Song for a Dark Queen (2 page)

By the time I had done, her head was growing heavy in the hollow of my shoulder.

So I carried her home to the household that was like a disturbed ants’ nest in the dusk, more than any other thing that I can call to mind. Rhun the Nurse came running to meet me with a white face that looked as though she had not slept for a hundred years. And I put Boudicca into her arms, still in her sleep holding to the play-thing sword that I had made for her.

‘Here she is,’ I said, ‘she had followed the war-band. Take better care of her another time.’

I HAVE NOT
forgotten, in more than five and twenty summers. I have not forgotten, the great Song of a Queen’s Victories that I promised to the Princess Boudicca.

It is all here, garnered within me, the things that should go to the making of such a song; the things that I have known with my own eyes and ears, the things that have come to me through the eyes and ears of others, the things that my own heart within me tells me must have been in this way or that way. All the things that make up the life pattern, the life song, of Boudicca the Queen of the Iceni.

How should I begin my song?

I would sing first of the King’s high Hall in the midst of the Royal Dun, the fires burning always down its length, and the paved space between the fires, where the women made the Corn Dance at harvest time. And the warriors gathered to the evening feasting, with their weapons laid behind them. And the skulls of ancient enemies daubed with red and yellow ochre, grinning along the great tie-beams where the firelight scarcely reached; and the laughter, and the harp-notes flying like sparks from the fire in windy weather. And the women’s quarters ranged behind the Hall, where the women wove scarlet and purple on the standing loom, or sent for me to come and play to them while they sat combing their hair; and where, in the Royal Chamber, on the bedplace piled with goose-feather pillows of embroidered green and crimson and blue, on a
night that smelled outside of grass and elderflowers and thunder brewing over the marshes, my Lady Boudicca was born.

I heard her first cry, squatting in the little side doorway that gave out into the chariot court, with my harp silent across my knees. And a woman of the Kindred came to me and said, ‘Still there, Watchdog? The Queen has borne a Royal Daughter to her Lord, and so the line goes on.’ For we are an old People, and among us the Kingship goes not from father to son, but down the Moonside, the Womanside; and the King becomes King only because his sword is strong and he is wedded to the Queen.

So I was the first to know, even before the Priest Kind sounded the moon call on the sacred oxhorns, that was taken up and sent on and on from end to end of the land, telling the People of the Horse that a new Royal Daughter was born to carry forward the life of the tribe.

And I took my harp and went and walked a while among the half-tamed trees of the apple garth, making a small music just between myself and the stars.

I would sing of the horse herds grazing in the broad pastures between the forest and the fen lands; the proud-necked stallions and the leggy two-year-olds and the trained chariot teams and the mares in foal. And the wide-winged sunsets over the marshes, caught and flung back by the reedy lakes and winding waterways until it seems as though earth as well as sky is turned to fire. I would sing of wild geese flighting down from the north in the autumn nights, and the thick green-smelling darkness of the forest verges in high summer when the cuckoo’s voice is breaking; and the swirling pattern, red-enamelled on the bronze face
of the King’s warshield, that I have seen her tracing with one finger, as though she would find some secret in it.

I would sing of all these things, for it seems to me that all these things gave something of themselves to the making of the Lady Boudicca.

When she was four years old, her mother went beyond the sunset, taking with her the seven-month man-child who had never drawn breath in this world. So I would sing of the death-fires for a Queen; and how, after they were cold, the People of the Horse had no Queen anymore, but a Royal Daughter who carried the Queenship within her, as seed time carries harvest, for a future day.

Four is over young for long grieving, so when the Lady Boudicca had wept a while, she grew happy again, trotting like a hound pup at her father’s heels whenever she could escape from the women’s side, save for the times when she came trotting at mine.

The years went by, and the years went by, and the wild geese came flighting down the autumn gales, and the mares dropped their foals in early summer. And still we looked to our southern and our western borders, and felt to be sure that our swords sat loosely in the sheath.

