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

by E. Knight

  He leaped up in one movement, his face darkening and contorting into a devil’s mask of rage so fast I actually recoiled.

  He thrust his face into mine. “Gara is dead thanks to you. She was a healer and the sweetest, kindest, most . . . most . . .”

  His throat worked convulsively, and he suddenly straightened and stomped off into the trees with impressive speed.

  Once again, I reminded myself that those “sweet” little children on the isle would’ve grown up to kill us despite the Druid’s ongoing protestation of innocence. Agricola knew what he was doing. I was a fucking hostage because I’d hesitated. Trust me, it wouldn’t happen again.

  The trader watched the Druid boy go and turned to stare at me accusingly.

  “Fuck you and your fucking fish smell,” I said. He didn’t understand Gaulish, but I could tell he understood the sentiment. Good enough for me.

  I curled up and pretended to sleep. But you can bet your arse I kept one eye open for any sign of a knife.

  YORATH

  How dare that fool even say her name? The sound of it—coming out wrong and harsh, trampling the music of it as if he’d stomped on her very heart with his ridiculous sharpened boots. Gods, I wanted to slit his throat!

  I leaned against an old pine, and Gara’s dream-self came to me, glowing as if lit by the moon from the inside. Everything in me gathered tight in my throat as I fought back the sobs.

  I should’ve protected her, but I hadn’t. I’d had to hide, and then it was too late, and I’d had to run.

  There was nothing you could’ve done, she whispered in my mind. The gods saved you for a reason. All of us on this side of life are helping you.

  A smile pulled at my lips even as I tasted the salt of my tears. Gara always found a way to soothe and inspire. I had loved her from the first moment we met when we both sang and danced the ritual of newcomers. We were only eight years old. She’d come from the Dumnonii in the southwest on the coast close to the “Tin Islands” that the Romans controlled through the Veneti in Gaul. She was studying to be a healer. Her father’s family had worked the tin mines for generations, but her mother was also gifted in the healing arts.

  On that first day, she’d smiled shyly at me and had taken my hand. She had been just as scared as I’d been. Over the nearly twelve years of training since, her straw-gold hair darkened into the soft brown of elm bark in fall, but the warmth in her blue eyes only deepened. The elders were right in training her for medicine—Nodons, the God of Healing, moved within her with every breath.

  We’d been lovers for years. She would’ve completed her twelve-year cycle of training in two moons. I had another eight years to go. During the harvest moon, before the festival of the dead, she was to return to her village in the south as a full healer.

  “We are a circle together,” she’d murmured one warm summer night, as we slept naked under the stars.

  I’d laughed. “Yes, I do the sacrificing, and you do the saving.”

  She’d playfully slapped my chest near where she rested her head over my heart. “Do not joke about such things,” she’d said with that ever-present smile in her voice. “The sacrifices you make sometimes do more than any healing herbs or prayers I manage. Sometimes, I kill and you save them on the other side.”

  “You never kill,” I’d said. “Sometimes the Gods call a soul back despite what healers and priests do on this side. That is not the same as killing.”

  She’d nodded sleepily, and I’d kissed her hair, which always carried the scent of juniper.

  I’d been dreading her departure, sure that I would lose her to some strapping warrior or miner the moment she returned to her village. Still, I’d been petitioning to accompany her on her journey home and to be sent to her people when I finished my training cycle.

  The elders had always smiled and nodded, murmuring that they would seek guidance from the gods on the matter. I could tell from their expressions they were only humoring me. But really, once I finished my training and was accepted by the gods in the final rituals, they could not dismiss my requests so easily. Out of all the scenarios I could imagine—that my father would command my return to the north to serve the Venicones, that Gara would marry a local boy before I was free from the sacred isle—it had never occurred to me that she, along with everyone I knew and had come to love, would be hunted down and massacred like animals in a pen by the dead-eyed Romans.

