Song for a Dark Queen (17 page)

And from somewhere deep within me rose the half memory of thunder over the marshes, and Prasutagus flinging himself over Boudicca in the path of the stampeding horse-herd. And then for a while everything became like a dream, full of tumult and cries and confusion, that had neither time nor place nor meaning.

I came back to myself a long while later. The noise of fighting had gone away into a great silence. Only a ragged cry here and there with long gaps between, only the sounds of running and scrambling feet that went and came and went again, and somewhere a man shouting to another in the Roman tongue, as the Red Crests went about their looting. Somewhere a wolf howled; and the day had long since turned to dusk and the dusk deepened into the dark.

There began to be a new light, red and fitful, and a crackling sound, they were firing the wagons with their piles of dead. Red light slanted through the gaps in the floorboards above me. The Royal Wagon was ablaze, and burning fragments began to fall all round me.

I thought that I must get the child clear. The fire seemed to reach in at me through the wound in my flank, as I lifted myself off her. But I could move. The ground under my hands was sodden with blood; her’s, or mine, or a mingling of both. She lay very still. The flame-glare from the next wagon slanted in between the wheels, and warmed the colour of her skin, and her eyes were wide and looking up at me; but she lay exactly as I had set her down, and surely she was very still.

‘Come, little bird,’ I whispered stupidly. ‘Wake! It is time to be away!’ I would get her out on the far side
of the wagon; and if we could get clear of the flame-light before we were seen, the night would cover us.

‘Nessan!’ I said. ‘Nessan! Wake now!’ For my wits were still half gone.

And then I saw that she was dead.

I took her by her shoulders and pulled her still further under the burning wagon, so that when it fell in it would cover her and take her with it, beyond the reach of the Red Crests. I laid her straight and seemly as best I could, drawing the heavy braids of her hair down either side of her face and on to her breast, straightening her torn skirts down to her feet. I unsheathed my sword – I still had a knife, and that was all the weapon I should need now – and folded her hands on the hilt. Not because it was a sword; she was not her mother – but for a parting gift, because it was mine. If I had had my harp with me, I would have left her that instead. A timber fell beside us with a shower of sparks, and one side of the wagon settled a little.

I crawled out between the wheels on the far side, the side away from the day’s battle; and left her to the flames.

It is all over. And I can’t quite believe it, Mother.

We have pulled back to the old transit camp; and I suppose we shall be here for a day or two, while we bury our dead – we have surprisingly few – and get our wounded sorted out, and see to all the things that have to be seen to after a battle.

Paulinus drew up the line-of-battle troops in three ranks, one behind the other, across the mouth of the valley, with the auxiliaries and cavalry on the wings. Our spears took a fairly heavy toll of the first chariot charge; but they managed to break clear through the front rank, even so, and tear a few holes in the second, before the third flung them back. But when the second charge came on, our men had orders to hold until the last moment, and then make their throw all towards the centre of the enemy line. They carried out their orders splendidly, and tore a great gap in the centre; and we formed a wedge and drove through it into the very heart of the British battle-mass; after which the auxiliaries and cavalry closed in from the wings. It was hot work for a while, but eventually we got them on the run. – Only they couldn’t even run; they had parked their wagon train straight across their line of retreat. Jupiter! They must have been sure of victory! – And we cut them to pieces against their own wagons.

The troops spent most of the night looting. They killed everything that moved; man, woman, child, war-pony, even the draught oxen from the wagons, and then fired the ruins. Paulinus doesn’t usually allow that kind of thing, I’m told; but he made no attempt to stop them.

Boadicea seems to have escaped; but there’s no more she can do; no danger to the Province any more. We had a terrific victory. They’re beginning to say that
we killed eighty thousand British for the loss of only four hundred of our own men. But I’d take that with a grain of salt. I very much doubt if there were eighty thousand in the whole War Host; and we took prisoners enough to flood the slave market, this winter. And of course, despite the wagon line, quite a lot must have got away.

