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

by E. Knight

  YORATH

  The girls who volunteered to take the prisoner for the ritual cleaning and rites understood how he was to be prepared. They set off with him in the morning after giving him the purified mead and sacred plants in the lamb’s bladder that I’d prepared for us both.

  After a long fast, I climbed the hill where I’d found the white-berried mistletoe so pleasing to the dods. Mistletoe berries usually didn’t ripen until the fall. That it had blossomed so unusually early was yet another blessing, was yet more proof that the gods were pleased with my work.

  I waited until the white berries glowed like tiny moons in the silvered light and then collected them. Afterward, I climbed down and sought the trees that aligned with the stars of the running Huntress, put a wad of woad into my cheek, and sipped the holy mead. It didn’t take long for the veil separating me from the other side to disappear.

  So many of the dead on Mona showed themselves to me, but not Gara. I began to cry. My elder Druid was suddenly before me. “Gain control of your emotions,” he admonished. “Use your training. You are the elder now.”

  The idea of me—me—being the most learned of our priests once again gutted me into hollowness.

  But the elder laughed as if he, too, was struck by the oddity of it, and strangely, that made me feel better. “All is prepared?” he asked. “The sacrifice is willing?”

  My stomach clenched. How would I know until the very moment of the asking? All I could do was give him the very best of the “Honored’s Day”—to have him bathed in pleasure and peace—and hope that was enough. “I believe he will be,” I answered.

  “He must be,” my elder said, and I bowed my head, praying for Felix's willing heart.

  “Where is Gara?” I asked after some time, ashamed of my weakness. I should’ve been focusing on the great ritual to come and not on my lost love.

  The elder swayed in time with the leaves of the branches before me. “She has entered the Wheel of Souls, her life recast,” he said.

  It was as if he’d pierced me with a spear dripping with molten metal—it burned a hole clean through my heart. I’d never expected that! I’d thought she would be with me, giving me the strength to complete the ritual upon which the future of all our people relied!

  “You do not need her,” the elder said. “Just as we are reborn into new lives alone, you must walk through this ritual on your own.”

  I hung my head, trying to breathe through the hole in my chest. Would she be reborn into a soul I would recognize? Will she know me somehow when she sees me? Will I know her?

  I wanted to pray for it to be so, but I knew the only prayers that mattered right then were prayers for the success of the ritual, for the strengthening of our gods to repel and destroy the Romans, the invaders who ate up our souls and futures like the yellow mold that destroyed entire valleys of wheat and barley.

  “Complete the ritual correctly,” my elder Druid priest sang, “and repair the rift with the gods. It is up to you.”

  I submitted myself completely to both the honor and responsibility of the task. The priest closed his eyes and began chanting the prayers of life and death, and I sang them with him. The deep tones of his singing vibrated within the marrow of my bones, and I harmonized with him for hours. All was going exactly as it should.

  Light-headed from the mead and the fasting, I entered the circle of chanting torchbearers just as the full moon reached its highest point. Everyone hushed as I placed the offering of mistletoe at the feet of the great oak and turned to my prisoner.

  The Gaul’s cheeks were flushed, and his normally light eyes looked black in the flickering torch light. He grinned at me, and I breathed out in relief. He was joyous!

  “Felix of Gaul, of the People of the Elders before the Time of Rome, do you come to the arms of the woods willingly?” I thundered, first in the language of the land and then in Gaulish so he could understand.

  The people moaned with excitement when he grinned and threw his arms out as if in ecstasy. And when I translated his answer—“Yes, yes! A million times, yes!”—some of the chanters began to weep with relief. He was willing. It was the best omen of all.

  The singing and dancing began in earnest as I called upon the gods of all our people and the souls of all who had not yet been recast to accept this sacrifice. To accept it as the ultimate gift of hope and victory over our enemies.

  Felix was saying something to the girl who’d stood beside him. I signaled to her. She walked away from him, smiling with tears in her eyes. How much she loved him! How much he loved her! It could not have been more perfect!

