Song for a Dark Queen (9 page)

She tried to pull away, but instantly the straying caress turned into a grip that she could not break. She twisted and strained for an instant, then stood still and rigid in his grasp. ‘Let me go!’

The Queen rose to her feet. In that breath of time, she looked taller than any man there. ‘Let her go, Commander.’

He began to laugh, pulling the Princess closer. ‘Lady, you should not breed such pretty daughters if you do not want them to be admired!’

Essylt made to dash the wine-jar in his face, but he caught her other wrist, laughing still, and dragged her half across his knee. ‘Pretty Princess! Pretty vixen! –’

The wine-jar crashed to the Dancing Floor and rolled across it, spilling its crimson stain as it went.

The Queen cried out something, high and furious. I never heard what; all things seemed happening at the same time, and the Escort Commander was laughing still as Duatha beside me took the table at a flying leap, and I saw the torchlight strike fire from the blade of his knife that seemed to have leapt from his belt into his hand. The Red Crest Commander, his laughter left unfinished, sprawled backward off his seat, with blood bubbling from a hole like a second mouth that had opened in his throat, while the Royal Daughter, blood and wine mingled all down the front of her gown, tore herself free. Men had sprung to seize the Queen between them; and one of the Red Crests in the doorway shouted, ‘Murder!’ to the rest in the night behind him; and there was a rush of men. Our own warriors snatching at the daggers with which they had been hacking off their meat so short a time before, and hurling themselves upon those around the Queen. And I caught my own knife from my belt, and made for Nessan, where she stood pressed back against one of the great roof trees, and got her behind me, just as the Red Crests with their short stabbing swords came charging up the Hall.

I stabbed at the firstcomer, but he took the blade on his shield and jabbed the great bronze boss up into my face. All round me, our warriors with no weapon but
their knives, were close-locked in battle against the heavy painted shields and deadly short-swords. I knew the shouting and trampling, the great wave of bronze and red that seemed breaking over us, the yelling faces. But I was three-parts blind with blood; and a great blow took me on the side of the head; I was beaten and battered to my knees, and the last thing I heard was Nessan screaming, before the darkness took me.

There was one jagged hole in the darkness; like a rent in a black cloak; and through it, I saw and heard as a man may do in an evil dream, and have no power to move or even cry out, a woman with her back to me and her arms lashed above her head to one of the roof-trees, and her gown torn to below the waist so that her back was bare, and her bright hair tumbled about her shoulders, all blood-dabbled and fouled; and a man-shaped beast in bronze scales standing behind her and to one side, his feet wide-planted, and in his hands a centurion’s vine-staff upraised. And even as I watched, he brought it down again across her back – and again – and again. I saw her shudder to each blow, the quivering muscles in her back and shoulders standing out, convulsed, the bloody weals springing on her white skin. She did not cry out under the blows, but a hoarse terrible raving came from her. And I knew that it was the Queen. The beast in bronze scales checked for a moment, and looked, grinning, towards someone I could not see. And the Procurator’s voice said, ‘Ten more strokes, I think. Yes, ten more should help to quench her fires.’

And dead men were lying round me, and others standing with their arms bound behind them and their wounds running red; and somewhere, a girl was still
screaming, the terrible high screaming of a wounded hare, that went on, and on. . . .

I struggled to get to my feet to do something, anything; and the world tilted and slid away from me sideways, and the darkness took me again.

GRADUALLY, OUT OF
the darkness grew a grey fog. I was floating up through the fog; and the further up I floated, the worse grew the pain in my head, and the nearer the threat of some horror waiting for me; so that I struggled to get back to the nothingness of the dark; but my struggle seemed only to drive me further up towards the surface, the grey fog thinning all the while. And I was lying on piled fern in my usual sleeping place in one of the side aisles of the Hall. And there was an armourer’s hammer beating in my head. I fumbled up one hand to find what was amiss with it, and felt the folds of rag bound round it, and the dryness of crusted blood; and the memory of last night broke over me in a wave. I let out a cry, but I am thinking that it was not from the pain in my head.

