by Ruth Eastham
Queen Boudicca’s tribe was systematically being slaughtered.
A shout went up from behind him. Aidan saw Romans on horses weave out between the trees and pour forward.
He was right in their line of approach; they were coming straight at him, but still he couldn’t move. He saw their swords pointed; the horses’ misty breaths coming in bursts … he could make out the colour of their eyes; their stares going through him and beyond to their targets as they accelerated forward …
Aidan’s mouth gaped as the charging horses were upon him. He felt his whole body tense, his back arch with a raw, bone cold as the spectres went right through and past him …
He stood there, numb with the shock of it. On the battlefield he saw the sea of red uniforms swell, the mounted Romans reach the Celts. He saw the remaining Britons begin to fall back and retreat; those left trapped in the field abandoned to their deaths.
A shout went up – loud enough to carry over the noise of the fight.
Aidan gaped.
From behind Iceni ranks thundered a chariot pulled by two horses. Their hooves tore up the waterlogged soil as they pounded forward; their manes streamed back in the wind.
There was a woman at the reins, holding them high.
Either side of her was a tall girl: one with her cloak edged in fur, the other with her auburn hair braided in one great plait.
Aidan shuddered with recognition.
Boudicca’s daughters.
And without the faintest doubt, he knew who was driving that chariot.
It was Queen Boudicca.
Was it her desperate bid to help the trapped tribesmen? One last act of defiance?
It was impossible to know for sure.
The wheels were a blur of movement. Boudicca raised a whip, then cracked it down, spurring the horses to go even faster …
Out of nowhere, a Roman spear plunged towards the chariot.
One of the horses reared, in a stomach-turning spray of blood, letting out what was more a shriek than a whinny.
Aidan clenched his teeth. He saw the chariot swerve, tilt, the three occupants thrown violently to one side. The axle broke, and a wheel careered away. There was the sound of splintering wood. Sparks flew up as metal twisted and scraped against metal.
He saw the two horses slam the ground, sliding to a stop amidst the wrecked chariot.
Aidan held his breath. He saw the mother and daughters, lying still. There were dark patches of blood on their clothes.
Boudicca’s head lifted slightly. He saw an arm move, then a leg, and she began to drag herself towards her daughters.
Aidan heard feet pound in time. A group of Romans had separated off from the others and were heading in their direction. A gold-black Roman banner seemed to fill the sky; an eagle with its wings outstretched, talons out.
Still Boudicca pulled herself forward. One of the daughters turned her face towards her mother; the other was trying to get up, but couldn’t.
Aidan found himself right beside the three of them, transported there – he had no idea how. He could see Boudicca’s face clearly, the face he had first seen between the branches in the clearing; the same face he’d seen reflected in the glass of the museum case.
The group of soldiers got closer.
Boudicca wrenched her sword from its scabbard with a cry, clutching it with bleeding hands. Aidan saw a leaping hare engraved in intricate swirls. He saw a ruby on the sword’s hilt flash like an angry red eye.
He heard Boudicca call to her daughters. He could hear the desperation in her voice; the angry fear. But he was still powerless to do anything, only stand and watch.
Boudicca had reached her daughters and she was gripping them, speaking to them in a low and urgent voice, in a language he didn’t understand.
And then, in the next second, the girls were being dragged to their feet by the soldiers, and Boudicca was crying out as they were wrenched away from her, calling to them in that ancient, forgotten Iceni dialect; repeating the same words over and over …
In that moment, Aidan heard the words clearly. And as they came to him through the air, in that tiny moment of time before the words faded, somehow he understood that forgotten language.
‘Truth!
‘Valour!’
Boudicca was calling out their names.
Her daughters’ names.
The scene began to shift and fade.
Aidan saw the girls pulled towards the deep marshy pond with its thin wisps of flame, but the vision was accelerating away from him in a blur of blue light until …
A wave of sound broke round Aidan, as if he had suddenly surfaced from deep water. The upbeat pomp of a brass band with its sliding trombone notes. Laughter. The clank of blunt swords clashing against one another.