Everything feels a bit flat, now. But I imagine that we shall have plenty to do later. Paulinus sacrificed on the Altar of Vengeance when he had made the more orthodox offerings after the battle; and intends to make a thorough job of seeing that nothing like this ever happens again, if he has to wipe out what remains of the Iceni and about six other tribes, and burn down half the Province to do it.

If ever I am Governor of Britain, I hope I never have anything like this to handle!

Mother dear, I’ve kept my promise to write, after a fashion. But I have suddenly decided I shan’t send this letter. There are things in it better not written lest the wrong eyes should read them. And things that will make you worried and sad. It’s dirty, too. I’ve carried it in my saddle-bag all this while, and there’s blood on it. I’ll write you a nice clean letter with no blood on it, when I have more time. Or maybe I’ll wait till I get leave and can tell you the story myself.

There’s a good fire burning in front of the Governor’s pavilion. Sylvanus – another of the Staff Tribunes, and normally rather an exquisite young man – is trying to roast a hare over it on the point of a spear. I shall drop this into the hottest part of it, and watch the papyrus crumbled away.

Your loving, tired, dirty and hungry son

Gneus Julius Agricola

I LOOKED BACK
once, and saw the ragged fringe of flame leaping up from the burning wagons. The horsetail pennants of the Royal Wagon had become tassels of flame, and there was a woman hanging head-down over the side, among blazing rags of embroidered horsehide. And my ears were full of the sounds of sack and pillage. Somewhere the wolf howled again. I half ran, crouching low, for a patch of thorn scrub, and lay full length in the shelter of it, until I had snatched back enough breath to go on. There were moving shadows in the night, running, lurching, crawling on hands and knees. I joined them, making for the dark refuge of the forest.

Away at the end of the wrecked wagon line, I passed close by the little hillock with its crest of thorn trees, and left it to its dead priests. I did not go seeking my harp hanging from its thorn branch. There would be no more harp-song.

Yet was on my forehead that I was the Queen’s Harper still; for on the forest verge, in the shelter of a jagged earth hollow under the roots of a tree that had been blown down in some past gale, I stumbled among a little knot of men. One of them had me by the hair, his knife cold at my throat before I well knew it; but another caught his arm and cursed him for a fool who could not tell a Red Crest from another of themselves. And he let me go. And I knew from the sound of the tongue that I was among my own tribe.

There were four of them, black shapes in the lesser
dark. And a fifth lay still in their midst, muffled in a cloak. A woman’s shape I thought, even then; her face a pale blur like something floating under the surface of dark water; and bending close, I knew the truth even before one of them said, ‘It is the Queen.’

I put my hand under the breast folds of her cloak, thinking to feel the stillness of death, but the life in her was still beating.

‘We found her against the northern flank,’ said another, ‘lying across the wreck of her chariot. The charioteer must have been killed and the horses bolted. She had bound the reins round her waist, to have her hands free for her sword. There’s no mark on her save a broken place – here – running out of her hair.’

‘The Mother of Foals turned the eyes of the Red Crests away, and we were able to bring her off, round the end of the wagon line,’ said the third.

And the fourth said, broodingly, ‘She promised us the victory.’

There were a few ponies who must have escaped the same way, running loose among the scrub; for the Red Crests, though they had butchered every living thing among the wagons, had not given chase. Maybe they thought too few had escaped to make it worth their while. We managed to catch two, and got the Queen up on to one of them. She lay heavy in my arms as one newly dead, and when I would have lifted her up, the wound under my ribs pulled me back as with ropes. Two other men took her from me, and lifted her up and over, while I crouched coughing on the ground.

‘How sore is the hurt? Can you travel?’ someone asked.

I knew what that meant. If I could not get away with
them, they would kill me to save me from a slow death or falling into Roman hands, according to the custom of the Tribes. But I was not done with my life yet. Not while Boudicca lived and might have need of me. I shook my head, my breath coming back. ‘A spear-hole under the ribs. It’s not deep. I’ll do well enough if I can stop the bleeding.’

The Queen fell forward along the pony’s mane, and they bound her hands together under its neck with broad strips torn from her cloak, to help keep her from falling off, while I made shift to lash myself tight about the middle with a strip torn from my own. Then we dragged ourselves into weary movement, and straggled off along the woodshore, until in the first grey light of dawn we found a deer track leading northward into the depths of the trees. So we set out to carry the Queen home.

