The Eagle and the Raven (48 page)

Now Caradoc swung along beside Cinnamus, his thoughts on the coming Council and the new decision that awaited him, and the war band melted with him into the embracing forest, leaving yet another scene of carnage to feed the raging fires of Scapula’s obsession.

When they reached their camp hidden in a tiny valley, little more than a tree-choked gully with stubbed rock behind and a wide view of all the approaches in front, Bran was waiting for them with Caelte and the girls, and before any man ate they went to the stream. Bran made the incantations and the Roman weapons and armor were cast into it, for its goddess. Then they gathered about the fire, feeding silently.

An hour later Llyn and the horses came. He sent one to the freemen to be slaughtered and the others were tethered in the forest, then he flung himself down with the other men. Eurgain went to her tent and Bran followed to attend to her wound. The valley was quiet, each warrior wrapped in his own thoughts. The days of loud laughter, boasting, and squabbling were long gone. The men of the west had taken on the atmosphere of the lonely places that were their only home, and they had acquired the wild beast’s facility of sleeping with one eye open wherever they happened to cast themselves to rest. Even the children were like animals, swift to startle into flight, suspicious of everyone.

Caelte sat with his back against a tree, humming as he fingered a tune on his harp, and the girls took their wooden swords and poked at each other, while Caradoc lay with one elbow propping up his head as he watched them. Eurgain was fifteen and Gladys fourteen, two unkempt, undisciplined girls, Caradoc thought, more at home with blood and sudden death than with dogs and hunting, or with the suitors who should have been courting them. They were both old enough to be betrothed but showed no interest in the young men of Llyn’s war band. Or so he believed. He did not know them very well. Soon it would be time for them to join Eurgain’s group of sword-women and take their chances with the other women who fought and died, blooded like all the young chieftains without ritual and without pomp. He sat up and took out his sword. “Cin,” he said. “Give Gladys your sword. Eurgain!” The girls came to him panting and flushed and he held his sword out to his daughter, who took it eagerly, her fair hair falling about her face, and her strong brown arms hefting it. Gladys took Cinnamus’s heavy blade, adjusted her grip on the hilt, and soon the clang of iron on iron rang out and the chiefs clustered to watch. Caradoc sat still, thinking of his wife and his sister sparring happily before the Great Hall, but Cinnamus could not contain himself. He got up and circled the combatants.

“Feet farther apart, Gladys,” he commanded. “Eurgain, don’t watch the sword, watch the eyes or you are dead.” The older girl had her aunt’s cool, steady swing, but the younger one was quick. They fought well but as yet they were no match for professional soldiers, and the weight of the shields would slow them still further. Caradoc got up and went to the tent.

Eurgain was lying on their blankets, wrapped in her cloak. She smiled at him as he unbuckled his belt and dropped it, and cast his own cloak down beside her. “Is your leg easier?” he asked, lifting the covering to see it, and she nodded.

“Bran packed it with herbs and it’s closing already, but it will be very stiff for a couple of days. No fighting for me tomorrow.”

“No fighting for any of us tomorrow. I have decided to go north and let Scapula have this country.”

“He is no longer interested in the country,” she said. “All he wants is you.”

He grinned at her, a lopsided grimace. “But as Emrys would say, I
am
the country. We can open a new front in the north, Eurgain, and have the advantages of the escape routes into Brigantia and the more rugged territory. Also, we will be closer to Mona and our grain supply.” Caradoc was surprised that Scapula had not made a concerted effort to break through to Mona and destroy the lush, productive fields. He himself would have done it, in Scapula’s position, but Scapula was losing his judgment, allowing his preoccupation with the rebels to warp his good sense.

“In the north we will face the Fourteenth and the Twentieth,” Eurgain pointed out. “We have had little to do with them so far. But of course you are wise. If we stay here we will be trapped.”

“Scapula will find the Ordovices and their mountains a very different proposition,” he replied. “Emrys tells me that Roman patrols have been seen quite deep in the mountains, and Scapula is obviously exploring the paths and passes. It will do him no good. He is losing men to us every day. We have held the west free for nearly five years. Think of it Eurgain, five years, and if only we can hang on for a couple more, Rome will declare Plautius’s frontier zone to be the official boundary of the province and we will be free.”

