by E. Knight
I felt my face grow hot. “As well as can be expected,” I said, feeling bad about all the times I had hated them for being what I could never be. They hadn’t deserved what was done to them. No one could ever deserve that.
Smack.
Just as I didn’t deserve Verico.
Smack.
There he was now, swaggering around with the visitors who were gathering outside the Great Hall, showing off the bloodstained bandage tied around his head. Verico, the big blond bear that women said was good looking and that everybody said was a great warrior, and who should have been drowned at birth.
Smack.
I had never liked the way Verico looked at me. Then, on the day of my father’s death, he took it into his head that I might want what he called “comforting.” “You’re all alone in the world now, little Ria!” When he slid his hand around my waist, I dared not make a fuss in front of all the guests who had come to show respect to my father.
The rest of his “comforting” came later, when all the mourners had gone to bed. Somebody must have heard me cry out, but nobody got up. Perhaps they all thought somebody else would deal with it. Perhaps they didn’t care enough to leave their warm beds. But I vowed afterward—some time afterward, when I was able to think—that if ever I heard a cry in the night, I would get up and see what it was. I wouldn’t leave it to everybody else. No man should be allowed to do that to a woman if there was someone else around to plunge a knife into his back.
Except, when it came to the test, I was too scared to do the brave things I had told myself I would do. And now everyone was clamoring for justice for my sisters, and I was silent.
Verico thought I wouldn’t dare complain about him. He was wrong. But then I was wrong, too, because it did no good. People said our men were more honorable than the Romans, but I know the truth. Duro might be a famous warrior and an advisor to the queen, but he was also Verico’s foster father. He’d trained Verico to fight, just as he had trained my older sister, although much good it did her against those soldiers. Duro seemed to think that the sun shone out of Verico’s backside, and I should be grateful to be chosen. But I had seen Verico’s backside and everything else he had, too. There was nothing shiny down there. No matter how often he hid under the blankets to polish it.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
Another pause to answer, “Is there any news of the queen?”
What everyone was really asking was, What now? What will happen now that the king’s will has been thrown aside, his women have been trampled upon, and Rome’s men think they have free rein to rob us? What is to stop them claiming everything for the emperor and leaving us to starve? What will we do?
The fleeces were the cleanest they had ever been by the time I was called into the Great Hall. They told me to find the green-and-gray plaid shawls and the thick skirts and the plain belt-braids. All the things that the princesses hardly ever wore in public because the older one said dressing like that—like everyone else, she meant—made them look like goatherds.
I couldn’t see why clothes were needed. Both the sisters were safely burrowed down under warm furs by the hearth. Princess Sorcha glared at me through a tangle of red hair as I knelt to place the clothes beside her. The lucky princess, the tribe all called her, because her birth had been blessed by some good omen or other—but all her good luck had been stripped away now. I stepped back and crouched by her sister instead.
Princess Keena was thirteen winters old, two winters less than me, and the few people who dared to mention it said we both took after our father: narrow-faced and dark-haired. But huddled in the furs and staring into the flames with those big dark eyes, she reminded me more than ever of a little mouse. As I knelt to place the clothes beside her, I saw she had a shiny red bruise on one cheek and a split lip. I wondered what sort of fighting hero had done that to her and whether he was proud of his day’s work. When I reached to comfort her, she flinched. “I am so sorry, mistress.”
She looked at me as if I were a stranger. “I will be all right,” she mumbled, her words misshapen by the swollen lip. “I will feel better soon.”
“Of course you will,” I told her. What else could I say? Until that day, she could have had no idea what men were capable of. Nor had I. Those monsters had made even the hateful Verico seem restrained. I said, “They told me to bring you some clothes, mistress,” but she did not seem to hear me.
Neither of my sisters looked as though she wanted to get up and pull her boots on. The queen, though, had other ideas. Whatever her faults, she never lacked courage.
I was standing to one side of the yard. I saw the surprise on the faces of the crowd as the queen came out under the thatched porch of the Great Hall. She stumbled a couple of times, held up on one side by Duro and on the other by one of her women, but she was on her feet. As she came into the fading daylight, her head lifted. Hair that was still caked with blood fell in a red tangle around her shoulders, tumbling down over a linen wrap. Her neck was bare of the golden torc that usually encircled it, and her pale arms were gooseflesh in the cold. Instead of her usual tunic, a fine green woolen wrap skirted her hips. Her companions helped her up onto the back of a heavy cart that had been pulled up close to the porch. Someone had draped a red cloth over the side to smarten it up.
For a moment, there was an anxious silence. Then came the shouting.
“The queen! The queen! Bou-di-ca! Bou-di-ca!” Cheering, whooping, stamping, as if they could lift her up on the sound.
She looked out across a yard filled with Iceni who had traveled here to offer her the kind of honor her husband had never been given. And then she turned her back on us all.
I saw the pain in her eyes as Duro stepped forward and lifted the bloodstained wrap. The cheering died. People gasped. I had endured the sight of the flogging, but even I was not prepared for the torn and bloodied mess that was revealed. It was as if her flesh had been mauled by a wild beast. Someone wailed, “No!” and a child started to cry.
