Songwoman

by Ilka Tampke

  Two soldiers took Caradog’s arms while three others braced their sword tips against his back. He jerked against the restraints, wincing as the swords pricked his skin. Then he was still.

  Ostorius Scapula stood before him, drinking in every detail of his Mother-given grandeur: his height, his oxen shoulders, his warrior gaze, unflinching from his enemy’s face, his hair and beard that fell in rusted hanks to his chest, but more than this, his sovereignty, his unbreakable certainty that he should stand free on this land.

  ‘Let me grow drunk on this moment,’ Scapula said in the castrated sounds of the Latin tongue. He leaned forward and drew a deep breath of Caradog’s skin. ‘Let me taste the scent of your enslavement.’

  Caradog thrashed against the Roman guards, but they held him firm.

  I stood, paralysed. I could not make sense of what I saw before me. It was as though the sun itself had been stopped in the sky.

  ‘Was there ever a slave worth more in the Roman markets?’ said Scapula to his soldiers. ‘I will gain a good price from the Emperor.’

  ‘And will you tell him that you, yourself, were unable to catch me,’ said Caradog, ‘that you needed a woman of the tribes to do what you could not?’

  Scapula darkened. ‘Perhaps I will tell him that the payment I desire for your capture is your execution by the torturer’s tools.’

  ‘By the Mothers, Caradog,’ I whispered. ‘Do not speak further.’

  ‘Clever counsel,’ said Scapula, still staring at Caradog. ‘Though your Mothers will not aid you now. They are Rome’s whores and I have fucked them until they are fit for no other.’

  Silence spread like blood in water. My heart could not hold the defilement.

  ‘Finish this, Governor,’ said Cartimandua.

  ‘I will,’ he said. ‘But first,’ he turned to my husband, ‘tell me who you are.’

  ‘I am Caradog, son of Belinus, skin to the wren and War King of Albion.’

  Scapula balled his fist, then gave a blow to Caradog’s abdomen powerful enough to rupture his stomach. ‘Who are you?’

  Slowly Caradog lifted his head, spat the vomit from his mouth and repeated his title.

  I closed my eyes, bracing for the second blow, but Scapula stood patiently for a few moments, then said, ‘We could do this all night, and I would no doubt enjoy it, but I have ridden day-long and I am keen to rest, for we leave at daybreak for Rome. So if you cannot correctly name your position, then I have no further choice but to do it for you.’ He turned back the fire and pulled out the iron tool. It had a small square plate at its end, which had heated to a dark orange glow.

  With horror, I recognised its purpose.

  Scapula said, ‘Open his shirt.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Ailia, be silent,’ Cartimandua said, her voice low, her gaze locked to the ground.

  ‘How can you permit this?’ I gasped. Did she have no power? No authority? This was her kinsman. He deserved a noble death, not this humiliation.

  She sat, unmoving in her seat, and would not meet my eye. She was as toothless as an old woman, her own title merely an ornament on her governor’s breast.

  ‘Bring him before Claudius,’ I said to Scapula, ‘but let him die as the war king.’

  Scapula turned, seeing me for the first time. He put the tool back into the fire. ‘You are she who consorts with the warrior dog,’ he said, ‘she who they call the Kendra.’

  ‘I am she.’

  ‘Then Mithras has blessed me with a bountiful harvest this day,’ he said. ‘For I have caught both the swine and his favourite sow.’ He ran his eyes over my grey farmer’s shawl, my tattered hair. ‘And you are she who they revere above all others…’ he murmured, shaking his head. ‘No wonder you are all still living in mud burrows.’

  There was a ripple of laughter among the soldiers.

  Scapula glanced back to Caradog. ‘I will take you to Claudius as your slut suggests, but her—’ he stared at me with the disgust one might show to something wrong-born, ‘—this demon—I can kill now.’

  Caradog bellowed, trying to wrench himself free.

  ‘Not her,’ said Cartimandua over the scuffle to subdue him. Finally, she had lifted her head.

  Scapula turned to her. ‘She is too precious to let live.’

  Cartimandua stood up. The light from her mantle made a fire of her face. ‘You have promised much great favour in exchange for the supply of Caradog. I ask for nothing, but that you release this woman.’