She lay back. “I prefer to think of you,” she said softly. “Ah Caradoc, I love you so well. When you take me in your arms I do not regret that we may die tomorrow.”

He took her luxuriant fair hair and spread it wide on the blanket and she raised her arms. He slipped off his brown tunic and his breeches and enfolded her, feeling her warm hands glide down his back and over his buttocks. She’s like the rain, he thought, seeking her mouth. The sweet, cold summer rain that patters gently over the parched fields of my soul. Eurgain! He parted the cloak and lifted his head to see the nakedness beneath, running his fingers over skin as puckered and scarred with old sword thrusts as his own, yet still infinitely precious to him, still full of dark, appealing secrets. With a peculiar constriction of her heart she watched the ravaged face above her blur into softness.

“Arviragus,” she whispered, “I do not care if the whole world is consumed with the fire of war as long as there is some corner where you and I may lie together.” He smiled slowly and brought his hands to cup her face, so small, the blue eyes sparkling with humor and desire, the full lips parted, but a shadow fell across the tent flap and Cinnamus called, “Lord, an Ordovician embassy has arrived. Emrys is hard pressed and wants us to pack and move tonight.” Caradoc sighed. “Give them meat and beer, Cin, and tell them to wait. Tell them that I am attending to important business.”

They heard Cinnamus laugh and stride away, then Eurgain pulled his head down roughly. “What business could be more important?” she murmured and he chuckled, one of his rare, throaty eruptions of humor.

“None, my love, none at all,” he agreed.

The Ordovicians had brought grim news. The Fourteenth and Twentieth Legions were gathering for a concerted push up the Severn valley and Scapula was with them, determined not to waste one day of the summer campaigning. He had mustered fifteen thousand men, all that the active legions could spare from the forts of the frontier and the peaceable towns, and the lowland lay almost undefended while he pursued his fey, fleeting enemy with angry singleness of purpose. Caradoc sat listening, two thoughts in his mind. If the Brigantians, the Iceni, the Trinovantes, had had one spark of honor left then this would have been the time to strike and strike hard, while he and his chiefs kept Scapula entangled in the west. But he knew bitterly that there was no resistance left anywhere but around himself, and this opportunity would go by, perhaps never to return.

He also pondered the coming year. Fate was drawing his time as arviragus to a close, he knew that too. Scapula had never before gathered such an army and Caradoc, chin in hand, unseeing eyes fixed on the faces of the Ordovicians, felt his thoughts stretch out, probing across the mountains, reaching for the mind of the man whose gaze turned stonily west, seeking him. What would Scapula do? Would he continue to press them with patrols? Would he mass his host and wait for them in some valley somewhere? Would he come to his senses and march on Mona, then sit and rub his hands while they all starved to death? If it came to that, could they slip into Brigantia and find a welcome from Venutius?

He waved the Ordovician down and he rose, squinting into the late sun. There were too many questions he could not answer. He felt his destiny throb in his veins, pulsing with his hot blood, returning to plague him with a force that was driving him like a runaway horse. He clutched the reins but was unable to control it. He could only look ahead with sudden fear to the time when destiny would come to a sudden, unpredictable halt and he would lose his hold and go tumbling on, bereft of all guidance. His hand went to the magic egg that hung on a thong about his neck and his fingers closed around it. The steady spell it wove served to calm him and he spoke evenly. “We will come,” he said. He turned away.

“Madoc, Cin, you too, Llyn, have the camp struck. Leave nothing but ashes.”

They all moved to do his bidding and Eurgain limped to him. “It is time to call out the full force of the Demetae,” she said, but he disagreed.

“I will call on them, yes,” he replied. “But I want to leave some chiefs to handle the coastal patrols if they can. Scapula thinks he can get at me from the rear, but he is mistaken. The Demetae can swim better than fish, and fight in their boats like water gods. He has a surprise coming to him, that dour old Roman with the stomach ache! Now go, Eurgain. Get your women ready to leave.” She hobbled away and he stood very quietly, listening to the subdued, efficient bustle around him, saying goodbye to yet another sanctuary that had become, even briefly, a home.

