Suddenly, I was on my feet, shaking with rage and wishing I had my sword, though I did not know who I would have turned it on. I wanted to smash at something, anything. Blindly.
“Maeve,” Branwen said softly. Her voice seemed to come from a long way off, from a long time ago. “We are your friends.”
“Possibly the only friends you have on Mona,” added Viviane, “the only friends you have among the druids. So sit down and listen to us.”
I looked from one to the other, and they kept their gaze on me, even Viviane, who had a nerve calling herself my friend, though true enemy might be the next best thing. But I did not sit down.
“No,” I said. “If you call yourselves my friends, you listen. You listen to me. Do you want to know what I wanted for my daughter? I wanted her to have a mother. I wanted to keep her, just like I kept Sarah, even though I had to run away with her and leave my home and my friends behind. Both my daughters’ fathers died before they were born. I never knew my father either. There was never anything I could do about that. But I could have kept Boudica, I could have loved her. I will never forgive the druids. First they steal her from me and then they lie to her. And if you have perpetuated that lie, I will never forgive you.”
Oh, but you will forgive them, a voice inside me spoke.
“Shut up,” I spoke aloud. “Who asked you?”
I am with you always.
“Maeve, are you all right?”
Branwen stood up and put her arm around me, and I could feel how badly I was still trembling.
“No, I am not all right,” I said, but I sat down again and let Viviane give me another sip of wine.
For awhile none of us spoke.
“We’re sorry,” Viviane began, “but—”
“Don’t,” I cut her off. “Just tell me where she is now. Tell me how to find her.”
“I am not sure that would be wise,” cautioned Viviane. “I am not sure that would be in anyone’s best interest.”
“Viviane,” said Branwen before I could protest. “I think we better tell her the whole story.”
“What story?”
“When Boudica was fourteen,” Branwen took the narrative reins, “her foster parents brought her back to Mona, and presented her as a candidate.”
“Now you can see why her lineage mattered so much,” put in Viviane.
“She studied to be a druid?”
“She was determined to follow in her father’s footsteps, well, I mean not—”
“Not the footsteps that led to a tidal bore.” I was starting to feel punch drunk and perhaps literally drunk after all the restorative sips of wine.
“Do you want to hear this story or not?” demanded Viviane, knowing that she had me by the short hairs (the ones I had left, anyway).
“Tell,” I sighed. “All.”
“Go ahead, Branwen,” Viviane deferred. “You knew her best, as much as anyone did.”
With continued interruption from Viviane, Branwen went on. The year Boudica arrived at college was the same year Branwen and Viviane were entering their last four of nineteen years of training. Of our form, they were the only two women remaining. They began to take on responsibilities in the college, especially mentoring younger women. Nissyen had long since been put out to pasture as a dorm head, and after the disasters that had occurred on his watch—me being chief among them—he was lucky to get bed and board. After my brief era, female students were housed separately and chaperoned far more vigorously. Along with one of the Crows, Branwen was junior dorm mother, so to speak, to the first form girls, among them my daughter.
“She looked so much like you, Maeve, when I first glimpsed her at admissions, I swear I thought I was seeing your ghost. Of course, she looked like Lovernios, too, but then, so do you….” Branwen trailed off for a moment, flustered; her narrative style was usually more confident. “But I could not see much of you in her as I got to know her.”
“Except for her willfulness and arrogance,” Viviane made sure to note.
“You are too harsh, Viviane,” objected Branwen. “I think you mistook her seriousness for arrogance. It set her apart, made her seem a little aloof.”
“You may be right, Branwen,” Viviane conceded. “And she was not as willful as her mother. Strong-willed might be a better way to say it. Determined. And she actually studied.”
“Unlike her mother, you mean,” I said. “We all know that story. Stick to this one, would you.”
“For her first dozen years or so at school there’s not a lot to tell,” Branwen went on. “She worked hard at all her studies, though what she wanted most was to be a brehon and military strategist like Lovernios. She did not make many close friends, and yet her classmates respected her and on those occasions when she let down her reserve to argue passionately on some point, everyone sat up and took notice, students and druids alike. She had great potential as a leader—”
“Which is why it was such a loss to the college when she had to leave just when she would have started studying law,” Viviane broke in.
“Had to leave!” I repeated. “Was she…did she have a child?”
Like her mother before her. It was all I could think of. Her story, my story. A mother and daughter who shared the same father, all of it mixed up.
“No,” said Viviane. “She wasn’t stupid like you and me. No sneaking off into the moonlight for her. And remember you weren’t exiled because you had a child. Boudica would not have been asked to leave, in any case. She was too devoted a student. The child would have been fostered. No, the druids would never have willingly interrupted her studies.”
“Then why—”
“Does the name Claudius mean anything to you, Maeve?” said Viviane. “As in Emperor Claudius?”
“Of course. Do you mean she left because of the invasion? That doesn’t make any sense. From what you tell me, she would have wanted to be in the thick of the resistance.”
