The Eagle and the Raven (23 page)

When the sun had gone and the chill of evening rose from the ground they stopped, hunger gnawing at their empty bellies. Caradoc spoke sharply to the litter-bearers who stumbled in their faintness, but Cinnamus said, “It does not matter, Lord. He is dead.” Caradoc fell beside the shadowed form and took hold of the limp hand, covering it with his own and leaning over the bloodied face. Togodumnus gazed past him into the star-studded sky, a slight, serene smile on his lips, and Caradoc cast his cloak over his face and sank to the ground, weeping quietly. The chiefs sat or lay in silence beside the path, watching the last ricon of the House Catuvellaun mourn for his kinsman.

They reached Camulodunon late on the fourth day, bearing their burden. The first gate had been deserted, and stood wide, but the gateguard of the second saw them coming, straggling like sick cattle across the dyke, and he ran for help. Men and women came rushing from the huts, spilling out of the gate, welcoming them with cries and tears, and taking the litter from their weary arms. Eurgain, hearing the commotion, stepped out of the Great Hall with Gladys beside her. The filthy, staggering group of men climbed slowly toward her and she waited, her eyes frantically searching and her hands pressed together. Then she saw him, his hair tangled about his thin face, and his eyes black holes of suffering. With a shout she flew toward him and fell on her knees, embraced him, felt his quivering hands on her hair. “Eurgain,” he said. Then his legs would not hold him anymore and he sank before her and wrapped his arms about her. They clung to each other eyes closed, while the first shocked wailing began for Togodumnus and the gate was swung shut and bolted fast.

At last they rested in the Great Hall, sitting ranged about the walls, heads lolling back in an exhausted indifference, watching the servants scurry to stoke the fire and carve meat for them from the haunch of roasted beef. Caradoc, too, rested against the wall, but his eyes had closed as soon as he had sat down, and Eurgain sat quietly beside him, her arms folded on her knees. Gladys came gliding across the floor to squat before him, but neither woman spoke. The Hall was hot. Sun beat down upon it, and the fire sent a suffocating mixture of smoke and sizzling fat drippings out into the dry air. Every now and then Caradoc shivered and drew his cloak tightly around him. At length Fearachar ran up, bearing a platter heaped with meat and bread, porridge, and boiled peas, and a jug of beer. Caradoc stirred, opened his eyes and sat up with effort as Fearachar set the plate before him. He began to eat, slowly, carefully, even though he was famished, but he drained the jug in one long gulp and Fearachar left again to refill it. A low, halting spatter of conversation began around them as the chiefs, revived by food and drink, talked to their freemen, and Caradoc felt his blood begin to flow again sluggishly, unwillingly, and his head began to clear. He mopped the last of the gravy from his plate, loosened his cloak, and turned to Eurgain.

“Llyn?” he asked, his eyes anxious and his voice still not strong.

“He returned last night with Fearachar. He and the girls are with Tallia in the house.”

He nodded gratefully and then the starved, hollowed eyes left her and found Gladys. “And you? How did you return home?”

“I found a cavalry soldier in the woods, Caradoc,” she answered quietly. “He was wounded. I killed him and took his horse. What happened there by the river? How was it that we dishonored ourselves?” Her tone was wondering, bereft of bitterness. The time for recriminations, regrets, or anger was long past, and she, like the remnant of the cowed, puzzled Catuvellaunian tuath, hung suspended in stunned hopelessness. Caradoc answered shortly, scarcely aware of what he said, his head buzzing for want of sleep.

“We were betrayed by one of our own kin, we were tricked by the enemy, we were set upon by our own countrymen. Is it any wonder that even Camulos and the goddess deserted us? We were not dishonored, only outnumbered and surprised. We will fight on.” Outside, the wails and keening of Togodumnus’s mourners came to him, rising and falling, a fitful, stricken wind, and his mind pressed with the plans and decision that had to be made.

Eurgain began to speak rapidly, her eyes filling with angry disagreement, but he lifted a finger and put it to her lips, rising stiffly, standing with one shoulder against the wall. His legs still felt like straw husks.