  I approached Felix and felt a momentary pang at the sight of his wide eyes and how very young he looked. But I reminded myself that his own ancient people of Gaul would welcome him on the other side as the true tribesman he was. He could earn no greater honor for one who had turned his back on his ancestors and pretended to be Roman.

  His soul would thank me for this someday. He gave me a beatific smile, as if thanking me here and now—another sign of acceptance from the gods.

  With a quick lunging move, while chanting the sacred words, I wrapped the rope around his neck and twisted. In almost the same moment, I swung the butt of my sacrificial knife hard on the spot that I used on recalcitrant bulls. Finally, to seal the magic, I slit his throat in one fast, hard move. He fell to the ground and did not move.

  In that moment, an owl silently swooped over the man’s head, wheeled into an open clearing silvered in moonlight, and snatched a rodent before taking off again. Everyone gasped and murmured at the sight, then looked at me.

  Yes, I thought. I am your last Druid. I alone can tell you what it means.

  When the sacrifice’s lifeblood stopped pouring out, I held out my bloodied arms, threw my head back, and bellowed with joy.

  “The gods have accepted our sacrifice!” I announced in a deeper, stronger voice than I could’ve ever produced, as if the gods themselves spoke in unison through me. “And they have given us a clear sign of the path of our victory! Just as the owl destroyed its victim in an open clearing, we will demolish the rodents of Rome in open battle. We will defeat the destroyers of Mona! The gods have spoken!”

  When I finished, the chanters began again, and some of the people began to weep and dance in a frenzy of relief and hope. I held my arms out to the moon and filled my soul with its light and the promise of victory.

  But there was a pull. One among us, I could feel, did not lose himself in the joy. One who was still afraid. I turned to find him. Sorcha’s warrior. “Do not doubt the gods,” I thundered, and he jumped in surprise.

  “You are a warrior,” I continued. “And need a warrior’s sign.”

  He nodded. “Take his head,” I commanded.

  When he mounted it on a spear, I made everyone look. “The sacrifice still smiles!” I crowed with joy. “Don’t you see? He was a willing sacrifice, pleased to be with his ancestral gods once more. His own rejection of Rome is our victory!”

  The people roared again and began celebrating with even more abandon.

  The gods had spoken. I had listened. I’d been redeemed and would now be the redeemer of our people.

  Remembering that the ritual was not complete until I joined the Iceni queen, I turned to Sorcha’s warrior. “We must go to Londinium, where Boudica’s forces gather to attack,” I said.

  We set off right then, carrying the head of a Roman boy returned to his ancestral gods, complete with a promise from the Gods of all Wood and Water and Creatures of Our Land that victory over the Romans was ours.

  As we walked in the moonlight toward the queen of the Iceni, I remembered the three questions I had asked myself as I watched the sacred isle burn in the night. I knew the answers now.

  Why was I spared? To save our people.

  Why had the gods abandoned us? We’d displeased them. But I’d set things right.

  And most important: What do I do now?

  B
ring victory to Boudica's rebellion, and all our people.

  Never had I been more certain of anything in my life.

  PART FIVE

  “The enemy was intent upon butchery: fire, hanging, crucifixion.”

  — Tacitus

  THE SON

  S.J.A. Turney

  Two weeks earlier

  Londinium

  T

  he summer sun beat mercilessly down upon the land, a conflagration searing the fields and towns, browning the lush greens of late spring, parching the world. The farmers, so exultant at first that a good growing summer was upon them, now lamented the general lack of water as they watched their winter stores desiccate before their eyes.

  Andecarus could smell and taste Londinium, acrid and sour at the back of his throat, before he crested the last rise and laid eyes upon its northernmost edge. Dust filled the streets, and the movements of people, carts, and animals kicked up clouds of gray and brown that hung like a smudge in the air above the roofs, only slightly masking the odor of the docks and the fishing wharves that baked in the golden heat. It was a heady, nearly overpowering aroma, and none too pleasant, yet for Andecarus of the Iceni, son of Duro—and of Rome, after a fashion—even this smell was a welcome one against the pungent stink of charred timber and charred flesh, the iron-tang of blood, and the stink of opened bowels.

