A Year of Ravens: a novel of Boudica's Rebellion

by E. Knight

  "I'll see you settled." Andecarus ushered the Druid out, still managing to avoid addressing me. I glowered at his lean back as he disappeared from sight.

  "It's good your son was the one to find him," Boudica commented, seeing my gaze. "It will restore his reputation in the war band if he's the one to bring us a Druid."

  I winced inside. I was Boudica's right-hand man, and no one doubted my loyalty . . . But my son was another matter. Andecarus had fostered with the Romans as a child, a hostage of good behavior after the last rebellion, and he'd returned more Roman in his ways than anyone liked to see, myself included. The fact that he'd killed his foster brother in a fight after Verulamium last month didn't aid his reputation, either. Even though that fight was justified, the queen needed her warriors alive and fighting Rome, not killing each other.

  Sons. I swear to Andraste, they were only put on this earth to plague their fathers.

  "Duro." My queen's voice roused me from brooding as the bard resumed his song. "What do you think the Druid's omen means?"

  "Andraste favors us." I sat, feeling the ache in my bad knee. "Our goddess of war has given us three victories. Three cities, plucked like plums. Rome is reeling."

  It gave me such fierce pleasure to say those words.

  Boudica continued whetting her sword, her scarred and capable hands moving in long strokes. My queen looked not unlike a sword herself: lean and spare as a blade, nicked up and down with scars along her bare arms like a sword's nicked edge after a raid, nothing soft in her long, tense body or her hawk-like gaze. I'd stood among the king's warriors the day he wed her nearly twenty years ago, seeing a girl of sixteen, tall enough to look even me in the eye—a girl with straight, glowering brows and a bridal wreath clapped over her tangle of rough red hair, and I'd thought you might as well hang a flower garland on a sword.

  "Open battle," she said at last, thoughtful. "It's not the way I'd choose to do it."

  I had been hearing her thoughts on the subject for years, when this rebellion had consisted of Boudica and me in the forest on moonless nights, burying caches of weapons under rocks for some hoped-for future fight. "Our chiefs have no discipline," she had said often.

  "We stand a better chance of destroying Rome's legions if we whittle them by attrition," she said now. "Melting from the shadows to fight and then melting back—that was Caratacus' way."

  "Caratacus went to Rome in chains," I reminded her.

  "Because his chiefs grew impatient and forced him into open battle."

  "Because that bitch-queen Cartimandua turned him in when he fled to the Brigantes. You should have let me cut her throat at your husband's funeral."

  "Perhaps I should have." But Boudica looked pensive, spinning her sword on its tip, her lean fingers flexing. "She warned me."

  "Of what? She's afraid, and she should be. As long as she's been sucking Rome's cock, she knows what's coming when we kick them back to the pit they crawled out of. Once they're not here to protect her—"

  Boudica waved that aside. "She's a coward, but it doesn't make her wrong. We don't win when we fight the legions openly."

  "We've never faced them with a force as great as this," I pointed out. "And the Druid says the gods guarantee us victory." I liked open battle. Where was the honor in formations and maneuvers? A screaming charge to set the blood on fire, swift killing, burials for the dead and honors for the living—that was war. But Boudica was my queen, and I'd been her champion for years, ever since I'd seen she had the same fire Caratacus did. A certain madness was needed to take on a war like this, to spit in the eye of an emperor and all his legions. She had it, and I'd fight her war any way I was ordered.

  "Having a Druid to read our omens changes everything. There will have to be a war council." Boudica grimaced. "I hate war councils. Why can I not order the chiefs to follow my commands and have done with it?"

  "Because we are not Romans." It's the glory of our people—a frustrating glory, to be sure, for anyone who has ever tried to lead us. We do not answer cow-like to a single ruler: every chief has a voice; every chief has a vote. You wish to lead the Iceni, you must convince us why before we stir a finger toward our blades. We are free men. Free women. Not Roman dogs to submit to whips and inventories.

  I rose from my stool, grimacing as the old ache settled into my bad knee. I had a Roman slave I'd taken from Londinium; she was a bitch, but her massaging fingers were a miracle on my old wound. "Quarrels to be settled tomorrow," I reminded my queen. "Disputes over the plunder from Verulamium."