“I call for Council!” he said, and the talk died away. “Slaves depart, the rest of you come close. I cannot find the strength to raise my voice.”

All gathered around him and he surveyed them grimly, pity and rage filling him. They looked like a pack of sick, emaciated, and mangy wolves, tamed by hunger and hardship, but their eyes raised to his face in trust. Faintness swept over him, but he fought it down, the new, callous stone of calculation and determination heavy in his breast. “I will not speak of the unspeakable,” he said, “nor of the passing of my brother. We are the Catuvellauni. We do not surrender. The tuath shall fight until the last of us falls. If anyone wishes to leave Camulodunon while there is still time, and flee into the west or go to the Druids on Mona, I will not deprive him of his honor-price or decree him a slave. Are there any who wish to go?” He stopped speaking to gain strength but no one moved. No eyes dropped guiltily, no hands quivered in sudden betrayal, and he felt a weak, pathetic surge of renewed pride waft toward him from the cavernous, desolate eyes that met his own.

He began again, his voice filled with cold decision. “Then we will prepare for another fight. I want the gate torn down and the hole filled with earth and stones. Is Alan here?” His farmer freeman stood. “Alan, see that all the cattle, the others, as well as mine, are driven into the woods to the north. Set a few peasants to guard them. If necessary they will all be slaughtered. I want no Romans feasting on my honor-price.” Alan nodded and sat down again. “Vocorio, you and your freemen find all the farmers and peasants you can and bring them within the defences. Most of them will have hidden themselves in the woods, but round up those who will come. There are plenty of empty huts.” Images of the chiefs who would never ride home flitted quickly across his mind, but nothing could help them now and he did not want the survivors to think back on them and their fate, not yet, and so he let the sorrowful picture go without speaking of it. “Mocuxsoma,” he called, returning to his vision of what had to be done. “Burn the bridge across the dyke. Do it immediately. The peasants can cross on logs. And all of you, scour the town for weapons. Any thing will do as long as it can be used to kill Romans. But for now, go home and rest this night.”

He wanted to say more, to talk about glory and honor, but even his thoughts had an empty, mocking ring and he dismissed them, sinking once more to the skins. He felt nauseated with weariness and with the unendurable tragedy of the past few days. Fire me high, Tog had said, fire me well. Pain stabbed at him as the words came back to him in Tog’s own faltering voice. Tog. Feckless you were, and lawless, digging into the rich basket of life with both eager, greedy hands. Yet, I loved you. You were linked with the high stars, blown gloriously, impulsively on the winds of the heavens while I… He looked down at his filthy, shaking fingers. While I am chained to the earth and my hands will never touch a star. Only a sword. Only a bitter, cruel sword. He battled his emotion, swelled now by his exhaustion, and he finally looked up. The Hall had emptied. He forced himself to look at the two women who waited.

“There is no hope, is there?” Eurgain said.

“None at all,” he replied brutally. “We are finished as a tuath and as a free people. Eurgain, I want you and the children to go into the west. I will send Caelte and his freemen with you, for I do not think that we shall ever again sit here in the nights and listen to his songs.”

She had been expecting just such a request and she replied emphatically. “No, Caradoc. This time I will not cower behind my children. I do not want to pass into the west, knowing that none but I and my family are survivors of the great Catuvellauni. Such loneliness could not be borne.” She took his hand and kissed it and Gladys looked away, feeling a great isolation engulf her for the first time in her life. “If we are to die, my husband, then let us die together. I Iove you and will not live out my life without you and among strangers.” He kissed her, too tired to argue, but warmed by her words, and they rose together and went out of the Hall, leaving Gladys sitting in emptiness, her sword heavy about her waist, and scalding, salt tears burning her brown cheeks.

