The Eagle and the Raven (50 page)

“Vote, then,” he barked contemptuously at them, and they quickened to life. “Those who will continue as I have begun, stand.” Madoc and the Silures got up, and a few of the Demetae, and with surprise Caradoc felt Emrys stir and rise beside him.

“I cannot force my people,” he said. “This is my personal vote.” Sine remained on the ground.

“And what of the rest of you?” Caradoc pressed. “Do you want to be freed from your oaths?” The eyes slid away from him, but heads were shaken and a low chorus of No, Lord, Never, reached him. “I know what you want, you foolish people,” he said gently. “Retain your oaths, and I will lead you to battle as you wish. If we are victorious you will never again question my judgment, and if we lose may you each be dishonored until the last Roman has left these shores. Do you agree?”

They did not want to agree but they were caught in the net of their own casting. Now that they had vented their spleen in open Council, many of them were thinking again, but it was too late to retract proud words without blood being spilt. They did not want to go into death dishonored, for the dead without honor could not rest and could not return to life until that honor had been avenged. The debt was eternal. But their fear drove them. Fear of more hardships and bereavements, fear of the gradual transformation of their tuaths into landless, witless peasants, little better than the animals they slew for meat. At last, with obvious reluctance, they agreed.

Caradoc dismissed them. The night was quiet and deep, and there were many hours to the dawn. He immediately called Madoc, Emrys, and the chiefs of the Demetae to him and they sat by the deserted fire discussing their last test, mustering all the lessons learned during the years of courageous and despairing recklessness that had brought them to the verge of doom. It had to come to this, Caradoc thought fatalistically. I have kept them together longer than any arviragus before me, but loyalty to the kin always comes first and they have given me more of that loyalty than I deserved. Now they take it back, and I cannot blame them. It is so much easier for me. I no longer have a tuath, no kin to goad me to jealousy. But, oh Camulos, I wish that they had chosen another time! The seed had been sown, and the shoot sprouted in such hope. Yet it is still so fragile, so new, and we are harvesting it before the appointed time.

“Let Scapula come to us,” Emrys was saying. “We must choose the battle site and then wait for him to find us. And it must be done quickly, before the legions can separate us.”

Caradoc nodded absently. He felt curiously empty, as though he had somehow lost the reason for his existence and had forgotten why he was there, and his drive and purpose had flowed away. He knew that in the morning he would have adjusted to new circumstances and could look ahead as he had always done, but now he sat with hands loosely hanging from his coarse-clad knees and his eyes on the ground.

By the time he awoke in the morning to drizzle and a warm wind, he had recovered command of himself and the people. He called his spies. “Go east,” he ordered them. “Find the legions. Get drunk or fight. Do a little careless talking, but make sure that Scapula knows what we plan.” He sent them away and turned to Cinnamus. “How many warriors will march?”

“Counting the women?”

“Of course. Have you been quarreling with Vida again?”

Cinnamus smiled wryly. “Lord, I have fought with Vida all my life. Did you know that when I went to her father to request the cup of marriage she turned her wine jug over my head and vowed that she would never wed such a ragged pauper as I? Mother, what a woman, I thought as I left her. I knew then that I had to have her. But she made me fight for her, the vixen, and I have been fighting for, with, and against her ever since…”

Caradoc smiled. “The head count, my friend.”

“Ah yes. If you wish to count the women, then you command ten thousand warriors, Lord.”

“And Scapula five thousand more. An even match, do you think?”

Cinnamus fixed him with that inimitably level, green stare. “It has never been even, Lord, yet we are still standing here in the rain and the west is still free. I think that answers your question.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

W
ITHIN
two weeks, an astounded Ostorious Scapula heard that the rebel had tired of his policy of slow attrition and was ready for a stand. At first he did not believe, preferring to think the news just another artful deceit to open the campaigning season with an explosion, but his scouts confirmed the rumor and for the first time in untold months he was able to sleep without the nightmares brought on by his churning stomach. At last, at last, Caradoc had played into his hands with the most incredibly naive blindness. He stood with his tribunes under the shelter of his dripping headquarters and watched the soldiers hurriedly pack their mess kits, wanting to run in the rain and wade joyously in the puddles like a little boy. He had been right to hold on, to keep picking away at the west.