  “Smells better than Camulodunum,” murmured the lad at his side, as if reading his thoughts.

  Andecarus gave an involuntary shudder as his mind relentlessly furnished him with the latest in a long line of horrifying memories of wanton bloodshed—a Roman unfortunate enough to have been taken alive by two of the more battle-maddened warriors; they’d busily dissected him in the street as he screamed for mercy—or for death, which amounted to the same thing.

  He glanced sidelong at Luci on his fat little pony, an almost comical sight. The boy—an unwanted cooking-house slave with no real place in the queen’s war band—had been foisted upon him as a traveling companion and had done little other than question Andecarus over almost everything they passed.

  “I thought the Romans had stone houses?” Luci asked, frowning at the timber, wattle, and daubed-mud structures at the periphery of this, the new great trade hub of Roman lands.

  Sighing, Andecarus gestured ahead. “The ordinary people live in ordinary houses, but beyond a few streets of these are buildings of brick and stone with delicate carving. There’s a bathhouse with a furnace that never stops burning.”

  Burning.

  How long would it be before Londinium, too, lay smoldering and littered with the dead?

  “And a forum?” Luci asked, yet again dragging his attention back to the present. “I never got to go into Camulodunum before it was burned, and I’ve never seen a forum.”

  “It’s just a glorified square with a few higher-class buildings,” Andecarus rumbled, peering between the houses ahead. He could just make out the small forum with its tall, colonnaded basilica and there, far beyond, the wide, muddy River Tamesis with its forest of jetties and masts, thronged with boats of all sizes, from the sleek, speedy Roman liburna to the wide, heavy vessels of the northern Gaulish tribes to the small fishing boats of the Cantiaci, who plundered the river of its silver-scaled treasures to sell at an inflated price in the markets of Londinium. So many boats at those jetties . . . many more than usual.

  “There are still plenty of people in the streets,” the boy noted. “Where are we going?”

  “To the offices near the basilica.”

  “Is that where you used to live?”

  Andecarus fought the urge to gee up his horse and ride ahead of the constant barrage of questions. He forced himself to smile instead. “No. My foster father’s house was a gaudily painted place by one of the smaller rivers. Not too far from the forum, though, I suppose.”

  “It must be strange to have lived here for so long?”

  Home? What was home? In some ways this place was more home to him than his true father’s holding—the roundhouse belonging to Duro of the Iceni. Following that pointless and costly rising against Ostorius Scapula a dozen years earlier, the fourteen-year-old Andecarus had been given over to the Romans as a political hostage. For the next three years, he had lived in the household of a then rather sedate tribune named Catus Decianus, treated, if not as family, then at least as a respected foster child. As the settlement had grown and expanded around them at an astounding rate, he had learned his Latin and read the humorless prose the Romans laughingly called comedy. As the jetties along the riverbank doubled in number and then doubled again all within a year, he had studied the commentaries of Julius Caesar and his wars—that was an eye-opener in respect of some of the local tribes, for certain. As Governor Scapula settled comfortably into Camulodunum, Andecarus had listened to the family’s tutor relating the heart-stopping tale of Arminius of Germania and his revolt, which had destroyed three legions yet had brought such violent retribution from Rome it had almost obliterated the tribes—a most pertinent tale, as he now realized.

  “Strange, yes,” he managed.

  Londinium was familiar, and in a way that his true family’s home was not. Returning finally to the Iceni from a decade of exile among the Romans—three years in Decianus' household, another seven with the auxiliary—he had been initially uncertain what to do with himself. The tribe was as alien to him as the Romans had been when he was first taken, and his estranged father lavished attentions instead upon a fostered brute who Andecarus had been expected to call “brother.” And what could be read from that fact? That the belligerent Romans had raised an Iceni hostage and produced Andecarus while, in his place, fostered by the best of the Iceni, a selfish, savage killer had been forged?

  “What was it like to be taught by a Roman?” Luci probed brightly.

