Song for a Dark Queen

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Is there something amiss?’ I asked, quickly.

  He opened his eyes and smiled. Already the greyness was passing. ‘Nothing. A pain under my ribs and a moment’s darkness. It comes on me sometimes after a day’s hunting or the like.’ He turned back to the thing we had been speaking of. ‘A lament for broken swords. And yet it seems that yourself, you had no sword to lose, yesterday. Strange, I could have sworn that I have seen you burnishing an old sword before now.’

  ‘I carried a sword when Boudicca’s mother and the world and I were all young. Few people remember now. Few harpers are fighting men, and the Romans would expect no sword from me.’

  ‘And so you did not bring them one.’ He turned and looked at me; a long, hard look.

  ‘Like the Queen, who they would expect no sword from, either,’ I said, and wondered in that moment, where she had hidden her father’s great blade. Under the gowns in her clothes’ kist, maybe. No, she would have been more thorough than that.

  ‘I wonder how many old swords are hidden in the peat-stacks and under the house-thatch of the Iceni today,’ Prasutagus said.

  ‘More than the Romans dream. Spearheads, too – though indeed there is none so great a difference between a war-spear and a heavy hunting-spear, when once the collar of heron hackles has been stripped away. They did not even notice that none of the women came in, for they do not train their own women to bear weapons in time of need.’

  ‘That is true. Maybe we are not so toothless as they think us.’ But almost as he said it, he struck his fist on his knee. ‘Grief upon me! I speak comforting words to myself as though I were a bairn! The Horse People, I make no doubt, have good store of weapons yet, hidden in the dark. But in the daylight, before the eyes of Rome, before the eyes of other tribes, we are disarmed and dishonoured! And that is my doing.’

  ‘The order was from Ostorius Scapula,’ I said.

  And again we were silent, hearing the wind in the feathered reeds. And Fand, the brindled bitch, daughter to one of the hounds who had come with him from his own hunting runs eight years ago, raised her head and whimpered softly, looking at her Lord.

  ‘The order was from Scapula, yes,’ Prasutagus agreed at last. ‘But it was with me to choose whether or no it should be obeyed. There was a moment – I could have set fire to the stubble. I could have had the whole Horse People out in revolt, and maybe driven the Red Crests back into the soft lands to the south.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I started to think.’

  ‘What kind of thinking?’

  ‘That the Red Crests do not take easily to defeat, no more easily than the Tribes; and that they can always send for help from across the seas, for they are as many as the leaves of the forest, that though they fall in the autumn come again in the spring. I began to think of burned thatch and hearths left desolate with no man to come home to them.’

  ‘It is you that should be the harper, not I.’

  ‘I wish I were,’ Prasutagus said. And again he turned full face to me. ‘It is not easy to be a king and think too much. In another kind of world, maybe. . . . But in our world, a king should leave his thinking to his Harper and the Priest Kind. It would be easier to bear. He might even be a better king, that way.’

  ‘Despite the burned thatch and the hearths left desolate?’

  ‘We should have gone down with honour, by the Warrior’s Road,’ he said. And then, ‘I do not know. Cadwan of the Harp, there are so many things that I do not know.’

  6

  Day Draws to Sunset

  THE WINTERS CAME, and the springs woke in the alders, and the mares dropped their foals in early summer, all as it had been before the Horse People were stripped of the right to carry sword and spear. And year by year we paid our tribute of gold and horses and young men.

  No more children were borne in the Royal Chamber; but the two Princesses grew and flourished. Essylt, the Royal Daughter, fair-skinned and freckled like a foxglove, blue-eyed and long-boned like her mother; like her mother in most other ways too, both within and without; only from Prasutagus her father she had her hair that was the colour of a bay horse in the sunlight. And Nessan, the little one, born while the midsummer fires were blazing. And Nessan was nobody but herself – unless she had in her some Princess of the Old People, the Little Dark people, who were here before ever the Horse Folk came; for there was never yet a conquering people that did not mingle their blood in some sort with the blood of the conquered. Old Nurse swore that it was so; but Old Nurse was of the Dark People herself. Nessan was bird-small, with black hair and huge rain-grey eyes, and her milk teeth came crooked, so that the teeth that came after them were crooked too, though it only showed when she laughed. I loved to see her laugh, the little dark one, just as I loved to hear her sing. She could sing like a bird in a white-thorn tree, less full than a blackbird, softer than a robin, a thrush maybe.