“Oh, she did want to,” Branwen assured me. “More than anything. But her tuath withdrew support—”
“That wasn’t the only reason she left,” Viviane said before I could ask why again. “The druids would have kept her at college without tuition. I know. I was there when the matter was debated.”
“So was I, Viviane,” Branwen almost snapped “May I finish?”
“Please,” I begged.
“Her tuath withdrew support because their tribe, the Iceni, well, they weren’t conquered, Maeve. They were bought. It’s a crude way to say it, but they made an alliance with the invading forces. As I am sure you know, Romans have always feared and persecuted druids. After the invasion, Claudius outlawed the practice of druidry not just in Gaul but everywhere in the Empire, including, of course, the newly conquered territories. Boudica’s tuath did not think it politic to have a daughter of a prominent family allied with one of the last druid strongholds.”
“I see,” I said. “But if she is as stubborn and determined as you say, it is hard to imagine that she went without a fight.”
“Oh, she fought all right,” Branwen acknowledged. “Her family sent a message ahead. The day it arrived she asked to speak with me alone. We walked away from the college, down to the straits and, oddly enough, Maeve, we ended up at the yew trees.”
The yew trees where I had revealed my pregnancy to Esus, where I finally screamed the story of the rape. Where he and I had been lovers for the first time.
“I had known her for years by then,” Branwen was saying. “She was about twenty-eight years old at the time, so she no longer reminded me so much of you. Most of the time, I was able to forget whose daughter she was. But that day in her anguish and defiance, there you were again. Her red hair had come loose and flew about her in the wind as she stood, and she looked fierce and frightened all at once.”
“‘I won’t go back to live among traitors,’” she kept saying.
“‘You will be going back to your family,’” I reasoned with her. “To ensure their safety. Don’t judge your parents so harshly for the
tribe’s decisions.”
“‘They are not my blood,’ she insisted. “They are not my lineage. My place is here where my father lived. I must go on with his work. It is more important now than ever with the eastern tribes conquered or colluding.’
“‘Your place,’ I said sternly, though I felt for her, ‘is where you will do the most good, and the least harm.’
“She said nothing for a moment, and her face was still and expressionless. Horribly still like the air before a storm, like the stillness before an ambush.
“‘Who decides?’ she spoke at last, her voice low and caught in her throat like it was clawing to get out. ‘Who can know another’s place, another’s fate? Who can know!’
“I almost felt frightened of her in that moment. She looked so haunted, her eyes staring as if she didn’t see me or know me, as if she wasn’t there with me.”
Just like my father, just like her father.
“‘The faculty will be holding a council,’ I said. ‘Signs and omens will be interpreted, auguries consulted. Everything will be taken into account.’
“‘I want to be there,’ said Boudica. ‘Branwen, please, I have always trusted you, loved you like an older sister. Will you go intercede for me? I only want to be allowed to speak on my own behalf.’
“She was not a demonstrative person, but she reached out to me then and took both my hands and looked at me with such beseeching that it broke my heart. I gathered her into my arms, and she let me hold her, though she did not return my embrace.
“‘Cariad, I will do what I can,’ I said. ‘But you must understand, the question under debate is not what would be best for you—’
“‘I understand,’ she cut me off and pulled away abruptly. ‘What matters is the combrogos.’”
As Branwen went on with the story, I stopped hearing her voice, or Viviane’s occasional outbursts. I was no longer in the timeless fire-lit dark inside the Tor. I was back on Mona. I knew those sacred groves, those solemn, perilous debates.
The old archdruid still lives. The same one who sent me beyond the ninth wave now presides over my daughter’s fate. He has aged, stands less straight. Two younger druids support him on either side, but he still plants the staff, declares with a voice that refuses to relinquish authority: Here now is the center of the world.
It is night. Firelight fills the circle, laps at its edges, touching feet and faces, bark and branches, the underside of leaves, hushed now in the stilled wind. Now the words begin to move around the circle, from one druid to another, the way the breeze will liven this tree, then that. Through it all, my daughter stands silent, sinking her roots into this ground she means to hold, even as her leaves tremble and shiver with every shift in the argument.
Some say she is a dedicate to the college and cannot be turned away if she chooses to stay.
Others argue that the support of the tuath must be steadfast.
Some insist that her legendary patrilineage makes her an exception to any rule.
Others caution that keeping her against the will of her family and tribe may stir up trouble, draw unwanted attention from the Roman forces in the east.
A few say, bring it on. Let’s use it as a cause for rallying the resisting tribes.
Many say a war over one person is a waste of resources; we must bide our time, plot.
“What say you?”
The archdruid’s voice seems to come from everywhere, from the ground, from the trees, from the sky, from inside her own mind. Boudica looks around dazed. As attentively as she has listened, she feels someone has just shaken her awake.
“What say you, daughter of Lovernios?”
Boudica opens her mouth, but the speech she has prepared does not come out. She feels empty, has she always been empty, just a hollowness waiting to be filled, so that she can be poured out, poured out.
“What say you, Boudica?” the archdruid asks a third time.
“I say,” she spoke at last, her voice seeming to come from far away, so that she heard it outside herself. “Like my father before me, the great Lovernios, I say: wherever I am, there is the enemy of Rome. And so it shall be until my death.”
