The Eagle and the Raven (87 page)

“With your permission, sir, I would like to show you something,” he said. The primipilus immediately got up and followed him, and he led him to the outskirts of their camp and beyond, to the crest of a hill that by daylight would have given them a long view west. The sentry dropped to his stomach and wormed his way to the skyline, a moonless roof of blackness above them torn with the white blaze of the stars, and pointed. “If you fix your eyes over there and wait, you will see it.”

The primipilus did as he was bid. At first he could make out nothing but the dark waves of empty land, but then he saw it, a tiny red flicker, then another some way from the first, and then another, all of them miles away and barely visible. He knew immediately what he was seeing, and his heartbeat quickened. Campfires. Dozens, hundreds of them. Campfires in the west, not in the south where the Brigantian lady’s town lay, nor to the east where villages hugged the banks of the numerous rivers that rose in the higher, wooded country. He left the sentry at his post on the hill, strode back to his tent, and called for his subordinate.

“Take a legionary and ride at once to Lindum,” he said. “Tell the legate that a much larger force than he had supposed is seeking engagement, and he must mobilize the rest of the men. Tell him that if he does not, he may face a siege.” He did not need to spell out the rest of the message. A siege could mean the kind of tragedy that had destroyed the bulk of the now-refurbished Twentieth. The man slipped away south and the primipilus prepared for another day of fatigue and blood.

By noon the next day, a day of intermittent drizzle and gusting winds, the primipilus knew that he must retreat or lose every man he had left. Half the rebel force was dead or wounded but he himself had lost all but two hundred of his auxiliaries, and by nightfall the main bulk of the rebel host would have arrived. A retreat across this barren, open country with no forest to melt into, would be near suicide, but to stay would be certain suicide. He ordered his trumpeter to sound the retreat, and his little band closed ranks and prepared to march. He put the slingers in the rear. He had no archers left.

Nasica heard his centurion out with an ominous silence that he did not break until the man had saluted and withdrawn. Then he rose heavily. “I will make no judgment until I have all the facts,” he said loudly to the tribune who had come at his secretary’s call. “Either the primipilus is an idiot, which I know to be untrue, or that Brigantian fiend has once again bungled it and incited her husband to a full-scale attack on Brigantia.” He snatched up his helmet, and at his bellow his servant came scurrying, breastplate in his arms. “Have the troops prepare to make a forced march, every one of them. Send a speculator to Camulodunon, to the governor. Turn out the cavalry. Get them on the move as an advance guard.” Disgust and anger welled within him. “Ah Hades!” he snarled, and pushed his way out the door.

The cavalry came to the relief of the primipilus and his hundred remaining legionaries a day and a half later. By the time Nasica and the rest of the Ninth caught up to them he had time only to swiftly deploy, for Emrys, Madoc, and the western tribes had reached Venutius and his exhausted war band, and Roman and chief at last clashed in full strength. By accident, for there was no time for design, Nasica had the advantage of a hill placement, and he surrounded his men with his fifteen hundred cavalry. Emrys, Madoc, and Venutius strung out their men and women in loose lines, feeling defenceless without rock beneath their feet and at their backs and a forest’s arms under which to hide and regroup. Venutius did not wait for Nasica to order an attack. He ordered a charge on three fronts and his people responded gallantly. He had the satisfaction of seeing the tight Roman block divide in two, the legionaries turning to right and left as his chiefs speared a passage through their midst and flowed up it. But the cavalry had simply moved outward, keeping their positions, waiting for their order, and though Venutius and his host had divided and surrounded the infantry, they themselves were contained by the lances of the mounted soldiers.

Nasica sat on his horse and watched critically. I could knock these wildmen into the greatest fighting force in the world in a year, he thought. It has taken them a long time to grasp the basic elements of civilized warfare but, by Mithras, now they are on the brink of a military sophistication that would make old Aulus Plautius blink. No wonder the Twentieth went down! But the Twentieth has always been too independent for its own good. Valens is a showy fighter, too many fancy tricks up his sleeve. The Ninth cannot be surpassed for sustained courage and solid obedience.

His senatorial tribune cantered up to him and saluted. “The tenth cohort is hard pressed, sir, and the second and third have become separated from the first but they are holding.”

