The Eagle and the Raven (31 page)

They scrambled up onto the warm earth of the bank. “I do not take you lightly,” he said. “There are two wounds that plague me. One is seen by the world but the other is my pain at your unhappiness and my constant care for you.”

She relaxed against him and her arms crept around his neck. “I love you also, Prasutugas,” she whispered. “Oh, how I love you! More than my kin, more than my love for the people, I love you. What is existence without you? For your sake I will give hospitality to this Roman, this Pudens, and smile and be agreeable, but my smile and my outstretched hand will be only for the love I bear you.”

He kissed her gently, their many and often wounding differences submerged for a while under the love that had taken them both by surprise.

She stood up, pulling the heavy, wet tunic away from her legs. “I must go to my duties. Ethelind will be crying again and Hulda will be walking her up and down and getting angrier and angrier.” She lifted the hair from the nape of her neck. “How hot is it! I can’t remember such a scorching summer! I suppose the Romans will be congratulating themselves on having found a new province that promises to be as fruitful and pleasant as their own country.” She snorted. “Let them wait until the snow comes! Then we shall see.”

He struggled to his feet and stood looking at her, knowing by her sudden lost, pensive air that her thoughts were on Caradoc and the mystery of his disappearance. He picked up his sandals and sword and moved away. “Shall we sleep under the stars tonight?” he asked. “We can bring blankets, and lie beside the river. Ethelind will not stir until the dawn.”

She came to herself and grinned at him. “If you promise not to roll me into the water when it is time to get up! I may catch a chill and have to take to my bed. Then you will have to receive the Roman by yourself.”

“And how disappointed you would be!” Together they strolled back through the green, listless dimness of the copse, and long before she reached the door of their hut Boudicca could hear the baby’s thin, hungry wails.

That night they carried their bedding out onto the tall grass that grew beside the river and sat watching the lingering summer light fade slowly from the sky, and the white stars come out to hang low and glittering over the marshes. The soft darkness was full of the noises of warmth and life. Frogs burbled in the mud, insects rustled and clicked around them, and away in the forest the owls hunted, and the myriad small, unnameable things uncurled beneath the trees’ close protection and made of the night a friendly, many-hosted time. The two young people talked quietly and without strain of simple matters of the heart and the day-to-day concerns of the tuath, but they did not speak of the future. For them the night was precious, a time of rest which they had learned to hold fiercely for themselves alone, hours which contained only the companionship of privacy. Prasutugas forgot the grinding worries of a tribe whose welfare revolved around him like a great, weighty wheel. Boudicca pushed aside the creeping terror that seemed to her sometimes to be like a noisome choking sludge which drowned all joy. The future was for the sunlight, linked remorselessly to actions and decisions where each was forced to become what he was not. Only here, beside the silver lullaby of the river flowing calmly by forever, under the flaming silence of star fire, could they remove the cloaks of necessity and care. They sat huddled under the blankets, heads together, murmuring and laughing. They made love and got up to drink from the clear, cool river, and loved again, and though they did not sleep they wandered back to the gate refreshed when the coming of the sun was only a grayness in the east and the wind of dawn poured a steady, crisp air around them.

The day was hot again, and sultry. Cattle stood in the river with hanging heads, while the naked children splashed and shrieked around them. Horses walked slowly with tails swishing at the clouds of flies. The people sat in the shade of their huts, and only the few slaves were busy about the Council fire that had been kindled outside the palisade. Even the tradesmen, the blacksmiths and weavers, the tanners, the jewelers, and the clothmakers, left their tools and congregated by the water to gossip desultorily or drowse. Prasutugas, all his thoughts fixed anxiously on the Roman delegation even now wending its way to the borders of his land, walked the paths of the town with Lovernius and Iain, all three sweating and silent. Boudicca spent the morning riding among her cattle and her fields, talking to the peasants and freemen who worked for her, looking bitterly and sadly at her honor-price and wondering how much of it would end up in the bellies of the ever hungry legionnaires. In the afternoon, dispirited and oppressed by the heat, she went to her bed and slept with the baby in the crook of her arm.

