He licked his cracked lips with a dry, trembling tongue. “My sword. I need it.”
She smoothed back the white-streaked, blond hair and looked up at Lovernius. “Bring a sword.”
“But Lady,” he hissed, glancing sideways to the bed. “It is forbidden.”
“If I have to get it myself you will be sorry!” she said in an undertone. “Go quickly. You know where to look.”
He bowed unhappily and went out, and she turned back to her husband, laying her cheek against the frail, heaving chest. “I love you Prasutugas,” she whispered. “I have always loved you.” He could not answer. All his will was bent on keeping silence, and the echoes of another reality were already floating fitfully through the dark confusion of his mind, like harness bells tinkling far away on a scented summer evening. Boudicca sat back on her heels, her arms folded on the edge of the bed where the damp sheets trailed the floor, and all in the room listened, trapped, to that agonized breathing. The girls slipped in, their cloaks clutched under their chins in frightened hands, their sleeping tunics mired with mud and snow brushing the floor, and they came and stood behind her.
“He will recover again, won’t he, Mother?” Ethelind whispered, but she did not answer.
How pitifully old you have become, my husband, she thought, her eyes on the tense, quivering muscles of his face. And how old I feel also. I die with you tonight. My life is over, though I go on moving down the long years. Oh take me with you, Prasutugas, take me with you, don’t leave me here in this terrible coldness! Lovernius approached and she rose, taking the sword from him and laying it carefully beside her husband. It was dull, the blade stained, the hilt encrusted with wet earth, but his hand stroked it and he smiled and closed his eyes.
“Druid,” he muttered, “Druid,” and she leaned over him.
“He will come, Prasutugas.” He shifted then. His back arched suddenly, his eyes rolled, then he lapsed into a stupor. Such a death! she thought in desolation. Such a rude, unlovely passing, with no Druid to ease his going with spells of loosing, and only a blunt, useless sword by his side. And the tuath goes with him, sinking even as he has lain ailing, dying slowly and miserably, limbless and impotent. She sat in the big, comfortable chair where he had often rested with his good arm in his lap, watching her with an amused affection as she paced to and fro by the bed and shouted her frustrations. The girls huddled close together, not daring to speak. The chiefs, Lovernius, and Iain, his shield-bearer, squatted at the foot of the bed and looked at the floor. The lamps burned with an occasional spasmodic flicker, but the shadows, like people frozen into a timeless tableau, were still.
He spoke once more before he died. “Andrasta! Raven of Nightmares!” he called, his voice urgent, then his breathing faltered. Boudicca sprang up. He took another shuddering lungful of air and opened his eyes, fighting to keep it, but then he had to let it go and it sighed from him in a long, quiet wind. He did not breathe again. His chest lay motionless. The pain-marred face relaxed as though with an enormous relief, and a new silence rushed in to capture the little group in its aggressive embrace.
After a long moment, Boudicca turned to Iain. “Go immediately to Favonius,” she said tonelessly. “He will want to send a message to the governor, and to Rome. Tell him that if he wishes to see Prasutugas he must come in the morning. Tell him…” The large, sweeping lines of her face suddenly seemed to crumple inward and she waved him out, striding clumsily back to the chair beside the bed. Prasutugas lay quietly, his head turned toward her, his hand flung out to touch her like the hesitant reaching of a shy child. The other chiefs came crowd ing behind her, murmuring together, and at last Brigid began to cry, but Boudicca put her chin in her palm and watched him.
He was lain on a bier in the Council hall and for three days the Icenian chieftains sat around it on the floor, speaking to one another of his virtues. Boudicca, seated on a chair at the far end of the room with Brigid and Ethelind silent at her feet, listened impassively to the soft, respectful murmur. No chief rose to proclaim Prasutugas’s might in battle or his bravery in raids. No one acted out his fights in single combat with the champions of other tribes. She drank her golden mead slowly and reflectively, hugging such memories to herself. He had been a peacemaker, her gentle husband, and perhaps it was right that the chiefs should bring to mind his careful wooing of Rome, yet she felt ashamed that in all the long history of the Iceni, Prasutugas should be the only lord remembered for his agility of mind rather than of body. He lay quietly in their midst, braided hair on his green breast and a silver helm on his head, with his great blue-enameled ceremonial shield beside him. But no sword rested under his limp hand, and the soft songs Lovernius sang now and then were as plaintive and tender as the lays of love.
