The woman went to the fire and sat in one of the wicker chairs, looking up at Aricia with a frank interest. “So you are the famous lady of Brigantia,” she said. “Beautiful and treacherous. And troubled also. Beautiful you are, Ricon, as beautiful as a lush summer night, and I can smell the treachery on you, and the stench of dead dreams, or living nightmares. No,” she continued, seeing the expression change on Aricia’s face, “I do not fear you. You bring to me more than I bring to you, sick Lady.” Aricia shrugged and sat in the other chair, then her eye was caught by the feet. They were blue, but not from the cold. She bent closer. More snakes curled in intricate whorls, an infinity of sharp-toothed open mouths and slit, hooded eyes, tattooed under the tight skin. The Druid laughed, shaking back her sleeves, and more snakes crawled up her arms, coils unwinding, heads hidden where they reached for her neck. Aricia sat back shocked, the woman shook down her sleeves, and the blue terror was hidden.
“You cannot look into my face. You are full of disgust and scorn,” the Druid commented. “Am I a woman or a monster? For to you, Lady, a woman is nothing but your soft, ever hungry body and everyone else is a monster. Well. Tell me what you want of me.”
Aricia swallowed and forced her voice out into the huge, unbridgeable void between them. “I wish you to take from me a dream,” she said harshly. “That is all. When you have done this you may go. I will pay you anything you ask.”
The black eyes suddenly softened. “If you are not careful you will pay for my services with your soul. Tell me your dream.”
Aricia told her. At last the horror spilled from her, loathsome and alien, while the wind rose outside and the rain slowed. The Druid listened in silence, her eyes on the fire, reaching beyond the words to the agony. When the words ceased and only the agony remained she closed her eyes, folded her arms, and withdrew into silence. Aricia waited. The afternoon dragged sullenly to a close. On the porch, just outside her door, Andocretus sat and sang quietly to himself, a rain song, a flower song, and the Druid sat enclosed in her thought, thin and stern, brown and white. Then she sat up and pulled a clinking leather pouch out of the folds of her tunic. She opened it and drew forth a bronze ring and then another, and began to tie them into her now-dry hair. “Ask!” she commanded.
“Who is this…this thing that comes to me? Is it my husband’s death that I see?”
“No. Venutius comes to you out of your faithlessness, and the arviragus comes to you out of your lack of honor, but it is Albion herself who stands before you in her deathrobe, she who was unsullied and fairer than any other land, whom you have betrayed into rape, disease, and death. I am, she says, I am, I am Albion. Your roots are plucked up, lady of Brigantia. There is no longer any friendly soil on which to plant your feet. You have cut yourself adrift, and this is your madness.”
“Albion is earth, rocks, trees! The land cannot change its character, no matter what race puts its feet upon it!”
“It can. It has. Two men have gone into your ravenous belly, and it is not enough for you. You are sick with greed, yet even the greedy may remain whole. You are torn in two because you are also sick with hatred of yourself.”
“Take the dream away! Heal me!”
The other shook her head. “I cannot take it away. It is not an omen or a warning. It is you yourself. Only you can drive it away.”
“How? How!”
The Druid tied the last ring and put the pouch away. Then she looked Aricia full in the face, with sympathy. “Send for your husband. Beg his forgiveness. Then join with him against Rome. If you do I promise that you will never have this dream again. Deep inside you, Ricon, you know the truth of my words, and you did not need to have me dragged halfway across Albion to tell you so.”
Slowly, painfully, like an old woman, Aricia got to her feet. Her face was slack and gray, as Caradoc had seen it, as Venutius had struck it. “You are all the same,” she said with difficulty. “Liars, impostors, caring only for the power that will give you back the tribes and the land, to manipulate as you wish. I ask a simple thing of you and you cannot do it.”
“Listen to me, Aricia, and listen well,” the Druid retorted angrily. “I am going to break one of the ancient laws by which I live, for if I do not, nothing will save you. Sit!”