“Very well. Order one cohort of cavalry to the tenth. Swing the fourth cohort lower down the slope.” The man rode away, the trumpets blared, and the battle swirled to new formation. Nasica hunched deeper into his cloak as a thin rain began to fall. It was going to be a long day.

Two days later Aricia stood in the doorway of the Council hall, snuggled deep into her blue cloak, looking out over a gray landscape. The rain had begun to fall in earnest the day before and now it sheeted down, turning the paths of the town into sticky yellow quagmires, and dancing off the dripping thatch of the huts. Sullen water filled all the potholes and dribbled past doorskins. Now the wind was rising, making the streams of rain quiver and undulate and blow wet against her. She hardly felt the new, chilling cold that spoke to her of the approaching autumn. She was anxious. The messenger she had sent to march with the troops that pursued Venutius had not returned. Her eyes vainly quested the northern trackway and encountered only the misted shadow of the gate and beyond it the wreaths of greasy smoke where her dead chieftains were becoming sodden black ashes. They are coming for me, she thought. They have defeated Rome and now they will rise out of the fog like gods. I will see them creeping slowly out of this pall of water, and they will stand me on the wall and cut my throat.

The town was quiet. Freemen squatted by their fires, women mourned dead kinsmen, and out on the hills the shepherds sheltered in the hollows with their dripping sheep, but though a fire crackled brightly in the dry coziness of her Roman house, and Andocretus and his songs were as close as a word from her lips, she had stood hour upon hour with the gloom of the Council hall behind her and her terror gathering ahead.

Andocretus left the shadows and spoke to her. “Come and get warm, Lady,” he said, shivering as the wind sought the undefended door and found him. “Nothing is moving out there, and you will get no news until the rain stops and the ground dries up a little.”

“He is coming for me,” she said dully, her eyes still on the gray day. He laughed shortly, wishing that she would leave the hall and go to her house so that he could run to his own hearth and drink wine and sleep.

“It is simply not possible that the Romans have been defeated and you know it. You are allowing your foolish fancies to make you ill, Aricia.”

She slumped, and her gaze fell to her mud-caked boots. “I suppose you are right. I will go to the house. But bring me men, Andocretus, for I want to be guarded.” She raised her hood and left the frail shelter of the door. He snatched up his cloak and followed her, and together they picked their way toward her private gate and the wet-slicked stone wall. She had almost reached it when a shout spun her on her heel, and she saw a chief toiling to her. Andocretus cursed under his breath, his cloak already heavy with water, as the man came up to them.

“The legate of the Ninth is behind me,” he panted. “He shouted until we opened the gates to him.”

“Well, why are you telling me this?” Aricia yelled at him, relief dissolving the fear. “Of course you let him in! Why did you make him wait?”

“Because you told us not to open for anyone and because he is in a rage.”

She thanked him brusquely and sent him away, and was turning to her gate once more when Andocretus took her arm. “Lady, I think I will wait for you in your house,” he whispered. “Nasica is coming.” He was through the gate before she could answer and she turned and stood still, watching the tall, thick-set commander splash bare-legged through the mud. His short cloak was plastered to his body, and his helmet and breastplate were shining with moisture. His face was grim. He did not look at her as he came up, nor did he greet her, and the fear was back. His men had been defeated, as the Twentieth had been defeated, he was alone, he sought help from her, he…

Then he was facing her, breathing heavily, the round pocks on his face standing out livid against the angry red of his skin. His eyes were cold, as cold as the icy rain that trickled down her throat and soaked the neck of her tunic, and she stepped back, felt the wall behind her, and could go no farther.

“I have lost a thousand men,” he said quietly, and his low tone was more menacing than if he had screamed at her. “A thousand good fighting men dead, do you hear me, Cartimandua? And half that number are wounded. I had to drag out the whole damn legion and march it halfway across your accursed territory and fight every madman out of the west, because of you.”