So the last warriors of Camulodunon prepared for their end. They worked quickly and grimly in a town whose once cheerful, light-filled huts stood silent and waiting, whose paths and open spaces lay forlornly silent in the thick heat of the summer afternoons. The rites for Togodumnus were held in the same drugged, resigned quiet, and the crackling of his pyre was the only sound for a day and a night while the sky clouded over, great thunderheads moving majestically in from the coast to bulk heavily above the town, and lightning flared spasmodically over the ripening fields. Caradoc felt nothing as he thrust the torch into the dry brushwood on which his brother lay. There was no room left in him for grief or sorrow, and he could not speak of the youth that had been, for the days of raiding and light-hearted stealing, of drunken pranks and half-earnest sparring, belonged to another age. Once there had been two brothers, growing up under a mighty ricon, with friends and cattle, with loves and hates, but they had no reality, they belonged to one of Caelte’s songs, to part of an old, sweet dream. No one wept as the flames caught hold and began to feed. All of them, the chiefs, their women, the sullen Trinovantian peasants, heard in the roaring fire the hot and pitiless words of their own coming deaths, and they stood dumb and passive, as if seeing their own bodies consumed.

The gateway was blocked, the cattle driven deep into the woods, and the peasants housed unwillingly by dead men’s hearths. The country and the river lay deserted. And still the Romans did not come. Gladys took a coracle and disappeared one day, alone, leaving no word. Llyn wandered in and out of the Great Hall, up and down the paths, morosely scuffing the dry dirt, and the little girls played desultorily with Gladys’s seashells, while Tallia sat in the shade. Eurgain and Caradoc walked the walls day after day, blonde hair and dark mingling on the hot winds, choked with words they could not say. Cinnamus crouched in the lee of Camulos’s shrine, polishing the sword that already gleamed fever bright, murmuring incantations over and over to the god that brooded angrily within, and Caelte, his gentle, humorous face serene, stood outside his hut and strummed his harp, making new songs while the sun drowsed in his music and watched his long, supple fingers move in its light.

Gladys returned after a few days, and with her came a scout, one of the few left to watch the legions. Caradoc and Eurgain, standing high above the valley, saw them come and scrambled down to greet them as they slipped through the slit that had been left in the wall.

“They are waiting for the emperor, for Claudius himself,” the scout said without preamble. “They are camped in the woods not five miles away, and Plautius is fuming at the delay but dares not move until the party from Rome arrives. In the meantime he has sent Vespasianus and the Second against the Durotriges.”

“How long?” Caradoc interjected.

The man shrugged. “How should I know, Lord? It has been two weeks since the message went out. Perhaps another two.”

“And then?”

The scout looked at them curiously. There was something so fatalistic, so immovable about their faces, that he scarcely recognized them. Caradoc had a hand on his lady’s shoulder, but it rested lightly, almost confidently, and she looked before her with eyes that were clear and untroubled.

He felt a strange respect, as though the two were gods above all fear and uncertainty, and he shuffled, aware of his own mortality. “Then the emperor himself will lead the troops to an easy, safe victory, and the legions’ aquilae will ring the Great Hall.”

Caradoc and Eurgain remained motionless when he had finished, still showing no emotion, and Gladys left them and strode away toward her own spartan hut. At last Caradoc smiled, a whimsical, warm smile that lit his face with sympathy. “Go to the Hall and eat. We cannot spare much but there should be meat at least. Then sleep, and return to the forest. If you are wise you will not come back.” The scout nodded curtly and went away, climbing the steep path with weary feet, and Caradoc turned to his wife. “The news does not alarm me,” he said. “Indeed, Eurgain, I can feel nothing. In two weeks we will be dead and Camulodunon in flames, yet I look at you and my heart laughs. Why?”

She faced him and cupping his lean jaw in both of her hands, kissed him on his mouth with cool, steady lips, and then, rising on tiptoe reached to touch his eyes. “Because there is nothing left to face, no unknown,” she replied lightly. “There is only you, and me, and the sunshine, and death.” They stood for a long time with their eyes closed, pressing against each other in the deep shadow of the earth wall, while above them the swifts darted, crying joyously in the free blue sky.

