“I find that hard to believe,” she said. “They have been on the move all summer, and the legions have only just gone into winter quarters. They have not had time to Council all together.”
“The news I hear is that the decision was handed down by the master Druid himself, subject to each chieftain’s approval. There were no objections. Shall I tell you who was chosen?”
“If you like.” She smiled at him briefly, noting sleepily how the wine had brought a dull flush to his heavy, pockmarked features and swelled the flesh around his bleak eyes.
“Oh I like. And so will you. I have been saving this information until the end of the evening. I thought it might put the crowning touch on a good dinner.” He smiled back at her, his mouth conveying only his ever present cynicism, his eyes an unwavering stare of observation. “The choice has fallen on Venutius, your husband. It seems that he is their new arviragus.”
Nasica’s smile widened as he saw the pale face blanch. He watched clinically as she leaned forward to pick up her cup, an almost imperceptible shake in her fingers as she brought it to her mouth and emptied it quickly.
“No,” she said with a little gasp. “They would never choose him. Never! He is not to be trusted, he cooperated with me and with Rome for too many years. He…”
“He is to be trusted now,” Nasica replied. “In fact, the choice is a logical one since he comes into the west from the outside. By choosing him no one tribe can be incited to jealousy of another because its chieftain has gained eminence. He brings a backbreaking load of wrongs and personal grievances with him. Hatred for Rome because of what she has done to his beloved Brigantia, and hatred for the tame natives—you, in particular, Cartimandua. You must admit that you made his life a living torment. And he has had three years in which to prove himself. But all that is behind him now. He is arviragus. He won’t come back to you, no matter how you thirst for him. Personally, I find the situation amusing. You, one of our staunchest allies, married to our greatest enemy.”
She snapped her fingers impatiently and the servant moved quietly from the shadows to refill her cup. Once again she tipped it high, licking her lips, then she flung it onto the table, where it clashed and rattled amid the debris, coming to rest against Nasica’s empty plate. “I fail to see the humor. What will the governor say now?”
“Nothing. Why should he? I have sent on the news, and he will remember who it was that gave Caradoc to the emperor. He will not trouble you, Cartimandua.”
She turned onto her back and lay staring at the ceiling, one arm raised across her forehead and the other tapping the back of the couch. Venutius as arviragus. That fumbling, hot-tempered innocent chosen by the master himself to pick up Caradoc’s mantle… Her lip curled contemptuously. Impossible! Caradoc had had a brilliant, devious mind, a mind that could outwit Scapula time and again, a mind that projected power to his followers, a mind that was rich, whole, unrelenting. Ah Sataida, Caradoc, Caradoc! Venutius was a simple, foolish child, unable to plan his way from the north of his country to the south, let alone plot and carry out military operations year after year. Or was he? Have I ever seen him as a man? she wondered. Perhaps I do not know him at all. Suddenly she was greedy for him, and on the wave of this terrible hunger came an idea. She sat up unsteadily.
“Nasica, order the servants out.” With eyebrows raised he did as he was bid, and when the door had closed quietly he turned back to her. She was sitting upright on the edge of the couch, her hands pressed tightly together. “Now,” she said. “What will you give me for another arviragus chained at your door?”
You bitch, he thought, looking at her with admiration, seeing her tongue flick out to moisten red lips, the gleam of excitement in her eyes. You fiendish little bitch. How long will it be before there is no one and nothing left to sell, and you begin to feed on yourself? “The price will be the same, I imagine. I will have to send to the governor for confirmation. What makes you think you can do it?”
“While I am living he will not come near me, but dying… I think, Nasica, that I must begin to die, very slowly, very painfully.”
He lifted his cup in salute and for a moment their eyes met in perfect understanding. Then she said, “Tell me, legate, how do Roman men make love?”
He was not taken aback. He had seen it coming for a long time and had been waiting with amusement. Now she was frenetic, fired, and her movements were jerky and continual. Her hands flew over the table and about her hair, in a tension within her like a tightly coiled spring. The languid sleepy woman had gone, swept away on the tide of this tight, hot-eyed animal. He knew better than she herself what had caused this sudden burst of energy and lust, and something within him answered her impudent invitation with a callous affirmative. “I have no idea,” he responded easily, “seeing that I have never been driven to that extremity. But I know how native women make love. With reluctance.”
