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The more ascetic among the Druids starved themselves to achieve a
state in which the flesh would no longer hunger. Perhaps that was what
had happened to her and Ardanos, or perhaps it was that in the place
where they were now, beyond all the distractions of ordinary life, they
could speak soul to soul.
“When they come,” he whispered after a little time had passed.
“When they break through, will you come with me to the Blessed Isles?
They will know us for Druids, and they will drag us captive through
the streets of Rome and give us to the beasts in the arena if they take
us alive.”
“Yes, my love. But not yet. There are brave men here, and it would
be wrong to desert them too soon.”
He laughed a little at that and kissed her forehead. “I never doubted
your courage, Lhiannon.”
The stars were growing pale as the full moon climbed the sky. On
such a night it seemed impossible that soon men would die. The Ro-
mans called the moon a chaste goddess. Could they not see that to break
the peace of this night with violence was a blasphemy?
Lhiannon sat up, lifting her hands to the skies. “Holy Goddess, holy
Goddess,” she sang:
“Upon the world of warring men
look down and make their hatred cease.
O holy Goddess, hear us now,
oh hear our prayer and give us peace . . .”
As if in answer, a ball of fire arced across the face of the moon. It
landed on a thatched roof and began to burn.
“Goddess have mercy on us all. It has begun!”
More fireballs fell, some catching buildings, others sizzling on the
ground. From the gate came shouting. As she and Ardanos started
toward it, a warrior ran past them screaming, clothes streaming flame.
She screamed herself as a bolt from a ballista whipped past and skewered
another man to a wall.
Farther along the wall men were shouting. Fire billowed up where
the logs of the palisade had caught and men scrambled back from the
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fl ames. This is what the storms prevented, Lhiannon thought numbly. I am
sorry I cursed the rain . . .
Bands of men dashed here and there as the alarm was shouted from
different parts of the wall. She and Ardanos separated to get the chests
where they had kept their remaining ban dages and surgical tools; when
she emerged from her hut, she saw one of the chieftains grab Ardanos’s
arm. The man pointed toward the other end of the dun and he nodded,
cast one desperate glance back at her, and started off at a run.
Now they were bringing wounded into the space before Antebro-
gios’s house and laying them on blankets brought from those huts that
were not yet in fl ames. Lhiannon hurried to the nearest, who had a bal-
lista bolt through his thigh. The shaft was a stout piece of ash wood a
little over two feet long, but all she could see protruding from his fl esh
were the three fins on the end. An arrow could have been broken off ,
but this shaft was too thick; she would have to pull it. There was not
much blood; they could hope it had not severed an artery.
“Hold him,” she said to the man beside him, whose leg would need
splinting next. Grimacing, he nodded, and leaned his weight on his com-
panion as she gripped the shaft beneath the fins and gave a sharp tug.
Her patient screamed and then went limp. Lhiannon gritted her teeth
and pulled again, using all her strength. She felt something give, then
the thing came loose, the evil quadrangular head spattering blood across
her skirts. More blood welled from the hole. She grabbed a wad of wool
and pressed down hard, then bound it tightly in place.
The wound ought to be washed out with wine. The man should be
kept quiet and fed infusions of white willow for the pain. She could
even do it, if he lived—if any of them lived—through the next few
hours. As it was, he might live until morning and die of infection
thereafter. He might survive to live in slavery and wish he had died
today.
But they were setting a man before her with a splinter from a smashed
log through his shoulder, and here was another whose knee had been
crushed by a catapulted stone. Her awareness narrowed to the next deci-
sion, the next incision, to red blood and firelight and pain. Men screamed
and bled beneath her hands, some fainted, and some of them died. Once
when she looked up she saw the moon glowing red from the smoke in
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the air. No chaste goddess she—this was the bloody shield of Cathu-
bodva, the moon of war.
The regular hollow boom that shook the earth beneath her might
have been her heartbeat. It was only when men began to run past that
she realized the Romans were attacking the gate. Despite all the mis-
siles the defenders could rain down upon them, the locked shields they
called the “tortoise” were protecting the men who swung the ram.
She saw Caratac in all his battered splendor shouting a group of war-
riors into position at the top of the steep slope that ran down to the gate.
“Get out of the way!” One of Antebrogios’s house-guard yanked
her to her feet and shoved her toward the roundhouse. “Take cover! You
can’t help them now!”