Evening brought an illusion of coolness, and after a subdued meal eaten in the open and a word with her husband she walked alone to the forest, her feet bare on the dry earth, and her cloak slung over her arm. The grove of Andrasta lay deep within the trees, at the end of a path that had already narrowed through disuse, and to her distress she found that once or twice she had to push aside arching brambles or step over straggling encroachments of nettles. No sacrifices had been offered that summer, not since the Druids had vanished, and as she walked, Boudicca thought of the gatherings of chiefs and their women who had crowded to beg spells and make incantations here before the chariots had rolled south to face the Catuvellauni. Her father had bowed his massive head with the others, that head which lay hidden somewhere, the skull bleached white by now, or else hanging lonely and forgotten against the lintel of some deserted Catuvellauni hut, and Prasutugas had taken his great sword in both life-filled, mighty arms and had swung it through the air, laughing, to show her how sharp Iain had made it. He had sliced through a leaf fluttering past him. No, she thought, eyes squeezed shut for a moment while her body moved along the way she knew so well. No, I do not want to return to those times. He is right. If the tribes had decided at some Samain Council to give up warring and to live in peace forever, how good and rich life would be now! But for Rome… It is not the same… It is as if we steal the object of our fervent desire instead of paying for it honorably, and the joy of its possession will turn to loathing and self-reproach.

The grove lay still and secret, lit dimly by the heatless rays of the new-risen moon, the shadows of a thousand branches black-chequered over the semicircle of the roofless wooden shrine and the dark stone altar. Andrasta sat cross-legged beside it, tall and thin shouldered, her eyes closed, her mouth parted a little, the moonlight touching her winged helm and the writhing snakes of hair that escaped from under it. Her arms, thin and formless as hazel sticks, rested beside her knees, and in each upturned palm a silver-chased skull gazed vacantly into the gloom. Boudicca glided forward, but even as she stood before the face that was forever closed behind the lidded eyes, she felt the absence of magic in the grove, the pathetic, desolate emptiness of the place. The power had gone. The Druids had felt the winds of change begin to blow within the Iceni, and they had cursed the people with warnings, but the people had turned their faces to this new wind and their backs upon the invoker and the sages, and when they had turned cautiously around to see what would happen next, the Druids had melted away and their curses had seemed mean and void of strength. If you dance with the demons of Rome you will pay with everything you have and more, the Druids had said. But Prasutugas had shown the calm stubbornness, which had at once attracted and repelled Boudicca, and the war-weary people had braved Andrasta’s wrath and formed ranks behind him.

“Where is your anger, Queen of Victory?” Boudicca asked her quietly. “Where is your vengeance?” But the stillness was calm, dumb, and the night untroubled by whispers. Boudicca stood there helplessly, knowing the uselessness of prayers and invocations. She had not believed that in the end her husband would surrender to Rome, but now Rome was coming to fill the darkness the Druids had left with a blacker presence, and she could do nothing.

Suddenly a twig snapped behind her, and the dry grasses stirred. She turned. Lovernius stepped into the moonlight, a bundle in his hands, and for a moment they smiled at one another ruefully. Then he came up to her and spoke.

“I thought you were Hulda,” he said. “I did not recognize you, Lady.” There was caution in his voice. “I have not been to make an offering all summer.” The words could have expressed contrition at his laxness or an acceptance of Andrasta’s slide into oblivion, and he watched her carefully.

“What have you brought?” she enquired evenly, as he unwrapped his gift.

“Some money. A silver bracelet that was part of my mother’s honor-price. And a knife.” Moonlight gave the pearled hilt a gleaming luster, and garnets glimmered on the little scabbard. She swiftly scanned his face and then ran an admiring finger down the heavy, encrusted edge of the scabbard.

“It will do no good, Lovernius. She will not receive the gifts. The Druids have bound her with spells, and nothing we can do will rouse her to our will.”

“Nevertheless, I will offer them, and I will keep bringing her what I can.”

She watched him lay the bundle on Andrasta’s knees, listened to the words of debt, but she knew that the goddess was no longer impelled to honor the present with a service, and she slowly swung her cloak around her shoulders and prepared to leave the grove. “We are alone, you and I,” she said flatly, gruffly, as he scrambled to his feet. “Tell me, singing man, out of your wit, what shall I do?”