  Queen Boudica nodded, the gold torc about her neck winking in the lamplight, and I slipped from the tent. The war bands were at last on the move again after nearly a month's halt by Verulamium. The vast field of tents and campfires spread before me like a field of stars. I heard the distant shouts: men swearing, women singing, slaves working; the creak of harness and the whicker of chariot ponies and the chink of metal. I smelled smoke and blood and hope.

  So many warriors had come to fight for my queen. More than Caratacus ever had. Enough to take even Rome by the throat.

  I was Duro, champion of queens and adviser of kings; my name was known wherever tribesmen traded wine and song. I was the man who slew six Coritani warriors one by one, armed with nothing but a hand-axe. I was the man who defended a footbridge single-handed against the Trinovantes and dammed it either side with the dead. I was the man who faced a champion of the Cornovii, who boasted he would hang my old head from his door by my long gray hair. He might have given me the cut to my knee that still had me limping, but I ended that fight by hanging his head from my door. My sword was famous, decorated in fire-red enamel along the hilt, and the bards sang songs of my battles across six tribes. I had earned those songs because warriors may live brave, or they may live old—rarely both. But I had. I had seen fifty summers, and I was still a man to be feared in the rush of spears. I had defied the odds. I would continue to do so. I would see Rome fall, and that was a promise.

  I touched my sword hilt, sealing the vow, and returned to my own tent, wishing I could make my own son believe it.

  VALERIA

  Her captor's son came to the tent while Valeria was lighting the lamps. "I've returned from the latest scouting run," Andecarus said, rehanging the last lamp for her. "Brought back a wandering Druid, but there was other news as well. Governor Paulinus has encamped his men and is sending for the Second Augusta to join his ranks—we intercepted one of the dispatches."

  "How far away?" Valeria's hunger for news of her fellow Romans was bottomless. Andecarus was kind enough to feed it.

  "Perhaps a month's march for a war band this large."

  Already a month since the sacking of Verulamium. Everyone knew battle was coming next—the Iceni and their red-haired queen would at last face Governor Paulinus and the legions of Rome. Die screaming, you savages, Valeria thought, giving the lamps a vicious clang, but she couldn't withhold a nod of thanks for her captor's son. "Thank you, Andecarus. You're a good boy to bring me news."

  He was hardly a boy—just a few years younger than she, really—but Valeria couldn't think of him as anything else. It had been her household where Andecarus had fostered as a young hostage, after all. He was a good boy, even if he was an Iceni barbarian. Valeria didn't hope he died screaming. Just his father, his queen, and all the rest.

  Andecarus' eyes touched the tattoo at the base of her throat. She'd been the Roman lady who ruled his boyhood, the procurator's nobly born wife. Now she was his father's slave. The irony was not lost on Valeria, either.

  He gave a nod of farewell—he always left before his father returned—and when he was gone, Valeria reached up and touched her tattoo: a crude symbol like a coiled moon, borne by all Duro's slaves. "What does it mean?" she had said when he marked it into her flesh the day he claimed her in Londinium. Terrified, but not showing it because a Roman did not show fear.

  "It means nothing." His huge rough hand had drilled the needle along her sk
in like a line of fire. "All it means is mine."

  Later that day, Valeria had dragged herself to the dull bronze mirror in Duro's quarters and looked at the mark, revolted. A tattoo. She looked like a barbarian woman, blue-inked, her silk stola replaced by one of those hideous striped cloaks. "You are not a barbarian," she had informed her own reflection through clenched teeth, yanking at her wild hair until she'd tamed it into its usual tidy knot. "You are Valeria of the Sulpicii. Your name is proud, your blood is ancient—"

  And your family would disown you, the thought continued in a poisonous whisper. Because you offered your neck to a needle and your body to a barbarian rather than fall on a sword like an honorable Roman.

  Valeria had not looked at the tattoo since, but she could still feel it pulse at the base of her throat, like an evil god had marked her dishonor with a dark thumbprint.