Where was Ardanos? Lhiannon hesitated, staring wildly at the
confusion of moving men. There was a rending groan and the great
bar across the gate cracked and fell. The timbers shivered beneath an-
other stroke; held in place by the rocks piled behind them, they splin-
tered under the impact of a third great blow. The defenders reeled
beneath a new shower of missiles as the first armored enemies squeezed
through.
She edged back until she was huddling beneath the overhanging
roof of the roundhouse, but she had to see! More Romans were pour-
ing through the gap. Steel clashed as they drove against the Britons
waiting there. She heard Caratac’s war cry. A sword skittered across the
ground to her feet and she picked it up, then dropped it again. She was
a healer; her heart was torn by anguish, but even now there was noth-
ing within her that answered to the Morrigan’s rage.
The embattled knot of men were moving toward her. As she real-
ized it, the defenders broke and ran. She saw Caratac rise up from the
tumult, laying about him with great strokes of his long sword. Romans
reeled back from the terror of that blade and for a moment the space
around him was clear. He leaped forward, saw her cowering, and hauled
her into the shadow behind the house.
“They shall not have me or you either, priestess! The palisade is
down on the west side. Come with me!”
His arm was like iron around her waist. Half dragged, half running,
she fled from house to house as the battle raged on. As they neared the
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palisade she thought she saw Ardanos’s white robe in the midst of a
/>
group of running warriors. She tried to call out to him, but she had no
breath. Then Caratac was thrusting her through the splintered gap in
the logs; she tripped and rolled down the bank. He slid down after her,
pulled her over the second bank, and together they skidded down it into
the darkness beyond.
Lhiannon looked back. The sky above the hill was red; most of the
houses must now be burning. A haze of heat and smoke obscured the
sky. Or perhaps her vision was dimmed by tears.
As Caratac led his party up the lane, a turmoil of dogs, spotted and
brindle and gray, came tumbling through the gate of the farmstead
barking in a cacophony of keys. Roused as her pony shied, Lhiannon,
startled into awareness for the first time in days. Ardanos would have
had a Word of Power to calm them, she thought sadly. King Caratac,
however, had the voice of authority. The dogs swirled back and then, as
someone else called them, fell silent, tails wagging and heads down.
Lhiannon’s heart leaped as she glimpsed a white robe behind them. It
was a Druid’s robe, but the tall figure beneath it bore a boy’s face above
a young man’s soft black beard.
“Lady Lhiannon! What are you doing here?” he exclaimed, and
hearing his voice, she recognized Rianor, who had been a student with
Boudica. He looked down the line of weary men and his face changed.
They were a tattered crew, many of them ban daged, warriors who
had escaped after the fall of the Dun of Stones and been collected by
Caratac in those first frantic days as they dodged Roman patrols. The
king was no longer the pleasant young man who had visited them at
Mona, no longer even the exhausted warrior who had wept over his
brother’s body at the Tamesa. Above the royal torque, Caratac’s face was
worn to a framework for eyes that blazed with purpose. The berserk
energy that had gotten her out of the Dun of Stones was leashed and
focused now to the service of their cause.
“Holy gods, you were at the dun—we all heard how bravely it was
defended,” said Rianor. “We
were praying for you at the Isle. My
mother was of the Belgae, so they sent me here . . .”
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“As you see, we have wounded,” said Caratac. “Some of them will
recover well enough to fight again, and some should not travel farther.”
“Are the Romans coming? Are you here to command the defense of
Camadunon?” Rianor gestured toward the hill to the south of the
farm.
In the long years since the hill was last needed as a place of refuge
forest had grown up around it, but someone had already started cutting
trees to rebuild the palisade. With a kind of numb despair Lhiannon
found herself calculating where an enemy might try to scale the hill.
Caratac shook his head. “King Maglorios is sending men to hold it.
I must fare to the country of the Silures. The tribes to the north and
west will be our best defense if the south fails.” He turned to Lhiannon.
“Lady, I will be traveling fast and hard, so I must leave you. This dun
guards the approaches to the Summer Country, and from here you can
find escort to Mona or to Avalon.”
“Thank you.” It was all she could say, though there had been too
many nights when she had cursed him in her heart for not leaving her to
die with Ardanos.
Rianor helped her to dismount, and together they watched the king
ride away with the three of his own tribesmen who had survived. She
wondered if she would ever see him again.
“Ardanos is not with you?” ventured Rianor as he showed her
where she would sleep until more huts were built in the dun.