And the year came when Boudicca was thirteen summers old, and it was time for choosing who should be her Marriage Lord and take up the old King’s sword when he must lay it down. Then, when the harvest was over, the King called out the Oak Priests from their sacred clearings in the forest, and summoned the chiefs and nobles of the tribe to the Choosing Feast. Chiefs of the Parisi, too, the chariot warriors who had spread
along the coasts to our north and become bound to us by blood ties so that now we counted almost as one people. Almost, but not quite.

The chiefs and the nobles gathered. Too many for the guest-huts, too many to crowd within the Hall, and so the black horsehide tents were pitched in the in-pasture below the Royal Village, and the great fires were made in the King’s forecourt. The Weapon Court, we called it, from the tall black stone that stood there for the warriors to sharpen their weapons on in time of war. And for three days and far into three nights the feasting went on, and the King and the chiefs and the Priest Kind took council together, while the Princess Boudicca and the women of the Kindred remained shut away in the women’s quarters.

And on the first morning of the Choosing Feast, the King sacrificed a young black stallion to Epona the Lady of the Horse Herds, the All Mother without whom there can be neither children to the tribe nor foals to the herds nor barley to the fields. And on the first night of the Choosing Feast, the freshly flayed hide was laid out in the midst of the apple garth, and Merddyn, chief of the Oak Priests, lay down upon it to sleep the Choosing Sleep, that Epona might come to him in his dreaming, and give him of her wisdom to carry back with him to the Council Fire.

And on the third evening of the Feast, the Choosing was finished; and after, as it seemed to me, the choice had hovered around half the young braves of the tribe, it fell at last upon one, Prasutagus, son of Dumnorix, who was of the Iceni on his mother’s side, but his father a chieftain of the Parisi.

It had taken the full three days to make the Choosing; and even after it was made, there were
growlings and murmurings, for never before had we followed a King who was not pure bred to the Horse People; and not all men thought well of the new way of things.

Not all women either.

In the noontide after the Choosing Feast was ended and the chiefs and nobles had gone their ways, I was walking to and fro in the apple garth, for there was a new song on me, and at such times I need always to walk. And Boudicca came up through the old wind-shaped trees, with her skirts kilted through her belt, and a pair of throw-spears in her hand, just as she must have come from the practice ground. We are not like some tribes whose women go to war with the men in the usual pattern of things, only in times of sorest need our women follow the war-trail with us and we lead our mares under the chariot yoke; yet our mares are broken to harness and our women learn to use their spears, lest the need be upon us.

‘I heard your harp,’ she said, ‘and so I came.’

I had no need to ask her why. Ever since the day of the willow-wood sword she had come to me in time of trouble, before ever she would go to Rhun her nurse.

There was an old tree at the head of the garth, half-fallen into the grass, but with its little hard apples already russet-gold among its grey wind-bitten leaves. She sat herself down on the sloping trunk, and I settled in the long grass at her feet, and looked up at her, waiting for her to tell me what she would be telling me, in her own good time.

And because of the Choosing Feast, all at once I saw her with a freshly opened eye, and knew with a small ache of loss, that it was not a child I looked at anymore, despite the small white scar on her temple where she had
fallen out of a tree when she was ten. She was tall; taller than many boys of her age; and held herself that day like a Queen, her head braced upright as though already it carried the weight of the moon headdress. Her mane of strong straight hair sprang from her head as though with a life of its own, yellow as autumn birch leaves. Soon now, I thought, she would have to braid it after the manner of the Women’s side. Her eyes under their winged and feathery golden brows seemed darker than their usual blue, as the saltmarsh darkens when a cloud shadow passes over. I had seen them darkened like that before; I had seen her in a rage often enough; it had never lasted, and ended as like as not in laughter. But looking up at her now, I saw that this was something else than rage, and would not end so soon nor so easily. And I hoped in my heart that the Lord Prasutagus would know how to handle it, for assuredly no one else could.

She sat so long, the spears in the crook of her arm, looking down between the apple trees, that I began to think she had forgotten I was there. Then she said, ‘They have sent for Prasutagus, already.’

‘They would be doing that,’ I said. ‘As soon as the Choosing was over.’