  But that mark meant she was safe—that was the bitter truth. Duro was the queen's right-hand man, champion of the Iceni. No one touched what was his, and that meant no one ever laid a hand on Valeria when she moved through the colorful tents carrying water or kindling. No one aimed a kick at her or told her to get on her knees and open her mouth. Not like the slave girls belonging to lesser warriors, the girls who Valeria had seen handed around as interchangeably as blankets. Not like the few other Roman women who had been taken alive and not killed outright—they had it even worse. And Valeria knew with an icy shiver that she, as the wife of the hated procurator who had ordered the Iceni queen's flogging, should have had it worst of all. Almost the moment she was captured in Londinium, she'd heard one of the warriors—Duro's hulking foster son, he was nothing like Andecarus—say casually, "We should stake that little bitch over a fire and feed her to the dogs."

  Valeria had frozen in a sick, ice-water drench of terror, hearing those words. Maybe that was the moment Valeria of the Sulpicii, such as she was, ceased to exist. The moment family honor, wifely virtue, Roman gravitas—all those things she'd drunk in with her wet nurse's milk—fell away like a sloughed skin. It hadn't taken very much, after all. Just a few words from a hulking savage, and honor fell away to reveal a woman who would scheme, crawl, and fight to the death as long as it meant survival.

  Survival. What a thing to have to worry about. For so long, Valeria's worries had seemed mountain-sized—worries for her husband's flagging career, worries that she would disappoint her illustrious family. But from the moment Londinium came under attack this summer, the moment that found Valeria hiding in her villa, helping the slaves barricade the door, all those mountain-sized worries shrank to grains of sand. The only worry left was survival—and survival was not the shrill yammer of ambition and disappointment, but a small matter-of-fact voice that had spoken up when the barricaded doors splintered apart. The voice that said firmly, Make yourself useful to one of those warriors who just swaggered in, or you will be dead.

  "Well," Valeria said aloud now, mocking herself. "At least you whored yourself out well." A lifetime of entering a crowded atrium on her husband's arm and being able to tell instantly which of a dozen droning men in togas was the most important—that skill had not deserted her, because she'd chosen the queen's champion without hesitation from the crowd of blood-splashed warriors. She'd stepped out from the weeping slave women, straight and proud, and nailed her gaze to Duro's. She was a craven, dishonored slave, but at least she'd enslaved herself to the right master. For the small price of a tattoo and every ideal she'd ever held dear, Valeria was safe.

  Night had fallen, the camp outside awash in brawls and beer, the night chilly now that autumn had descended. Valeria finished lighting the lamps. The tent was spacious by barbarian standards: a bed heaped with furs, a heavy painted war shield hung on the wall beside a spear with a shaft thick as Valeria's wrist. No books, of course, no scrolls or ornaments. A tribesman's idea of decorating a home was a line of skulls over the door. Valeria glowered at them, remembering her husband's farm in Gaul—that little rustic villa he was so inexplicably fond of. She'd never liked it; it was so small and cramped compared to their house in Rome. But it had an atrium; it had civilized couches for dining; it had proper baths with heated water. And no skulls. Valeria thought she would happily slit a throat for a chance to see that villa again. Preferably Duro's throat, but she wasn't choosy.

  She had a sudden vision of her husband, Decianus, at that same villa, so clear she could almost reach out and touch him. Catus Decianus with sunlight on his thinning hair, patient hands fiddling with an abacus as he looked out over a field of sheep. Counting coins and sheep; it was the life he wanted, and Valeria sent a brief prayer that he was enjoying it. You should have fallen on a sword, she thought, when you failed in your duties in Londinium and left your mess behind you. But I should have fallen on a sword, too, rather than let myself be dishonored, so I am no better than you.

  And of the two of them, at least Decianus could have a hot bath.

  Valeria's captor entered then, ducking his massive height through the door flap. He was perhaps fifty, built like a craggy old oak, with a gray mane of hair like an aging lion. His weather-beaten face seemed permanently set to amusement, ferocity, or amused ferocity, and he slanted a brow to find Valeria curled up on the heap of wolf-skins. "You are the laziest slave I've ever picked up," he said and held out his hands. "Water."

