“Is it? How can you, a Roman, understand that an enemy may be loved even while your sword cleaves him in two?
How can you, with your disgust for us and our barbarism, begin to know the meaning of a warrior’s honor?”
“I feel no disgust for you or your people,” he said. “I, too, live by honor. It is simply interpreted in a different way. I do my duty and am proud of it, and if my duty included atrocitas for the sake of my emperor, then I would order it. But Gladys, I prefer swift battles, and then a slow, peaceful transformation.”
“Well, you will not get it here!” she retorted.
“Why not?”
“Because the tribes value one thing above all others, and that is the one thing Rome can never promise, pay for, or bestow. Freedom. Freedom. You will never kill all resistance no matter how many years you squat here in Albion, let alone turn the warriors into Roman citizens apart from a few weaklings like Cogidumnus, because death is always preferable to slavery, and freedom is the jewel beyond all price.”
“How like a bird you are indeed,” he said. “A poor, struggling bird with wings cut and claws filed. I wish that I could set you free.”
“It is easy enough,” she answered lightly. “Open the door of the cage and let me go.”
“Where would you go?”
“Into the west. What difference can the detention of one aging, miserable freewoman make to the great Roman war effort?” She turned her face away to hide the beginnings of tears, so close to the surface after days of physical stress and mental torment. The sun finally sank, picking up its red skirts and hiding them behind the cloak of the cliffs. Twilight descended, a dim, warm shadow, and in a sky still tinted with melancholy light the first stars appeared, faint and pale.
“You underestimate your value,” he reminded her, tactfully ignoring her struggle to contain herself, and she shook her head emphatically, lifting the hem of her short tunic to dry her face.
Then she turned back to him. “My only value lay in Caradoc’s willingness to surrender to you, but I know he would never do that. Would you? He has the chance to go on. He will not give it up in exchange for seeing me again.” They stood then as if by unspoken agreement, and began to wander back to where her cloak and sandals and his helmet and breastplate lay, a black huddle on the rock. It seemed to him that he had shed them years ago. When they reached them Plautius took her cloak and laid it gently around her shoulders and she thanked him briefly, turning for a last look at the placid, star-silvered water and the empty sweep of rock-strewn beach. The ecstatic, sparkling child was gone. Plautius, a hand under her elbow, his eyes scanning the sharp profile as she looked back, felt the guarded dignity of a royal captive wrap her again. By the barge his officers waited, torches lit in their hands, and the aft light on the tall seagoing ship cast red ripples that danced on the water. He felt her move away from him, lifting her elbow from his grasp, and he realized that he had been gripping her too tightly for politeness. He adjusted his helmet.
“Lady,” he said as they neared the boat. “Will you have dinner with me and my staff tomorrow night in the Hall? I can promise you good conversation, a few jokes, and of course a change from a prisoner’s diet!”
“I do not wish to sit all evening and be stared at!” she retorted, but she was smiling, the silver at her throat glinting as her breast rose and fell.
“I will order ten lashes for the first man who raises his eyes to you!” he promised and she laughed suddenly, pitifully, the humor catching in her throat and turning to sadness, dimly aware of the new course her life was taking, a new thread waiting to twine about her. In the boat she sat far apart and silent, already fighting a future that promised only more sorrow.
Pudens himself came to fetch her when the broad blade of sunset still blooded the horizon. He was dressed in his toga, the white linen folding softly about his legs, and he bowed to her and offered his arm. She stepped from the hut, with Eurgain’s long blue tunic swishing about her. Her hair fell clean and shining, and her little remaining silver was polished and bright. Plautius, in his explorations, had come across one of Eurgain’s tiring boxes shoved under the bed, and in it had been a tunic and a thin silver circlet. He had sent them to Gladys in the morning and she had sat for a long time, fondling the cool, regal gown. It smelt of friendship and happiness, bouts on the practice ground, and drinking together in the Hall while Llyn chased his sisters and Caelte sang softly. She put it aside, determined not to wear it, but it lay on the bed all day, reproaching her as Eurgain herself would have done, and she paced before it, her eyes never leaving it. If she put it on she would be admitting something to herself and to Plautius, something unlooked for and unexpected that as yet she could not face. If she went to the Hall in her worn, war-torn green male tunic she would be saying something else, something that would take the fragile, delicate growth of a spring flower in the middle of her winter and crush it forever, leaving her frozen in the grip of her self-made isolation. In the end she stripped, washing in the hot water the guard brought to her. Then she slipped Eurgain’s tunic on, tying it with her own plain leather belt, and setting the circlet on her brow. You are a fool, she told herself. You are more crazy than Tog ever was. She placed a hand on Pudens’s arm and walked slowly to the Hall.