“The same thing I shall do,” he replied simply. “I shall go on singing to my lord of his triumphs and mistakes, and you must raise your child and tend to your honor-price.”

“So that in the end the Romans can take both? I want to go away, Lovernius. I want to run into the west.”

He searched her eyes for a long time, and then gently took her hand. “You do not really want to do that,” he said. “You love him too much to leave him defenceless. Have courage, Boudicca! Our time will come. We must wait.”

She turned away and together they filed back onto the path. “I am not good at waiting,” she answered him at last. “I have learned many things in my short life, Lovernius, but patience is not one of them!” She spoke gaily, her mood of depression lifting, and he spoke in the same vein.

“If you would spend more time with your mouth shut and your eyes on the stars, and less with your head down, charging at everyone and everything like a mad bull, you would learn it!” he quipped, and she laughed.

“Make me a song to remind me,” she called back over her shoulder. “And come and sing it to me every day. Prasutugas would reward you handsomely for teaching me to curb my tongue.”

“No, he would not!” he replied. “He is besotted over you as you are over him!”

She chuckled again but did not comment, and the town’s firelight beckoned them as they left the trees and ambled slowly toward the gate.

Rufus Pudens and his escort of tribunes and infantry arrived late the following afternoon. They were greeted riotously by the townspeople, the farmers from outlying areas, and many traveling tradesmen and drifters who had gathered for a look at the new masters of Albion. Prasutugas and Boudicca stood at the door to the council hall with their train, a splash of vivid, motionless color in the jostling, shouting mob. Prasutugas had donned his high bronze helm and had left his hair loose, and it cascaded over his shoulders in golden waves. His ceremonial sword hung from his enameled belt, and his one arm rested along the jewel-strung shield that had been his father’s, and his before him. Boudicca waited demurely at his side in her soft yellow tunic. Gold bracelets tinkled as she clasped and unclasped her blunt fingers, and on her head was the gold circlet studded with amber that had been a wedding gift from her husband, but circlet and stones were lost in the bright hair that curled and frothed to her waist.

“Remember,” Prasutugas whispered to her out of the corner of his mouth. “I forbid you to lose your temper today. If you do I will punish you, and this time I mean it most seriously.”

“I promised, I promised!” she hissed back at him. “Andrasta, love has made a fool out of me! Oh look, Prasutugas! Here he comes! Such gleaming assertion, such dazzling might! It is not too late to change your mind, you know. And who is the tribesman with him?”

“Hush!” He nudged her and then stepped forward, for the tight, armored group of soldiers had wheeled to a halt by the gate at a short word of command, and a silence had fallen among the admiring crowds.

Pudens dismounted together with his tribunes and swung onto the path that led straight to the hall, and in spite of herself Boudicca felt a thrill of approval at the smoothly folded scarlet cloak, the shining breastplate, the plumed, glittering helmet. A clean order and discipline radiated from the sure, upright stride of the four men, the back flung set of their shoulders, the free tilting of their heads. With them came a tall, burly chief clad in a sleeveless, vivid blue tunic. Bracelets bit into the bulging flesh of his upper arms and a plain iron sword thudded against one long, thick leg. His hair was soft brown, graying a little above his high forehead, and as he came nearer, Boudicca saw his face more clearly, a face that could have been handsome, alive with sensitivity and humor, if only it had not been stamped with sulkiness and petulance. I know that man, Boudicca thought to herself incredulously. I have seen him before. Prasutugas suddenly felt as though he and Boudicca were children caught out in some forbidden game by stern, disapproving adults. The Romans came up to him, removed their helmets, and he passed his shield to Iain and extended his arm.

“Welcome to this tuath,” he said warmly. “Food, wine, and peace to you.”

Rufus Pudens took the proffered wrist. “I thank you, Lord, in the name of the emperor,” he responded gravely. “It is a great pleasure for me to meet with you personally at last. This,” he said, indicating the tribesman with a small gesture, “is my interpreter.”

The chief rapidly translated Pudens’s words, then added, “My name is Saloc. The noble Pudens has some facility in our tongue, but not enough to make his meanings clear to you. That will be my honor.” He stepped back, took her husband’s arm briefly, then turned his attention to Pudens, who was holding out his hand to Boudicca and waiting.