She laughed, and leaving her couch she came and stood over him. “Does a commander stoop to rape?”
“Not usually. It is better for a commander to buy his women.” The smile had left his face and he lay relaxed and waiting, his eyes echoing the sarcasm of his words, and she began to strip the jewelry from her arms.
Aricia shut herself up within her house, and Caesius Nasica remarked to his officers during a staff meeting that the Brigantian queen was very ill. Before long the troops were speculating on the nature of her sickness and whether she would die, leaving Brigantia in the far more capable hands of a praetor. The rumor filtered slowly through the forts and garrisons of the lowlands and from thence to the native populations of the towns. By the time a new spring came eagerly elbowing winter out of the way the story had grown. Cartimandua was dying of a wasting disease that shrunk the flesh from her bones and made her unable to stand. Some said it was her goddess’s judgment upon her, and a fitting retribution for her betrayal of Caradoc. Some said that the Romans were poisoning her. Some said that now, nearing her end, she had repented of her dishonesties and lay on her bed weeping and tearing her clothes, calling for her husband. Only her most loyal chiefs, Nasica, and the governor knew the truth, and all waited with bated breath for the gossip to reach Venutius’s ears.
Spring waxed hot and strong, and Brigantia celebrated Beltine with gaiety. But Aricia, pacing from window to door and back to window in the dim, stifling prison of her Roman house, saw neither the sun dancing on the hill outside nor the black, star-frosted sky. She waited to feel the moment, the right moment, when she could be sure that Venutius had word of her distress and she could send Andocretus to him to confirm the rumors that would surely, she told herself, twist his heart and darken his days. She settled the affairs of the tuath through Andocretus and went no more to the Council hall. She had not bothered to replace Domnall with a new shield-bearer, for her arms had forgotten how to hold sword or shield. Finally she sent for Andocretus.
“Tell me the mood of the tuath,” she requested. He closed the door quietly and came to her across the soft sheepskin rugs, his legs bare and tanned with hot sun, his blond hair loose and already bleaching to a gleaming white-gold from days spent with his flocks.
He shrugged. “It has not changed. Your chiefs know that you are not ill, but as Venutius took with him all whose loyalties were suspect, it does not matter. The freemen are busy with sowing and birthing, and I have distributed seed as you ordered, making sure they know it came from Rome.”
“Then if I send to Venutius now, and he comes, no Brigantian hand will be raised in his defense?”
He allowed his gaze to travel the sun-starved, pale skin, and the drooping shoulders. The air of lethargy and boredom that enveloped her reached to him also, making him feel suddenly tired. “None at all. No Brigantian rushed to save Caradoc either. There was only your husband, Lady, and now he and his men have gone. You have nothing to fear from Brigantia anymore.”
She glanced at him sharply, but innocence shone on his brown face. “Very well. I want you to take a chief and horses and go into the
west. Find Venutius. Tell him that I am dying and that I wish to see him and beg his forgiveness. Make up anything else you like, I don’t care, but convince him that he must come.”
“How am I to reach him before the western wildmen shove a sword through my gut?”
“Do you think the rumor of my illness has come to his ears yet?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can be sure that no strange tribesman taken in western territory will be slain before he has had time to give his news. Venutius will be mad for news of me. His anxiety will be destroying him, I know, Andocretus. He will be grasping at every whisper that comes to him out of Brigantia. You will reach him in safety.”
“What of Rome?”
She walked away from him and slumped onto her unmade bed. “The governor is sulking. He wants to go home. Now that Scapula’s western frontier has been refortified and secured he will not push the rebels because he simply cannot be bothered. He allows the forts and garrisons to defend themselves but he will not let them mount any attack. He feels that he has done his duty now that he has cleaned out Siluria for good. Nasica told me so. You will be able to cross the battle lines without hindrance.”
“Gallus wants the emperor to order a full withdrawal from Albion,” Andocretus said softly.