The barbarian, in his simple animality, had caved in first, as Scapula had always known he would. Now, Divine Claudius, he thought happily, now we will see. The savage horde was moving north, still well within the cover of their mountains, and the scouts were pacing them, well-hidden in the dense, spring-hung bush beside the tracks. No attempt had been made to interfere with them, and by this Scapula knew that Caradoc was serious in his intent. He wanted Rome to find him. Scapula favored his second-incommand with a rare, beaming smile.

“I do not think the season will be overlong, Gavius. What a stroke of good fortune! Caradoc and his army, both together in one place and actually waiting for me! You would have thought that after all this time the stupid barbarian had learned some sense. He must know that we have no equal in pitched battle.”

“I have heard that it was not a matter of good sense, sir,” his tribune answered carefully, admitting to himself a certain disappointment.

The officers shared an admiring regard for the dogged, crafty enemy they had never seen, and their letters home were full of a speculation about him that the whole city of Rome had come to share. What manner of man was it who could resist not one but two legions, for over four years? Was he human, or a demon conjured out of the rivers where the tribes worshipped? Mothers disciplined their unruly children with the mention of his name. Young women dreamed of being captured by him, young men of fighting him and winning, and the bored, jaded members of Claudius’s entourage enlivened the long winter days with titillating gossip about him. He was disfigured, a monster. He was the bastard son of a Roman trader who had seduced and abandoned his mother, and he had sworn revenge. He was Mars himself, come to jolt his lax worshippers into a new reverence. The permutations were endless. Even Claudius’s new wife Agrippina played the game when she was not devising others that were less innocuous. But Claudius, remembering the hostile, disdainful eyes of the barbarian princess who had defied him all those years ago, did not join in the fun. He had forgiven Plautius for marrying her, indeed he could have done little else, for Plautius had arrived home on a tide of hysterical public acclaim and Claudius had presented the pair with another estate and a team of chariot horses for the arena. But he did not encourage them to come to court and they had retired thankfully to the Silvanus’s ancestral halls. Claudius knew who the people’s arviragus was. He was a man. Brilliant, charismatic, but still only a man, who ate and slept, fought and loved, and as such he would be defeated one day and come before him here, at the heart of the world. Claudius could wait.

“Caradoc did not choose an open confrontation freely,” the tribune went on. “His chiefs have tired of harassing tactics and want the issue decided once and for all.”

Scapula gave him a sharp look. “So you have set him up as some kind of people’s hero, too?” He looked back at the gray landscape. “You will change your mind when you see him. He is nothing but a filthy, skinny, uncouth madman.” The commander’s voice rose a notch and his face began to flush.

“Yes, sir,” the tribune said hastily.

Emrys walked over to Caradoc and laid an urgent hand on his arm as he stood pondering, his brow furrowed under the winged helm. “Arviragus, you must decide, and decide soon,” he said. “For four days we have marched beside the river and passed many valleys, and we must stop. The legions are only two days away.”

“I know,” Caradoc answered automatically, “I know. Give me a moment, Emrys.”

They had come down out of the hills for the first time in months, to the feet of the steep, rock-strewn foothills and the big river that rose near Emrys’s town, and then they had turned north to seek a good place to give battle. Caradoc had known that the trees above them were full of Roman scouts, but he forbade Madoc to flush them out. Let them watch and count, let them run to Scapula, let him come swiftly, swiftly, and then, oh please the Mother, then a little peace, a little rest. Now he shook his head decisively and waved the leaders on. “This place will not do!” he shouted. Resignedly they began to straggle on, the late afternoon sun bathing them, and Caradoc, watching them go, seemed to see them all wading through a fine, blood-soaked mist. He swung after them. He was not sure what he was looking for, but no valley he had yet seen had smote him with the immediate certainty that this was the place, and something inside him kept his eyes ahead, to the next clean swoop of tree-clad land, the next high-running, gray-rocked declivity.