Blinking, gasping, Aidan watched grinning Roman soldiers help up Iceni and shake hands, or give each other bear hugs. The triangular bunting strung out along the fence posts flapped like waving hands.
The scene of the festival materialised once again.
Everything exactly as it had been.
– CHAPTER 21 –
VALOUR AND TRUTH
‘What is it, Aidan?’ Emmi’s voice. ‘What happened?’
‘Did you see them?’ he panted. His hands were still trembling like crazy. ‘Did you see the battle?’
Jon nodded his head, glancing worriedly at Emmi. ‘Er, yeah, Aide,’ he said uncertainly. ‘The re-enactment. We all saw it.’
‘Not that one!’ Aidan said. ‘The real battle! Boudicca and her daughters!’
Aidan let Emmi and Jon help him round the side of a marquee, and they sat him on a patch of grass as he struggled to get his breath back.
‘Maybe it’s the knock to the head he got this morning,’ Aidan heard Jon tell Emmi behind his hand. ‘Delayed concussion.’
‘We did see the horses in the race acting all weird,’ said Emmi. ‘Firefly went crazy! She was in the lead, but she stopped suddenly before the end and refused to cross the finish line. The driver was nearly thrown off. She would have won too. Berryman is furious!’
On the other side of the tent, Aidan could see the final part of the re-enactment being played out. Queen Boudicca, a.k.a. Miss Carter, being transported on a stretcher held up by grief-stricken Iceni, a solemn convoy to lay her in an imitation tomb of grey painted polystyrene.
The procession was walking in time to a sombre drumbeat.
‘You look terrible, Aidan,’ said Jon. ‘I thought you were going to faint or something.’
‘Tell us exactly what happened!’ Emmi cried. ‘You saw Boudicca’s daughters again?’
Aidan nodded slowly. His head throbbed. How could he put into words what he’d witnessed? The killing. The horrible chariot accident. The girls taken to be killed. His chest twisted as he thought of it.
Emmi and Jon stared at him in amazement as he told them everything.
‘Oh Aidan,’ said Emmi, as she and Jon helped him to his feet. Her face was pale.
‘It happened …’ Aidan pointed as he located the place, ‘… right over there. Where the lake is now, only it was much smaller and deeper back then – more like a pit.’
‘That would explain how we found one of the arm bracelets there,’ Emmi said thoughtfully. She looked over at the lake. ‘Sacrificial pits,’ she murmured. She looked back at the boys. ‘Remember, we read about those when we were researching the will-o’-the-wisps? They believed the flames were magic.
‘Maybe the Romans …’ Emmi winced. ‘Maybe they sacrificed the daughters to give thanks to their gods for winning the battle. And if that’s where they were killed, that could explain why their ghosts came to haunt that place when their bones were disturbed.’
Emmi swallowed. ‘What I think is that at some time after the battle – maybe years later, who knows – surviving members of the Iceni tribe collected the bones of the daughters from the pit; maybe Boudicca’s body was there as well. They gave them all a proper burial, in secret. They wouldn’t ha
ve wanted the Romans to find out and destroy the graves.’
Aidan was still trying to get his head straight. The vision was telling him more – he just knew it. He racked his brains about what he was missing, but his sore eye throbbed so much he could hardly think. He forced himself to visualise the scene again: the battle, the overturned chariot, Boudicca crawling towards her daughters. Her tormented face as she cried out to them.
‘But we know from the legend that the queen was buried alone,’ frowned Emmi. ‘Lay her to rest in a tomb of her own.’
Aidan’s confusion suddenly collapsed into something else: a stabbing sense of excitement.
Emmi’s words came back to him; what she’d said about Boudicca’s daughters: Nobody knows what they were called.
Aidan got up so fast that he nearly knocked Jon over. An elated panic spun through him. The answer had been staring them in the face all along! ‘How long until the fracking starts?’
Jon fumbled to check his phone. ‘An hour and ten minutes until the first blast … but what about Berryman?’ he said with a confused expression. ‘I thought we were going to spy on him and …’
‘There’s no time!’