Candlelight and firelight spilled out to meet her, and in the doorway Plautius stood waiting to receive her, imposing and foreign to her eyes in his snowy toga bordered with senatorial purple. The hand he offered to her was heavily ringed and his wrists were covered by embossed arm bands of gold. He inclined his head. “I will not insult you, Lady, by welcoming you to your own Hall,” he said. “Let me rather welcome you to the company of my friends and my table. It occurred to me in the night that perhaps my invitation would seem like a new ploy to gain your support. What I could not win by coercion I might succeed to by a kinder, more devious route, eh?” He smiled. “If I gave you that impression I apologize, and deny any such intent.” She took his metaled wrist, thinking how grossly, how finally Tog and Caradoc and all the others had underestimated the Roman mind. There had to be more to men that made them masters of the world than the unexcelled ability to wage war, and she understood how Plautius had come to be a senator, a general, a much-loved and respected man. She swallowed. Forgive me, my brother, she thought. Forgive me, Cunobelin, true father, forgive, forgive, members of my Council. She spoke slowly, her words almost drowned by the laughter that gusted from the Hall and the rattle of dishes and cups.
“Welcome to this Hall,” she said, her grip firm. “May your stay here be one of rest, and peace.” For a long time he studied her face, seeing a proud submission there, the promise of a gift, and he was profoundly moved. He knew that the words were not for Rome but for him, yet in declaring him formally safe from her she was also facing the final ostracism of her tribe. He slid his hand back and took her fingers in his own, finding them warm and firm.
“Enter,” he said gently and she followed him while the men in the room fell silent and rose to their feet, cups in their hands.
After that night, Plautius allowed her to walk free. He was busy again, closeted night after night with his officers, and soon Gladys stood by the gate and watched the legions march away, the Ninth to the land of the Coritani on the borders of Aricia’s country, Sabinus and Vespasianus’s Second to the southwest to put down the fresh stirrings of revolt among the Durotriges, and the Fourteenth and the proud, independent Twentieth toward the west. Camulodunon emptied but for the members of the commander’s staff, for the soldiers who were left to build more permanent housing for themselves and to defend and maintain the town, and for the Trinovantian peasants and Catuvellaunian freemen who had scattered, only to come creeping back under Adminius’s persuasion. Plautius had them put to work. The legions were moving slowly, conscripting local labor to build roads as they went, and the speculatores and beneficiarii already clattered over the smooth cobbles on their swift horses, carrying dispatches to and from Camulodunon.
