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

by E. Knight

  "Duro," she mused. "What if we lose tomorrow?"

  I wasn't disquieted by her words. Any good leader speaks of defeat in the dark hours of the night before victory. It is wise to do so—those who brazen victory and declare defeat impossible tempt the gods. Boudica spoke of defeat for the purpose of rendering it null, so I drew my whetstone calmly down my blade. "Even if we lose, what of it? We have made a song of freedom that will ring for a thousand years. No one will forget the Iceni or their red-haired queen."

  "Will they not?" She smiled.

  I caught her eyes. "Win or lose, we are already victorious. We made Rome tremble. We shook an empire to its core. Even if we were massacred to a man tomorrow, I would not trade this year of rebellion for all the peace in the world under Rome's boot." And that was truth.

  My queen gave me a sudden grin like a flash of torchlight. "It has been glorious, hasn't it?"

  "That it has. Besides," I added, "we are not going to lose."

  "So let us be merry, old man." Boudica called for her bard, and he strung his harp and sang the song he'd woven years ago for the duel I'd fought against six Coritani warriors, and then I called for a newer tune and he drew magic from his strings, telling of a flame-haired queen so tall her head brushed the clouds, whose spear haft was a full-grown oak and whose sword was a streak of lightning. We sang and we listened, my queen and I, as the moon fell down the sky. Tomorrow's coming triumph surged giddy in our blood, and in all my life, I had never been so happy.

  VALERIA

  If there was anything that annoyed Valeria, it was how her own body betrayed her while she was asleep. She always began the night curled under the furs as far from her captor as possible . . . but the nights in Britannia were so cold, and at some point she invariably turned over in her sleep toward the nearest source of warmth. Never mind that it was a bloody-handed, foul-mouthed illiterate whose most fervently held beliefs involved dead Romans and bone decor, he was warm. Valeria's mornings invariably began with a scowl as she realized that yet again, she was cuddling with a barbarian who smelled of wood smoke, sheep fat, and sword oil. Keeping moral standards high was clearly impossible in cold climates. It was no coincidence that the empire that had civilized the world sprang from the south.

  But dawn that morning found Duro already risen for once, plucking at a platter of stale bread and dried meat. His gaze found Valeria as she pulled her tunic over her head. "Arm me," he said, rising. "It's time."

  Valeria finished tying up her hair, coming to the stack of clothes and armor he had laid out the previous evening as painstakingly as a bride laying out her wedding veil the night before her vows. "It's a pity you weren't born Roman," she couldn't help saying.

  "In the name of all the gods, why?" Duro pulled his old tunic over his head, and she saw the white lines of old battle scars along his ribs and chest.

  "Because you're passably disciplined for a savage." Valeria shook out his battle tunic—heavy red wool, thick enough to cushion the weight of the mail that would come over it. "You'd have done well in our legions."

  "You see me with a breastplate and a gladius, setting fire to huts and drinking that sour piss you Romans call beer?" Duro shrugged the red tunic down over his head, and Valeria tugged the hem straight. "I should cut your tongue out for that."

  "You haven't done it yet, and after this morning, I doubt you'll have another chance."

  He gave a wintry smile as he reached for his mail coat. "We're going to win, Roman."

  Valeria gave the smile right back. "You're going to lose, barbarian."

  "One of us is wrong." He slid his arms into the coat. "Today we'll find out which."

  Fear pulsed in Valeria's stomach despite herself. One hundred thousand Iceni warriors, she thought and swallowed. No matter how she scoffed at barbarians and their screaming charges, she'd spent months watching Duro and the other warriors spar: stripped to the waist, teeth bared, slashing with brutal strength. They were no mean fighters.

  Legionary discipline will win the day, she told herself and sent a prayer to Fortuna for Governor Paulinus and his ten thousand men, entrenched in their valley just a scant few miles away, doubtless making their own desperate appeals to the goddess of luck.

  She finished arming her captor in silence. The mail coat, rare and expensive in these savage lands, burnished to a silvery gleam. The red tunic and blue breeches. The long-sword in its enameled red scabbard. The war helm with a crest of scarlet feathers . . . Valeria could not help a smile.

  "What's that smirk?" Duro caught the twitch of her lips.

  "This looks like a legionary commander's helm. Governor Paulinus wears one very similar."

  "I'll look for it on the field, then, so I can kill him."

  Valeria stood back, gazing at her captor critically. Duro looked not unlike Paulinus: both tall men, weathered and hard-muscled, with the same smiles of calm ferocity. Cut Duro's graying lion mane short and trade the mail coat for a cuirass, and the man in front of her could have been Rome's champion instead of Boudica's; a man who could effortlessly command legions and order provinces. The kind of man you pushed Decianus to be. The irony was not lost on her in the slightest.

  Duro rummaged in a chest under the line of skulls and tossed a bundle of cloth at Valeria. Silk, cool, smooth silk—with a jolt she recognized the green stola she had been wearing the day she was captured.

  "Put that on," Duro ordered, busying himself with a pot of something foul smelling and blue that looked like woad. "You know what Roman legionaries do to our women. If the day goes ill for my queen, you don't want to be mistaken by a lot of rampaging centurions for a native woman."

  He sounded sublimely unconcerned that the day could ever go ill for his queen. But he had admitted the possibility, something Valeria had not heard him do in all the months she shared this tent. Hope flared a little more strongly. She sent another prayer to Fortuna as she slid her roughened hands over the silk, remembering the woman who had worn it last. What a bitch that woman had been. Perhaps I still am. But a bitch who knows something more about the world than the one taken captive in Londinium.

