Ravens of Avalon (37 page)

“She is surely your daughter, my lady,” murmured Calgac. “Good form with that, um, spear.”

Boudica changed her smile for a regal frown, straightened her tunica, and strode forward. Men parted to let her through, as impressed, she hoped, by her air of authority as by the spear in the hand of the man who followed her.

“Mama,” cried Rigana as she came into view. “They were going to
kill
the boy!”

“Nay, Lady—noble queen!” said a round little man with a very red face, simultaneously trying to bluster and bow. “I beat the boy because he is stupid and lazy, and the little girls started to yell at me and the red-haired one
hit
me, and look at the mess they have made of my stall!”

Boudica looked more closely and saw the beginnings of a notable bruise on his cheek.
Good for you, Rigana!
“I see …” she said aloud. Unfortunately, the man was within his rights, and she had no desire to fight this out in a Roman court of law. “I suppose the boy is your slave?”

“He is, to my sorrow, and a more stupid, worthless—”

“Then his value is doubtless small,” she cut across his words. “Will this compensate you for the insult to your honor, the damage to your shop, and this worthless boy?” She stripped off one of her golden arm rings and held it out to him.

“Yes, but the boy cost …” His protest faded as he got a good look at the gold. “Yes, great queen, you are most generous!”

“I am, for that arm ring is worth more than you and your shop and everything in it.” Men straightened and bowed their heads as she swept the crowd with a regal glare. “Before all the gods, I call you to witness that compensation has been offered and accepted, and to attest to that fact if required.”

“Yes, Lady,” came the murmurs, and from those who recognized her, “yes, my queen!”

“Crispus, get a few names in case we need them, while Calgac and I take these mighty warriors home to face their own justice,” murmured Boudica, moving forward to collect her offspring and their prize.

“Which of you had this idea?” she asked as they entered the Roman-style house that had been assigned to them during their stay.

Rigana eyed her dubiously, clearly trying to decide whether claiming leadership would bring her praise or blame.

“Riga wanted to see the shops,” Argantilla said precisely, “but I saved the boy!”

“Ah yes …” For a moment she considered the younger girl. Rigana had always been more aggressive, but clearly Tilla also had steel. Then she sighed and turned to the boy. “Well, let us take a look at you, child.” She lifted his chin and gazed into dark eyes wide with defiance and fear. “What is your name?”

“He
called me ‘you little bastard,’ ” muttered the boy, “but there was a woman who called me Caw.” She could see now that he was desperately thin, and she glimpsed the weals of the whip beneath the tattered tunic he wore.

“Was she your mother?” Boudica asked more gently. He spoke with the accent of the Trinovantes, but that was to be expected. With such hair and eyes, he could be a Roman bastard or the child of a Silure woman taken in war.

“Dunno …” Caw looked down.

“Well it’s no matter, you belong to us now. We will make your freedom legal once you are grown. And we do not beat our servants, slave or free!” She turned to the warrior. “Calgac, will you take our new child and find him food, a bath, and clothes? When you are recovered, Caw, you will attend my daughters. I expect you to help them, but you must not let them push you around. And you two—” she turned to the girls, “—must treat him with courtesy.”

“Yes, Mama,” they chorused, impressed into good behavior, at least for now.

t was hot in the square. As the line of richly dressed men and women moved sedately forward, Boudica pulled her veil forward to create a little shade. Prasutagos looked at her enviously. His hair was growing thin on top, and he would have a very red pate by the time they were done. The Roman citizens among them had pulled the ends of their togas over their heads. She had always assumed that the voluminous folds of the toga were intended to demonstrate that the wearer was not expected to do anything practical while wearing it, but clearly, in their native land, the garment also served to provide protection to men who had to stand about for hours of official ceremonies in the hot Italian sun. She could feel sweat trickling down her back beneath her linen gown.

Sweet smoke eddied through the air, veiling the tile roofs of the buildings that surrounded the square. This place was the most emphatically Roman part of Colonia. It had been laid out at the eastern edge of the town, where the battlements had been leveled to provide more room. On one side the half-built walls of the new theater gleamed white in the sunlight. Though she saw no image ofJupiter, his brooding presence hung over the place like an invisible cloud. But the figure of Victory on her tall column gazed complacently upon those who had come to the civic altar to offer incense to the
genius
of the emperor. Boudica had no objection to participating, though this rite seemed stiff and perfunctory after the power of the Druid rituals. Anything that increased the virtue of the ruler could only improve the way he dealt with Britannia.

Prasutagos gave a patient sigh as step by step the kings and chieftains moved forward. At least he had been able to amuse himself by looking at the buildings. She had learned to interpret his sighs as she did his silences. This one expressed a number of things he was too politic to say, such as his opinion of the togas some of the Catuvellauni wore. Britons who had come over to the Roman side early had been rewarded by making their tribal center a town, Verulamium, and given the status of citizens. The Peace of Rome required her to be polite to them, as it kept her from speaking her mind to Cartimandua.

Through the smoke she met the Brigante queen’s dark eyes.
You despise me as a traitor,
they seemed to say.
Yet here we both are. Caratac came to you in secret, but to me he came openly. Can you swear that faced with my choice you would not have done the same?
And Boudica, recognizing that she might have betrayed Caratac herself if giving him up had been the price of her children’s safety, was the first to look away.

Her nostrils flared at the sweet spicy scent as they came to the altar. She bowed her head and cast a pinch of crumbled resin on the fire. Then they were done, and moving toward the chattering group gathered under a sunshade at the edge of the square.

“Do they really think that going through this show will make us love Rome?” she murmured.