‘Why should they be in so great a hurry? There is time enough.’

‘He is an unbroken colt – like the colts that our horse-masters break in to harness in their second winter. He must be broken in to the Kingship, and in this world, who can be sure how much or how little there is of time.’

‘There is time enough,’ she said again, as though clinging to the words for a talisman – or a weapon. ‘I hate them all! The King my father is still young and his sword-arm strong.’

It was in my mind to say ‘Surely. And tomorrow he may ride hunting and come home on a hurdle.’ But instead, I said, ‘This Prasutagus is seventeen, already two years past his manhood-making. If he is to be trained to a new life, the sooner it is done the better. Let you remember it will be no easy thing for him; no easier than for the two-year-olds when they are brought in off the freedom of the far-runs and trained to run under the chariot yoke.’

‘Why should it be easy for him?’ she demanded. ‘It will not be easy for me, to be mated to a man I have never seen before.’

‘You will have come to know him well enough, long before the women make the Bride Song for you.’

But she was not listening. ‘Why should it be a stranger, and not Vadrex or Cassal?’

‘Does your heart go out to Vadrex or Cassal? I have heard you say that Vadrex has only spots where his beard should be.’

She laughed at that. But the laughter cracked in her throat. ‘Na,’ she said, after a moment. ‘But at least they are not strangers. Why must they choose a man out of the Parisi?’

‘You ask so many questions, my head goes round,’ I said, trying to keep the thing light. ‘The Parisi are great warriors.’

‘So are we.’

‘And so are the Catuvellauni who press ever closer along our borders. It may be that a day comes when it will be well for the Iceni that the Parisi are bonded to them by marriage with the Royal Daughter – with the Queen.’

She was silent again, a long time. Then she said in a small breathless voice, ‘One day I must take a
Marriage Lord, that there may be a chief to lead the tribe in war, and another Royal Daughter to carry forward unbroken the Life Line of the People. But not yet. I would not take him yet. I would take my sword under the covers with me at night, as the young braves do, and have my freedom still. And if the Catuvellauni come against us, and – and my father is not here to lead the War Host, I would lead them myself. It would not be the first time that the People of the Horse have followed a woman on the war-trail – and she not needing any prince of the Parisi to bear her weapons for her.’

And then at last, she brought her gaze back from the distance between the apple trees, and looked down at me. ‘Cadwan of the Harp, do you remember how once you promised me I should have a great sword like my father’s, and you would make me a great song of a Queen’s Victories?’

‘I remember,’ I said, ‘and then I made you a toy sword of white willow wood, and a small foolish song to go with it.’

‘I have the sword still, and the song. Do you mind how often I begged it of you when I was a child – long after I had it by heart. But still, I would be having the great song you promised me, one day.’

‘One day,’ I said.

‘And the sword, too.’

A little chill wind came up through the long grass, and for a moment it was as though a shadow passed between us and the sun.

FIVE DAYS LATER
the Lord Prasutagus drove into the Royal Dun.

The watchers on the gateway saw his dustcloud on the track from the north-west, and at the heart of the dustcloud a seed of dark that grew and flowered into a chariot drawn by a four-horse team in the Roman manner. He had been driving at full gallop on the last stretch, far out-distancing his companions and the pack beasts that followed behind. But at the foot of the slope where the track begins to climb through the Royal Village, he reined back, and came in through the gate at last, not in a thunder of hooves and iron-shod wheels and spun clods, as most young men would have done, for the show of the thing, but at a gentler and more courteous pace.

He held the reins himself, though his charioteer stood beside him – I came to know him later for a man who liked best to be his own driver, which sometimes his charioteers found hard to bear – and for sure he handled the dun team as well as a man could do.

Beside the weapon-stone he brought them to a halt, tossed the reins to the charioteer, and sprang down before the wheels had ceased to turn, and came on towards where the King waited for him in the doorway of the Hall. And as he came, a pair of brindled wolfhounds, the finest that ever I had seen, came bounding from behind the chariot, to follow at his heels.