“I… I do not understand,” she whispered, seeing his lips curve in a brutal smile and the spittle gather in the corners of his mouth. “Surely you did not take the whole legion after Venutius and his war band, you…”

He came closer to her, water coursing down his blunt face, his jaw thrust forward. “I sent you help as you requested, seeing that you could not handle your own petty quarrels, but you did not know that the whole of the west was coming for you, did you? I will fight no more of your wars!” he roared, and she shrank back, the hood falling from her black braids, the rain sticking the hair in tendrils against her scarred cheek, her chin. So it was true. All of them after her, all of them bent on destroying her. Nasica would desert her, it was not her fault.

“Please, Nasica,” she whimpered. “How could I know? Everything went wrong.”

“Everything always goes wrong around you, you greedy, grasping whore!” he spat. “The governor will not be happy when he hears about this, and I shall make sure he hears it all! It is time a praetor was appointed to set things to rights here. Brigantia is too strategically important to leave in your inept hands.”

“My people would not obey a praetor!” she snapped back, rallying out of her desperate shock. “How many men can Rome spare to patrol where my chiefs patrol? You are dreaming, commander.”

“No, you are the dreamer,” he growled between clenched teeth. “Rome is the master of Albion, and every day of your rule is a day of sufferance from the governor. Even your life belongs to Rome. You forget this, Cartimandua. Rome lifted you up. Rome will cast you down. You have drained blood and manpower from the Ninth just once too often in your foolish persecution of your husband. From now on you are on your own.” He turned away, and though she felt as though she would collapse with the humiliation, she called after him.

“Nasica! Venutius…the rebels…”

He stopped and shouted over his shoulder, “They were beaten, but just barely. I left their dead to be picked over by the wolves. Venutius lives. Try your aging charms on Valens next time, Cartimandua. He has been quartered far from female company for a long time and may not be too particular by now. He might even send you soldiers next time you are in trouble, if the price is right. You make me sick!” He vanished into the murk but Aricia could not move. She was trembling with cold and drenched to the bone. Nasica’s scornful words hammered her like the cold needles of the storm, but she could not think of his threats, not yet, nor of how close she had come to annihilation at the hands of the men of the west. She knew the dream would come to her that night.

Emrys, Madoc, and Venutius pulled back into the forest. Without surprise their battle with the Ninth had cost them dear. It had been on ground that was not of their own choosing, and even if the autumn rains had not begun, they knew that the chance for a major thrust against the Twentieth and so into the lowlands had gone by. They knew that they would go back to their old, wearisome tactics that winter—carving up patrols, attacking baggage trains, resisting the attempts of the Twentieth to wrest just a little more of the border lands from their hands, and fighting to regain the Silurian territory and to keep the area too troublesome for the erection of a permanent fort. Emrys had gone to Domnall when they were at last safe around a welcoming fire. The Druids were going from chief to wounded chief in the thin rain that pattered through leaves which had begun to acquire the dry, yellow tinges of autumn, and shield-bearers and freemen sat oblivious of the wetness, cleaning and polishing weapons dulled and mired by death. He did not approach Venutius. He did not trust himself that far. Domnall was sharpening the arviragus’s great sword. It lay across his knees, and the whetstone ground along its edge with a sound that gritted Emrys’s teeth as he greeted the Brigantian and squatted before him.

“No man will tell me of my wife,” Emrys said gently. “I am spoken to with a cloying pity, as though I were a child to be shielded from evil. Domnall, you give me the words.”

Domnall’s hand came away from the whetstone and the grinding ceased. He wiped his fingers on his cloak and turned the sword over. “Your wife is dead, Emrys.”

“I know that. I have reason to believe that you saw her die.”

Domnall glanced up, then back to his lap. The whetstone once more wove its rough circles. “Who gives you reason?”

“No one. Only rumors.”

“Leave it alone, Ordovician chieftain. She died well, and that is all you must remember.”

Emrys rested his elbows on his knees and linked his fingers together carefully. “How well did she die, Brigantian warrior?”

Domnall laid the whetstone aside abruptly and put both palms flat on his master’s sword, but he did not look at Emrys again. “The Lady of Brigantia stood Sine and the young chief on the wall and offered their lives in exchange for the arviragus. He was ready to give himself to her, but Sine forbade him. She said that she would not have the responsibility. The lady cut her throat and threw her over the wall.”