“That is why he does nothing. But he is a fool. If he would take a tour of his western frontier himself, he would understand how completely he plays into Venutius’s hands by giving the rebels this long respite. Time to eat and grow strong again, time to rest, time to plot. But he does not care. He is nothing but a time-server, and if he leaves Albion before Venutius explodes out of the west once more he will be luckier than he deserves.”
Aricia looked down at the hands that had begun to twine about each other of their own volition at the mention of Gallus’s desire for the permanent abandonment of Albion. The thought of Rome going away forever was too terrible for her mind to contemplate, but the subsequent thought, the one that brought real, incapacitating fear, was the bloody, fire-rimmed picture of the chieftains of the west, riding out of the mountains at last, like violent gods hunting her down. It will not happen, she told herself vehemently. If I deliver Venutius to the governor it will not happen.
“Our governors have not been lucky men,” she said as lightly as she was able, and Andocretus felt his mouth dry up. Roman luck was a weak, pale thing beside Albion’s hatred, and he must go on an errand for Rome and face the hostile eyes of Albion’s forests, walk the narrow tracks of her mountains, with only Roman luck to ward away her virulence.
“I hate war!” he said suddenly. “My father used to taunt me and call me a coward because I loved my songs and not my sword, but I am not a coward. I simply hate war.”
“Poor Andocretus,” she said gently. “You should have been a Druid,” and he did not hear the contempt in her voice. She knew that he was gifted and handsome and weak, but not in the way Venutius was weak—not weak with too much honor or too much love. Andocretus was weak with too much self-seeking, a mediocrity in everything but his talent. In the days when bards had been Druids he would have failed at both. But he was good to the eye, young and tall and fresh, and she rose to kiss him longingly.
“Go now,” she said. “Practice your lying. If your eyes falter when you face Venutius, he will know all, and here. Take him this.” She strode to her table and flung a heavy gold necklace to him, encrusted with jet and seed pearls. “This will melt his big heart. It was his wedding gift to me.” He caught it and stuffed it into the pouch at his belt. “If you are unlucky enough to tell him your tale with a Druid standing by, and you are accused of falsehood, point out to him that the Druithin have always hated and been suspicious of me. Bring him back, Andocretus, as you love me!”
“But I do not love you, Lady,” he quipped as he went to the door and opened it. “Does Nasica?” Then he began to laugh and she laughed also, and he closed the door behind him and walked out the gate under the steady summer sun.
He struck out due west, taking with him another young chief, a member of Aricia’s bodyguard, and they went unarmed. When Scapula disarmed the tribes he had allowed certain ricons and their nobles to retain their weapons, but the majority of Brigantians went without defences and Andocretus had decided that it would be safer for him and his companion to be seen as helpless. They did not hurry. They ambled across the Brigantian hills, their tans deepening under the ceaseless blowing of the hot wind and the bright cascade of sunlight. Their eyes swept across the vast, rolling horizon, and they filled their nostrils full of the odors of bending grasses and hidden flowers. They sang gay songs, and Andocretus was glad to be free of his aging, darkly complex mistress for a while. He could understand her desire to capture an arviragus on Rome’s behalf but her constant appetite for a husband she did not love, indeed, one she had fought with through all the years since her return to Brigantia, puzzled him. He put her behind him and did not look ahead, content to savor the lengthening hours of sweet summer daylight, the nights swathed in his cloak listening to the stars’ faint music. He and his friend ate well, demanding hospitality from the village chiefs as they went or sharing onions and leeks with odd Roman patrols that moved freely across Brigantia. It was with reluctance that they came at last to the western coast and turned south, walking their horses hock-deep in the gray, swirling foam that sucked at their hanging feet.
“Where is Venutius?” his companion asked him, his brown hair whipping into his eyes as he flung stale crumbs to the seagulls that had followed them every day in a squawking cloud.
Andocretus raised one shoulder, his eyes narrowed against the spray. “I do not know. We will keep to the coast until we reach Deceangli country, then take the first path that strikes inland. We will stop at the fort at Deva, I think, and get news of the rebels.”
“I hope they are not summering in the mountains. I hope they have come down to fight. I am afraid of mountains.”
“And I, too, but with luck we will have good guides.” His friend nodded, smiling, and they cantered on.