  When ever she could escape from the Women’s Side, Essylt would be away to the stable court, or watching the smith hammering out a hunting-spear, or down in the marsh making a fish trap with Duatha, whose father was chief of the household warriors, when she could persuade him to let her come. But Nessan would come to me and my harp; for she had the music in her. ‘Since you are not the Royal Daughter,’ I told her, ‘you should have been a boy, and then you could have been harper to a Queen.’

  In the world beyond our frontiers, Caratacus, after nine years’ warfare in the western hills, had gone to walk in chains in a Roman triumph, betrayed into the Red Crests’ hands by the Queen of the Brigantes; but that is another story altogether.

  Ostorius Scapula was gone, too, and we had a new Governor, Suetonius Paulinus; a great soldier, so said his reputation, following him from the ends of the Empire; but a hard man like an east wind and a hammer.

  And in Rome, the old Emperor was dead; some said by poison at the hands of his wife; and a new Emperor reigned in his stead: a man with music in him, even as I, but possessed by spirits of darkness. It is far, from Rome to the frontiers of the Horse People, but we began to feel his darkness hovering over us. We felt it through new laws and regulations that ate away our remaining freedom, through the officials and the money-lenders. The harvests had been poor for three years running, and many of the great chiefs were in debt – yet it was more than these things, and it lay over more tribes than the Horse People. An unease, a sense of dread like the silence that comes over the furze beneath the shadow of a wheeling hawk.

  But still, the ordinary things of life went on. And the time came, when Essylt had seen fifteen summers, and Nessan two summers less, to be holding the Choosing Feast for the Royal Daughter. So the feast was held, and Merddyn Oak Priest, who began to be too old for such duties, slept his night on a freshly-flayed horse-hide in the apple garth; and the choice fell upon Duatha, he that was son to Arviragus, chief of the King’s companions. A tall, hot-blooded lad he was, with his manhood scars still fresh upon him. And for Essylt and Duatha the choice was a happy one, for they had been close to each other since the fish-trap days, though I have sometimes thought more in the way of brother and sister than in the way of two who will one day be man and woman to each other.

  Grief upon me! It all seems so long past, and it is just one year ago.

  One day, not long after the Choosing Feast, Roman officials came to the Dun when it was not time for the collecting of taxes, on some private business with Prasutagus. And in the evening of the next day, when they had gone again, I walked in the in-paddock, which has always been dear to me on early autumn evenings, when the brood mares are gathered close with their foals, and the dusk lies like smoke under the alder trees, and the smell of the first frost is in the air. And Prasutagus came by, driving a new chariot that he had been trying out. He reined in and got down when he saw me, and we began to walk back towards the Dun, leaving the charioteer to take on the team.

  ‘So – that is over,’ said Prasutagus.

  ‘The Romans?’

  ‘The Romans.’
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  ‘What did they come for?’

  ‘I have been making my will. That is what they call it, among the Romans, when a man has it written down before witnesses, what is to be done with his goods and gear, after he has gone beyond the sunset.’

  ‘Was that needful?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so, yes. Since my father died, I am a rich man, my horse-herds as big as those of the Queen herself, maybe bigger, if the mares do well this year. And I have done what a great many rich men do in these days; I have left half of what I possess to the Emperor – in the hope of buying his favour, so that my wife and the young ones may keep the other half in peace.’

  ‘You have not a grey hair as yet, in that red poll of yours,’ I said quickly.

  And he laughed, ‘And there may be a score more Emperors come and gone in Rome before my time comes for the Long Journey.’ Then he grew sober. ‘But these are uncertain days, and the Emperor Nero is not the Emperor Claudius. It is better to make plans for the night while the daylight lasts.’

