Dreaming the Hound
Page 51
If we put these facts together, we have a spring uprising, in which a number of well-armed tribal warriors conducted at least two well-planned raids, which took full advantage of the governor’s preoccupation in the west of the country. It seems to me unlikely that whoever ruled the Eceni could have mustered a war host from amongst a defeated, disarmed nation without some degree of preparation and warning and, given the restrictions of winter, that this preparation had been under way since at least the previous autumn.
If this is the case, then Prasutagos’ death—the timing of which is also inexact—is likely to have come towards the end of those preparations.
Tacitus’ eloquent description of the abuse of the native tribes by the Roman colonists of Camulodunum makes stark reading. A single paragraph summarizes the conditions that led to war:
It was against the veterans that [the rebelling tribes’] hatred was most intense. For these new settlers in the colony of Camulodunum drove people out of their houses, ejected them from their farms, called them captives and slaves and the lawlessness of the veterans was encouraged by the soldiers, who lived a similar life and hoped for similar licence. A temple also erected to the Divine Claudius was ever before their eyes, a citadel, as it seemed, of perpetual tyranny.
Thus we have the Trinovantes in Camulodunum being treated as are all natives by the occupying power: with contempt and little observation of the law. We have also from Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars the fact that Nero—a profligate spender even by Roman imperial standards—had considered withdrawing his troops from Britain. This in itself might not have caused panic, but Dio Cassius tells us that the imperial adviser Seneca
… in the hope of receiving a good rate of interest, had lent to the islanders 40,000,000 sesterces that they did not want, and had afterwards called in this loan all at once and had resorted to severe measures in exacting it.
The tribes of the east, therefore, were under immense social and political pressure. It is not hard to imagine each new insult pushing them closer to the edge of war and the Eceni were well placed to spark a rebellion. They had been party to a fairly effective armed revolt in AD 47 and they were not immediately under the thumb of the veterans in Camulodunum as were their neighbours, the Trinovantes. Their king, Prasutagos, however, was a client king, installed by Claudius and presumably considered a loyal Roman subject, unlikely to rebel.
We know very little of Prasutagos other than that he was “famed for his long prosperity” and that he died having made one of the most insane wills in history, which named his two daughters as co-inheritors with the emperor.
It is hard to imagine why he did this. Possibilities range from his signing a document he could not read, to his signing a document that was given to him with little option; a case of “Sign this and we might honour it; don’t sign and we’ll take everything anyway.”
The question of the rights of women to inherit at this point is open. Cicero reports that the “Lex Vocania” broadly forbade any man “included in the census” to make a woman his heir. This was transmuted by Augustus who ruled instead that women might inherit if they had given birth to three children if they were Roman citizens; four if they were free-born Latins; or five if they were not citizens. This would suggest that girls too young to conceive, or who had failed to marry or to bear children, could not inherit.
This brings us, then, to Prasutagos’ daughters about which precisely nothing is known except that they were “outraged” by the centurions sent to take possession of the entirety of his inheritance at the same time as their mother, the Boudica, was “Scourged”.
Here, Tacitus is our only source, but he is fairly specific that it was the king’s daughters who were raped and his wife who was flogged. One wonders—at least I wonder—why a group of armed men with nothing whatsoever to lose chose not to rape the wife as well, but paused in their blood-frenzy for long enough to organize a flogging—which is hardly the most spontaneous of events—and then neither raped the Boudica nor slaughtered the entire family afterwards.
Two things seem relevant here, both minor points of Roman law. Elsewhere in Tacitus is a vivid description of the revenge meted out to the family of the traitor Sejanus at the time of Tiberius, roughly half a century before the Boudican revolt. In this, we hear of Sejanus’ young daughter who is dragged off to execution, entirely too young to understand what is going on or why. “Historians of the time tell us that, as there was no precedent for the capital punishment of a virgin, she was violated by the executioner, with the rope on her neck.” Much later, in the fourth century AD, the young woman who became St Agnes was also “violated” before her execution on the grounds that she was a virgin and it was illegal to execute a girl who had yet to lose her chastity.
If we add to that the very well documented fact that flogging was routinely practised against insurgents prior to their crucifixion (Christ is the obvious case in point) then we have the possibility that the rapes of the girls and the flogging of the Boudica were not simply the acts of men out of control, but the planned prelude to a judicial execution of a family caught in the act of rebellion.
The question remains as to why that execution failed to take place and for that we have no reasons, except that, like its successor, the Spanish Inquisition, Rome was a punctilious observer of the rule of law and the execution of a king’s family was not something to be taken lightly by anyone less than an emperor. A governor might have the necessary authority to carry out such an act, but we know that Paulinus was otherwise occupied in the assault on Mona. Thus whoever acted in the east was almost certainly overstepping his powers and a senior officer might reasonably be assumed to have stepped in to stop it.
These, then, are the written historical grounds for this book. The rest is built around my interpretation of the archaeology. One piece is relatively unaltered: a tombstone was found in Colchester dating from the period of the Boudican revolt. It was dedicated to a man named “Longinus Sdapeze” who had fought with the First Thracian Cavalry. The tombstone and the wording thereon are almost exactly as described in the text.
