The Eagle and the Raven (99 page)

“If he returns,” she growled, her lip curling. “Have you had letters from Priscilla?” Now the sleep-swollen eyes became puzzled, then wary. “What is it to you? It is no business of yours.”

“True. But Priscilla always hated living here. I simply wondered if she was any happier at Camulodunon.”

Uneasiness began to stroke him. She had never before called Colchester by its ancient tribal name, and it tumbled into the thick silence of the room, bringing with it a new, raw menace. Her eyes were slitted, grinning at him, she was leaning slightly forward, her shoul ders tense, and suddenly he was aware that his sentry’s measured tread no longer pounded outside the door. Prickling with a cold presentiment he rose and went to the window, flinging wide the shutters, but the courtyard dreamed its cold dreams under a forest of white stars, and he turned back to her, mystified and alarmed.

“What do you fear, Favonius?” she asked him, a catch of derision in her deep voice. “The Druids are a memory. Andrasta is a tale for children who will not go to sleep. What brings sweat to your brow? Are there spells in shadows? Does the forest mutter incantations with the wind?” She moved toward him. “You thought you understood this land, but now you know that you do not, and that is why you ache for the familiarity of things turned suddenly strange.”

“I certainly do not understand you tonight!” he snapped. “Are you drunk? Boudicca, I can do nothing for you or your daughters. Where is that sentry?”

Words hovered on her tongue—biting, murdering words, words of hate and wounding. Brigid killed your son. Brigid stabbed him. Brigid skewered him like a poor, ignorant young fawn and his blood pooled black under the moon. “Say them, Boudicca!” Subidasto urged her, his rumbling whisper a gleeful rasp in her brain. “Take off his clothes and begin to cover your nakedness!” But though she felt the need curl in her mouth like hot wine fumes on a winter’s day, she backed up slowly until she had placed the desk between them.

“Andrasta has him,” she said evenly. “Lovernius! Aillil!”

Then he knew. He tugged at the knife in his belt and hurled him self from the window shouting “Guard, guard!” but the door opened, her men rushed at him, and she slid aside from his waving blade and laughed.

“They are all dead, Favonius,” she said. “The garrison is a tomb, and soon the whole of Albion will be a tomb also, a Roman charnel house. We trusted you, and you failed us. You could have given us your support but you turned your back and closed your ears to the screaming of my children and the sounds of my humiliation.”

He did not struggle in the chiefs’ strong grip. He just stood there looking at her sadly. “It seems that I underestimated your degree of pride,” he said. “But Boudicca, you cannot win. All the odds are against you.”

“Not this time, Favonius. The governor is miles away, with half the occupation forces, and the rest of them are straining their eyes after him. I am not going west, I am going south. I will burn Camulodunon to the ground.”

His ruddy features paled, and she could see the odds regroup in her favor behind his bloodshot eyes. “I am to die?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Yes. If you have spells to bind your gods you had better speak them. I thought of taking you into the grove of Andrasta, Favonius, and setting your head upon a stake, but for the friendship my dear husband held for you I will give you a clean death. I think it is more than you deserve.” She did not give him time to speak again. “Strike, Aillil,” she ordered calmly; then she turned her back, and when she heard his body slump onto the floor she left the room and walked toward the gate. “Coward!” her father snorted furiously in her ear but she ignored him, thinking of Prasutugas lying pale and noble under the earth mound, sleeping his long sleep.

Before they left the garrison the chiefs hitched the horses to the detachment’s wains and loaded up all the grain and weapons they could find. Then they tore the flaming torches from the walls and ran from building to building, thrusting them into the corpse-inhabited rooms, and soon the crackling inferno dwarfed the stars which were fading slowly toward dawn.

The tribe moved swiftly. The first blow had been struck and Boudicca was consumed with haste, knowing that time had begun to quicken its pace and before long the speculatores from Lindum carrying routine messages from the fort to the garrison would discover its destruction and spread the alarm. The tuath left its territory that night—chariots, wains, and people filing quietly away from the dark, deserted towns and villages and the leaping orange pyre of the garrison. For three days and two nights they journeyed south, snatching sleep and food when they could, as the wooded land began to rise to gentle hills. Long before they reached the appointed meeting place the Trinovantian scouts met them, and they moved through trees alive with horses, warriors, cooking fires, and shrieking children. There was no longer any attempt at concealment. The host mingling together now was too great. Colchester was barely a day’s march away and it was already full of rumor and confusion. The only advantage left to the people was in speed. Boudicca greeted Domnall at last, in a clearing beside a small stream, and they embraced.