“We will camp around the next bend,” he said to his train. “Madoc, it is the Silures turn to mount a guard. See to it.” Behind him he heard the singing begin. The army had sung each evening since they clambered down out of the mountains’ grasp and had plunged their sticky, wiry bodies into the water. Now the song swelled out suddenly, picked up by ten thousand throats as the sun became a fiery ball entangled in the trees. Tonight it was a raiding song, rich with words of victory, and he listened to it impassively, unmoved by the full, rolling tones flung up against the hills and cascading back to the river floor. His advance force had already vanished and he himself was nearing the foot of the spur of land that swept to the river. The sun dropped lower. He reached the spur and rounded it slowly, thinking of nothing but fire and food, then all at once he stopped.

He was looking into a valley that opened out on his left. Its mouth ended a mile further on, the new spur dim in the rapid shrouding of evening. The valley itself ran back, at first a flat grade strewn with needle-sharp gray rocks that had tumbled from the plateau above, then rising swiftly and steeply to a haphazard, boulder-pitted slope dotted with stunted trees and hung with the girdle of some ancient fortification. The sun had almost gone and the whole silent, empty place was lit by cheerless and forbidding shafts of light that faded before the dismal shades of night even as he stood rooted to the spot.

Cinnamus came to a halt beside him and whistled. “This is the place, Lord, beyond any doubt. We can repair the defences halfway up the slope and not even Scapula will be able to fight up that hill!”

“I think you are right, Cin. Emrys, pass the word that I do not want the people camping down here. Send them up onto the plateau above the valley and they can light their fires in under the trees.”

“Then you have chosen this place?” Emrys pressed him. “We will fight here?”

Caradoc shrugged. “I am not sure. I will tell you in the morning.”

Emrys stood up. “By then it may be too late,” he remarked, but he went away, and Cinnamus went with him.

Caradoc raised his head to watch the long, snaking tuaths scramble up the steep slope. It was almost full dark and somewhere on the other side of the river, lost in a murky, damp, early summer twilight, fifteen thousand men waited to smash his people’s pride. He felt lonely and friendless, and full of foreboding. He lowered himself onto a rock in deep shadow and sat for a long time while the night breeze sprang up, bringing to him the sweet, rich odors of the newborn leaves, running sap, and the wild, delicate tang of the thorny gorse.

I smelled that smell on my wedding day, he thought, Eurgain and I, young and innocent and full of brash hopes. I wish that men were not dumb, stupid gaming pieces of the Fates. I wish that I could take destiny and bend it to my will. Cin was right. No place but this could serve us so well, and that is a good omen. It would be foolish to march on and perhaps be caught by Scapula in a place where we cannot turn to fight. He put his head down onto his knees, lacing his fingers and placing them behind his neck. I will stay here. I will run no more. He felt his fate tighten its hold but he fought it off. I will be the master, he thought obstinately. I will make my soul mine to command. Yet he sat on, unmoving while the stars came out, and all the valley shone with the cold silver light of the rising moon.

In the morning his spies brought him word that the Romans had been delayed by the dispatches. Scapula was making very sure that his rear was safe before the final encounter. He felt that he could take his time, and the soldiers made their last-minute preparations while the speculatores returned to him with word that the lowland was quiet.

Caradoc ordered every man and woman to work, and they spent the day gathering rocks to repair the curving wall behind which they could shelter themselves and the freemen could use their slings. He, Emrys, and Madoc stood high on the lip of the plateau, looking out over a land bright with summer sunshine.

“I do not want the chiefs to fight to the death,” he told them. “If the battle goes against us, tell them to run so that we may fight another day. Impress on them, my friends, that though it is honorable to die in battle, yet it is better to swallow honor and live to go on fighting.”

“You doubt,” Emrys commented, and Caradoc turned to him, annoyed.