Aidan’s body jumped with an excited kind of electricity. That was it! That had to be it! He couldn’t help give a wild little laugh. ‘We need to get back to the clearing. Now! Go back down into the chamber Robbie found!’
‘But it’s a danger zone, Aide, man,’ Jon protested. ‘And there’s nothing there. It’s cleaned out. You saw the place.’
‘Come on!’ said Aidan. ‘I’ll explain as we go.’
Aidan’s mind was in overdrive as they rushed full pelt towards Carrus Woods, and he gave his friends a tumbling explanation as they ran.
Guarded by leverets, Valour and Truth.
Leverets were young hares. Boudicca’s young hares.
Her daughters!
All along, Aidan realised, the Carrus chant – passed down generation after generation – held the clue to everything.
Boudicca was buried in a secret chamber of her own, and that chamber was guarded by her own daughters. That meant that …
‘Boudicca’s tomb has to be right next to her daughters’ tomb!’ exclaimed Emmi. She cast Aidan a grin and her eyes sparked. ‘Oh my God! That makes total sense. I read once about how some tombs had secret chambers. The front part was used as a decoy, so if it was found it would be thought that was all there was. But the main part was hidden right behind!’
Somewhere in the background, Aidan was vaguely aware of a car in the lane.
‘Boudicca’s tomb must be somewhere in the underground complex!’ Emmi declared. ‘We just need to get back into the daughters’ tomb and find the way into it.’
‘The walls seemed pretty solid when we were last down there though,’ Jon protested. ‘Just rock and earth.’
‘We need to check more carefully,’ Aidan told him. ‘Especially the wall right opposite the entrance, I reckon. We’ll probably need to smash our way through.’
‘That might take some serious hardware,’ said Jon.
‘Dad’s work shed by the stables!’ shot Aidan. ‘We can grab some tools from there on our way past.’
They skidded to a stop in the yard and dashed inside the building.
‘This looks good.’ Aidan heaved a mallet from its hook and dropped it in a holdall. He rummaged around for other suitable equipment.
‘This too,’ said Emmi, grabbing a beefy claw hammer and shoving it in the bag.
She whirled round to face the boys suddenly. ‘Imagine!’ she told them breathlessly. ‘Imagine being the first to go into Boudicca’s tomb since she was buried there! Imagine what we’d find …’
Jon added a crowbar and big torch to the bag. ‘Yes, but let’s not forget about the six fracking explosions,’ he said worriedly. He got out his phone. ‘The first will be at 7 p.m.,’ he muttered. ‘Then the others at fifteen-minute intervals after that.
‘I’m setting a ten-second countdown for each. I want some warning before those things go off!’
Aidan pulled the bag up on to his shoulders and they ran across the yard in the direction of the woods.
‘And if we’re still down there,’ called out Emmi, ‘when the last one hits?’
The question hung in the air, unanswered. Because at that moment Berryman’s red Porsche slammed to a halt in the yard right in front of them, forcing them to stop. The door swung open and he jumped out.
‘I knew we should have used Centurion to pull the chariot!’ His cheeks were flushed as he strode towards them. Aidan smelled alcohol on his breath. ‘You told me the other horse was a sure winner!’ he told them. ‘My friends all lost their bets!’
Before anyone could reply, Berryman was storming into the stables, Aidan following in panic.
The man came to a halt in front of Centurion’s stall. His eyes bulged a little as he took in the scene. Centurion’s bandaged leg; the bag of medication with Ann’s surgery name stamped on it.
Then he spoke, spitting out each word like it was a bullet; his voice dangerously low.
‘What – is – going – on – here?’
Centurion tossed his head, his hooves clattering the floor.
‘He got an injury and you didn’t tell me?’ said Berryman coldly. ‘You’ve been having him treated behind my back?’
‘Dad’s paying for it!’ said Aidan defiantly. ‘It isn’t costing you anything!’
Berryman turned on him. ‘You were lying to me, Aidan. All that rubbish about the black eye and not being able to race; it was all a story! Did you tell your dad to keep away too? He was obviously in on the whole thing!’