“We were separated when the enemy broke through. I last saw Ar-
danos with some of Antebrogios’s men. Caratac got me away, but we
have had no word of the others. It is most likely,” with an effort she kept
her voice calm, “that he is dead or captive.” She had sought him on the
spirit roads without success. In her current state of weakness that might
mean nothing. Surely if he had been killed she would have felt his pass-
ing. But if he lived, why had he not reached out to her?
“Oh my lady, I am so sorry!” exclaimed Rianor. “We all knew how
much you loved him, and he you. Otherwise you would have been
made High Priestess instead of Helve.”
Lhiannon closed her eyes in pain. Did they all assume that she and
Ardanos had been lovers? It seemed hard to have the reputation without
having had any of the joy. And yet that was not entirely true, she thought,
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remembering how they had lain together beneath the moon. Soul to soul,
they had been united with a completeness that few who had experienced
only the body’s sweaty couplings ever knew.
“My lady,” he said then, “have you had any word of Boudica? I—we
hoped that she would come back after your visit to Avalon.”
“She chose to return to her tribe,” Lhiannon said steadily. “A mar-
riage was arranged for her with King Prasutagos, to unite the two branches
of the Iceni. I suppose she will be as happy as any can be in these times.
He seemed to be a good man.”
“If he is good to her, that is enough for me!” Rianor said fi ercely.
“But it is strange to think of her married to one of those who bent the
knee to Rome. At least she will be safe in the Iceni lands.” He got to his
feet. “I wish that we could say the same—if the Roman advance contin-
ues, they will come this way.”
T W E L V E
Routed from the west country, the rain clouds that had soaked the
Durotrige country moved north and east to deluge the Iceni lands, and
the season that should have brought sunshine saw a succession of storms.
As water pooled in the fields, drowning the growing grain, there were
times when Boudica wondered if her words to the Roman had been
prophetic, for this year there would be little to harvest. Nor could they
hope for help from Dun Garo, where the land was even lower and the
rivers bigger. All of the Iceni chieftains would be begging the Romans
for the grain they needed to get their people through another year.
As the rains continued to fall the roundhouse smelled perpetually of
woodsmoke and dung and the woolen garments that had been hung
from the beams to dry. The most valuable of the breeding stock had
been brought to the higher ground of the dun and penned inside, but
every day, it seemed, someone would come splashing up from one of the
other farms, asking help to rescue marooned sheep or strengthen the
dike that protected a house from a rising stream. And soon the coughing
sickness began to stalk the countryside, and Nessa and Boudica were
both kept busy brewing herbal teas and broth.
In the days that followed her arrival at Camadunon, Lhiannon
realized that torment in the mind, unlike pain of the body, was best
treated by activity. Work that required all one’s attention was better
than riding. She had no wish to
spend more days as a passenger, staring
at mental images of Ardanos in chains or dying, and in any case no man
could be spared to escort her to Avalon. Here there were wounded men
who needed her nursing, food to be cooked for the laborers, and when
there was no other work, an extra pair of hands could always be used at
the dun.
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From time to time a shepherd or farm lad would trot into the stead-
ing with word of the Roman advance. Vespasian had left engineers to
build Roman fortifications on the Dun of Stones and then continued
his campaign. Rumor had them marching north or south or stopping
entirely, but by the feast of Lugos it was known that they were on
their way.
They had done all they could at Camadunon. The ditches between
the four stone and timber ramparts that surrounded the hillfort had
been dug deeper and the topmost bank was crowned with a new pali-
sade. Stone faced the slots that led to the gates on the northeast and
southwest sides. An ox had been offered to the gods at the new shrine
and supplies had been laid in, and from the surrounding countryside
came men.
Camadunon stood on the border between the farmlands and the
Summer Country. If it fell, Avalon would have no defense but its fens.
At night Lhiannon would lie sleepless, remembering the Dun of Stones.
She began to realize that she could not endure the mounting despair of
a siege and the terror of an assault again, but how could she desert the
people who had come to depend on her?
Boudica came out of the herdsman’s hut and wrapped the heavy
wool of her cloak around her. Rosic was the chief of their shepherds, but
he was better with sheep than with children, and had come begging
her help when his wife fell ill. His daughter Temella had tried to nurse
her siblings, but she had been close to panic when Boudica arrived.
At this season there should have been some hours of light left, but
clouds from the afternoon’s rainstorm still covered the sky, leaching
color from the sodden fields. She rubbed the small of her back as the
baby kicked sharply. When she was inside with the children she had not
noticed the ache. At least her own child was warm and safe in the cradle
of her womb, and Rosic’s younger ones had kept down the soup she fed
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