Chapter Twelve

T
HE
time passed slowly. Claudius and his entourage lay seasick on a stormy ocean while the Catuvellauni waited almost listlessly with nothing to do. There were no fights or petty squabbles, for there was not even anything to quarrel over, and the men and women withdrew into their last dreams, sitting in the sun or walking slowly, wrapped in a drugged peace.

Only Gladys was restless. She got on her horse and rode in turmoil around and around beside the dyke like a newly trapped deer or a young boar at bay. Her life suddenly seemed to her to have been worthless and useless, a journey never begun. Fiercely, bitterly, she did not want to die, but honor was all she had lived for, and now she knew that only by dying could the years behind her be proved to have been of value.

In an early summer dawn of silence and cool, still air, the Catuvellauni rose to find their town ringed with a dense mass of helmets and studded shields. They were not alarmed, and they buckled on their swords calmly, took their spears, said their last farewells quietly, and moved to their appointed places, breathing deeply in the sweet morning.

Caradoc gave Tallia a knife and herded her and the children into the Great Hall. “When the Romans can be heard on the path below,” he said, “kill the children. You will know that I am dead, and Eurgain with me. Farewell, Tallia.” Llyn flew at him, hugging him and shouting incoherently, beating at him with balled fists like little stones, and Caradoc took him firmly by both wrists and forced him back.

“Llyn!” he said sharply, though he wanted to gather his son into his arms and cry with him. “How does a Catuvellaunian chieftain die?”

The boy raised a flushed, tear-strained face. “He…he dies like a warrior, without fear.”

“Even so.” Caradoc did not trust himself further. He tore away the pleading, clutching fingers roughly, and turned to the girls who stood silently watching him. He knelt and kissed them, hearing the sound of the incursus and then Cinnamus shouting “Lord! Come!” from without. He dared not look again at the tiny, bewildered little group, and he drew his sword and ran outside.

Cinnamus, Caelte, and Eurgain joined him as he came. Already a clamor rose from the walls, and below he heard the sharp, clear orders barked as the legions surged forward to lay wide planks over the dyke. Halfway to the stopped gate Gladys joined them, her arms bare but for her silver, her hair piled haphazardly on top of her head and already loose, her eyes still swollen with sleep. Together they reached the top of the wall and peered over.

The valley below was swarming with soldiers, and Caradoc’s sweeping glance took in a little knot of men far back, standing on a knoll and watching. He pointed. “That must be the emperor, curse him! Where is Plautius? And what is this?” The ranks parted directly below him and he saw something being wheeled forward.

“Ballista, Lord,” Cinnamus answered coolly. “They will weaken the walls and the soldiers will tear a hole. Then they will pour in like water through a breached dam.” Even as he spoke a dull boom reverberated through the air and the ground shook beneath their feet.

“We cannot fight, not yet,” Gladys said, the frustration and venom in her tone causing Eurgain to look at her sharply. “We must sit up here like stupid pheasants in a tree, and wait to be struck down.” She looked along the curve of the wall, where the chiefs stood resting on their spears, their women beside them, splashes of scarlet, blue, and yellow. “Like stones, like dead, useless branches,” she spat. “We should leap the wall and die quickly.”

“Peace,” Cinnamus said easily. “You sound like Vida,” and incredibly, wonderfully, they laughed, the swift ripple of mirth reaching the soldiers beneath them who paused to look up. In that moment Cinnamus coolly leaned out and threw his spear, and one of the men below crumpled backward. His fellows raised their shields again and went back to their digging, while the ballista let fly with a crack and a whizz and the stones from the peasants’ slings clicked and rattled.

“Where is Vida?” Eurgain asked.

Cinnamus shrugged. “She is still in bed,” he grunted. “She will come when she is ready.”

For a moment Caradoc was back in the Great Hall. The fire leaped merrily, voices rose and fell, the meat spat and smelled delicious, and he, Tog, and Adminius raised their cups while Cunobelin swayed to Cathbad’s music and Aricia and Vida argued and shouted, their black heads together, their black eyes flashing and their hands flying through the smoky air like the ashes spiraling to the roof. Eurgain put a hand on his arm, and he was recalled to himself by her touch.