A week after they had turned south along the coast they met a Roman patrol out of Deva. There was no laughter and loose talk with these fully armed, flint-faced, grim men who spent their time scouting the foothills. They were men who had lived for so long with the hourly expectation of a savage death that there was no longer anything but a wary animality in their eyes. If Andocretus had not seen them and hailed them fluently in their own tongue they would have shot the two youths from afar. Their centurion wasted no time in conversation with them but yoked their horses together and took them to the fort, he and his men moving swiftly away from the ocean through the Deceangli’s brooding forest. Even when the great walls of the fort loomed up out of its little valley, the centurion and his men neither relaxed nor chattered among themselves.
Once arrived, the centurion ushered Andocretus and his friend into the presence of the legate, leaving them without a backward glance. The legate, Manlius Valens, looked them over quickly as they stood before him, his arms folded on his desk.
“Who are you, where are you from, and where are you going?” he snapped crisply.
“We are Brigantian chieftains, seeking contact with Venutius, leader in the west,” Andocretus replied smoothly and politely. “We are to tell him that his wife is dying and wishes him to return to her.”
“Brigantia,” the legate muttered, unfolding his arms to thumb through the dispatches lying piled neatly under his hand. “Brigantia.” Andocretus and his companion waited while the man found the message he was looking for. He skimmed it rapidly and then tossed it back onto the desk, favoring them with a cold smile. “What do you want me to tell you?”
Andocretus stepped forward. “We need to know where Venutius is, where his host is summering.”
The legate barked once in laughter. “Three days ago he and his men attacked a posting station not twenty miles from here and took all the horses. They killed thirty of my men. He is very close, gathering horses and massing
his men, but the governor will not have us attack him before he can fall on us. You will have no trouble finding him. He knows that my hands are tied. Do you want a guide?”
The two young men looked at each other, then Andocretus shook his head. “No, sir. We do not want to take the chance of being seen with a Roman, but we would like supplies.”
Valens folded his arms again. “Very well. Good hunting.”
They realized that they had been dismissed. Awkwardly, they left the office and wandered onto the parade ground, uncertain who to approach, staring at the motionless men who stood guarding the aquila, the sentries high on the wall, feeling unwanted, a nuisance in this place of constant danger among men who stood endlessly to arms.
Andocretus wondered how long it had been since the men of Deva had laughed for sheer happiness. Now I think on it, he mused, I have never heard a Roman laugh for nothing at all, for simply the joy of being alive. What a heavy people they are! Then the legate’s secretary emerged from his office and beckoned them, leading them around behind the administration building to the granaries.
“Fill your packs,” he told them. “Your horses have been victualed and watered. If you wish, you may stay here today and tonight, but the legate advises you to leave at sundown and put a few miles between yourselves and the fort before you rest. If the tribesmen catch you too close to Deva they will be suspicious.” He left them to stuff the grain into their packs. Andocretus had no wish to linger in that forbidding, death-scented place. He and his friend went to the stables, led out their horses, and breathed a sigh of relief when the tall gates slammed shut behind them with indecent haste.
It was noon. The sun was high in a blue, cloud-dotted sky. They hurried out of the valley and entered the forest once more, veering south and slightly west, riding slowly and in silence. The trees closed around them and were immediately suffocating to them both who had been reared under Brigantia’s wide sky, and they soon began to sweat. The forest was oppressively still. Occasionally a bird chuckled or the undergrowth rustled, but in the main a brooding quiet weighed down upon them, laying fear on their shoulders and about their necks like soft veils. They did not stop to eat but in the late afternoon, when light shafted through the trees and a slight breeze rustled the dark leaves, Andocretus reined in. “I cannot bear this anymore,” he half-whispered. “I am going to climb a tree and see where we are.” He stood on his mount’s broad back and sprang onto a branch, disappearing upward with scarcely a sound. Minutes went by while the young man on the ground held the horses’ heads and peered anxiously above him and around into the evening’s first shadows. Then Andocretus sprang down softly beside him. “Far to the south the forest begins to thin,” he panted, “and rocks and cliffs appear. But I think we have another day’s march before we reach the foot of the mountains. We will make camp here.”
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