Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  “Ygerna—”

  She looked back at him, hurt. “I thought that someone liked me for myself. This time. You said you did.”

  He put his hands out, over hers. He could take both of them in one of his. “I was afraid you would think of that. But I didn’t have to be told to like you. Truly. I will swear it if you like. On—” He stopped to think. Romans didn’t regard an oath in the same light the Britons did. “On Mithras’s name. Or on the legion’s eagle. I wouldn’t break either of those.” He had never before noticed how dark her eyes were, like black water, with a light somewhere at the bottom.

  “No, I believe you. It wasn’t your fault, Correus.” He was bareheaded, and she could see his face clearly. She gave it a long look, thoughtful. He still thought she was a child. And even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t matter, because what she wanted was not on the list of possibilities.

  Outside, a trio of soldiers, just coming off sentry walk and muffled to the eyebrows against the storm, trudged by. One of them was singing.

  Farewell for I must leave thee, I’m off to the army,

  And I might not be back when it’s over,

  So come and hold me hand and watch the moon arisin’

  And roll in me arms in the clover.

  Ygerna went to the shuttered window and listened. “That is a new tune.” She liked music, he had discovered, and could mimic any tune once heard, although the Latin words were still generally beyond her. She sang it over to herself wordlessly. “That is pretty.”

  “The words are very unsuitable,” Correus said. “That’s not a song for girls to sing, and you’re far too young, if it were.”

  She looked at him over his shoulder. “Your governor seems to think I am old enough to be queen of the Silures.”

  * * *

  “Thaw. It is thaw.” Rhodri pulled himself up out of the tangle of cloak and bedstraw in the house where the king’s captains slept, as the first rays of winter sun came through the withy shutters. Outside was the steady drip, drip, drip of melting snow.

  Across from him, two other bundles of straw and cloaks muttered and heaved themselves about, and Llew and Owen sat up, Owen as usual reaching out to see that his harp bag was where he had put it the night before. Owen would check for Fand, his harp, before he would look to see if last night’s woman was still with him. He poked Llew with an elbow. “Listen.”

  “Water,” Llew said. “Thaw’s come. I hadn’t thought to go to Tir-na-nOg so soon. I had other things to do yet.” He made it a joke, but Owen gave him a black look.

  “When I sail West-Over-Seas there will be a dozen Romans to row the boat and fetch my beer,” Rhodri said, pulling on his boots. “I thought I’d kill them now, to be sure.”

  Every man went to Annwn, the otherworld, in the end, but it was ill luck to call it by name. They spoke instead of going West-Over-Seas, or of Tir-na-nOg, the Land of the Young, where no one was old, and there was drinking and fighting with companion-adversaries who would rise up again, whole, at nightfall, to drink and feast and tell cheerful lies of earthly prowess.

  “You’ll have a good season for them,” Owen said to Rhodri. “They’ll be up out of their holes in a week, and building again.”

  It was only a matter of time before there was a fort and a road on every passable stretch of Silure ground, before they were boxed in like cattle in a pen. No one knew it better than the king’s captains.

  Better to go to the Sun Lord on a spear-end, Llamrei thought. She sat up and began to dress. Like most of the Silures, she was small and dark, but her slimness was the wiry grace of a mountain pony. She had passed thirty on her last birthday and had never married. Whenever she felt the need, she found a man to ease it, and although Rhodri had complained afterward that he would as soon put the Morrigan on his staff, the next time Llamrei had looked at him, he had gone to her like a hound. It was Llamrei who did the choosing. Between times, any man who thought that a woman who rode with the war band was fair game generally found a dagger in her hand. There was only one man to whom Llamrei would go for his asking.

  “I want to wash,” she said now. “Is there any water?”

  Rhodri nodded and pointed to a small barrel against the wall, freezing cold but with only a thin crust of ice on the top.

  Llamrei shook the straw out of her cloak and stood up. She was dressed as they were, in trousers and wolf-skin boots, but her shirt was hung across her shoulders. They paid no attention to her nudity nor she to theirs. She was one of them, an old companion, warrior first, woman second. Across her breast was the same blue spiral pattern of the Spear Mark that the men bore. Llamrei had earned it. For five years now she had been one of the king’s captains.