  The smoke of the evening cooking-fires was hanging low over the roofs of the village and the Dun as we came to the small side-gate into the chariot court.

  Prasutagus swung away to see his team stabled, walking proud with life, then he checked an instant and put out a hand to the corner-post of the long chariot shed, and I heard again that small dry cough. Then he walked on into the gathering dusk.

  On a day towards winter’s end, Prasutagus and his hearth companions called for their horses and whistled up their hounds and went hunting.

  It was a day that started fair, but turned to wind and sleety rain; and they returned at evening with a couple of red forest deer slung across the backs of the carrying ponies, but themselves drenched and wild and sodden as though they had been hunting with Blue Haired Mananon along the seabed.

  They dismounted in the chariot court, and Prasutagus looked round for Fand, who was daughter to that other, old Fand, and his favourite bitch as her mother had been before her. She had not gone out with the hunt, being heavy in whelp and near her time. But always she would come running to him when he had been away, to bury her muzzle between his hands, whimpering with delight at his return. But this evening she did not come, and he called for her, and then for the chief of the kennel slaves. ‘Baruch! Where is Fand?’

  The man came out of the shadows. ‘Back there behind the fodder store, and the pups are coming.’

  ‘In this weather? Man, have you not the sense to get her into shelter?’

  ‘She’ll not come – and I am afraid to rough-handle her –’

  ‘Is something amiss?’ Prasutagus demanded.

  The old slave shook his head. ‘She was well enough with the first two. She is in trouble with this one.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Prasutagus said.

  When he did not come into Hall with the rest, and Duatha told the Queen what had happened, she looked at the drenched companions steaming by the fire, and sent out his armour-bearer to bid him come into the warmth and get him dry and some hot food inside him. ‘It will not take long, and then he can be going back to Fand,’ she said, as though she were his mother.

  But the armour-bearer returned alone. ‘My Lord Prasutagus says that he will come in a while and a while,’ he said.

  But it was a long while; and when he came, and the evening meal half over, he was like the ghost of one long drowned in wintry seas; grey white to the lips, his clothes hanging on him as coldly sodden as sea-wrack. He came to the fire, holding out his hands to the flames; and they had blood on them, and they shook.

  Boudicca went to him. ‘Hai Mai! You are the wet one! Let you come now and change those sodden rags.’

  ‘In a little,’ he said.

  And Essylt, close behind her mother, asked him, ‘Father, how is it with Fand?’

  ‘She’s dead. It will be well enough with the cubs if Baruch can find them a foster mother.’ And he turned from the fire towards the entrance to the Royal Chamber, where his armour-bearer waited for him.

  When he came back, in fresh tunic and breeks, his hair standing out in spikes where he had rubbed it dry, he went again to the fire; and Boudicca herself brought him food and wine from the table, that he might eat beside the blaze. But he ate only a few mouthfuls of the food, then pushed it aside and drank the wine. It seemed that he could not stop shivering.

  ‘This is a cheerless fire that we have tonight,’ he said, and forced a grin. ‘It looks bright enough, but somebody must have cast a spell on it, for it gives out no heat.’

  I felt a faint movement against my knee, and when I looked down, Nessan, who was sitting there as she often did in the evenings, was looking up at me, with trouble in those strange rain-grey eyes of hers. ‘Is he sick?’ she asked at half breath.

  ‘He is chilled to the bone, and he has just lost his favourite hound. If Epona grant it, a night’s rest will see him well again, little bird.’

  But next morning did not see Prasutagus well again. He was flushed as he had been grey the night before, and with a small wracking cough that grew worse as the day went by. And by evening it could be seen that he found it hard to catch his breath.

  ‘It is the lung fever,’ said the Healer Priest, and shook his head.

  ‘He is very strong!’ Boudicca said. ‘Stronger than the lung fever.’

  And again the Priest shook his head. ‘There is an echo in his heart that should not be there. I first heard it when I listened to the life within his chest, seventeen autumns ago.’

  ‘If it has been with him so long, it can make no difference now,’ said the Queen, with terror in her voice.