“I don’t think it matters,” Prasutagos replied. “Romans are always most concerned about the forms of things. So long as we go through the motions, they don’t seem to care what we really believe. I think they show
their
faith in the things they build …” His gaze went back to the square. “Even the walls of their houses are straight and tall, like ramparts, hiding what lies within.”

Boudica smiled, wondering what he was dreaming of constructing now, and let him lead her into the shade.

It was cooler beneath the awning. Slaves in green tunics moved among the crowd, bearing trays of spicy tidbits and wine in cups of blue glass.

Boudica’s expression of pleasant interest grew a little fixed as she saw Pollio coming toward them.

“A lovely afternoon, is it not? Almost warm enough to make us Romans feel at home.” His tone was casual, but she flinched from the intensity of his gaze and drew her veil around her shoulders and across her breast as an additional shield. “It is my honor to present my new assistant—Lucius Cloto from Noviomagus in the Atrebate lands.”

Boudica blinked, mentally subtracting fat and facial hair to match this narrow-eyed man to a boy shouting curses as Ardanos dragged him away. Unfortunately Cloto had been right about the power of Rome, and clearly he had been rewarded, though his awkwardly draped toga looked as though it was about to trip him. From the new name, he must have become a client of Pollio when he became a Roman citizen.

“King Prasutagos, of course, you know, but you may not have met his lovely wife, Boudica,” Pollio went on.

“Oh I knew Boudica when she was only a gangly girl, long ago,” said Cloto. He and Boudica exchanged edged smiles.

“Since then many things have changed,” she said blandly. It would probably be neither politic nor dignified to mention that in those days she had outrun him on the hurley field.

Indeed, my lovely wife,
said Prasutagos’s raised brow,
I sense a tale I have not heard.

“No doubt we will meet again this fall, when we make the rounds after the harvest,” said Cloto.
I was right … and now you will pay,
he smiled.

“Did you know that the people here call him by the name of one of the Greek fates, ‘Clotho’?” asked Prasutagos when the two tax collectors had gone. “He measures out the amount due.”

“He was a student at Mona when I was there,” said Boudica, “and just as unpleasant a boy as he is a man. He’ll be dangerous—he knows what people are likely to have and what they will be trying to hide … Will this affect the building project at Teutodunon?” The double-tiered roundhouse had not satisfied the king for long. Prasutagos’s new plan called for a group of buildings in a vastly expanded enclosure.

“I shouldn’t think so,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m providing work for people who would otherwise be potential rebels. The Romans ought to thank me for getting them off the roads.” He shrugged. “The Romans say that fate is something that no one can evade.”

Prasutagos smiled but Boudica did not. Certainly all that the Druids had done to evade the fate foreseen by the seeresses had only helped to bring it to pass. Which of their own efforts to preserve their people would instead bring disaster? Despite the warmth of the day, she felt a chill.

he day had dawned clear but a cold wind was herding clouds across the sky. The Turning of Spring always brought unsettled weather, thought Boudica, picking up a bundle of bedding to transfer from the two-tiered great house to the new roundhouse that had been built for the women beside it. Geese were winging northward, and the royal family was moving out of the two-tiered hall. It would be a relief, she thought wryly, not to have to fall asleep to the sound of men arguing around the central fire.

“Mama! Bogle is gone!”

Boudica turned as Argantilla came running toward her.

“He’s an old dog, darling. I am sure he has only lain down somewhere out of the way for a nap.” Though it was hard to know where that might be, with the dun a-bustle with men digging the new bank and ditch, now that they had finished the roundhouses that would flank the council hall.

“But I’ve looked
everywhere!”
At eight, Argantilla was growing into a sturdy, responsible child, red-faced with exertion just now, with her father’s thick fair hair. It was a relief to have one daughter who could be depended on to know where she had left her shoes the night before, but Tilla’s conviction that she was the only responsible person in the family could sometimes annoy.

“No, you have not,” Boudica said tartly, “or you would have found him. These days he is too lame to have gotten far. Ask your sister to help you look, or Caw.”

“Rigana is out on her pony, helping the men bring in the cows,” Tilla said disapprovingly. “I think Caw is watching the blacksmith.”

Raised in the Roman town, Caw did not have the ease on horseback of her girls, who had ridden since before they could walk, but he was clever with his hands. Argantilla still regarded him as her discovery, and the boy revered her as his rescuer. Boudica had no doubt he would drop whatever he might be doing if Tilla asked.

“Go find him, Blossom,” she said aloud, “and find the dog, and then you can come back and help
me.”

Prasutagos ought to be helping as well, but he had discovered a convenient errand to Drostac of Ash Hill. Now that the two roundhouses flanking the Council Hall were completed, Boudica and the girls were taking all their things to the one allotted to the queen. Except for a few things he would need at night, the king’s gear had to be moved to the Men’s House on the other side. The gods alone knew how he and his house guard would organize things over there, but that was not her problem.

What she would have preferred, Boudica thought wryly, was a separate house just big enough for her and him. It was time the king and queen made another journey through the tribal territories, though now that he was High King she supposed they could never be as entirely alone as they had been when she ran away from their wedding feast and woke to find him cooking breakfast over her fire. She smiled reminis-cently, then gave herself a mental shake and picked up the bundle of bedding once more.

She had arranged all her own gear and she and Temella were making up the great bed when Caw appeared at the door. It was a new bed, and she was looking forward to testing it when her husband got home.

“My Lady,” said Caw with the formality that even after three years in their household he still used. “We have found the dog.” He waited.

“Is he injured?” Boudica asked.

“I believe something is wrong. He lifts his head, but he will not rise. Argantilla is with him down at the end of the new ditch. He is too heavy, Lady, for us to carry home.”