The snow continued to fall. Sometimes it thinned and slowed as if tired of its duty but no wind came up to move the burdened gray clouds, and Prasutugas was carried to his mound through a thick, white curtain that hurried to cover him like a Druid’s pall. Inside the barrow it was dark and cold but somehow welcoming—a safe, secret room where he could sleep undisturbed, far from the turmoil of living—and his chiefs put him reverently on the ground and began the last solemn rites. The spokes of his chariot gleamed in the torchlight. His richly chased silver plate, his golden brooches and bracelets, stored up the full, hot light against the long darkness to come and glowed in the shadowed corners of the little room. His men delivered eulogies, but with an embarrassed reluctance, and the words were all of gratitude and amity. Boudicca did not speak. She wanted to praise him for his sweetness, his tolerance, the steady, comforting years of loving he had shared with her, not for his peace, but these things were private and she could find no public deeds to glorify. When the ceremony was over she left the mound and went to her hut. Ethelind drifted to the stable, led out her unwilling horse from its oats and warm straw, and vanished under the snow-laden branches of the forest. But Brigid saw Marcus hovering beyond the cluster of men and she ran to him. He wore Icenian breeches against the cold and his long native cloak made him look like a young chieftain, but his thin, almost pinched face was Roman and his black, short hair, sprinkled with snowflakes, curled around his ears.
“I’m sorry, Brigid,” he said. “We all knew it was coming but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. I feel I’ve lost an uncle, or even a father. He was always so good to me.”
“It’s all right,” she replied. “I think he is happier in death. It was strange, Marcus, watching him die. I was terrified when Lovernius came to fetch me but somehow his dying was so…so small, as if it really wasn’t important at all. Do you understand me? I expected something shattering to happen—time to stop for a moment, or the lamps to go out, something to mark death, but nothing has changed.”
“I suppose death is a going away, just as birth is a coming in,” he said awkwardly. “It is only people who change, Brigid.” She brushed the persistent, gathering humps of snow from her shoulders and pulled her cloak more tightly around her. “Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Good. Then let’s take a boat and go downriver. The countryside will be deserted today and we can build a fire later on. Would you like that?”
Swift words of teasing mockery rose to her lips but for the first time in their long relationship she had no desire to utter them. He was smiling, his eyebrows raised, and without a trace of awkwardness she leaned forward and kissed him on his cheek.
“Thank you,” she said. “I would like that very much.”
They went to the river, picked their way through the upending fishing coracles cluttering the pier, and cast off in a small boat belonging to the garrison. Marcus took the paddle and expertly guided them to the center, where they drifted, the sleepy current bearing them toward the sea. It was warmer on the water, though in the shallows to either side of them the still, forgotten pools were rimmed with ice and the thick brown rushes and waterweeds stood clogged with silted snow. There was no sign of life in the shrouded marshland that s
tretched away from them on either hand, only an occasional water rat splashed into the murky darkness and then swam strongly and was lost in the choked white riverbank.
The snow was turning to flurries mixed with sleet, and Brigid lifted her face to the low sky. “The weather is warming,” she said. “Soon it will rain.” He did not reply and they floated on, swathed in silence and pale coldness. They sat for an hour, sunk in their own lazy thoughts, secure in a mute companionship, then Marcus took up the paddle and deftly steered them toward a dim, tree-hung backwash. They climbed out, pulling the little craft high, then set about collecting dead twigs and branches, their blood slowly heating to tingle in their toes and fingers as they worked. Before long they had kindled a fire and sat staring into it, their shoulders hunched over knees drawn up against the damp. The stately sobriety of the day hung with calm wings above them and they gazed into the flames for many contented minutes without speaking. Then Marcus stirred.
