The Eagle and the Raven (90 page)

He brushed aside her thanks, not deceived by the diversionary words. “Second-hand information can never take the place of a personal assessment, though, can it Lady? I have learned a great deal about Albion from the most surprising sources in Rome.”

She almost choked. She put down her spoon and gave up all pre tence to good manners. “You have spoken to Caradoc,” she said flatly. “Would it be too much to ask how he fares?”

Paulinus raised his eyebrows. “You jump very swiftly to the wrong conclusions,” he answered. “Do you think that I would seek to embarrass a man whose loyalties would forbid him to give me any pertinent information? I did speak with him. He told me more with his silences than he did with his words, and both were full of love for his country and longing to be home. That is all. I spent many hours with Plautius and his wife.”

“And what did they tell you?” Boudicca glanced away from Paulinus’s cragged face. The voice was her husband’s.

“They told me that Albion will probably never fully submit. I listened, but I believe them to be wrong. She will submit to me.”

“Ah well,” Agricola remarked lightly. “If any man can clean out the west it will be you, Suetonius, but let us not do it tonight. I prefer to clean off my plate.”

“No, please,” Boudicca protested. “We are not discomfited. You both know my husband’s allegiance to the Roman cause, and my own reluctance, but you must also know that I have promised him my support. If we must spend the evening wasting breath on social nonsense then our journey will have been for nothing. We wish to know you, and you wish to measure us. What is wrong with that? I hate the game of words.”

“So do I,” the governor admitted, “but I hardly think it right to swap animosities over the dinner table. You asked me a question, Boudicca, and I will answer you. Caradoc is well, though he looks older than he is. He and his wife have become good friends with my own friend, Aulus Plautius. His children are well, also. Gladys is married to Plautius’s former second-in-command, Rufus Pudens, and has become a Roman citizen. Eurgain ran away, and if she was not drowned, lives on Hibernia, the island you call Eriu. And Llyn…” He paused. “Llyn does not like Rome very much.”

“How much you do not say!” Boudicca rasped. “Well, I must thank you for what you give me.” She met her husband’s eye. It was all a long time ago, he seemed to be saying, it belongs to a different age. The Caradoc you knew lives only in your memories and dreams. I wish that I too could be at peace, she thought vehemently. I wish that I had been born like Prasutugas, or even Aricia, able to compromise, to wear a different face for every day, a different soul for every passing year.

“Here comes the Icenian mutton,” Agricola said. “Tell me, Lord, are there any domesticated hogs in your land or do you prefer the flavor of wild boar you have speared yourself?”

“I am no longer able to hunt, unfortunately,” Prasutugas answered mildly, “but I do prefer wild boar. My chiefs hunt every day, and I still train my dogs.”

“The Mauretanian tribesmen hunt lions on horseback, with spears,” Paulinus offered. “It makes great sport. Do you hunt, Lady? What game do you prefer?”

Boudicca felt Prasutugas’s blue eyes on her again. She answered steadily, her mind suddenly full of the dark forest, a stink of dead fox, and a man’s mutilated chest. “Yes, sir, I hunt. In the days when I was young I hunted men and cattle. Then when Rome came I took to netting the boar. Now I think I prefer the deer. They require more skill to bring down than either men or boar.” She smiled at him and he took a moment to consider her, the sentences on the Icenian report passing slowly through his mind. The regular dispatches from the commander of the Icenian garrison had been well-thumbed by Agricola and himself and he knew that she was not lying, nor was she boasting. She had indeed hunted men. The dispatches said other things, too. She was all fury, all noise, but her danger was perfectly contained by her love for her husband. The garrison commander dismissed that danger. She was a woman who liked to talk, to stir up the dust, and that was all. Paulinus was unmoved by her flamboyant beauty. The long, soft green tunic fringed in silver which set off her curling bronze hair and golden brown eyes, the six or seven silver bracelets clinking loosely on each scarred arm, the profusion of necklaces, the coronet studded with polished amber, spoke to him only of the wealth that Rome had brought to her. He did not like or dislike her. She and her lord were simply two more factors to be taken into account as he filled in his swiftly complicating picture of the island, and he had already placed them where they fitted.

“I agree with you,” he said. “The deer follow their instinct, but men ought to temper instinct. They ought to reason as well, but unfortunately reasoning will often lead them astray. I was struck many times by this faulty reasoning during my campaigns in Mauretania.”

“How so?” Prasutugas was interested.