  The physical ache of her loss left me wanting to throw my head back and howl like a wolf. The only thing that seemed to calm me was envisioning tearing my arrogant Roman prisoner apart, organ by organ, limb my limb. I wanted him to know a glimmer of the suffering he and his friends had caused.

  But I could do nothing until the gods told me clearly what they wanted me—the only survivor of Mona—to do to set things right. Night after night, I sought the sacred configuration of trees to commune with the gods and the ancestors, asking for help in understanding what I must do to heal our rift with the divine realm. Our gods had left us to die in Mona. What did we need to do to earn back their protection?

  On the first full moon of our trip, I again sought answers in a sacred wood. And this time, finally, the gods spoke to me.

  Beams of moonlight extended slim fingers between swaying branches as images flooded my awareness. I saw brilliant yellow mold blighting our wheat and barley fields in vast tracks of farmland. I saw rust spreading on an ancient sword of the giants until it disintegrated. I saw ants swarming over a dead bug until all that was left was a carcass shell. What were the gods trying to tell me?

  Slowly, the images changed. Began to move faster. Pulsed with a raging energy as if the drummers of the isle had materialized and called forth the Song of War. Farmers cut the blighted grasses and set them aflame. An iron-smith burned the rust away in a river of liquid red. A foot stomped the ants until they disappeared in the dirt.

  I waited. Then, as if I hadn’t seen it a thousand times in my mind, the day of the attack appeared before me yet again. Of the maddened priest thrusting his face into mine, ordering me to sacrifice the large, red-haired Roman. My refusal. Of the panicked way the Druid—who taught me the spells but was never supposed to utter them himself—yelled them out of order. Of his wild slashing with the long-sword. Of the head rolling. The truncated body weaving before collapsing with a thud.

  The wild screams. The press of the invaders. My panicked flight. Then it all began again. The Romans across the channel. The maddened priest. The slashing. The head flying off the Roman’s thick body as the sacred prayers my elder wasn’t supposed to utter roared in my ears. The head rolling, the blood spurting, the eyes still blinking, the mouth working. The head . . . the head . . . the head.

  Why were the gods sending me these visions again and again? I sang the Song of Openness and Guidance and swayed with the wind that gusted around me, rattling the leaves.

  A raven burst through a thicket with a terrible cry at the same moment—in my vision—that the maddened elder yelled at me to kill the Roman during that awful morning of the invasion. And then I understood.

  My priest had enraged the gods by ignoring the ancient rules of the most sacred sacrifice of all. The gods demanded the proper ceremony and ritual, performed in the ways of the ancients, passed down from time immemorial. They wanted it done correctly, with respect. My elder had done it wrong. He’d been in a panic. And he wasn’t a Vates.

  Finally, finally, I understood what they wanted, why they were angry.

  The gods had demanded a blood sacrifice, but we had not realized it in time. My elder priest understood too late and attempted the rite at the wrong time in the wrong way, without a willing sacrifice, and without following the rules the gods themselves had set for such powerful magic.

  The ultimate blood sacrifice—not of enemy warriors, but of a sacrifice of the gods’ choosing—had to follow the ancient rules, or the magic worked against us. The gods had saved me, one who was sanctified to perform such a
sacrifice. And they had handed the very man they wanted sacrificed unto me.

  My Roman was the gift, the sacrifice the gods required to set things right. That’s why the elder priest had told me to bring him.

  The shame I’d felt over running and surviving was lifted. As long as I performed the holiest of sacrifices correctly, I could be the one to save us all from the terrors of Rome.

  I would not be the Druid who ran, but the survivor who brought about our people’s reconciliation with the divine.

  A great peace settled over me. As if in response, a mist rose from the earth and swirled around me in a languid dance of approval. My heart slowed to match its movement, and it felt as if I breathed in time with the spirit of the earth itself.

  FELIX

  The Druidling was acting even weirder than ever. Beyond looking smug and staring up at stars all night, he’d stopped calling me by my name and referred to me as the “Gaul of the People of the Elders before Rome.”