Two of us walked all the while beside the pony to steady her on its back, the other three straggling behind with the second pony. At most times I was one of those who walked beside the Queen; the others accepted that it was my right when I told them that I was of her household; and in steadying her, I could steady myself against my own weakness that made all things hazy and my feet seem very, far away. Once or twice I rode the second pony for a while, but he was a chariot beast, and not good for riding, and for the most part we tried to keep him fresh in case of a greater need.

Somewhere about the Trinovantes’ border, we came on a deserted farm, and killed a half-starved pig. We made a little fire, though we dared not raise much smoke for fear of who or what might come to it, and feasted on scorched flesh, and even contrived to get a little blood-broth down the Queen’s throat. She
seemed able to swallow though she gave no sign of being aware. And questing through the small turf-roofed huddle of buildings, we found other things that were of use to us; among them an old cloak to replace the Queen’s that, though ragged now, was all too brightly scarlet. And for me, more rags to bind over the hole in my flank that oozed redly all the while. If I could stop the bleeding, I thought through a haze, I could maybe hold back the growing weakness until we got the Queen home to her own place again.

But the best thing we found in the place was a farm sledge, old and rickety; no more than a shallow hurdlework box on clumsy runners; but we piled bracken into it and harnessed up the chariot pony as best we could, and laid the Queen within. And after that we had better travelling, save when the sledge got bogged down in soft places or once when it was nearly swept away at a river ford.

Other people began to come and go in the fiery mist that was all about me. The wild country was full of fugitives; never many together for on the run, especially in familiar country, a handful do better than a large band. A few joined themselves to us, all the same. None that I knew, and now I cannot remember their faces, and I am doubting if they will remember mine. We were shadows cast together, no more.

We pushed on, living on the country as best we could; a country that was already stripped bare; and lay up for a few hours from time to time, not because it was night, or because it was day, but because we had come to some spot where there was grazing for the two wretched ponies, or a corner of a ruined bothie to make a shelter for the Queen.

Sometimes, as my weakness grew on me and the
wound seemed to strike deeper, I rode beside her for a while; the sledge was big enough for two, though it made hard work for the pony, and the men on the hauling ropes. I could earn the ride by holding her against the jolting of the rough way. And one day, as I crouched, holding her so, against my knee, I felt her stir, and when I looked down her eyes were open. She had opened them not long after we first set out, but they had been only holes in her face. Now she was looking out of them, looking up at me, not yet knowing where she was, or why; and the dark forests had gone from behind them, and once again she was the Boudicca I knew.

She stirred again, and felt my arm about her, and said, ‘Cadwan?’

‘I am here,’ I said.

‘Do you remember how you carried me home in your cloak, when I had run away to follow my father against the cattle raiders?’

The man leading the sledge pony looked back over his shoulder.

‘I remember,’ I said.

And after a while, she asked, ‘Where is my father’s sword?’

‘Here beside you.’ I lifted it and put the hilt in her hand, but she let it fall back into the bracken.

She looked about her, seeing the sledge and the wretched ponies, and the men looking like their own ghosts padding alongside. And her eyes came back to my face; a little frown between them. She did not ask of the battle. She had no need to. ‘The children? What of – the children?’

‘Dead,’ I said, ‘both dead. All dead. Sleep now, Lady.’ For she was still too near some shadowy
borderland for the words to have full meaning for her.

I do not know if she slept, but she closed her eyes, and said no more for a long time.

We came at last, skirting the cold ruins of Camulodunum, across the frontier runs into our own land again. A land almost bare of people in its southern stretches, though at least we were able to get a few scrub ponies in place of our two that were almost done. Most of the people who were left had gone into hiding, driving the best of the herds with them into the forest fastnesses. And the few who remained seemed stunned, and looked at us with sullen and even hostile eyes; for the news of the battle had gone through days ahead of us. But they gave us food; warm water and fresh rags for our wounds; only no shelter anywhere, lest the Red Crests should come.