Aricia sank back wordlessly, as though an unseen hand had pressed down on her head. “The Romans are going to cast you out of Brigantia. They will take your kingship from you and make you a beggar, and no one, not even a peasant, will give you shelter. They will see you for what you are at last, and their trust will turn sour. When Julius Agricola becomes the governor, remember my words. Then you must prepare to wander, you and your dream and your madness. Today, right now, you can make a lie of my vision. Turn back to Venutius! Cut Rome out of your soul and let your husband fill the void with his love and his sanity!”
“I despise my husband!” Aricia shouted. “I have always despised him, and I do not want him back! Ignorant fool!” She put her head in her hands. “I don’t know what I hoped for from you,” she whispered. “I should have known better. When I came to Brigantia I heard one of your brethren try to turn my people against me, while speaking of the evil of Rome, but they did not listen, and neither will I. Romans are men, Druid, just men, bringing to Albion more than they can ever take from her. I have terrors, but you have them too. What do you fear? Why do you hate Rome? Name your price and then go.”
The woman rose and picked up her cloak. “You will do nothing?”
“No.”
“Then my price is your soul. I will ask you for it the night I leave Brigantia. Now I think I will go to the hall and drink some wine.” She went out, swinging the cloak around her shoulders. For a while, Aricia could not move. She wanted to call Andocretus to her, she wanted to lie on her bed and cry, but she stayed with her head resting on her knees, her scarred cheek rough under her palm, eating once more a dusty feast of despair.
For three days she did not leave the room, and neither ate nor drank. The wind continued to swoop and keen over the treeless moors of Brigantia, but the sun shone benignly and the children ran into the fields to gather the first spring flowers. Andocretus came to her door each evening but she sent him away without opening to him. The lamb was roasted in the Council hall, the flagons were passed, the jokes shared without her. Then, late in the evening of the third day, she sent for the Druid. The woman came swiftly and Aricia stood in the doorway and watched her stride from the gate, white tunic billowing like a swan, ringed hair sailing also, out on the gale. She saw Aricia and slowed her pace, and Aricia stepped onto the porch and spoke quickly, urgently.
“I have made up my mind. I want you to carry a message to my husband, wherever he is.”
The Druid looked at Aricia curiously. There were dark circles under her eyes. She was hunched deep into her yellow cloak, and her hands were shaking. “Lady, are you ill?” she asked.
Aricia shook her head violently. “No. No! Will you carry my message?”
“That depends on its content. What shall I say?”
Aricia stood straighter, with her head turned away from the bite of the wind and her eyes questing, and though she leaned against the lintel of her door the trembling in her knees and hands did not cease. “Say that I am deeply wounded because of my actions with regard to Caradoc’s betrayal. Say that I beg his forgiveness. Say that I have been mad, blinded, but now I wish to right my wrongs. Tell him that if he will come back to me I will put Brigantia and all her chiefs and warriors into his hands, for the defence of Albion.” The effort had cost her dearly. She closed her eyes, and the Druid thought that she would faint. “Tell him…tell him I have great need of him.” A pulse fluttered in her throat, a visible sign of pain, and the Druid took her by the shoulders and drew her away from the lintel.
“Open your eyes, Aricia, and look at me,” she commanded. Slowly, Aricia did as she was bid, lowering her eyes to the other’s, feeling the stony gaze probe her.
The woman sighed and released her. “No.”
“Why not? In the name of Brigantia, why not?”
“Because I am forbidden to carry a message that is a lie.”
The silence stretched, deepened, became charged with hostility, then the woman smiled wryly. “I see the thoughts chasing one another across your face. You want him back, but not for his good or Albion’s or yours. What would you do with him if he should come? Has any plan formed in that hot, devious mind of yours? Poor lady! I wish to leave Brigantia tomorrow. Come with me. We can find him together. Leave your Roman house and your pretty clothes and your jewels. Come into the west. Be reborn, Aricia!”
Aricia struggled for a long second, for an eternity, her face all anguish and lines of aging, like a livid scar. The Druid withdrew from her, leaving Aricia to fight the battle alone, but then the grimace ceased and the full lips formed an ugly line of determination. Aricia’s eyes fastened on some point far away beyond the wall, and the Druid knew she had lost her.
“If you are going tomorrow you must be paid,” Aricia said.