  Llamrei tied her hair back with a thong and dipped water from the barrel, splashing it over her face and breasts and swearing at the cold. Llew came over and began to wash also, knocking the splintered ice free of the surface with the dipper. They rubbed themselves dry with their cloaks and pulled their shirts on, teeth chattering.

  Rhodri and Owen and the rest were up, pulling on their boots, fumbling in the straw for belts and daggers, combing their hair, which most of them wore like Llamrei, at just past shoulder length, and tying it back out of the way.

  “Food,” Rhodri said hungrily. “I smell something cooking.”

  “There will be more cooking than just barley cake,” Llamrei said. “The king will have to make the choice now, with the thaw.”

  Llew was fiddling with the small dagger he wore in his boot. He looked up sarcastically. “Is there a choice?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Owen said irritably. He slung Fand in the harp bag across his back. Llew and Owen were spear brothers, blood brothers, which was a sworn kinship deeper than any birth relation. It made them squabble with each other when there was a battle coming, from the cold fear of losing one another.

  They kept it up as the captains crunched their way across the softening snow in the courtyard to the Great Hall of Dinas Tomen. There was barley cake cooking in the embers of last night’s fire, and the ten captains picked pieces of it gingerly from the hot stones and dipped bowls of thin soup from the kettle that hung over the new fire. The vegetables were old and soft, and the meat scarce, but they had got by on much the same all winter. There would be better meat with dinner, but they knew that the barley stores were nearly gone. Although much of the livestock had been found by the Romans, they had been able to hunt. But the fields had gone untended all last season. What crops had not gone to ruin from neglect had been taken by the Romans or simply ridden over.

  Rhodri dipped a horn of mead from the vat by the door and sat down between Owen and Llamrei. The mead was thin as well, watered to make it go further. Rhodri swallowed and made a face.

  Llamrei dipped the barley cake in her soup and took a bite. They would have to hunt as soon as they could, she thought. Even the meat was running low now. There wasn’t enough stock left to butcher without decimating the herds entirely, and a war band couldn’t ride far on soup. She said so to Rhodri, and he nodded and gave her a quick grin.

  “And raid a Roman grain house if we can.”

  “I am thinking we’ll see little enough grain between now and the last hosting,” another man, Hywel, said. He had lost his wife and two sons the last season, and he had lived through the winter in bleak endurance until he could carry a spear again. He was right, Llamrei knew, but she glared at him.

  It was a bad way to end, caught like a wolf in a trap, but the other choice was not good, either. The rest had talked of it, of peace with the Romans, but Llamrei had stayed out of it. In the end it would be the king’s choice, and then she would follow what Bendigeid decided. But thinking about it made her cold. She mopped up the last of her soup with the barley cake and wished for the hundredth time that it was not Bendigeid who was the king, but Owen or Aedden or any of the others who were of the family. But it was for Bendigeid that the god had spoken, the Druids said, pointing to the night sky and making magics with the fire, and
in truth it had been plain enough to anyone who looked at him that he was the god’s, in the same indefinable way that Llamrei was his.

  “He’s sleeping late,” Llew said, and nobody asked who. It was the king for whom they had been waiting since they had first waked to the sound of dripping water.

  “Teyrnon is with him, most like,” Owen said. He drank the last of his soup and wiped the back of his hand across his mustache.

  They will quarrel, Rhodri thought, remembering the night he had ridden in from Pen-y-Darren. They have quarreled all winter.

  As if in answer, the inner door that led to the king’s private chambers swung open, and the king came through, with the Chief Druid a half step ahead, as befitted his rank. The Chief Druid was greater than any tribe, greater than kings. It was to him that the sky spoke – and the great god who has no name, the self-created. In Teyrnon Chief-Druid was the sum of all knowledge and ultimately, if he wished it, all power. But his realm was beyond that of wars, and the Roman forts creeping up the Usk and Rhymney valleys were the king’s matter, unless the Chief Druid wished to make them his. Plainly he did not. Equally plainly, unless Teyrnon put a Binding Law on him, the king would brook no meddling in his kingship.