“Brigid,” he said hesitantly, his voice falling dull and flat in the close stillness. “Would you consider coming to Rome with me when I go?”
Her head snapped around. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that instead of waiting years to marry we would do it right away, in secret, and take ship together.”
“But we can’t marry without permission, you know that. And even if we could, how would I get all the way to Colchester without being missed?” Excitement shook her voice, belying the doubt in her words.
“We could think of a way. Ethelind would help, I know she would. As for the wedding, we could manage it once we got to Rome.” He flung another log on the fire and turned to her, speaking rapidly and with fear. “If we wait we’ll never be married. I feel it, Brigid. Something tells me that if I go away without you I’ll never see you again. Call it a fancy if you like, but I can’t shake it off. There’s a doom coming.”
She had never heard him speak so seriously and she edged closer to him. He put an arm around her and pulled her against him. “I trust you, Marcus,” she said in a small voice, “but it is an unforgivable thing, to run from my tuath and my kin. If I go, Mother will not take me back.”
“There will be no turning back for either of us,” he spoke into her wet hair. “I’ve done all I can, and if we are to stay together it’s the only way.”
“I’m afraid.”
“You’ll be safe with me, I swear,” he promised with more confidence than he felt. “And once Father is over the shock he’ll support us.”
She extricated her hands from the folds of her cloak and rose, then drawing one of the bronze bracelets from her wrist she ran to the water’s edge and hurled it far. It sank immediately and she folded her arms and began to shiver. “Why did you do that?” he called and she turned slowly, trying to smile at him over the dying flames of the fire, her eyes filling with hot tears.
“For Andrasta,” she said. “The Queen of Victory must not become the Raven of Nightmares.”
For a month the tuath hung in a strange limbo. Two days after Prasutugas’s burial a Council was called and his will discussed, and though the chiefs were not happy at its directives they accepted it. Brigid and Ethelind now ruled the Iceni, but all knew it was in name only. Favonius had sat with the freemen during the proceedings. He had not spoken, but the people were aware of him and all that he represented, and they did not forget that half the wealth of Icenia now belonged to Nero, his master. The officials from the procuratorial office hung about the town with the traders and Seneca’s employees. They seemed not to know what to do, or they were waiting for something, and as winter deepened and the nights drew in, no chief ran to Boudicca with tales of abuse. She herself was quiet and subdued, riding alone over the hard, wind-raked turf, sitting for long hours by the Council fire, drinking thoughtfully by herself in the hut she was reluctant to leave for the past-haunted house. The snow had become rain but when the skies had cleared once more the temperature had dropped and remained sullenly low, and icicles hung from the eaves of the huts and houses. She was despondent and tense, caught in a mood that was more than the slow grieving for her husband, but she blamed the weather. Winter was hard on man and beast, and this winter could prove to be the hardest of all. The dense forest was locked in cold, and the trees stood with a brittle stiffness and glittered with frost. The river began to ice over. Men and beasts huddled together in the same mood of irrational, glum expectancy, and even the heatless glisten of the noon sun on the crystal whiteness of the marshes failed to raise their spirits. They felt that spring would never come, and if it did it would come too late—for what, they could not say. They knew only that something irreplaceable had passed with the dying of Prasutugas and as yet there was nothing to fill the chasm, and perhaps there never would be. The tuath was like a boat without oars, rocking just out of reach of a busy current.
Priscilla was unaware of weather or mood, and moved fussily about her little house in the garrison, packing and unpacking, for Marcus was to leave soon for Colchester and Rome. But Favonius found himself straying to the high gate in the palisade wall and looking out beyond the copse, to where Boudicca’s town lay. He was uneasy. He had never taken the peoples’ muddled religion seriously before, but now his mind dwelt on the war goddess Andrasta and her fierce Druids, long gone, and he could not drag his thoughts away from the sense of malevolent, brooding magic spreading toward him from the vast forests. Winter was a time of slackness for soldier as well as chief.