“So you came,” she smiled. “I did not believe, but it seems that the Druid was right. The host is enormous, Domnall. We have been passing through it for hours. Who are all the people?”

They squatted together by the fire that his servant had kindled, and he poured beer for her before he replied. “They are Trinovantian, Catuvellaunian, Coritani, some Cornovii, some Dobunni. The Druids have been moving among them once more, and they came. Caradoc said that the spirit of freedom was dead in the south, but he was wrong. It only slept, Lady, and you have awakened it. You, and the cruelty of Rome. Will we Council?”

She nodded. “Tonight. I bring arms and food, but not enough for this gathering. Do the people have weapons?”

“Most of them, and those that do not will soon be bearing gladiae and pilum. Food is short, but if we take Colchester we can replenish the wains.”

Colchester. Camulodunon. She drank her beer and did not answer.

Evening fell into a dark, soft spring night, and before her Council began Boudicca went to her daughters. Ethelind was sitting under a tree, her chin in hand, gazing intently into the little fire that her servant had made for her. Her blanket and cloak were folded neatly beside her, and Boudicca stepped up to her. “Are you well, Ethelind?” she asked brusquely, her offhand, rough manner disguising the ache she always felt when she looked at the frozen face of her elder daughter. “Is there anything you need?” Ethelind did not look up but her hand came out slowly, a warning, a signal of distress, and after a moment Boudicca stepped back and turned away. Andrasta, she thought in sudden fear. What can I do with them? Somehow I believed that when we left the town they would recover, why I do not know, but how can I march and think and fight with this dumb pain always beside me?

Brigid was walking to and fro by the stream, which was now a black mirror trapping stars and leaves in its smooth surface, and her long silvered hair was swaying about her knees. “Come down!” she was calling to the rustling branches. “There is no moon to show you how the river’s blood is full of little flowers. Andrasta! Come!” Hulda sat with the young chief whom Boudicca had ordered to guard them, both of them silent and grim, and Pompey quietly cropped the grass.

“Has she eaten?” Boudicca asked harshly, and Hulda nodded.

“Only meat, and water from the stream. Lady, what will you do with her when the fighting begins?” Boudicca looked toward the slim, shadow-dappled figure.

“How am I to know?” she snarled. “I cannot think of it now, Hulda, there is too much hurt.” She stalked back to the clearing where the chiefs and representatives from the tribes were settling themselves before the fire. Sinking onto a blanket beside Domnall, she looked them over critically, and a warm feeling of homecoming stole over her. The stricken, lost mood of hopelessness about the girls began to fade. This was how it had been when she was a child. A hot, welcoming Council fire glinting and glancing on a thousand torcs, necklets, brooches, and bracelets. Bronze helms shining like bright gold. Sparkling, expectant eyes and the excited, sibilant rise and fall of many voices. The flutter of cloaks—red, green, blue, scarlet, striped, patterned, flowered. The clang of sword in scabbard. And of course the wine passing gaily from hand to hand, the spontaneous lifting of a fair voice in song, the stories, the quarrels, and over it all, the close, fierce protectiveness of the kin.

She rose, held up her arms, and the talking died away. She stepped forward, unbuckled her sword and handed it to Aillil, then she shook back her fiery and flame-haloed hair and began to speak. “Chiefs and people of the tuaths! You see before you a woman who has lived all her life in obedience to Rome, in cooperation with Rome, a woman who believed and trusted in the justice of the emperor of Rome to bring peace and prosperity to her people. Yet you also see before you a woman who has been grievously and cruelly wronged. In exchange for my full trust and cooperation, people of Albion, my tuath was robbed, my people dragged into slavery, my daughters outraged, and my own body tied to a stake and whipped without mercy. Do my words fall on ears already ringing with the same sad tales? Is it not true that each one of you carries a similar burden of pain? You are here because you are afraid.

“The Iceni, through all the years since Claudius came, have been the model of a Roman-loving tuath—the richest, the softest, the most privileged companions of the conquerors. We, of all the people, should have been secure. But what do you see now?” Her hard, masculine voice rose, abrasive as the tongue of a cat, and its cracked tones splintered around them. “What has happened to the Iceni,” she shouted, “can happen to you in spite of your craven submissions, it can come with no warning. The Iceni have learned a bitter lesson. Rome is faithless, greedy, and lying!” She dropped her arms and lowered her voice. “So I will tell you what I will do. I will avenge this terrible wrong. On behalf of my poor, despoiled children I will burn Camulodunon, I will burn Londinium, burn, burn them all, and then I will turn to meet Paulinus as he marches home, and I will burn him too. I speak as a woman and a mother. If you wish to come with me and avenge your own wrongs, then let us march and fight together. Is there any tribe that will not come?”