“I will take my price, never fear,” the Druid said, nodding. “If I walk from this town tomorrow, I will charge you nothing. The price has already been named.”
“It is a valueless price.”
“Perhaps. A pleasant night, Ricon.”
Aricia went unsteadily back into her house and closed the door, and as she did so she realized that she could not allow the Druid to leave Brigantia alive. The certainty came to her full-blown, as a clear, cold thought. Horrified, she stood still, with her hands to her mouth. Kill a Druid? It was forbidden.
No tribesman in all the long history of her people had ever raised a hand to the Druithin, and the curses on such a one would be so terrible that even the Druids did not care to think them, let alone speak them. Kill a Druid. Murder a Druid. But it must be done, I must do it now, tonight. If I do not she will find Venutius and tell him…tell him… Did she read my thought? Does she know what I wish to do with him? I want you back, Venutius, oh how I want you back. You will pay for humiliating me and going away. I want you here before me, chained, kneeling on my floor, your red head bowed. If I could have Madoc and Emrys, too, I would, but you will be sufficient. No, I cannot do it, not this. Not a Druid. Perhaps I can cut out her tongue, or keep her here, a prisoner, or…Or kill her. No! Not that! Never!
The knife lay in the wooden chest, under all the pretty gold-tasseled tunics and bright cloaks. She drew it out and then sat with it in her lap, her fingers cold and limp upon it. Darkness came swiftly, blown into the town like scudding black clouds before the wind. Her servant came to feed the fire and light the lamps, and she sat on, one half-formed thought succeeding another in her mind, and beneath them all, a still growing malignancy, the certainty that the Druid must die. She must have Venutius back so that once more time would move soberly and purposefully, from day to night to day, instead of whirling around her in aimless confusion. If the Druid spoke to him he would never come. If I could see him just once, she thought, his resolution would crumble. He cannot have ceased to love me, he cannot! And then, when he is here, when I have heard the words of apology from his own lips … She stood suddenly and went to the door on trembling feet, the knife gripped tightly in numb fingers. Then I will sell him to Rome.
Night had fully fallen and the courtyard was in shadow. The chill wind flapped at the cloaks of her motionless bodyguard, making them look like giant black birds, and as she left her house and crept, shivering, to the gate, the moon’s light was hidden by a swift-flowing cloud. Before her men could come to her, she called to them to stay where they were, and she passed out of her stone-walled compound. The town was busy, cheerful. Voices that were raised in laughter, the sweet yellow shafts of torchlight, the patter and scuffle of spring-quickened feet, all came to her like fragments of some world that existed far out of her reach and that came to her only in dreams. It was some other world filled with solid things, shapes that did not dissolve with the touch of a thought, people who retained a core of reality and did not melt into nightmare—firelight, sunlight, candlelight, light that did not come gray and diffused from the back of her own mind.
She slipped quietly along the deserted paths that ran behind the wooden houses of the chiefs, and passed at the back of the Council hall, carrying with her a moment full of Andocretus’s voice, raised in song within. Under her feet the ground began to slope away to the earthwalls and the gloomed moor beyond, and then the river. The guest huts clustered under the wall, to the right of the tall, unguarded gates, sunk deep in shadow. No lights showed beneath the doorskins. Aricia walked cautiously to the doorway of the first and raised the skins, but it was empty. The second hut was also cold and dark. But when her hand gingerly pushed aside the soft leather of the third she saw the faint orange glow of a dying fire and a still, softly breathing form on the cot, an almost indiscernible length of body dimly silhouetted. She stepped soundlessly within, letting the skins rustle closed behind her. She stood for a while, struggling to breathe as fear choked her, and she saw in her imagination the spells of protection and warning hovering over that sleeping monstrosity. Then she slipped the knife from her belt and glided to the bed.