Very gently, Duro replaced the linen. Finally, on his nod, I passed up the thick woolen mantle, and it was draped around the queen’s shoulders and fastened with a pin. When it was done, she turned to face her outraged audience. Still, she did not speak. Instead, there were shouts of “Make way!” from the warriors, and moments later the girls stumbled out of the Great Hall. They were both in simple Iceni dress with their hair loosely braided around their pale faces. The little mouse moved awkwardly, clinging to her sister’s arm, head down. Her sister, tall and slender and beautiful, looked like a ghost bent on vengeance.
After they were helped up to join their mother on the back of the cart, I saw why she had chosen such a humble vehicle: there were high sides for them to hold on to. And that cloth, the color of blood . . . People said later that Boudica was driven by blind fury, but they were wrong. She never did anything without thinking it through first.
“My friends.” Her voice had lost its usual force, and the hush that fell as she spoke seemed to be willing her to save her strength. The sight of her wounds and her violated girls—dressed just like anybody else’s daughters—was enough. “My friends,” she said, “I am told mine is not the only family to suffer at Roman hands.”
There were murmurs of agreement. One or two names were called out. “My house burned, my sons taken as slaves!” cried a voice. Boudica lifted her head toward the sound. “I grieve for them, Mato, and for you,” she said, “and for every sorrowing family amongst our people.”
Someone was pushing his way through the crowd. I saw the lithe form and sleek dark hair of Duro’s son: not disgusting Verico, but the real son, Andecarus, the one who had been brought up as a hostage by the Romans. His gaze was fixed on Princess Sorcha. There were people who didn’t trust him because of his Roman education and his fancy cavalry horse and his years in their army, but my elder sister wasn’t one of them, and I thought they would make a good match.
Andecarus gripped the back of the cart as i
f he wished he could haul himself up to embrace his princess. She turned her face away from him.
Above them, the queen was thanking all the true friends who had come here; some had traveled a very long way, and tonight there would be food and beds for all. My sister was still refusing to meet Andecarus' gaze. He leaned in close to me and murmured, “Will she be all right?” I nodded. I dared not speak over the queen to say that I did not know what all right meant anymore.
“It was a betrayal of promises . . .” For a moment, the queen seemed to be lost for words. I held my breath, willing her to carry on. Duro leaned forward and whispered something in her ear.
“A breaking of oaths,” she continued. “An outrage against all of nature and the will of the gods!”
There were cries of “Shame!”
“But listen well, my friends. Listen and remember. There will be a record of the many wrongs committed against us. The gods see everything. Andraste will not be mocked. Our wounds will heal, and we will grow strong again. And all the time we are healing, we will prepare. And then, when the gods give the sign . . .” She tugged one arm free of Duro and raised her fist in the air. “We will have vengeance!”
“Vengeance!” They were screaming for her now, waving fists and sticks and chanting “Vengeance! Vengeance! An-dras-te!” And then “An-dras-te!” turned into “Bou-di-ca! Bou-di-ca!” because with those few words their queen had turned their minds from, what now? And, what will we do? To, when will we do it?
I was one of the few who saw the agony on her face as they helped her down from the cart. She paused to steady herself, then put one arm around each daughter and led them back inside the house. Only those of us who followed her in saw her collapse and heard her cry out as they dragged her across to fall facedown on the bed.
She was a brave woman, and the people loved her for it. Was I the only one who was still afraid? The only one who was thinking, Oh, what have you begun?
I rolled over in the bed, willing the headache to ease and the memory of what had happened to my sisters in the storehouse to fade.
If only my mother were alive and lying next to me. She would have found some way to make me feel better. She would have been glad I was safe.
“But I did nothing,” I wanted to whisper to her. “After that vow I made about answering cries for help—”
“You had a bang on the head. You were dazed.”
“The queen was flogged, and she still got up and made a speech. I should have—”
“What was the use of you throwing yourself away?”
“But—”
“Child, the Romans only came to take things. She could have let them pile all the things they could find into their carts and go. None of it was hers; the king left half to the emperor and half to the princesses. But That Woman chose to pick a fight.”
The truth is the queen was not the only one with opinions. Even I could not pretend that my mother was always right, but I know now that right and wrong are never as important as everyone thinks. Sometimes what you need is not to be right, but to have a warm body to curl up with and a sigh of friendly breath in your ear. And always, you need sleep. That was another thing my mother would have said. “Things are never as bad after a good night’s sleep.”
When I finally slept, I dreamed of my father. He was calling me by name. He had a gift for me, and he needed my help. I followed his voice, stumbling and bumping into things in the dark, groping along a twisted path, calling to him to wait for me. But every time I was close, there was something else in the way, and my father, the man I wanted to please more than anyone else in the world, was growing angry with me.
“Ria!” he called as my feet tangled in another tree root and he drifted farther out of reach. “Ria!”
Then he turned into the slave-master, kicking my feet to wake me into a frosty world where my father was as dead as my mother, I was a shameful coward, and nothing was as it should be.