  ‘She will rouse the free tribes.’

  ‘Do not fear it. I will keep her with me.’

  They stared at one another until Scapula scoffed and turned away. ‘Have her. She’ll be useless without her master anyway.’

  I did not know if I shook with relief or despair.

  ‘His shirt, I told you!’ Scapula was angrier now. Again, he drew out the branding iron from the embers, now even hotter than before.

  Clumsily, one of the soldiers cut the ties of Caradog’s shirt and pulled its fabric back over his shoulders.

  I let my gaze fall on the part-healed grazes and bruises from fighting. The skin was smooth and pale where the war had not reached it. ‘Nothing burns you, Caradog,’ I said. ‘You are as the sun.’

  ‘Silence,’ shouted Scapula. He raised the near-molten metal before Caradog’s chest.

  I willed Caradog to look at me.

  He did. He was afraid.

  Through my gaze, I held him as Scapula seared the indelible three letters of a Roman slave into his skin.

  12

  Poetic Land

  The warriors determine the fate of our tribes.

  But it is the poets who make us immortal.

  THE SUN shone through the barred wooden window, falling in crisp stripes on my bed. This was a different light from the soft haze that Lleu cast over the tribelands. It was stronger, prouder, more aware of itself. This was Apollo. The Roman sun.

  Despite the brightness, I shivered under the thin woollen blanket. In only four weeks here, the warmth of late autumn had been replaced by a sharp chill. I rolled onto my side and gazed at my now familiar lodgings.

  The tiny, white-walled room was furnished only with a narrow bed and a boxwood table, upon which stood a water jug and a scattering of the silver armbands I had carried with me from Albion. An alcove in the wall above the table sheltered a rough plaster statue of the Emperor, but otherwise there was no decoration.

  It was a rare private room in one of the thousands of cheap inns that lined the Tiber in the northwest quarter of Rome, a room in which Caradog’s wife could easily pass herself as just another in the stream of foreign travellers, labourers and traders who journeyed in and out of Rome seeking their own small slice of its glut. Its lockable door was my room’s only testament to the weight of coins I bore in my pouch.

  I sat up and peered through the bars to the street beyond. The horse-drawn goods carts that rumbled through the night, while roads were empty enough to allow their passage, were being replaced by the throng of foot traffic and food-sellers, already shouting their trade.

  The nutty smell of frying wheat cakes drifting under my doorway told me that the inn’s owner had awoken. The day was beginning like every other I had passed within the walls of this city. Yet today was not like any other.

  Today Caradog, Euvrain, and all the captured chiefs of Albion would be marched in chains around the stone square of the castra praetoria, the largest parade ground in Rome. Today Caradog would face judgement before the Emperor Claudius, a performance purposed only for the amusement of the crowds and the glorification of the Empire, for the war king’s execution was certain.

  Today I would see him for the last time.

  Along with Euvrain and their children, he had been held under close guard within one of the senators’ houses.

  I had not been permitted to see him. He did not even know that I was here.

  I poured a glass of water and drained it in one thirsty draught. Rome’s water was never co
ld and tasted of the leaden pipes that carried it into the city.

  I had left for Rome only hours after Caradog had been dragged in leg rings across Cartimandua’s floor. She had grasped my arm once we were alone, pressed coins into my hand and whispered, ‘There is a horse at the gate. I will give you this night to escape, then I must be seen to hunt you. Be sure you evade me.’

  I had ridden nine days to the south-eastern tribelands, sleeping only a few hours each night in the shelter of forests. At the port of Dubris I gained admission to a Roman trade ship by merchants who did not wonder at a woman travelling alone, so long as she had sufficient silver with which to quiet them.

  Thus I left the shores of my homeland.

  I had travelled with a poor woman’s invisibility and a rich woman’s purse. Both had been needed. In the port markets of Bononia I had bought a hardy-looking donkey, and had proceeded, by means of firstly farmhouses and, later, inns, through the busy roads of Gaul and onward to the Empire’s first city.

  I had arrived here in the last moon of autumn. I would leave tomorrow, when I had sung my husband’s rites.