For the rest, as ever, the fiction outweighs the fact although I have tried to build on a skeleton of what is known or can be inferred from the existing data. The structure of tribal society is my own, based around a relatively flimsy skeleton of archaeology and later records of Celtic Ireland, which was never invaded by Rome. One of the most concrete “facts” is the annual calendar followed by Breaca and her people which is based on a Gaulish remnant carved on stone. For the Gauls, certainly, and I believe the tribal Britons, the day began at dusk so that night preceded day, and the year began at the start of winter on what is now called Samhain, or 1 November. The night before, 31 October, is still the time when the veils between the worlds are thinnest.
The depth and colour are added to the characters and their journeys by the dreaming, which drives and enhances their lives. As with the previous volumes, the dreaming of this book has mirrored my own dreaming and the journeys of those who have joined it. This has no particular basis in what we might call ordinary consensus reality, but is based on an increasingly concrete experience of various non-ordinary realities that impinge on it.
For those who enjoy exploring the geography of these things, the caves of Mithras in which Valerius meets his god are fictional, but the Passage Tombs in Ireland in which he comes to know himself are very real and are almost exactly as described. These seem to me to have been designed expressly as dreaming chambers, although by a civilization far older than the late pre-Roman Iron Age of these novels. The rest, as ever, is as possible now as it was then, if we only set our intent sufficiently clearly and open to the possibility that the world is rarely as concrete as we would like to believe.
The author’s website, http://www.mandascott.co.uk, carries details of contemporary dreaming workshops, recommended reading and other resources.
CHARACTERS AND
PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES
THE LANGUAGE OF THE P
RE-ROMAN TRIBES IS LOST TO US; WE HAVE no means of knowing the exact pronunciations although linguists make brave attempts, based on known living and dead languages, particularly modern and medieval Breton, Cornish and Welsh. The following are my best attempts at accuracy. You are free to make your own. The names of characters based in history are marked with an asterisk.
Tribal characters
Airmid of Nemain—Air-med. Frog-dreamer, former lover to Breaca. Airmid is one of the Irish names of the goddess.
Ardacos—Ar-dah-kos. She-bear warrior of the Caledones. Former lover to Breaca.
Bán—Bon. Breaca’s half-brother, son of Macha. The “á” is pronounced rather like the “o” in bonfire. It means “white”.
Bellos—Bell-oss. Former slave boy of the Belgae, and companion of Valerius in Hibernia.
Breaca—Bray-ah-ca. Also known as the Boudica, from the old word “Boudeg” meaning Bringer of Victory, thus “She who Brings Victory”. Breaca is a derivative of the goddess Briga.
Caradoc—Kar-a-dok. Lover to Breaca, father to Cygfa and Cunomar. Co-leader of the western resistance against Rome.
Cunobelin—Koon-oh-bel-in. Father to Caradoc, now dead. Cun—“hound”, Belin, the sun god. Hence, Hound of the Sun or Sun Hound.
Cunomar—Koon-oh-mar. Son of Breaca and Caradoc. His name means “hound of the sea”.
Cygfa—Sig-va. Daughter of Caradoc and Cwmfen, half-sister to Cunomar.
Dubornos—Doob-ohr-nos. Singer and warrior of the Eceni, childhood companion to Breaca and Bán.
Eburovic—Eh-boor-oh-vik. Father to Breaca and Bán, now dead.
Efnís—Eff-neesh. Dreamer of the Eceni.
Eneit—Enate. Soul-friend of Cunomar. His name means “Spirit”.
Graine—Granya; the first “a” is pronounced like the “o” in bonfire. Daughter of Breaca and Caradoc.
Gunovar—Goonavar. Daughter of Gunovic and a dreamer of the Dumnonii.
Gwyddhien—G-with-i-enne. Warrior of the Silures, lover to Airmid.
Iccius—Ikk-i-ooss. Belgic slave-boy killed in an accident while enslaved by Amminios. Friend and soul-mate to Bán, now dead.
Lanis—Lan-is. Mother of Eneit, and a dreamer of the Eceni.
Luain mac Calma—Luw-ain mak Kalma. Elder of Mona and heron-dreamer. A prince of Hibernia.
Macha—Mach-ah. The “ch” is soft as in Scottish “loch”. Bán’s mother, now dead. Macha is a derivative of the horse goddess.
Madb—Maeve. A warrior of the Hibernians.
Roman characters
Latin is rather closer to our language, although we would pronounce the letter “J” as equivalent to the current “Y”, “V” would be “W” and “C” would be a hard “K” in all cases. However, this is so rarely used that it is simpler to retain standard modern pronunciation of these letters.
Decianus Catus—procurator of all Britannia under Nero.
Julius Valerius—officer in the auxiliary cavalry, originally with the Ala Quinta Gallorum, later the Ala Prima Thracum.
Longinus Sdapeze—officer with the Ala Prima Thracum.
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, a.k.a. Nero, emperor of Rome.
Quintus Valerius Corvus—prefect of the Ala Quinta Gallorum.
Quintus Veranius—fourth governor of Britannia, ad 57–58.
Seneca—adviser to Nero, emperor of Rome.
Suetonius Paulinus—governor of all Britannia.
Copyright © 2005 Manda Scott
Maps © 2005 David Atkinson
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DREAMING THE HOUND
Seal Books / published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Canada
Alfred A. Knopf Canada edition published 2005
Seal Books edition published March 2006
eISBN: 978-0-307-36580-4
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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