The archdruid raises his arms, and the wind lifts again.
“And so it shall be,” his voice rises.
“And so it shall be,” say the clattering branches, the dark oak leaves.
“And so it shall be,” echo the human voices.
“And so it shall be,” Boudica’s voice rings out above them all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHERE NOT ALL THINGS ARE REVEALED
“AND SO IT WAS DECIDED,” Branwen was saying as I came out of my trance, “that Boudica should return without protest to her tribe, with the full cooperation and blessing of the druids, under secret instruction to be their eyes and ears in the occupied territory.”
“You mean she is a spy?” I asked. “She’s taken it pretty far, if she has married the collaborating King.”
“Prasutagus,” Viviane supplied his name. “Yes, that surprised even the druids when we heard of it. We are still not sure of all the details. Communication back and forth from conquered to free tribes is not easy. Bear in mind that none of us has seen Boudica since she left.”
“But I bet every wandering bard has a story about that marriage,” I said. “I bet there’s more than one version going around. Which one is the best? Don’t tell me you haven’t heard rumors at least.”
“You are right about that, Maeve,” agreed Branwen.
“And I know which one you prefer to believe,” put in Viviane.
“And I can guess which one you prefer,” Branwen retorted.
“Tell both,” I urged them.
“Mine is not poetic or long, but it’s the most likely,” asserted Viviane, ignoring my mother’s maxim that a story is true if it’s well told. “They are both using each other. Boudica gets the inside track on all the tribe’s dealings with the Romans, and Prasutagus hedges his bets by marrying someone with connections to the druids, someone, moreover, from a prominent family with lots of horses and cattle. He also gets to spy on her and make it more difficult for her to send communications to Mona. It’s simple really. The rest is sentimental nonsense for second rate bards.”
I looked to Branwen and nodded for her to go ahead.
“This much we know,” Branwen began her tale. “Boudica returned to her family, and since her hope of becoming a druid was lost to her, she took up where she had left off with her martial training. A bit late in life, but she had always been quite talented and her determination to go to druid school was considered a loss as well as an expense to the tuath. If it hadn’t been for Lovernios’s fame and her foster mother’s gratitude to the druids, the tribe might never have sent her to college. Now that she was back, everyone hoped she would marry and have children before it was too late. But Boudica showed no interest in making a match, and despite her family’s wealth, suitors were scarce on the ground. No one pushed her. I think they were all a little afraid of her.
“A full turn of the seasons after Boudica’s return, Prasutagus came to pay a visit to the family. You might think he would have come sooner, but he had been in mourning for his young wife who died in childbed along with their only child. Now here is where the storytelling begins.”
As Branwen spoke, I could see everything: Prasutagus and his entourage arriving on horseback to find Boudica racing a chariot up and down a fallow field. It’s late autumn and the sky is full of low clouds, but Boudica is wearing only a tunic. Her braids unwind on the wind, a gash of color in the bleak landscape. She is as tall as most men, and in the chariot she towers against the sky. She sees the men but she does not slow her pace, and she makes one, two, three more circuits around the field. In one hand she holds the reins, in the other a laigen, which she casts as she completes her last circle, striking home into a moving target that hangs from a tree limb at the edge of the field. Only then does she slow her horse and come to a halt in front of the king, who is stand
ing and staring, though by now her foster father’s household has assembled to welcome him.
For a long moment she answers his stare from the chariot, both she and Prasutagus ignoring her foster father’s attempt to at once introduce, excuse and dismiss this foster daughter who has become such an anomaly. Then Boudica steps down and comes to stand before him.
“I am Boudica,” she says, “daughter of the druid Lovernios.” And she recites her whole patrilineage and then, as an afterthought, recites the lineage of her foster family, both maternal and paternal. The only lineage left out is that of the mother who bore her (the less said the better). But she has surely demonstrated the prowess of her memory as well as of her spear arm. Then she concludes, “I am at the service of the combrogos.”
The King of the Iceni is speechless for a moment. Does he notice that she has not affirmed her allegiance to him? Is he wondering whether to rebuke her or her foster father, perhaps have her punished in some way or kept under watch? Instead he blurts out,
“I remember you from when you were a girl. Do you remember me?”
And Boudica, who has been standing still and cool, reddens as only a red head can with bright, humiliating blotches. For she does remember a day she’d rather forget.
She had been with her family at a horse fair when a gang of children surrounded her and taunted her, calling her stuck-up and crazy, a changeling brat. She was swinging with both arms, but was hopelessly outnumbered. An older boy, old enough to carry a sword, came to her rescue, and chased the children away, beating them with the flat of the sword.
“One day, I’ll be king, king of the Iceni,” the boy said to the angry girl, who was still red with shame and fury. “When I am, there will be no bullying.”
“I so don’t believe this part,” complained Viviane. “It makes the story of your being a seducing silkie look dazzlingly original.”
“Shh,” I said, totally caught up.
“And I will be your best warrior,” the girl said, recovering her pride.
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