No one stirred. No one spoke. Her words were true, and every silent chief was pondering them with a frightened loneliness. If this could happen to the Iceni it could happen to all of them. She waited for the space of ten heartbeats while the fire roared and the night wind shared a spell with the compliant treetops, then she set her hands on her hips. “Good. We march tomorrow.” She swept up her sword and sank beside Domnall but the people sat on, immersed in the private tragedies that had so suddenly become the pitiless goads to freedom.

Before dawn the tribes were on the move, swarming out of the hills and onto the Roman road that ran from Icenia to Camulodunon. They no longer went unremarked, and in Colchester a panic broke out. It had become almost a city by now, and little remained of Caradoc’s old capital. It was a busy, well-planned Roman merchant town, always in the forefront of progress, and the huge defences of the Catuvellauni, once reduced to a low earthwall, had never been rebuilt. There would have been no purpose to it. Colchester was the seat of the governor, Colchester was at the heart of the occupation, and for years the inhabitants, Roman and native, had gone smugly about their business, growing soft and prosperous, hearing the tumult of Caradoc’s war from far away like the whisper of battles among gods who could never touch the world of reality. Now, suddenly and shockingly, something had gone wrong. With no warning at all the gods had become crazed, bloodthirsty chiefs within hours of the city, and long-forgotten fears woke to drive the citizens into the streets in the middle of the morning. What they saw reassured them. The sun shone and their neighbors scurried about their errands. Children squabbled and played in the wide, tree-lined avenues. And everywhere the soldiers, traders, secretaries, officers, both civilian and military, wove in and out of the citizens like a safe, unworried river of calm. After an hour or two of excited conjecture the people reluc tantly went back to their daily round. It was all so much foolish talk and anyway, the Iceni would be the last natives on the island capable of revolt.

The mayor was not so sure. He stood at the window of his office in the administration building that was part of the bustling forum, looking out at the sun-filled square and frowning to himself. The reports coming in had all been strident in their insistence on danger and he had alerted the legionary veterans on farms beyond the city. Many of them had come within the walls with their families, but they were the least of his worries. Should he order an evacuation to Londinium? The thought was not a happy one. Evacuation would mean congested streets, panicking women, accidents, and the complete disruption of all business. Besides, there were few active soldiers in the city to make a defence. Perhaps it would be better to arm the civilian men and keep everyone here. He had never in his life faced such a situation and he heartily wished that he had never run for office. He was a Catuvellaunian, a man awarded Roman citizenship for his services to the province, and though he did not believe for a moment that there was the danger of any permanent rupture in the life of the city, his worry came from some vestige of tribal memory. He turned to his secretary.

“Send a speculator to Londinium,” he said. “The procurator is there at the moment. Tell him the rumor, and ask if he can send us a detachment. We probably won’t need it and I will end up looking very foolish, but it’s as well to be prepared.” He went back to the window. The graceful, clean lines of the temple gleamed in the warm spring sunshine, and below the steps a girl was throwing crumbs to the pigeons who waddled and flapped around her in a gray cloud. His breakfast curdled in his stomach.

The lone scout drew rein and sat gaping incredulously at the sight before him. The sun was about to rise, and a cold light washed over the smoking, still-warm ashes of the ruined garrison, a light without definition, without heat. The air was perfectly still. In the trees the birds had concluded their dawn chorus and were silent, and in the eerie, long moment before the sun rimmed the eastern horizon the soldier kneed his horse closer, his hands slippery on the reins. Nothing moved in that charred wilderness, and, dazed, he picked his way through the black stumps of the barrack walls. Then, mustering great daring, he put his hand to his mouth and shouted, but the echoes of his own voice frightened him and he clattered out of the stunted gate and in under the sheltering trees of the copse. Here he dismounted, and leaving his horse tethered to an oak he crept up to the town. For a long time he lay looking at it, but it, too, was dead. There was no smoke from cooking fires spiraling from the thatched roofs. No dogs barked and chased brown children. He knew that he should enter it but he shrank from the ghosts and demons that lurked unseen in the still-untouched shadows of early morning, and in the end he wriggled back to his horse, mounted, and hurried back the way he had come. There was a posting station ten miles on, and beyond that another three or four, all with fresh horses, and he knew that he must reach Lindum and the Ninth as quickly as he could. He understood the wind of terror that swept him along. The Iceni had disappeared and they were not in the north. That could only mean that they had headed south. His commander had been right. The procurator’s actions had begun a war.