  Bendigeid sat down opposite the Chief Druid and looked from his captains to Llywarch and the other elders of his council who were filing in behind him. He glanced at the woman tending the fire, and she stuck the spoon back in the soup kettle and left. The king and his council got their own food, and Llew stood up and dipped a bowl of soup for Teyrnon. The Druid gave it a look of disgust and drank.

  “It’s what we’ve been livin’ on all winter,” Llew muttered and then made the Sign of Horns behind his back, because it was very bad luck to insult a Druid, especially a Chief Druid, especially if he heard.

  When they had all settled in their places and the hounds, which followed their masters everywhere, had squabbled and snarled themselves into their own places under the tables, the king put his bowl down on the hearth, then rose and dipped himself a flagon of mead from the vat by the door. He wore a heavy torque of twisted, finely worked gold around his throat and a gold fillet in his hair, which hung loose over the shoulders of his cloak. His dark face was appraising, eyes lighting on each captain or council lord in turn, skimming over Teyrnon, and coming back finally to Rhodri and the rest.

  “We have Lugh Long-Spear to thank for an early thaw,” Bendigeid said at last, “but before we can harry the Roman kind again, there is another matter: the royal woman they are keeping in the fort east of Llanmelin.” Llanmelin was an old stronghold, abandoned two years before when the Romans had built Isca Fortress too close for comfort.

  Llamrei gave him a puzzled look. The king had refused to buy the royal woman back from the Romans two autumns since, and wisely so. The whole tribe knew that. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because it is time we faced the fact that we may not win,” Bendigeid said, and the council lords bristled. Llamrei closed her mouth tightly. They would not win, and the king and his captains knew it, but to say as much was unthinkable to the old men in the council. The tribe itself would survive, there would be something left, but it would not be the Silures as they had been. The king watched her, reading her thoughts as he always could, and Llamrei looked away.

  “There will be no treaty with the Ordovices,” Bendigeid said. “Cadal has sent word of that.”

  “May the Morrigan look hungrily at him,” Rhodri murmured, and there was a small laugh down the captains’ table.

  “It is much to be wished,” Bendigeid said dryly, “but without him we are on bad ground, and the royal woman becomes important. You know how the Romans dealt with the southern tribes.”

  Llywarch nodded. He had warned Bendigeid when the Demetae gave the child to the Romans, but it hadn’t seemed important then, with Cadal ready to make alliance. Now it mattered.

  “They leave a tribe to its own government, as long as it is done under their eyes,” Llywarch said, “and as long as the tribe pays taxes that will keep it crippled. And to make sure of that, Rome chooses who rules.”

  “A ruler with some ties to Rome,” Bendigeid said. “A royal woman, for instance, taught for nearly two years to eat from Rome’s hand. If we leave her with the Romans, they will put her to their own use, and it may be that there will be no choice given to the tribe as to who comes after me. Also the Druids will be forbidden.” He looked at Teyrnon. A king could hide the Druids from the Romans, hide them and lie for them, or he could stand by and let the Romans enforce their ban unhindered.

  Teyrnon gave the king a grave nod. His mouth twitched into a faint smile, which made Bendigeid look back warily. “I am in agreement with the king on this,” Teyrnon said. “It seems that all things have their seasons,” he added dryly. “But it is for the king to tell me how a hostage may be taken from the fort by Llanmelin. I have seen it. It is a great fortress, and there is a Legion of the Eagles camped in it.”

  “Not from the fort by Llanmelin,” Bendigeid said. “Thus far the Roman governor has taken her with him when he has marched. If he does so again, he will have her by him in a marching camp, and somewhat more easily come by. If not, there will be fewer soldiers left in the fort by Llanmelin to guard her. We will wait until the Romans have moved north again.”

  “It could be done, I think,” Rhodri said. “It may be that the Dark Folk will help. They are kin to her, and to the king.”

  “They will not help if she dies,” Llamrei said.

  Owen looked at her. “Who said anything about dying?”

  Llamrei shook her head. “It… might happen.” Bendigeid’s eyes were fixed on her. She could feel them. She made herself look back at him.