  And a third time the Healer Priest shook his head. ‘We will do all that can be done. We will make the Sacrifices. But it is an old friend. Truly every man walks with death from the moment that he is born.’

  And Prasutagus lay on the great bedplace, propped high with the coloured pillows, trying to laugh without enough breath to laugh with, and telling the priests that it was only a pain in his chest that would pass by and by, and they were no more than a gaggle of old women.

  And all the while, for three days and three nights, the wind blew, howling round the High Hall, and the freezing rain drenched down. But on the third night the rain ceased and the wind died away, and the silence was filled with the faint trickling of waters; and in the air outside was the faint unmistakable smell which is the promise of spring as yet far off. And in the dark heart of that night, Prasutagus died.

  Boudicca and Old Nurse had tended him throughout, as they had done that first time, seventeen years before. And at first, Boudicca would not believe that what had happened that first time would not happen this time also. ‘Pile more rugs on him!’ she said. ‘We must keep him warm for his spirit to come back to!’

  And Old Nurse, weeping and clinging to her, said, ‘Hush, hush now, come away. This time his spirit will hot come back.’

  But Boudicca lay rigid along the bedplace, holding him in her arms, not seeming to feel the old woman pulling at her, calling and calling for more rugs to keep him warm.

  Essylt had stolen away somewhere, to Duatha, I am thinking, for what ever comfort he could be giving her. Aiee! The pair of children! But Nessan had come to me, just beyond the threshold, and I held her close while she shivered in my arms. ‘I wish she would not – Oh I wish she would not! Cannot someone stop her?’

  ‘Maybe you could stop her,’ I said. ‘Let you go and try.’

  And she went in, the little one, into the chamber where the Priests had begun the journey rituals, and the King lay dead; and I do not think that she spoke at all. But her arms did what Old Nurse’s could not do; and in a while the Queen got up and allowed them to lead her away.

  To the Lady Julia Procilla, at the

  House of the Three Walnut Trees.

  In Massilia, Province of Southern

  Gaul. From Gneus Julius Agricola,

  in Britain, Greeting.

  Most dear Mother, When I came away, you bade me promise to
write as often as might be. See now what a dutiful son I am! You also bade Marcipor to look after me as a good body-slave should do; but in truth, I seem to have done little but look after him, for he developed saddle boils on the way up through Gaul, and was direly seasick during the crossing. Anyhow, here we are, safe and sound, having landed at Rhutupiae, and come on to Londinium riding post. Tomorrow I shall buy a couple of horses and baggage beasts – they tell me the horse market here is good – and then join the next mounted party heading for Deva, where I learn the Governor now is.

  Meanwhile, I am lodged in the house of Decianus Catus, the Procurator, which is better than the Government resthouse. Catus is in fact the soul of hospitality; but only, I should judge, to those he thinks may be in a position to repay him in one way or another in the future. He is, after all, a business man, even though a business man in Government service. Dearest Mother, you are perfectly right, it is ungentlemanly to be rude about one’s host. But you brought me up to be truthful, and the truth is that I do not like the man, and I do not think Father would have liked him either. It is strange, considering that Father was killed in the summer that I was born, how well I seem to know him. That must be because you brought me up knowing him; and since I never thought to thank you for that before, I will thank you now. He was clearly so well worth knowing. But to return to Decianus Catus; it is really very good of him to give me guestroom, for he is especially busy at the moment: one of the native rulers, Prasutagus, King of a free state somewhere north of here, is dead this past month or more, and the Emperor has given orders for the state to be abolished, and the tribe and its territory absorbed into the ordinary pattern of provincial government. He is doing that all over the Empire, of course; and I suppose that since this Prasutagus has no son to follow him, and the royal line is at an end, this is the obvious time for it to happen to the Iceni also. So says Decianus Catus, at all events. It seems hard; but no one thinks there will be trouble. For one thing, the Iceni are unarmed – after trouble some years ago – and have no one to lead them. But apparently the money-lenders who have been busy among them are calling in the debts to be on the safe side; Seneca foremost among them. How odd that a philosopher preaching the virtues of the simple life should turn to that particular trade.