“The land is mostly desert,” Paulinus went on. “Impossible to map satisfactorily because the sand is continually shifting. The tribesmen could have maintained hostilities indefinitely if they had behaved with an animal’s instinct, but they did not. Instead of varying the routes their baggage trains took to and from food source to food source, they were unable to overcome the habit of hundreds of years. Of course, the terrain decreed that their food could only be grown near water, in the oases that dot the desert, and therefore the people had to return time and again to the same places. They could not live off the land when they ranged. It was a simple matter to discover the oases, destroy the food source, and then sit back and wait.”

Slowly, the words seeped into Boudicca’s consciousness. The food source. Destroy the food source. Food…destroy. All at once the full import of what he had said exploded in her mind and she felt as though she had been taken apart and put together again by a clumsy, inexpert hand. Her stomach churned. Her arms were so weak that she had to use both hands to lay down her mead. The men were not looking at her. Prasutugas had made a comment, Agricola also, and Paulinus was busily extolling the virtues of Mauretanian horseflesh. The tactic had been explained and dismissed in favor of a more satisfying subject of conversation.

He will do it, too, she thought incoherently. I knew it, I knew it. The moment I saw you, Paulinus, I knew. She could not take her eyes off him. Everything about him was blunt, powerful, ruthless, from his square-tipped fingers to the uncomplicated, clean lines of his face. She had heard that he had a reputation for cruelty, but not the warped cruelty of the weak. He was a keen disciplinarian, his decisions were swift, just, and final. He was, by all accounts, incorruptible. All these things… She forced her cup to her lips. The others had failed, all of them, but he would succeed. There was an air of solid, tenacious permanence around him. He knew who he was and where he was going, and once he had made up his mind, nothing would stand in his way. Neither gods nor men would sway him. He was going…he was going to Mona. The food supply. The source of the west’s strength. Grain for their bodies, magic for their souls. Mona. She struggled, panic-stricken, against the nausea, unable to swallow the mead filling her mouth. What can I do? What? She was unaware of the silence until Prasutugas said anxiously, “Boudicca what is it?”

Her eyes fled from one to the other, startled, wounded. With great effort she cleared her mouth of the thick, bittersweet mead. They do not know, she thought in amazement. Perhaps Paulinus himself does not yet know. But I know. “A piece of meat stuck in my throat,” she gasped.

“Is there something wrong with the mutton?” the governor rapped and she nodded.

“You Romans do not know how to cook it properly,” she joked desperately. “It is still red.”

Paulinus clicked his fingers impatiently. “Take it away and bring another piece,” he ordered. “I am sorry, Lady. Do you want some water?”

She shook her head mutely, aware of the question in Prasutugas’s eyes, the probing of his thought. A fresh dish of mutton was placed before her and she picked up her knife, tearing at the meat with blade and fingers, forcing it into her mouth. Someone asked her something and she answered without thought. Mona. I must get away, I must run. Venutius, it is over, all of it. Caradoc, did he tell his story to you? What shall I do?

“…a new census,” Paulinus was saying. “It is a nuisance but I cannot delay it. And your taxes will be going up, Prasutugas. The procurator is determined to raise them.”

Prasutugas shrugged and smiled, but his eyes stayed on Boudicca’s slumped figure. “They have gone up every year, but so has our revenue,” he answered. “When we cannot pay our taxes I will let you know, sir!” They laughed. The dessert was borne in, and more wine. Fruit was offered, with strong brown goat’s cheese, but the increasing weariness and pain Prasutugas felt was eclipsed by a mounting concern for his wife. She had not said one word for the last hour or more. She sat there like some meek, dumb peasant, bland-faced and seemingly shy, and though Prasutugas searched his mind he could find no reason for her sudden withdrawal. He was glad when the meal ended and they left the triclinium to the yawning servants and drifted a little unsteadily back down the cloister, past the wind-ravaged atrium, to the snug warmth of the governor’s reception room. For another hour they drank and talked. Boudicca rallied a little, but her digs at the emperor and the governor were ill-timed and lacked her usual wit. At last Prasutugas rose, thanked Paulinus for his hospitality, and he and Boudicca left the house, stepping out into the wind-swept night, their soldier escort before and behind them.

“Truly, I do not know where Boudicca’s colorful reputation comes from,” Paulinus remarked to Agricola as they stood together looking out the door onto the chill night. “I suppose that like all reputations built on rumor and gossip, it has been exaggerated. The woman is no threat to Rome or anyone else. She was as meek as one of Icenia’s lambs.”