Something moved in the shadows, and Old Rhun came crouching down beside me and pulled my hand away. ‘Leave be!’ she said. ‘Leave be, or you will start the bleeding again; and there are enough dead in the Queen’s Hall this day, without that you must be adding to them.’

I could only see through one eye, and when I tried to speak through my torn and swollen lips, my tongue seemed made of wood and would not answer to my will. She saw it, and took up a cup and held it to my mouth. I spat away broken teeth, and swallowed clear water, and forced out some kind of croak meant for a question; for many questions.

‘The officials and their Red Crests have gone,’ she
said, in a weeping voice. ‘They have stripped the Dun and emptied the stables and driven off the herds from the in-pastures. They have hauled away slave and free alike, with ropes round their necks. They have speared the very pups in the kennels.’ And yet I knew that she was telling me only the lesser things, and that there was more and worse to come.

My tongue was returning to me, and returning also, pressing in on me, the memory of that terrible jagged rent in last night’s darkness. I managed to force out a few words, ‘Boudicca – did they – ?’

‘They stripped and flogged the Queen, like one of their own garrison sluts caught thieving.’

‘And – the Princesses?’

The old woman bowed herself together like one in unbearable pain. She seemed to have aged a hundred years since I last saw her in the Royal Chamber. ‘They used the Princesses as – as men used women captured in war. Ochone! Ochone! They will never be maidens again till the moon stands still in the sky! I would have given them sleep – a little sleep to spread a darkness between them and the thing the soldiers did to them – Aiee! The children that they are! But their mother would not have it so; she will have them to stand beside her; she is without mercy, on them on herself on any living thing – and there is nothing else that I can do.’

I dragged myself to my elbow. ‘Where are they?’

‘Out in the forecourt where the warriors are gathering. Na na, lie still, there is nothing that you can do either.’

She began clinging to me, and I shook her off and blundered to my feet. The world dipped and swam round me, but the darkness did not come back. Broken
benches and trestle-boards lay across my way, and there was a strong acrid smell in the air. A hanging that I caught at to steady myself came down in my hand, charred all along its top; but at last I lurched out into the main Hall. For a moment I could not think why there seemed to be so much daylight in the Hall, the clear, constantly changing light of a spring day when the wind blows from off the sea. And then I saw that the foremost end of the roof was gone, hanging in ragged bat-wings of charred thatch and blackened timbers; and the smell of burning was everywhere, catching at throat and eyes. So there had been fire as well as blood, before the night’s work was done. Dead men, women too, lay in a careful row across the head of the Hall, more than a score of them, brought from wherever they had fallen, and laid straight and seemly, with the warrior-patterns of their death wounds upon them.

I all but stumbled headlong over the first of them, and saw that it was young Duatha. I knew him by his thin brown hands; a boy’s hands still, with the blackened thumbnail that he had jammed in a piece of chariot harness, two moons ago; not by his face, for that had been battered beyond anyone’s knowing, by something heavy, a shield rim, maybe, smashed down into it again and again. Of the Escort Commander there was no sign, nor of any other Roman dead. They would have been carried off by their own kind, I supposed.

‘What of the others – our own – who are not lying here?’

‘Carried off for slaves. Did I not tell you? You, I am thinking they left for dead. Ah now, you will fall – let you come back and lie down.’

‘But you? They did not leave you for dead? – ‘I said
foolishly. My head was full of swirling confusion, and I must stop the swirl of it and get all things straight.

‘I ran and hid away; I and others also, my own People for the most part, when we knew that there was nothing we could do. At least we can be of more use to the Queen now than all her dead warriors.’ And she fell behind me, weeping.

