. “There is a red squirrel staring at us through the branches of the oak right next to you. I see signs of badger setts and fox dens nearby.”

  “Excellent,” the elder said. “You see through the eyes of a hunter. Now do you see that the configuration of the trees around us also makes the sacred shape of the fivefold knot of the elements?”

  She turned in a circle, trying to see it. When she turned to face us again, her lips were pale. “No, I don’t.”

  “Or how this configuration echoes the alignment matching the sign of the Dreamer in the night sky?”

  Again, she looked around and murmured, “No.”

  “Or that the red squirrel is a female and that she watches us because we stand near the tree where she has buried the most food?”

  Boudica gave a long exhale, looking at her feet and shaking her head.

  “Our training in awareness of the invisible connections, alignments, and configurations of the trees and the stars gives us access to the true language of the gods, not one marred by the reflections of our own fears or wants. Do you understand?”

  She nodded, but her gray-haired warrior touched her elbow to remind her to speak aloud to the blind priest. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  “Your deepest want, your most intense desire, is to protect your people and remove the scourge of the Romans, yes?”

  “It is.”

  “So of course, every ‘sign’ you see confirms this desire to fight them.”

  She sighed, exchanging another look with her craggy-faced warrior. Something caught my eye, and I noticed a murder of crows circling over the clearing behind us. They came down like a black ribbon unfurling, one by one, to the ground. My heart leapt at both the beauty and strangeness of it.

  The priest seemed to sense the arrival of the birds, for he suddenly smiled at his visitors. “Now,” he added, “I must tell you that I also see the signs. There will come a time soon when we must cleanse the land of the invaders.”