The sun did his best to cheer us, making the ice retreat into the shadows and almost warming the bench outside the cooking-house. I tucked a thick shawl around my shoulders and began to pick the dirt out of a pile of clothes that had been clean yesterday morning. I wondered about the dream and whether my father really had been calling to me from the next world. It had seemed very real at the time, and besides, although I had forgotten all about it in the horror of yesterday, there really had been a gift.
My father’s will never brought my sisters anything but grief. It led directly to the Roman raid because handing over half the kingdom to the emperor was not enough; Nero wanted all of it. Yet there was another part of his will that nobody remembers. A part that brought joy and comfort to me: the part where a pair of brooches was promised to “my daughter Ria.” Me, the invisible laundry girl, mentioned by name! I was to have two bronze clasps that had once belonged to my father’s mother.
In all the confusion immediately after his death, nobody seemed to know anything about them. I dared not ask the queen or my sisters, so I had spoken to the slave-master. He said it would be dealt with. Two days later, with no brooches, I asked him again.
“It was the will of the king, my father, that I should have them,” I reminded him.
“And it’s the will of the queen and the princesses that we organize a decent funeral,” he pointed out. “First things first, eh? We’ll get to you. They’re probably put away somewhere over at the king’s family house.”
The house he meant was a grand farmstead beyond the bend in the river. The people who lived there were, I suppose, my aunt and my cousins, but if you had asked them to name their family, the word “Ria” would never have passed their lips. So there was no point in me going there to ask for myself.
I was still waiting for news when the Romans came to rip away my sisters’ inheritance and leave them battered and misused on the mud floor of the storehouse. So now, as they lay recovering in the Great Hall and I sat on the bench outside the cooking-house trying to pick mud out of the queen’s underthings, we were equal. Three violated nobodies, with no chance of receiving anything our father had wanted us to have.
And then came hope. It came and sat next to me in the shape of a frightened little shepherd girl who had hidden in a ditch until she was more scared of starving and freezing than she was of the soldiers, or of being beaten for running away from my aunt’s burning house after the Romans had marched the family away in slave chains. Glad that my father was not alive to hear such news, I put one of the princesses’ wraps around the girl and called to Luci to bring her some broth.
The girl knew nothing of the brooches, but she thought they might be with the things in the east paddock.
“In the paddock?” Perhaps her mind was wandering.
“They buried a lot of things before the funeral,” she explained. “I don’t know why, but everyone knows the soldiers take away money chests and dig up the floor, so some of the things were buried in the paddock. And I think some in the woods.”
She did not know exactly what was buried, nor where, but it was a start. Nothing I could do for my sisters would be of much help, but if I had those brooches, I could offer them a gift each from our father’s will. That must be the meaning of the dream. That was what my father wanted me to do, and maybe it would quieten the memory of the storehouse.
There is never as much laundry in the dead days of winter, with the household bundled in thick wool and heavy boots, hunched over against the east wind and more interested in keeping warm than in smelling fresh. That afternoon, with the clothes chests refilled and everyone’s gaze fixed on the queen and the princesses, I carried a bundle of clothes out toward the river just like I had done hundreds of times before.
“You be careful out there, little Ria.”
I jumped. I hadn’t noticed the blond hulk of Verico lurking by the gates.
“Down there by the water, all on your own,” Duro’s foster son went on, reaching out to swat my hip. “You never know who’s hang
ing around. I might come down later and make sure you’re all right.”
I stalked out without answering him, hoping he could not see that I was shaking.
When I was out of sight, I hid the bundle in the reeds, then cut back across to the path, hitched up my skirts, and ran all the way to the house where my father’s family had met such a dreadful fate.
The place was deserted. There was only a black stinking mess where the buildings had been. I skirted around it, pinching my nose and stepping over the fallen hurdles to pick my way around the back of what had been the cowshed. There was no sign of the animals. The emperor must have decided he owned them, too. Either that or the neighbors had helped themselves. Even the hens were gone: stolen or fluttered away to hide in the woods.
The east paddock must be the one with its gate flung down into the churned mud and the turf cropped close by animals that would never graze here again.
Ahead, black feathered shapes rose from something in the grass and flapped lazily skyward. I swallowed, then took a step forward, craning to see. There was a new stink as I approached: not burning, but something worse.
It was one of the dogs. She must have been trying to defend the house, with no more chance against the soldiers than her owners had, and without the understanding to surrender. I stood over her and spoke a curse on the men who had killed her, praying to Andraste that the birds would carry her safely to wherever brave dogs go after death. Then I began to search.
The girl had said the paddock, but nobody was going hide anything in the middle of an open field. The disturbance would be too obvious.
On the far side, opposite the gate, someone had been working on the hedge and clearing out the ditches. Shovelfuls of ditch muck had been slapped against the bottoms of the hedges, and branches that had been lopped had been piled up and left ready for sorting and burning.
It is not easy work moving a pile of branches because when you pull one, all the others want to come with it. I was hot and breathless by the time I found what I was looking for under the third pile: a raised patch where the turf had been chopped into chunks that could be lifted aside. The girl had been right. There was something hidden here, and if someone had taken the trouble to bury it, it must be valuable. Like a family heirloom that had belonged to the king’s mother and would now be a comfort to his daughters.