The hammer was still beating in my head, but the ground was steadying somewhat beneath my feet, as I stumbled my way down the Hall, through the ashes of the hearth-fires scattered all abroad, and the overset benches. On the Dancing Floor, one of the ochre-painted skulls from the tie-beam overhead had fallen and lay grinning at me from among the mingled stains of blood and spilled wine. Something rolled under my foot, and I saw that it was an amber bead from the Queen’s great necklace. And then half-hidden between an over-set table and the body of a dead hound, I caught the familiar glint of a bronze clasp on white mare’s skin, and I stooped, the blood roaring like a chariot charge in my head, and heaved the dog aside, and pulled out my harp in its bag. It seems strange, now, to remember it, but for that one moment I thought of nothing more. I opened the bag and drew out my harp. It had been trodden underfoot and the strings were torn, and one horn loosened, but I knew that I could make it whole again. And for those few heartbeats of time, it seemed to me a most wonderful thing that in all that red havoc, I had my harp again; as wonderful as the sudden starry opening of a flower among the stink and filth of a knacker’s yard.

The moment passed, but with its passing, much of the confusion also seemed to clear from my head. And carrying my broken harp with me, I went out through
the roofless foreporch, into the Weapon Court of the Dun.

There too was the sight and smell of burning. And there, as Old Nurse had said, the warriors were gathering. Men of the Royal Clan from the outlying settlements, each with a long-hidden sword or a hurriedly furbished war-spear. And there too, standing to one side with their cloaks drawn across their faces, were the women, who had come to be with the Queen, and to keen for the dead warriors who had no women of their own left in the Dun to keen for them.

And in the midst of her warriors, beside the tall black column of the weapon-stone, stood the Queen herself. A dead man’s cloak was flung round her shoulders over her torn gown, and the royal goldwork was gone from her arms and neck, – and she carried her father’s great sword, brought into the light from where ever it had laid hidden all those years; not as a man carries his sword, but cradled against her as a woman nurses a child. And behind her stood the two Princesses; but I did not look at them at all. Grief upon me, I could not. Above all, I could not look at Nessan. Coward that I am.

One of the warriors spoke up out of a long silence, as I lurched down towards them and the growing crowd parted to let me through.

‘We can cut them off before they gain the border.’

Boudicca cried out on him, ‘And then? – If we do that, more will come, and more and more, as many as the wild duck in winter, before we can make ready to receive them!’

‘They will come, whether or no.’

One from another, like hounds on a trail, they took up the cry.

‘And what, when they come, would you have us do? Bide still and wait while they drive off the cattle and the rest of our young men, and fire the roofs over our heads?’

‘Would you leave unavenged, that which they did here last night?’

The Queen looked round on them. And though she spoke no word, slowly the clamour died.

And when they were quiet again, she spoke out, swift and fierce. ‘Bide still and wait? Aye, we will seem to do even that, if need be, until the right time comes to unleash upon the war-trail!’ There was a trickle of dried blood at the corner of her mouth, and the smudged remains of last night’s eyepaint stood out livid on the grey-white of her face. ‘This is a greater matter than a cattle-raid and cries out for a greater revenge. So in the daylight, on the surface of things, we will bear what we must, to gain the time we need for our making ready. And in the dark beneath the daylight, we will send out by the old ways, the swift and secret ways, not only to all the Horse People, but to the tribes beyond our borders who have suffered at the Red Crests’ hands or who now lie under the Red Crests’ yoke, bidding them send elders and war chiefs that we may sit at the Council Fire together. Bidding them also to take their weapons from the thatch and the peat-stack, against the killing-time that comes!’

Behind her, with a sigh and a little flurry of movement, the Royal Daughter crumpled to the ground. Nessan still stood, steadying herself with one hand against the weapon-stone. Her eyes were wide and blind, and her mouth a little open as though for more air. But she was still on her feet. She had more strength than I had thought, the little dark one. The women were
gathering Essylt up from her crumpled heap, carrying her away. But the Queen never even looked round.

‘How long before that time comes?’ someone shouted.

She lifted the great sword higher against her heart. ‘Not too long. My father’s sword is thirsty after sleeping so long in the dark. She cries out for blood.’

‘
How
long before her thirst and the thirst of all our spears be quenched?’ the man pressed, stubbornly.

‘Two moons, maybe three, not more. The Governor of Britain, this you know, is far away in the far west, making ready for war upon the Priest Kind in their chief stronghold of Môn; and our Spear Host must be gathered and ready for the war-trail before he be free again to fly his Eagles against us here in the east. Can you wait three moons, my warriors?’