Th
e Great Hall was finally burned to the ground. Gladys stood and watched without emotion. All the farewells had been said, all the memories, bitter and sweet, had been felt and dismissed, and she waited now for the hollow places of her soul to be filled with another reality. When the ashes had cooled, Plautius ordered the site immediately cleared and leveled, and the new procurator, the architects come from Rome, and the officers gathered to discuss the erecting and financing of Claudius’s temple. Taxes, both annona and tributum soli, were set and they were harsh, for Claudius had refused to provide funds from his own treasury for the building of his temple. The money and labor had to come from the peasants who were even now threshing and harvesting their crops and preparing their cattle for winter. The peasants were outraged, not so much at the corn tax or the cattle that were driven from their fields as at the slave chains that fell about their necks and the optios who stood over them with whips as they labored over the charred remains of their freedom. Blood was shed, and cries went up, for a slave was less than a man. A slave was without rights, soul, or voice, but Plautius calmly ordered public floggings and executions and the grumbles died. The only resistance left went underground, into the fierce spirits of the naked, sweating peasants and once-free tribesmen. Gladys, walking by them of a morning, was pierced by the smouldering, dumb hatred in their black eyes. Guilt, held at bay in the lull after her capture, returned to torment her, and she again felt dishonored, reading in those suffering eyes a deep contempt. She should have been there beside them, sinews cracking, lungs straining, instead of lunching with Plautius in his tent and discussing the merits of Roman art. But though she was less of a prisoner than they, her hands were tied. I stayed, she told herself again and again. I fought to the end. I held tight to my honor. But she felt the muscles of her sword arm grow limp from disuse and her body soften with too much good food and too much leisure. She despised herself. She requested sword practice from Plautius and he agreed. He came to watch, an amused smile on his face as she circled and slashed at a disgruntled Varius, appointed by his commander to keep the barbarian princess happy. Once or twice she could have killed him but did not. She was not afraid of the immediate, final reprisal that would come, but she remembered her tribal promise to Plautius and something in her was repelled at the idea of betraying his trust in her.
One day, sitting and panting after a stiff bout in the shade of one of the new houses that now fronted the path to the gate, her sword beside her, she felt something in the dirt under her hot hand. She scraped absently at the earth and it dribbled away revealing a leather sling, coiled in a knot, brown with old blood. She quickly tucked it out of sight under her belt, not knowing why she did so. The soldier from the armory, which now squatted sturdily beside the stables, the hospital, the grain storage sheds, and the new barracks where the last circle had sprawled, came for her sword and she handed it over, rising wearily to seek water. A sling was of no earthly use coupled with her self-imposed truce, but she took it to her hut and cleaned it anyway, rubbing it with oils and wondering whose blood had spurted over its soft, brown hide.
Two days later she knew why Camulos, who now stood behind the stables, had given her the weapon. She had taken a coracle and drifted down the river, hugging the bank to avoid the laden barges that plied daily between the coast and Camulodunon, and raising a hand now and then in answer to the shouted greetings of the soldiers who stood beside the piled goods. Half a mile from the estuary she grounded her little craft, pulled it high, and left it, striding toward the lip of the cliff over rolling, grass-covered hills, breathing deeply and gratefully as the fresh landward wind buffeted her. She had given up sailing right to the estuary, for it was now a busy, noisy place where ships came and went, where soldiers gossiped with the inevitable traders and the sands were always full of cargo. Now she walked farther to where the cliff fell sheer to the rocks and the boiling surf below, and already her feet had made a faint track in the long grasses. She would tie up her tunic and clamber down the dusty, crumbling side without fear, coming to rest in silence and peace where only the cry of gulls and the crash of the breakers spoke.
On this day she crested the last humping roll of hill before the land broke off into blue sky, and she saw two men standing on the edge, talking. Immediately she dropped to her stomach, lying still in the dry grass, surprised at the mindless reaction of her body. She had nothing to fear anymore from Romans. All the same she lifted her head with caution, peering through the waving stalks of grass. Then a strange thrill went through her and her fingers clenched. One of the men was a soldier, a centurion, vine stick held languidly in his hand, sun glittering on his iron-stripped skirt, but the other… The other man was Adminius. She craned her neck, eyes straining. There could be no doubt. The light brown hair billowed toward her, the tunic was scarlet and yellow, the long sword clung to his breech-clad leg, and as he turned to say something to the soldier beside him she saw the broad, thick nose and the cleft chin of her father, but here it was a caricature of the features she had