The Druid lay on her back, a blanket draped carelessly over her, one snake-gripped arm hanging loosely to the rugs. Aricia bent down. The eyes were closed, the mouth was gently parted. Now I must not think, Aricia told herself. Do it, and afterwards think. Of Venutius running home to Brigantia, to me. Of Venutius rocking in the cart on his way to Lindum. But she stayed frozen, both hands clutching the hilt of the knife, her eyes on the peaceful, small face, so human now, so defenceless, so…so ordinary. Under her long cloak her body’s muscles tightened and loosened in spasms of terror, and cold struck through the rugs to cramp her feet and calves. But she could not move, she could neither strike nor withdraw. She began to cry quietly, unaware that she did so, the tears coursing down her face. If he were here this would not be happening to me, she thought over and over…if he were here…holding me back from myself…if he were here… Then she saw the glitter of eyes open in the darkness and her heart turned over and began to pound. The Druid did not move.
“No,” she said. “No, Aricia. I do not want your soul after all. You may keep it. It is worth nothing to me.” She closed her eyes again and turned over, and the snakes moved sinuously, easily, with her. After a moment Aricia lowered her arm and crept out of the hut, wounded, a broken animal.
In the morning the Druid came to say goodbye. Domnall was with her, and they both stood before Aricia on the porch of her house, new sunlight dancing joyously around them. She met them coolly, her shoulders back, holding out her hand to Domnall. He leaned forward and took it, meeting her eyes with his own. The warmth she read there was not for her and she knew it.
“So, shield-bearer, you are really going,” she said. “To hunger, constant weariness, and in the end a sword through your gut or an arrow in your chest. And all for nothing. Will you consider again?”
He took his hand from hers. “No, Lady.”
“And you, poor Lady?” the Druid said, those pebble eyes black on Aricia. “Will you consider again?”
I hate you, Aricia thought suddenly. I hate your arrogant purity, I hate your ignorant honor, your blithe, stubborn self-righteousness. You were not worth killing after all.
“No,” she snapped back.
She did not wish them a safe, peaceful journey, but went into her house and slammed the door. Leaning against it, her eyes closed, she felt a change within her. The heat of shame was gone, and her head was clear. She was left with only her hatred and her maniacal will, for every other emotion seemed to have died with her shame. Demanded or not, her soul had left her to follow the snake woman into the west.
Spring and summer pursued their accustomed courses. Lambing came and went, crops sprang up green and healthy, cattle wandered slowly over the bare, rolling land, and traders from Rome thronged river and coast. Autumn passed, and during winter, Aricia spent much time riding between her town and the fo
rt at Lindum to dine with Caesius Nasica. They discussed the year’s levy of Brigantian freemen to be sent to Rome, and talked of the sudden death of Claudius, poisoned, it was said, by a dish of mushrooms that the Empress Agrippina had prepared. The new contender for the purple was seventeen-year-old Nero, a vicious fool, in love with a nonexistent histrionic ability that led him to bore the courtiers with a feeble, piping singing voice, who fancied himself the new Augustus. Of more immediate interest to Aricia and Nasica was the state of her southwestern border. Many of her own chiefs patrolled it with the Twentieth where it touched Deceangli territory, and so far she had held her other borders without Roman aid, a fact that every succeeding legate of the Ninth had carefully noted in his dealings with the Brigantian ricon. She was worth all the gold and goods poured into her country, but only just. If the westerners decided to force Brigantia into combat and edge into the lowlands, the headquarters of the Ninth would move to her town and take over her kingdom, but the west was not yet that desperate.
WINTER, A.D. 54-55
Chapter Thirty-three
ARICIA lay on the dining couch in Nasica’s spartan house. A littered table was between them, and behind her a native servant stood to pour her wine. It was late. They had eaten and drunk and eaten some more, while outside the snow fell straight and silent. The lamps had burned low and their conversation had slowed to an occasional dutiful, social comment. Nasica lifted his cup from the table and leaned back, pillowing his head in his other palm.
“I heard a piece of news today that might interest you, Cartimandua,” he said. “Actually it is only a rumor, but a strong one.” It had been almost a year since Domnall and the Druid had left Brigantia with light steps and lighter hearts, and he eyed her thoughtfully, carefully, his gaze level and bright with anticipation. “Word is going around that the men of the west have elected a new arviragus.” He waited for her reaction, but she settled herself more comfortably into the cushions and stifled a yawn.
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