  Rolling his eyes, Andecarus heeled his horse’s flank, wincing at the pain in his knee as he did so and pulling out ahead of questions he was unprepared to answer. While he’d argued against bringing Luci along, and the boy had spun an incessant web of disquieting chatter along the way, he was trying his hardest to be patient. The Iceni slave boy had lost his father at Camulodunum and his place working in the cooking-house shortly after—no one had even bothered seeing that he had a new post until the queen’s eldest daughter, Sorcha, had suggested he be given to Andecarus. As a man who’d suffered his own difficult childhood, he could hardly bring himself to contribute further to Luci’s troubles, but sometimes the questions touched on raw subjects, and he was forced to draw a veil of silence over the conversation.

  His steed picked up the pace on this, the final stretch of his journey, descending the gentle slope in the shadow of the old fort, used as animal pens for nearly a decade since the legions left, yet now languishing in silence—no squealing or lowing of penned animals today. His mount plodded on, weary but resolute in the lee of that reminder of Londinium’s helplessness and his own last-ditch mission.

  In a world of chaotic, whirling change and uncertainty—over his future, his family, even his very identity—his horse was one thing upon which he could rely. The stocky chestnut mare, Selene, was strong and swift, slightly larger than the usual Roman mounts and blessedly unconcerned over her master’s lineage or upbringing. He and the beast had, in their earliest days together, formed that bond that only a cavalryman and his steed can. For after three years of learning in the quiet peace of Decianus’ house, the man had finished his term as a tribune and had been recalled to Rome, as a last act sending Andecarus off to serve the rest of his hostageship in a cavalry ala—a detachment of five hundred Gaulish auxiliaries attached to the Ninth Legion. There he and Selene had spent the next seven summers gutting and terrorizing the enemies of Rome alongside the heavy infantry of the legion. He'd had his first true taste of the battlefield there, first against the rising of the rebel Caratacus and later against the Brigantes to preserve the sovereignty of their Roman-favoring Queen Cartimandua. By the time he left the cavalry, An
decarus had risen to the rank of decurion, commanding a turma of thirty bloodthirsty Romano-Gaulish riders, and by his estimation, he had killed two dozen warriors with his own hand.

  The Ninth.

  He remembered so vividly standing on that hill at the edge of Camulodunum—could it only have been a few days ago?—gazing out to the northwest as he absorbed the news that the Iceni had routed Cerialis’ army, including that selfsame turma of the First Gallorum in which he’d served for seven summers until his appointed hostageship had reached its end. In response to the threat of the Iceni at Camulodunum, the new commander of the Ninth had force-marched his men—a gleaming steel centipede pounding through the dusty brown—to the defense of the colonia. He’d never reached it. Caught unaware by the Iceni almost within sight of their goal, they had been massacred without mercy—an echo of Arminius in Germania, Andecarus thought with grim clarity. Men with whom he had shared bread and wine and the terror of battle, gone to the gods on the tips of Iceni spears. Friends of seven years, killed by his own tribe.

  Boudica’s army had then turned its attention back to Camulodunum while the impetuous Cerialis and a few of his cavalry escaped to languish, brooding and humiliated, at Durobrivae once more. Just three years ago, that would have been Andecarus, wheeling his mount desperately in the press, his Roman helmet tight down over his braided hair, his spear lancing out, his heart torn in two as he fought for his adoptive people against his own. He could only thank the gods that had not come to pass. Fighting Ordovices or Brigantes was one thing—they were not his tribe—but this war . . . Even now he could not say in his heart of hearts for which side he would draw his blade when he was finally called upon. What was a child of two worlds to do? Throw in his lot with the estranged people of his birth and put to the sword the men who had educated him and made him who he now was? Or follow the eagle of Rome and bring terrible vengeance against his own father and cousins? How could dread Andraste, who kept a watchful eye over the Iceni, allow such things to happen? In the days before the Druids had retreated to Mona, such a thing would have been explained by the tribe's own priests, but now, directionless and lost, the people were forced to look to their own signs and try to determine their meaning. His knee twinged again, and he shook his leg out with a hissed intake of air between clenched teeth.