  I pulled on a woollen tunic and cloak, tied my sandals, and unfastened my door.

  The price of my room included a meagre breakfast, but I had grown to prefer the noisy hive of food stalls and taverns—the thermopolia—that lined the river round the corner from my inn.

  I greeted the house woman as I passed through the kitchen, then stepped onto the street. Immediately I was hit by the stench of people in numbers of thousands of thousands. There were no words in my language to express this number, for we had never had cause to fathom it. Only the Roman language could count numbers without end.

  I turned northward on the narrow street, weaving to navigate the out-spilling of wares from the potters, fruit-sellers, cloth merchants and candle stores. A bakery and a flower stall brimming with roses and oleanders offered respite from the reek of rotting food.

  Every handspan of this city was sealed by the armour of human life: houses so densely built you could not walk between them, paths paved with flagstones as wide as a bull’s rump, and the immense columned monuments—arches and temples—that filled the forum. Nowhere, no time, did this land breathe. Robbed of their porousness, the streets stank of human waste.

  I had wanted to hate it. And yet I did not.

  It had taken me without question. It did not care that my skin was pale, that my Latin was accented, that I had slain many soldiers of its army. It welcomed any who wished to walk on it.

  In only one month I had grown used to what shocked me at first. Rome was a wildness of its own kind. Gone was the steady rhythm of cattle, birdsong, the daily pouring of milk on the earth. This city ran to the drums of trade, the frenzied music of commerce. The hum of the land had been silenced by a human song. It would not last. It could not. It was an illusion, a trance as dazzling and brilliantly fleeting as the fires of Summer’s Eve. And yet whole countries had been enslaved in honour of its growth.

  I met the river, turning eastward on its bank. Here at least, the earth’s breath rose briefly up through the water to kiss my brow. I drank in the fresh coolness. A young girl rolled a spinning wheel past my feet. I watched her as she raced past, shrieking with joy, then disappeared into a dark doorway.

  I had reached my favourite thermopolium. Small wooden stools stood around a central table, shiny with grease. The cook was smearing spoonfuls of batter across a spitting hotplate and flipping cakes that were ready to turn.

  ‘Two please, Attius,’ I ordered, taking a seat beside the hotplate.

  Attius, with his keen ear and ready humour, had been a steady supplier of city knowledge for me. ‘Sauce?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stacked the cakes on a wooden plate, doused them with thick, black sauce from a spouted jug, and set them before me.

  ‘Where should I stand for the best view today?’ I rolled up a cake and took a bite, my mouth flooding with the saltiness of the fish sauce. If there was anything thing I would miss of Rome when I returned to the tribes, it was the bewildering, sun-soaked flavours of its food.

  ‘They muster at the Campus Martius, just up the river,’ said Attius. ‘Or you can stand anywhere along the Via Triumphalis and you’ll see them pass.’

  ‘I’d like to hear the Emperor.’

  ‘You mean watch the strangulation?’ He smiled. ‘Then you’ll need to get inside the barracks. But you’ll have to hurry. The ground fills quickly, and the war king from Britannia will draw a mighty crowd.’

  Bodies pressed on every side of me. Already my water skin was almost empty, but I would not risk my place in the crowd to go back to the fountain to fill it.

  Perhaps because I was a woman alone, or was artful in remaining unnoticed, I had been able to work my way from the entrance of the castra, along the northern wall to the eastern side of the parade ground, where I had gradually shouldered forward to a good position beside the stage.

  The scene was set for the ritual to follow. Cushioned benches lined each side of the stone platform, and on a marble podium between them stood two carved and gilded thrones. From poles festooned with trails of ivy and white roses, great swathes of white linen billowed above the seating. Many more blooms had been strewn across the stage, threading the air with their innocent fragrance.

  It was a stage for the gods, yet its centrepiece was a squat earthen pot, from which emerged a tentative sapling oak. I had not seen one since I had arrived in the city and was not prepared for the blow it would strike. Its scalloped leaves, limp from scant water, awakened every song and poem I had learned at the boughs of its kin. Stunted in its too-small vessel, this was the symbol that proclaimed our subjugation. Our sovereign tree, our deepest wisdom: bound, diminished.