  "I know how to manage slaves." Valeria fetched a basin as he unpinned the gold brooch at one shoulder and shrugged out of his green cloak. "Not be one."

  He splashed his muddy hands, giving a mirthless grin. "Slavery looks well on you, Roman."

  "Romans wear everything well."

  "I look forward to seeing you all in chains, then."

  "It will be a long wait, barbarian."

  He hit her, something he did very precisely. Always a snap under the chin, not hard enough to mark her skin, but precisely placed to snap her head back with a warning wrench. Valeria felt the sting sharply, but pleasure came with it. The smack was worth the satisfaction of proving to him that a Roman didn't show fear. That was the one ideal she'd been raised with that still held any use. Dishonored or not, a Roman woman did not cower.

  So she didn't rub her throbbing jaw, just brought her eyes to his and smiled sweetly. "Towel?"

  Duro shook his head. "What a bitch you are." His tone was grimly humorous. It was a game they played, the game where Valeria deliberately provoked her captor until he hit her. She suspected they both rather enjoyed it: he liked hitting Romans, and she liked proving Romans weren't afraid of savages. "I'm not surprised your husband ran all the way to Gaul," Duro went on. "You must have been the man in that marriage."

  I should have been. Valeria had dreams where she was the one who organized the defense of Londinium, the way she'd begged Decianus before he'd fled and she'd refused to flee with him—in her dream, the Iceni were pushed back instead of swarming the city. Impossible dreams. The Iceni would have swarmed the city anyway. Decianus had seen that clearly—he'd been the clever one, leaving for Gaul while the going was good. Even if the savages could have been repulsed, only in the logic of dreams did women give orders to warriors.

  Well, that red-haired harpy Boudica did. But she was unnatural.

  Duro dried his face, raking damp fingers through his hair. His broad arms were stacked with arm rings, bronze and gold winking in the light. Iceni men adorned themselves like women. Valeria brought mead in a looted Roman wine cup, and he flung himself down on the furs and stripped off his right boot. "I could use those magic fingers of yours on this knee, Roman."

  He never called her anything but Roman. "It wouldn't pain you if you kept off it, barbarian." She never called him anything but barbarian. Another game they played.

  "Sit by the fire like an old man, with my feet propped on cushions? Fuck that. I'll die in battle with a sword in hand."

  Or I'll cut your throat in the night. Valeria's smile was twice as sweet.

  Duro noted it. "Try anything, and I'll gut you. Then give you to my
warriors for a good beating."

  Someday he might, if he tired of the games they played. Valeria still couldn't stop her own tongue. "Shouldn't you do it the other way around?" she inquired as she pushed up the leg of his woolen trousers. "Beating first, then gutting?"

  "That's a Roman for you. Always knows a better way to do everything."

  "It's not an accident we rule the world, you know."

  "Not this corner of it. And you're still a lot of know-it-all bores who should be put to the sword."

  His knee was scarred by an old battle wound, seamed and purple. Valeria worked foul-smelling goose grease into her hands—oh, for the lotus oil from her private baths in Londinium!—and went to work.

  Duro gave a hiss of pain, falling back on his elbows. "You work magic with those hands, but it's cruel magic."

  Her massage skills were another reason he kept her, Valeria knew that. He could always find a prettier bed warmer, but not one who had learned from trained masseuses in Rome. Valeria had rubbed Decianus' shoulders when he was a young tribune—he wasn't a very good tribune; he was always pulling muscles, so Valeria learned to massage his aches. When had that fond habit fallen off? Probably when your mother told you it lowered your dignity to tend your husband like a slave.

  Valeria blinked the memory away. "Talk," she told Duro, kneading his twisted muscles. "It keeps your mind off the pain."

  "Don't give me orders." But after a moment's silence, he began speaking. He always did. "A Druid arrived in camp today."

  "I know. Your son told me."

  That earned her a slitted glance. Her captor did not take kindly to the fact that his Roman slave had had the raising of his only son. Which was why Valeria brought it up whenever possible. Another sweet smile. "Such a good boy," she murmured. "What a nice quaestor or tribune he'd have made instead of a barbarian in braids."