Marcus and Brigid no longer raced together. They paced among the somnolent trees, putting the last touches on their plan for Brigid’s escape, and the silent weight of suspense around them became so heavy that even they spoke unconsciously in whispers.
Then, on the day before Marcus was due to bid farewell to Icenia, doom fell. Boudicca had dressed and was cloaking herself for the walk to food in the Council hall when Lovernius pushed aside her doorskins and walked in unannounced, stuffing his dice into his belt pouch, his face suffused with wrath, and a half dozen chiefs tumbled behind him, breathless with panic. “Lady, Favonius is here with a guest, and several hundred other men, most of them soldiers,” he shouted at her. “I think it is the procurator.”
“Decianus?”
“The same. Favonius sent me to…” But he did not finish. The chiefs shouldered past him and pressed about her.
“I woke this morning to find them driving off all my breeding cattle!” Iain yelled. “All of them! My freeman herder is dead!”
“They dragged my daughter out of her bed, Lady. I cannot find her anywhere!”
“My granary has been broken into, and all my winter store is gone!”
She listened impassively though her heart had begun to beat erratically and her throat went dry. She picked up her amber-studded coronet and set it carefully on her brow, then raised both hands and the furor died abruptly.
“Peace, all of you! The procurator is here, and all misunderstand ings will be righted. Go to the hall and wait for me. Lovernius, Iain, you come.” She pushed past them and they made way for her as she bent her head, passing under her lintel and out into the winter morning. The sun was free of the horizon and its light had already gone from pink to golden. A keen wind lifted her hair and flung it back in her face and she clawed at it, her heart still thumping painfully under her ribs. She strode through the hut circles to the gate where Favonius had already started up the path, with a loose, portly man beside him and a stream of jostling, laughing legionaries behind. Favonius looked alarmed. And well he might, Boudicca thought in sudden fear. His escort looks half drunk. Surely they are not serving soldiers! No officer would allow such behavior. She stood and waited, turned into the wind so that cloak and hair blew out behind her, and Favonius came up and halted.
“Boudicca, this is the procurator, Catus Decianus. He brings an edict from the emperor.”
She met his eyes swiftly, and they were veiled, troubled, then she moved to scan his companion. Thick, bushing eyebrows almost met over large, watery eyes. His nose wa
s thin at the bridge but swelled to wide nostrils, giving him a deceptively fastidious look. His mouth was red and wet, held permanently in a smile of polite insincerity, and he was breathing loudly, his belly heaving with his chest. She felt the welcoming smile on her lips stiffen into disgust, and she quickly stilled her face.
“I am glad you are here, sir,” she said, striving to keep the distaste out of her voice. “Perhaps now my tuath can procure justice. We have been sorely used by your servants for some months now, and I am sure you are unaware of our plight. The emperor must know how loyally we have paid our taxes.”
He went on smiling. “Of course the emperor knows, Lady,” he replied, in a voice that was a painful wheeze. “He has instructed me to claim and catalogue the inheritance your late husband so generously awarded him, and with your cooperation it should not take long. Some of my men have begun already. Never let it be said that the members of the procuratorial staff are dilatory in carrying out their duty!” He chuckled at Favonius, and Favonius laughed politely.
“But your men are stripping my chiefs of all they have!” she exclaimed. “Their personal possessions as well! They are even taking freemen away! Surely this has nothing to do with the inheritance!”
Suddenly his eyes went as hard as agates. For years he had watched the Icenian tribute pile up on the docks at Colchester, a profusion of wealth outstripping the contributions of the other tribes and hinting at a far greater hoard to be picked over. Now his appetite would be assuaged. The Iceni had been growing in riches, therefore the Iceni had been dishonest in their dealings with their masters. The arrears must be set to rights. He hated the poor natives, but he hated the rich natives more. They had too much pride, they were invariably contemptuous and high-handed, but he knew how to cut them down. Paulinus did it with swords. He did it with figures. Either way, Rome benefited. And himself, too, of course. That was understood. He answered this raw-boned, red-headed queen with a careful disdain.
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