loved. Adminius was running to fat. His years in Rome had softened him, and bitter thoughts of treachery and revenge had eaten into the fair face, giving it a surly, crabbed look. Cunobelin’s unrivaled cunning was there, too, as it was in Caradoc, but not tempered by Caradoc’s sensitivity. Gladys felt sick. She knew that Plautius had kept them deliberately apart out of respect for her, but now here he was, alone but for a soldier, here in her hands. She pulled the sling out of her belt, thinking of the last time she had seen him, there in the dim stable harnessing his mount in a furious rage. He had flung his torc at her, grazing her cheek. I should have killed him then, she thought, but I suppose it has made little difference. Claudius would have plotted his invasion anyway, and Plautius would have come, and I would still be carrying with me the fiery brand of my tribe’s dishonor and my own guilt. Sholto died again before her eyes but she blinked the vision away, feeling around her cautiously. A stone, she prayed, eyes closed. Camulos, you put Adminius within my grasp. Now give me a stone. She forgot her new contentment, she forgot her still-nebulous dreams of imprisonment in the circle of Plautius’s strong, inviting arms. She was a sword-woman stalking an enemy, all effort tensed on the kill, and the man gesturing expan sively, laughing as the centurion spoke, was not her brother. Her fingers closed about a stone, round, smooth, too small, but it would have to do. She knew that she was not proficient with the peasant’s weapon and all she could hope to do was topple him over the edge. She shook out the sling and fitted the stone snugly within it. What if I hit the soldier? she thought. Then I must face Adminius with bare hands and die. She shrugged off the consequence. Mother, keep them talking, keep their eyes seaward, she prayed as she rose slowly. She swiftly raised an arm, began to swing the sling, gauged the direction of the strong wind. Die, you miserable wretch, she thought as the sling whizzed faster. No clean slaying for you. Die in shame. She let go and dropped out of sight, but before she began to wriggle back to the covering shelter of the trees along the riverbank she waited to see whether fate had been with her, her lips drawn back, teeth clenched. The stone struck. Adminius cried out, his hand flying to his neck, and even as he flung out an arm to steady himself he lost his balance and his feet slipped. The centurion leaped forward, grabbing at his tunic, but it tore away, and the scream that ripped the sun-drenched summer air was more sweet to Gladys’s ears than the loveliest song Caelte had ever sung.
At last, at last, she exulted, sliding on her belly through the grass as the centurion dropped his pitiful handful and began to run shouting along the clifftop. I am clean, I am avenged. Take heed, Tog, and all you noble dead. She reached the trees and forced herself to walk slowly along the damp turf beside the water until she came to her coracle, got in, and picked up the paddle, dropping the sling into the river. The sun beamed down, dappling the limpid depths, and fish flicked away like cold shadows to hide in the waterweed as her boat moved upstream. She would go back to Camulodunon. She had no need of the ocean’s balm this day.
Plaut
ius kept his opinion about the cause of the Catuvellaunian chief’s death to himself. He questioned the centurion briefly, listening to his story with an inward smile, then he sent for the river guards and enquired when the Lady Gladys had taken out a coracle that day. His knowledge of her and his growing intuition about her did the rest. The soldiers were saying that an insect had stung the barbarian in the neck and he had swiped at it, lost his balance, and fallen, and the story was a two-day wonder. Then Vespasianus returned from Rome and the legionaries found other topics of conversation. Plautius let the matter drop. He knew the necessity of using traitors and informers. He had done it many times in the past, but always with an almost physical distaste, and he was not sorry that Adminius was dead. He had outlived his usefulness to Rome in any case. The invasion had been so decisive that he had not even been needed as a puppet king. The act had not been murder. To a Catuvellaunian sword-woman it had been retribution, and Plautius knew that Gladys would not kill again in the same way. From then on he never once referred to Adminius in her presence, and by this she knew that he understood.
He took to accompanying her every evening when she floated to the beach and strolled beside the dark water, the cares and decisions of his day somehow shrinking into a new proportion under the influence of her calmness. Summer was almost over. The early mornings were soaked with a fine, white mist, the evening air held a nip, and day after day the migrating birds rustled overhead in piping black clouds. Preparations for winter were going ahead well. The Ninth had built an encampment on the Marches of Brigantia and were preparing to enter winter quarters, their front secured by Aricia’s promises of cooperation. Vespasianus had rejoined the Second, now in snug temporary barracks, while the Durotriges smarted, cowed after more than a dozen new defeats. Vespasianus had already begun to plan his push northwest in the spring if all went well. The Fourteenth and Twentieth were still moving uneasily through Cornovii country, all too aware of the proximity of the men of the west, but all seemed quiet.
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