“Something upset her tonight, sir,” Agricola objected. “I have never met a more forceful woman and I really believed that tonight she would give us a run for our money. Either you or I have offended her.”

“Well, it was not done purposely,” Paulinus snapped irritably. “Take them around the town tomorrow, Julius. I wish I could, but I suppose I must sit in the office and endure another day of the procurator’s interminable figures. I cannot stand the man. I have never met a more greedy, grasping bootlicker. If it was up to me I’d get rid of him.”

“He has his job to do.”

“Yes, and thank the gods it isn’t mine. He can go on counting money, and when I have finished with his stupid reports perhaps I can get on with my job as well. We can’t do much over the winter, but in the spring I think we can begin a campaign that will see the end of all the hopeless indecision in Albion. Now go to bed. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, sir. It was a successful dinner, all the same.”

“H’m.” They parted, Paulinus to his bed and Agricola to his own small house.

On the threshold of the merchant’s house the four soldiers saluted and left them, and Boudicca and Prasutugas left the cold, insistent wind, shutting the door behind them. They found their chiefs sound asleep, sprawled in their cloaks on the tiled floor around the wind-rippled pool, and they did not wake them. In the sleeping room the lamps still burned steadily, casting a somnolent yellow light, and Prasutugas flung his cloak onto the floor. Although his suppurating stump throbbed unmercifully, and his head swam with pain and fatigue, he went to his wife. “Tell me,” he ordered quietly.

Boudicca stood in the middle of the floor, still clutching her cloak around her, a new ravishment corroding her face. “He is the one,” she said tonelessly. “He has the answer. Destroy the food supply, he said. Prasutugas, do you know what that means? How could you have missed it? He will march on Mona in the spring. He will do what Scapula was too obsessed with Caradoc to do, what Gallus was too old to do, what Nepos did not have the time to do. He will burn the crops, salt the fields, and then it will all be over. It worked for him in the deserts he spoke of, and it will work here in Albion. Venutius cannot order the mountains to sprout grain! Ah Prasutugas! This man carries the odor of military success with him like a west wind laden with rain! I am afraid! I hurt!”

He considered her words slowly, forcing his thought through the pain that swam in his brain. “You are right, Boudicca,” he said at last. “I think that under this governor the west will see peace. I only wish that he had been appointed in the beginning instead of Aulus Plautius. How many lives would have been spared!”

She looked at him aghast. “Andrasta!” she whispered. “Peace is all you think of, Prasutugas, peace at any price, any price at all. Can’t you understand that peace is a delusion unless it means honor for Albion? What shall I do? Oh what shall I do?”

He went to her but was too tired to do more than rest his arm around her neck. “You know what you must do,” he said firmly. “Send to Venutius. Tell him what you suspect. It will make no difference whether he finds out from you now, or from his own spies in the spring, when the legions are on the move.”

She began to cry. Wordlessly, she began to help him undress. She was still weeping when he had laid his blond head upon the pillow and she started to prepare herself for bed. She slid under the covers beside him, her tears hot on his hand as he tried to smooth back her hair.

“Boudicca, please,” he begged softly, and she tore herself away from him violently.

“Even with you I am alone!” she sobbed. “Alone! I cannot go! I am tormented if I stay!”

“You once told me that nothing was as important as you and I,” he said presently, “and I believe it to be true. Let time carry everything else away, Boudicca, and remember only that I have loved you.”

She turned to him then, her arms reaching for him, her wet face pressed into his shoulder, struggling to quell the grief that shook her, but even when she fell, exhausted, into a heavy sleep, despair still stalked her.

Agricola called for them in the morning. The wind still blew but the sun shone brightly as they and the chiefs followed him past the archway to the forum, now crowded and noisy, and down to the stables, a row of neat, sweet-smelling boxes just outside the wall. He chatted breezily as they went, his attention focused unobtrusively on Boudicca, but she seemed to have recovered her aplomb. Whatever had upset her had not followed her through a night’s sleep, though she looked a little haggard. Horses were led out, they all mounted, and Agricola showed them Colchester until it was time for the noon meal. Although the foreshortened wall still stood where Caradoc’s earthwall had reared, it now boasted four gates, and the town had spilled out beyond the wall in a seamy clutter of shacks, huts, and tents where landless, lordless peasants tried their hand at thieving and deception.