  What in the bloody hell?

  He did it again one drizzly morning, and if my wrists hadn’t been bound, I swear I would have twisted that knobby head off his skinny neck in one go.

  “My name is Felix,” I growled. “I’ve never been a savage like you people. I am Roman through and through!”

  He pointed to my light hair and smiled as he stuffed a heel of hard bread into my hands—still tied at the wrist—to break the morning fast.

  Just because I have light hair and my ancestors once spread bear grease on themselves meant nothing. My people had been Roman for almost two hundred years! I’d always been more Roman than any short, dark, curly-headed sod from inner Italia.

  “By Castor’s cock, are you blind? Don’t you understand? Rome already owns all these lands. It is inevitable. You will never be rid of us because our gods are stronger. Haven’t we proven that enough times?”

  “The gods of these lands prefer people of honor,” he said. “No tribesman worth his spear would have done what you did—attack a sacred place filled with old men, women, and children. I think even your Roman gods must be disgusted.”

  “If your gods are so honorable, why are they not outraged when you burn men alive in wicker cages or . . . or kill them to foretell the future by reading their blood splatter!”

  That stopped him. The chunk of bread on the way to his mouth hung in midair. “What are you talking about?” he cried. “We do neither of those things!”

  “That’s not true. The great Caesar himself wrote of it!”

  “Lies!” the little Druid cried. “You make us look like savages to excuse your own savagery.”

  “So what do you do with your prisoners of war if you don’t burn them?”

  He shook his head. “We haven’t burned you, have we? Different tribes deal with their enemies in different ways, but burning them alive is not one of them, unlike you monsters. More to the point, our warriors would not murder every living thing on a peaceful isle for sport, as your people did.”

  “It wasn’t for sport,” I cried. “We had to stop future rebellions! We were saving you from yourselves!”

  The Druidling just stared at me without blinking.

  “Also, your people take heads and hang them as trophies!” I added when I could see I wasn’t getting through.

  He nodded. “The seat of the soul is in the head. Only warriors do this. They would never take the heads of innocents.”

  “Even so, you don’t think that’s a bit savage? I’ve heard some of your chiefs even drink from skulls.”

  “According to the rules of honorable warfare,” he said, nodding. When I rolled my eyes, he added, “Your people take vanquished warriors and force them to fight in a ring until they die, just for the entertainment of the masses. Is that not so?”

  “Yes, but it’s a way for them to earn honor, too.”

  “There is nothing honorable about killing for entertainment. That is murder and pure savagery.”

  Oh, now we were in a pissing contest? “Well your people wouldn’t have been so easy to defeat if you hadn’t spent eternity fighting each other over every little thing like the backwoods barbarians that you are.”

  As if he hadn’t even heard me, he said, “But you and your people traded dignity and independence to be Rome’s whore.”

  “We are not—”

  “What do you get from being their whore besides having to turn your greatest wealth over to them?”

  I ignored the jibe, reminding myself that barbarians would never understand. That’s what made them barbarians. His stare, though, was piercing. So I finally said, “We get citizenship.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means . . . well, that I have rights.”

  He cocked his head as if he didn’t understand.

  “If I own land, I can vote. If I have enough money, I can run for office eventually. Or I can rise through the ranks of the legions and lead the greatest army the world ever saw. I can . . .”

  Again, that stupid smile. I took a swig of mead that tasted like old piss. Why did his air of superiority get under my skin so? “The Romans brought us baths and gorgeous temples for their powerful gods and . . . and roads and . . .”

  “Baths? I’ve heard about your baths. We clean ourselves in the living waters of streams and rivers. You sit in the dirty, piss-filled, stagnant waters of countless others.” He shuddered with disgust.

  “And our temples,” he continued, sweeping his arm out to encompass the valley of wild woods and green hills, “are the living places where the gods breathe, not the dead marble of an empty room.