“What about fire, Caradoc? Have you forgotten…”

He clapped his hands to his helmed forehead in exasperated disgust. “Fire! Of course! Caelte, run and find Mocuxsoma and the others. Begin tearing down the kennels and the stables. Cin, find Fearachar and tell him to bring us fire. What is the matter with me? I feel as though I have been in a deep sleep.” His chiefs quickly ran to do his bidding and he, Gladys, and Eurgain crouched against the wall, feeling the vibration of the siege machine quiver in their feet and hardpacked earth under them crack and loosen.

Vida sauntered over and sat beside them, yawning, her face pale, blinking in the strong daylight. She was dressed in one of Cinnamus’s simple tunics, but her legs were bare, and her feet were unshod. Her sword was held in one languid, uncaring hand and two knives were thrust her belt

“Vida, where is your shield?” Caradoc asked.

She yawned again, then grinned at him, her big white teeth flashing in the sun. “I lost it to one of my husband’s freemen last night, Lord—at the gambling.” Caradoc was angry. He began to lash at her, words of anxiety, but Fearachar and the other chiefs came running, arms full of wood, and he rose.

“Make a fire here,” he commanded. “Pile on the wood. Get anything that will burn. If we can hold the soldiers back for a time it will be something.” They all hurried to fling brush, thatch, sticks from the walls of the huts, planks from the stables, on Fearachar’s fire, and soon it began to roar, the flames pallid in the sunlight.

The ballista hummed. Beneath them, the soldiers doggedly picked away at the wall, and the other chiefs, seeing what was in Caradoc’s mind, ran to take their own brands from the fire. Soon a hundred fires flickered, a ring of heat around the lip of the defences, and the heaps of wood grew beside them. Caradoc was satisfied at last. With a shout he grasped a burning brand, leaned over the edge, and dropped it. A scream went up below him. Gladys stamped her foot. “Right in the face, by the Mother! At them, Eurgain!” And Eurgain and Vida began to drag wood from the fire while Fearachar fed it.

All that day the Catuvellauni kept the legions from the walls, until the wood was gone from the kennels, and the stables, and all the huts of the freemen’s circle. Claudius, who had been watching greedily from his little hill, began to sweat under the noonday sun, and he called for his canopy, and sat under it, wiping his brow. Plautius finally ordered in the tormentae and the scorpios, and the chiefs began to fall from the walls, pierced by arrows as they stood to cast their fire downward, but the rain of orange hail did not stop, even though several of the fires, their tenders now dead, had gone out. Plautius ordered again, calmly, almost regretfully, marveling at the desperate tenacity of these uncouth people, and a great cry went up from the Catuvellauni. Flaming arrows now flew above them, burying deep in the dry, summer-parched thatch of the remaining roofs of the chiefs’ circle, and the huts burst into bright conflagrations, red against the slowly deepening, late afternoon sky.

“Caradoc, the children!” Eurgain screamed at him. “The knife is one thing, but I will not have them burned alive!”

Caradoc paused, wiping the sweat and grime from his eyes, and looked up. The Great Hall was untouched, rearing tall and proud against the gathering clouds of evening, just out of reach of the range of the scorpios. “I need you here, Eurgain,” he said shortly. “The Hall will stand until the walls crumble.” She thought for a moment, nodded grimly, and went back to her work, her blonde braids gray with ash, her hands swollen and burnt, her arms bleeding from a hundred scratches.

Night fell, and Plautius ordered the retreat sounded, well pleased with the day’s progress. The walls of the town were now so weakened that his men could pull them apart with bare hands, and the enemy had lost many men to the arrows of his scorpios. He stood beside a sleepy, grumpy emperor and watched the fiery destruction of Camulodunon. The tormentae had done their work well. The whole town was ablaze, all but the large, wooden building at the summit. It still stood defiantly, a black, flame-shadowed bulk, mocking him, but in the morning, when the fires would have eaten themselves out, the legions would at last be able to go in and they could complete their slaughter.