“Of course I doubt! If we win tomorrow it will be the first time any gathering of tribes has done so. We have every chance of winning if only the tribes will obey commands, but you know as well as I that they insist on fighting on their own, and even I cannot keep them together in the heat of a battle. It will be up to you, both of you, to control your people.”

For a moment they watched the activity below. The valley crawled with brown and gray-clad figures, sleeves rolled up, brawny muscles straining, and already the wall looked less untidy. The people labored in a mood of gaiety, laughing and singing as though they were preparing the spring sacrifices, and their light-heartedness irritated Caradoc. Children, he thought. All of them, children. He turned from them abruptly.

“Emrys, you and your tuath can take the middle of the valley. Madoc, the Silures must stand to the right where there is less cover for us. I will put the Demetae on the left,” he pointed, “where the trees crowd onto the valley floor and the cavalry will be unable to get through. Gather your people right against the river so that we may assault the men with rocks and stones while they are trying to ford it. Then we can fall back behind the wall.” They nodded in agreement. “And one thing more,” Caradoc finished. “Tonight the people can cast their rags on the fires. We will skulk in the colors of animals no longer.”

By sundown the wall was whole, sweeping the bouldered mile from side to side of the valley almost shoulder high, and the people retired to the height above to polish weapons and make their incantations. Their gods had traveled with them, and Caradoc, moving from campfire to campfire, listened to the rise and fall of soft voices grouped about the stone and wooden figures who squatted or sat cross-legged before their worshippers, three-faced or three-headed, grotesquely misshapen into swollen bellies, or thin as hazel sticks. He and the chiefs had stood by the river and watched as Bran dipped oak leaves in the water, muttering his spells, and they had cast into the muddy, silted depths the last of the captured gladiae and pila. The goddess did not respond but a dead fish had risen suddenly, floating on the surface like a rainbowed sliver of winter sun or snow, and it was a good omen.

Night had come, an angry sunset of black thunderclouds with burning, orange underbellies, and the spies had come too. Scapula had arrived. Caradoc strode with them to the lip of the gorge and looked out, seeing the twinkle of a thousand cooking fires across the river, and even as he tried to count them he heard the trumpet sound the tuba for the evening ceremonies to Jupiter. He dismissed the spies and walked to his tent, glad that things were coming to a head. He raised the flap and walked in.

Eurgain was setting out his dress for the morning, yellow breeches fringed in gold thread, the blue tunic patterned boldly with black and yellow squares, and the long, soft scarlet cloak, tasseled with gold. She had opened the box that held their jewels and he went to it, lifting the silver bracelets, the coral-studded brooches, the circlets set with pink pearls.

“Cin brought your shield,” she said. “Are you going to use it?” He looked to where his ceremonial shield had been laid beside the battered wooden one that had taken so many cuts, then he shook his head.

“The enameling would get scratched” was all he could say, a lump coming to his throat as he watched her brown fingers move among the treasured playthings of another time. “Eurgain,” he said, “I want to hold the women in reserve. I do not entirely trust the Demetae. They fight well but they are all like Tog. If the first charge does not win the day they swiftly become confused, and I may need to send you and Vida to strengthen the left flank.”

“And what of Llyn and his chiefs?”

He sank to the floor, pouring himself beer. “Llyn will fight beside me. He will protest, but this time I need him near me.”

“And the girls?”

“They do not fight. They can stay in the rear, with the children and the old.” He drank without pleasure, and Eurgain closed the jewel box and came to sit beside him.

“Caradoc, if we do not carry the day, what then?”

He put down his beer and pulled her closer, taking a braid in his hands and undoing it slowly. “Then we will run. Back to the west or into Brigantia. And we will start all over again.” He shook the waving hair free and began to undo the other one.

“Sometimes I think that we will grow old and die in these mountains,” she said, “and never again know a home that is not a leaking tent, or a cloak that is not threadbare, or a moment when we can laugh together without fear and walk under the moon without danger.”