‘No!’ Aidan shouted. ‘Dad had nothing to do with it! Anyway, you can’t sack him twice!’
‘I haven’t sacked your dad, Aidan,’ Berryman’s mouth was a tight line. ‘I have to let him go. With a more-than-fair redundancy package, I might add. Once the last horses are gone, I won’t need …’
‘We have to leave because of you!’
‘Calm down, Aidan!’ he heard Emmi hiss from beside him. ‘You’ll only make things worse.’
But Aidan couldn’t calm down. A wave of emotions was pressing down on him, threatening to swallow him up; all the feelings that he’d had to keep bottled up inside him all these weeks began spilling out.
‘You would have had him put down!’ Aidan was yelling now. Why was Berryman so bothered about Centurion anyway, with all the other things he was involved in? He must be some kind of monster. ‘You’d have done the same as you did to Velvet Dancer when she went lame!’
‘Centurion is my horse, Aidan!’ Berryman’s thin face was flushed with anger. ‘It’s my right to do as I choose. How dare you try and tell me what to do with my own horse!’
‘Please, Lord Berryman,’ Emmi came forward with her arms in a pacifying gesture. ‘We all just need to stay calm, and let Aidan explain …’
‘Old Lord Berryman would have been ashamed of what you’re doing!’
There. The words were out. Aidan felt his heart thump with fright, but he couldn’t take them back now, and he hadn’t finished saying what he was burning to say. ‘Your dad would never have signed his land over to fracking just to make a load of money. He would never have got rid of the horses the way you’re doing!’
He had to bite his tongue to stop himself saying more, about Robbie, the attack at his house … he knew he’d already said way too much. ‘Old Lord Berryman knew what Centurion meant to my mum,’ he finished in a mumble.
Berryman stood there, stock still, staring at Aidan, as if he was seeing him for the very first time. For once in his life, he seemed at a loss for words.
Then his face took on a hard look. He snapped the cover off his phone. ‘I’m calling the vet right now. And it won’t be your precious vet I’ll be calling, I can tell you that for nothing!’
Berryman turned away to dial.
‘No!’ said Emmi. ‘Please, Lord Berryman!’
But he ignored her. �
��Yes, Lord Berryman calling. I have an injured horse. I’d like you to come over – immediately if you can. Yes. It’s very urgent.’
Aidan felt tears of anger prick his eyes. He had the sudden need to talk to Dad, to tell him everything that had happened, to get his help. But what was he going to say to him? He couldn’t get back from the city now in time, even if he wanted to. And Berryman wasn’t going to listen to reason, that was obvious.
Aidan knew one thing. He kicked the ground. There was no way he was going to let anything happen to Mum’s favourite horse. A desperate plan took shape inside his head.
If Dad wasn’t here to defend Centurion, Aidan was going to have to take matters into his own hands.
‘The vet’s coming.’ Berryman couldn’t look Aidan in the eye. ‘I’m going to meet him in the lane,’ he said shortly. He strode off towards the gate.
‘He won’t get away with it!’ Aidan told Emmi and Jon through clenched teeth. ‘Any of it!’
They were going to prove what was going on. Somehow they were going to uncover the truth.
And the only way to the truth now, was to find Boudicca’s tomb.
Aidan took a length of rope and unbolted the wooden door to Centurion’s stall.
The horse came towards him with an unsettled neigh, ears flat back, and Aidan stroked the animal’s nose. ‘I’ll keep you safe,’ he whispered fiercely.
Centurion gave a soft snort, nuzzling against Aidan’s palm.
‘Er, what are you planning, Aide?’ said Jon, biting his nails.
Emmi said nothing. Instead she quickly went to where Centurion’s halter was hanging from its hook, and lifted it down. With a nod at Aidan, she helped him to fasten it on to the horse’s head, pulling the straps firmly in place.
‘But isn’t this stealing?’ Jon warned. His eyes were wide. ‘Centurion is still Berryman’s horse …’ His voice trailed off. ‘How can I help?’
He would need to add stealing to his growing list of criminal activities, thought Aidan, along with arson and whatever else.