  “You read my thoughts a little too well,” he told her, and a murmur went down the table and through the council. “She must not stay with the Romans!” Bendigeid snapped. “If she cannot be got back alive, then we take the other way!”

  “Kill a royal woman?” Owen looked frightened. A royal woman was the Goddess in her earthly guise and belonged to Earth Mother. To kill her was to be cursed, struck black and infertile in fields and herds and tribe; young men rendered impotent and strengthless, women left withered and barren. The breadth of her anger could pass across a land in a night, leaving nothing but blackened, twisted things in its wake.

  Bendigeid sat quietly, waiting for them to master their horror. Then he said softly, “Before now a royal woman has made sacrifice that her tribe might live. It is the lot of those whom the gods touch to make that choice if necessary.”

  There was a small, uncomfortable silence. That was a holy thing, not to be talked of freely.

  “Force the Romans to kill her,” Hywel said. “The Goddess may curse them with our blessing.”

  There was a quick murmur of agreement, of relief, but Aedden spoke up reluctantly. He was the youngest of the king’s captains and kin to him.

  “N-no. If they didn’t kill her when the king refused to bargain, then they have a better use for her, and I am thinking it is what we have talked of.” His face was unhappy, but he turned to the two by the fire. “Teyrnon Chief-Druid, can it be done without danger?”

  “Nothing that touches the Goddess can be done without danger,” Teyrnon said slowly. “But it is possible, if every attempt is made to bring the girl out of the Roman camp alive first” – he shot a glance at Bendigeid, who sat impassively watching them argue among themselves – “that the Goddess will accept that we buy the life of the tribe with the life of the royal woman, if we must.”

  They talked in low, hurried tones, pushing the matter back and forth among them like a hurley ball until they could bear to touch it. It was not the death in itself they balked at, but what might follow it. The tribe was fighting for its life. One princess was a small price to pay when seen from that viewpoint.

  Bendigeid waited until they had talked themselves out. “It is agreed. We will do anything short of leaving her to the Romans, before we take the other way.”


  “Whom will you send?” Aedden asked unhappily. Bendigeid had no sons. It was likely that it would be Aedden who would come after him in time. He wanted no part of killing a royal woman to ensure it.

  Bendigeid shook his head, not unkindly. No one should have to face that burden before the god put it on him.

  He looked the rest of them over. “Llamrei, because there should be a woman; Owen, because it is a matter for Druids.” Bards were Druids also, on a lesser level. “Rhodri, because he is neither. If there is a decision to be made, it will be Rhodri’s.”

  There was a murmur of assent, and Bendigeid stood up. Llamrei didn’t protest. As one of the king’s captains, she gave her first worship to the Sun Lord and not the Mother; but everyone honored the Mother, and there were some rites that could not be performed by a man.

  Bendigeid looked at Rhodri. “We need the Dark Folk if we can get them. I will try.”

  They will read you, too, Llamrei thought. Bendigeid pushed open the outer door into the cold sunlight. The Dark Folk were left-hand kin to the king. His mother had been one of their own. They would see right through him. But the Dark Folk had a way of going at a thing sideways, so that forbidden things were skirted, but it was still accomplished. He will make some bargain with them. And if we get that child back alive, he’ll kill her himself. It would look like an accident, she thought miserably, staring at the cold remains of her soup. The Goddess would know the truth, but her anger would fall on Bendigeid’s head, and he was the king. It was the king’s place to take the curse on himself and away from the tribe. The Mother forgive me, Llamrei thought. I’m not going to stop him. She’s been with the Romans too long.

  XIII The Sidhe of Ty Isaf

  Dinas Tomen was well awake now, and new smoke was beginning to rise above the rooftops. The fortress had an odd, transitory feel to it – of too many people crowded into too small a space. Some were to the south in the fortress at Crug Hywel; some had stayed behind on their farms to try to wrest some harvest from the ruined ground and hope the Roman soldiers would pass them by, but most were crammed into Dinas Tomen, where the king was, where whatever was going to happen would happen first – the war band, which meant every man of fighting age, their wives, children, grandfathers, priests, and livestock – a mad encampment of huts, tents, wagons, and cattle pens.