Somehow, in some strange, twisted way, he was sorry that it would all be over. He would have liked to meet this Caradoc, the chief whose determination in the face of certain defeat had kept his men fighting like lost demons. He would have liked to have shared a cup of wine with him, to have talked pleasantly of tactics and deployments over a good dinner. Already he felt the mystery of this land. It whispered to him as he lay in his tent at night, and it taunted him as he rode through its dense woods, a land full of spells and subtle, luring magic.

The cooking fires of his troops sprang up around him like sparks dropped from the colossal inferno that raged before him, and he thought of the tall chief he had glimpsed standing on the wall, bronze helm glinting in the sun, but Claudius spoke to him, a whip of annoyance in his voice, and Plautius sighed and bent to answer. He was not so sure now that he was more fortunate than his colleague Paulinus.

The chiefs sprawled sweating in the Great Hall, gnawing on chunks of cold meat and drinking the last of the beer as they listened to the steady wind of flames that was burning their town to ashes. Caradoc, sitting beside Llyn, with the little girls in his tired arms, felt a pang as he looked at them. So few had left. So few. Eurgain sat with her hands in a bucket of cold water, her eyes closed, and Gladys, her head sunk on her breast, was hunched against the wall, her naked sword resting across her knees. Vida and Cinnamus lay side by side on the skins and seemed to be asleep, and Caelte, who had recovered his harp from the corner where he had hidden it, sang softly to himself, seemingly unmindful of the angry red weal of a burn that snaked along one arm.

Caradoc knew that he should order them all out again to watch in case the Romans breached the walls under cover of darkness, but he did not have the heart to do so. Let them rest. What was the point of a sleepless night when here, for a time, they could forget their last tomorrow? Caradoc noticed that no one had crawled to the welcoming shadows of Cunobelin’s corner. The old warrior’s spirit still brooded there and would until the Hall fell in ruin, and Caradoc smiled in spite of himself.

“Caelte,” he called. “Sing us a song!”

There was a shocked silence, but Caelte’s kindly face lit up in answer. “What would you hear, Lord?” he asked.

Not of victories, Caradoc thought quickly. Not of raids or conquests. There must be no tears tonight. “Sing to us the song my father would not let Cathbad sing all those years ago, if you remember it. Sing the ‘Lady of Togodumnus the Many-Handed, and the Twelve Lost Cattle.’” A ripple of cracked, mirthless chuckles spread and Cinnamus sat up as Caelte struck a jaunty lilting chord and began to sing, the music slowly kindling the dull eyes that filled the Hall.

Togodumnus crept out in the deep, dark night,

He took with him no chief.

He wanted no man to spy him out—

Togodumnus was a thief! …

Caelte tapped his foot, his cheeky lyrics bringing smiles to the company, and they began to sway and hum under their breath, forgetting the desolation around them. When he had finished they applauded warmly, and Cinnamus shouted, “Ah, Caelte, what a good song! The best song you have ever composed! Sing it again!” So he sang it again, and they sang snatches of it with him, their quick ears picking up the words, and Caradoc, his heart lighter, glanced to the corner and fancied that he felt two spirits watching there, the heavy, cloying emanation of his father, and a merry, capering Tog.

Caradoc gently laid his sleeping daughters beside him on the skins while the Hall quieted down, and Fearachar came with cloaks to cover them and Llyn who was stretched out by his mother, already dozing. Caradoc sat back against the wall and Eurgain moved over to sit beside him. He put an arm around her and her head found his shoulder.

“How are your hands?” he asked softly.

“Better,” she answered. “But there are many blisters. If I want to swing a sword tomorrow I will have to bind them tightly.”

“It is not too late to leave,” he said after a moment. “I could let you and the children over the wall on a rope.”

“Oh, be quiet,” she murmured, and at last he laid his head on hers and fell asleep.