  “And your roads stab through the earth without respect for its sacredness—all so it can transport more soldiers for even more killing and raping.”

  I sighed. Really, there was no point to any of this. He would never understand the greatness that is Rome.

  “Are you married?” he asked after we finished eating.

  I laughed. “I’m only eighteen. And I’m not allowed to marry while serving in the legions.”

  “How long do you serve?”

  “Twenty-five years.”

  His mouth fell open. “You cannot marry for twenty-five years? By the gods of all that matter, they have stolen your mind, body, and soul to serve their endless appetite for blood.”

  I shrugged. “Most of the blokes have a local girl. Or they just use the brothels. When you’ve done your time, you can marry and adopt the little bastards if you want.”

  He shook his head disbelievingly. His ridiculous sense of superiority rankled. So I aimed where I knew it would hurt the most. “You married to that Gara girl?” I asked.

  In a blink, his face took on that tight, rageful veneer but then resumed its normal appearance almost as quickly before he stood and walked away. Huh. He seemed to be getting better at mastering himself, I observed. I didn’t know why, but it sent a chill down my spine.

  YORATH

  “Someone is coming,” my escort announced, abruptly pulling the horse to a stop.

  I snapped awake from the half dreaming induced by the cart’s rhythm. And a deep chasm of dread opened under my chest. Please, not more Romans!

  “Soldiers?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I squinted and could see what he meant. Three riders rode the natural way, not the stiff-backed way of the Romans. Colorful and checked cloaks billowed behind them, tribal cloaks, and I released a long breath of relief. Still, I could not take any risks with my prisoner now that I knew what the gods wanted me to do with him. I glanced back to make sure the gag hadn’t loosened. He was fast asleep.

  A woman rode in the center, blood-red hair streaming behind her. The Iceni queen? Not possible. I blinked several times to clear my vision. She was weirdly the queen and yet not the queen at the same time. It was only when she drew up that I understood. This had to be one of her daughters—thinner, younger, and exuding an even more feral fierceness than her mother. I hadn't known
that was possible.

  “I am Sorcha, daughter of Boudica, Queen of the Iceni,” she called. “We come from our victory at Camulodunum to beseech my mother’s sister’s people to join us in our rebellion. Do you have knowledge to share about what happened in Mona? We have heard terrible rumors.”

  “I am Yorath, son of Torkill, Druid Vates in training.”

  Her blue eyes grew wide, and she grinned. “So the rumors aren’t true, then! Some of the sacred ones have survived!” She looked wildly around with hope lighting her eyes, as if some of the long-bearded elder priests and stoop-shouldered elder priestesses might step out from behind the trees to greet her. “How many? Where are they? How are they protected? I can send bands of warriors to guard them—”

  I held up my palm to silence her. “I am the only survivor.”

  She blinked several times, her forehead scrunched. “No, that cannot be,” she finally breathed.

  “It is so.”

  The queen’s daughter clutched her stomach and closed her eyes. By the state of her horse and her clothing—blood-spattered and shredded—I could tell that she had set off right from the battlefield. The exhaustion on the faces of her fellow riders confirmed this. Our tribes liked to celebrate victories as much as they liked the fight itself, but I sensed that this young warrior had no patience for such trivialities. That must be why she had set off when she did. Sorcha of the Iceni seemed to burn from within with a rage that would only be sated by Roman blood, not by drunken victory celebrations.

  Then I remembered the violence against her and her sister that sparked the rebellion in the first place, and I understood.

  The queen’s eldest daughter dismounted and circled the cart. “Who is this?” she asked. But before I could answer, she had pulled out her dirk and growled, “Roman!”

  “Wait!” I called as her thin but muscular arm arced over my sacrifice’s sleeping chest. “Do not hurt him. I need him!”

  She stared at me as I rushed to her side, fury pulsating from every muscle in her hard-angled body.