For all Scapula’s slowly mounting hysterical impatience, he did not take Caradoc that summer. The combined Silures, Ordovices, and Demetae held him off, giving him tantalizing glimpses of themselves, forcing him to long, wearing marches, leading him on before they melted away into the thick-treed, sullen fastnesses of their country like mist before the sun, only to reappear and strike impudently at his rear. His belly gnawed at him for days on end during that season. He could not sleep. He swallowed his food with difficulty, knowing that it would turn to acid and pain. He watched his long-suffering men scrambling through rocky passes, fording deep cataracts that washed away baggage and pack animals, losing themselves in forest that stretched endlessly, with a deceptive, beckoning coolness and peace. Many of them were never seen again. At night there was the howling of wolves and the hooting of owls and in the morning there would be a sentry missing here, a careless officer found headless there, horses with throats slit. He captured no peasants, either, to assuage his burning thirst for knowledge. The land seemed empty under a hot, thunder-heavy sky. In the south his coastal patrols were faring badly and he reiterated his order to slay any human being unfortunate enough to be taken in Silurian territory. When he had defeated them, he decided maliciously, he would order them all killed, every last dirty, treacherous one of them. But the summer was not entirely wasted. He was getting to know the countryside. His surveyors and cartographers were charting the tracks and marking the places most suited for the building of forts, and they worked objectively and thoroughly under his meticulous eye.

Romans and chiefs were relieved when the long, hot days began to shorten and grow cooler. Scapula began to give thought to the placement of his winter quarters, but Caradoc, Emrys, and Madoc spent long hours sitting with their faces to the fire, thrashing out a strategy that would extend into the following spring. If Scapula withdrew for the winter they would be powerless to harry him and would have to cope instead with freemen who would have to stand to arms yet remain idle, and the prospect was worrisome. As the air slowly dried and the humid odors of summer were sucked out of the soil to blow away on the keen, tasteless winds of frost-sharp nights, Scapula spent sleepless hours growing more and more reluctant to disengage. If he put the legions into winter quarters the rebels could spend the blind months reestablishing their supremacy in the southwest and consolidating along their weakened frontier. If he did not, he faced the slow decimation of his exploratory patrols who would fight three enemies—the weather, the terrain, and the elusive chiefs. He was not so sure that the weather and the terrain were not sentient, either. Often the mountains seemed to conspire gleefully against him, picking his men off their shoulders and flinging them away, leading them astray along fair, guileless paths that ended in cunningly hidden chasms, and the weather had always changed when he did not want it to, pouring rain to fill the gullies where the soldiers toiled and beaming with sun when they had marched all day with no sign of a stream.

The mysterious, foreign magic shrouded him wherever he went, an uncomfortably felt yet unseen cloud of malevolence that slowed the reflexes of his legionaries and dulled their officers’ judgments. The dispatches from Rome were becoming increasingly critical. Too much money was being fed into the new province, too many replacements were needed in the ranks, and the returns were too few. Just why, Claudius asked him in increasingly strident communiques, were the tribes of the west not yet subdued? Scapula felt himself aging daily.

The legions did not go into winter quarters, and Caradoc began the task of winter campaigning with his dying hope suddenly renewed. Winter was a dangerous season for all, but more dangerous for the freezing soldiers who struggled through snow on paths that were unfamiliar, to a destination that had to remain unspecified. The tribesmen took a heavy toll of them, though they themselves were weakened by hunger and the necessity to keep moving without proper shelter. There were babies born in tents to women who lay on damp blankets between one day’s march and the next, and many of them died. Children who were not robust enough to survive long days on their feet and nights of cold sickened also. But the strong among them hardened to a swift toughness, to stand motionless in freezing water while the Romans passed by, to hang from cliffs while their feet scrabbled to feel solid rock beneath them, and to scratch under the snow to find roots and iced berries to eat. The scouts and spies moved back and forth. They were Caradoc’s eyes and ears, his indispensable link to Scapula’s movements, and thanks to their information he and his men were able time and again to lie above some bleak, snow-choked crack in the mountain’s armor and greet the already exhausted soldiers with the final blessing of a savage, clean death. Samain came and went, celebrated with a hungry ferocity by the assembled chiefs, and the demoralized soldiers neared the point of mutiny when they began to stumble across clearings full of wooden stakes crowned with the ice-hung, tortured faces of their compatriots.