  On the ground before the stage stood the full Praetorian cohort, the hand-picked guards of the emperor, a legion of cockerels in their red crested helmets.

  For another hour I stood and waited, listening to the murmured stories of the war king that rippled back and forth through the crowd. I smiled to myself. He would enjoy that his fame had spread throughout the Empire.

  At last a trumpet cry stilled the crowd. I craned my neck to watch the Emperor and his wife enter. The senators came first, filing through the draped doorway in white robes and laurel head-wreaths. When they were seated, the rear curtains parted. The parade ground hushed.

  A narrow-jawed man, dressed in cascading folds of purple, shuffled forth into a deluge of cheers and a shower of thrown flowers. I started at the face beneath the golden head-wreath. He was longrumoured to be weak and sickly, a puppet emperor, but the man before me looked sharp-witted and thoughtful.

  He and his wife took their seats on the thrones, smiling amid the hurled blooms and roars of adulation. Only when one of the senators stood, raising his hand, did the crowd’s noise abate. Then whispers swirled through the gathering. The procession was at the gateway. Caradog was here.

  My heart pounded for the full hour it took for the head of the parade to reach the stage. First came armed guards to ensure no children or dogs obstructed the parade’s path. Behind them came the first of Albion’s captured chiefs. The sight of them was a knife through my belly. As well as the leaders captured at Emrys, there were others whom I did not know, defenders of the eastern tribes, who must have been kept years under guard, as the Emperor awaited this day.

  Each of my kinsmen was bound in iron leg-rings, chained to each other or to their wives and children. They were not clad in their tribal skins and tartans, but in some mockery of our warrior costume: woad smeared artlessly across their faces, torn strips of fur wrapped around their prisoners’ tunics.

  They wailed and begged as they staggered, crying for clemency, lamenting the error of their resistance, and appealing to the grace of the Roman Emperor.

  The crowds jeered and spat, howling with laughter at their rags and clumsy Latin.

  I drew rigid with fury.

  Following the chiefs came cart after cart pi
led high with the spoils of war. These were the metals plundered by atrocitas; the swords, shields, knives, torcs, arm-rings, platters and cups wrought from the silver and copper of our soil. Within the deep mists and dark halls of Albion they were luminous, yet their colours paled under this stark light.

  Now came the wheeled stages upon which the scenes of the war had been recreated using life-sized models and human tableaux. I saw Claudius riding into Camulodunum on the back of an elephant, several hillforts succumbing to the legions, then lastly, and most spectacularly, a recreation of what could only have been the battle at Emrys.

  An enormous model mountain had been constructed on the platform. At its crest were the actors representing the warriors, each naked, but wearing a giant and grotesquely-rendered animal mask over their head. Their arms flailed and their genitals swung beneath the lolling heads of cows, pigs, sheep and geese.

  The Roman soldiers climbed the painted mountain, and the hybrid half-creatures began to fight them in plodding, graceless swipes. One of the warriors spun around, enacting a spear fight. From the cleft of his buttocks sprouted a thick fur tail.

  The crowd roared with laughter and disgust. But in their ridicule, they revealed what was strongest in us. We were bound to our animal spirits. Not in the witless, clumsy way the Romans mocked here, but by ways that were potent.

  The final cart was much simpler. It did not feature live actors, but giant-sized plaster figures depicting the moment of Caradog’s capture. He was easy to identify by the ragged crown they had given him, a jumbled nest of leaves, branches, and animal horns at odd angles. He kneeled before the figures of Scapula (far taller and more muscular than I recalled him) and Cartimandua, who had been fashioned into a yielding posture, her gaze averted, wearing the pale drapery of a Roman noblewoman.

  An animal lay prostrate at Caradog’s feet. It was at first indecipherable, a hunched beast, with tufts of fur glued randomly across its back. Yet as the cart drew nearer, I saw that the head of the creature was uplifted, and that it was not an animal at all, but a woman, her face crusted with dirt, peering at Caradog with an expression of anguish. At her breast they had rendered a gaping wound from which two serpents emerged, waving and bobbing, by way of some stringed mechanism beneath the cart. It was me.