  She looked at Duro, who was daubing his face in blue patterns. "What does it matter to you if I'm mistaken for a native and killed by centurions? Presumably if that happens, you'll already be dead."

  He turned to face her, looming in his barbaric war splendor, his face a brutal mask of blue paint. "I hate you Romans," he said. "I'd put every one of you to the sword if it gave back my world the way it was. Even you. But given a choice, I'd rather see you live, Roman bitch. In another life, you could have been a warrior, scars up and down those arms instead of pearls. Well," he amended, "if you'd drunk proper nourishing beer rather than watery Roman wine while you were growing up, and got tall enough to swing a sword."

  Valeria glared at that.

  Duro grinned, nodding at her armful of stola. "Either way, you're wasted in silk."

  "And you're wasted in woad," Valeria shot back. "In another life, you could have been a legionary commander. A good one."

  He laughed. "Gods, what a thought."

  "What a thought," Valeria agreed, thinking of herself with a blade. The idea!

  Silence stretched, and a horn sounded somewhere outside. Duro picked up his helm.

  "I hope you lose this battle," Valeria said with brutal honesty. "But I also rather hope you don't die."

  The words startled her. She felt no liking for him. No understanding, no friendship. But she would be sorry, at least a little, to see him dead.

  Duro gripped her hand in his huge one, pressing until her bones bent, watching with his narrow wolf's gaze to see if she flinched. Valeria smiled sweetly and squeezed back, digging her nails into the back of his hand. Neither flinched.

  He laughed a little. So did Valeria. He clipped her jaw one last time, in a kind of rough respect rather than anger, and then he was gone.

  DURO

  We sang as we rode to war. I took the rear
, urging the most hung over chiefs and their warriors into motion, haranguing the cattle drivers steering the massive wagons piled high with the treasure of three sacked cities. Many of our women and children would clamber atop those wagons to watch the battle—the treasure was safer accompanying the war band than being left back at the camp, which now held only the slaves, the sick, and the timid. I'd told Valeria to keep safe to my tent, even in such lackluster company. I smiled a little, wondering if I might be able to plant a child in her this winter once the victory was done. Nothing else to do in the snowbound months but stay inside and make your women pregnant, and anything that came out of that woman's womb was sure to be a warrior.

  The day was brilliant, the sun shining, the air full of biting chill. Frost rimed the dry grass underfoot, and dead leaves fluttered from the oaks. It was almost winter, the year dying, but for the Iceni, I saw not death but life.

  We sang, happy as children—but these children had vengeance in their hearts, and I had no doubt we made the Romans quake on our approach. We poured toward the broad plain, the greatest army ever seen in these lands, and what a roar came from our throats as we saw the gleaming blocks of the legions against the dark-forested hills below. My heart thumped in my chest as I sent my chariot rattling ahead, chivvying the chiefs into their battle lines. The Trinovantes on the left flank, our lesser chiefs of the Iceni to the right—the center belonged to the warriors like me and my son. He had fought with the Trinovantes at Verulamium, but today he'd be at my side where he belonged. I looked for him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  I halted my sturdy chariot ponies, hearing the sudden swell of cheering ripple down the line. My throat grew thick as a chariot thundered along the front rank of spears, a chariot picked out with silver so it caught the sun's every beam, and my queen pulled up before us in a whirl of mane and wheels like Andraste herself descending from the clouds. Boudica's bright hair was strapped into three flying plaits like red serpents, her face painted in swirling blue lines, her shield boss bearing a Roman skull. Her scarred back was bare and her face proud. My throat stung, and I realized I was roaring to the skies.

  My queen.

  She thrust her spear toward the clouds, and I half expected to see lightning crack down at her summons. "Today," she called in her voice like a bronze horn, "Rome dies."

  Another roar tore at the air. I was hoarse from shouting.

  "I come to you now not as a woman of royal blood." Her eyes raked her army like a hawk's, finding me, finding the old man at my left with the amber bead in his beard, finding the woman at my right with the lime-washed hair. Boudica's gaze touched us all as though addressing every one of her warriors alone and in their souls. "I come to you as one of the Iceni. I come avenging our lost freedom. I come avenging my scourged body—"

  A growling roar rose from the war band as she displayed her white back with its reddened scars. Her voice dropped to a savage hiss.

  "And I come avenging my daughters."

  My princesses flanked their mother in her chariot. Sorcha handled the reins as her mother's charioteer, and she lifted her chin as the shouts surged up in rage for her violation. Her red hair was crammed under a bright-polished helm, her face painted not in woad but in blood. My lucky princess, lovely and lethal. Keena clutched the side of the chariot, her face ghostly pale behind the woad daubs, but she, too, kept her head high.

  Boudica's voice echoed over us like a roll of thunder. "Roman lust has gone so far that not even age or virginity is left unpolluted! What can be worse than the treatment we have suffered since these men came to our lands?" We screamed back, too incensed for words. "But the gods are on the side of righteous vengeance. A legion which dared to face us has perished"—howls of derision—"and the rest are hiding in their camp or thinking of flight!" Boudica's spear pointed back toward the immobile mass of legionaries, so small against the darkness of the trees. "They will break under the din and shouts of our thousands, much less the blows of our swords!"

  I began thumping my spear haft against the metal rim of my shield, a brutal incantatory beat. The men to my left and right picked it up, and the beat spread back through our ranks: thousands upon thousands of spears sounding the glory of our queen.

  "We have come to it," Boudica said to the heart's drum of her army. "To this moment. I speak with a woman's resolve: conquer—or die."

  Sorcha raised her blood-painted face to the clouds and keened a savage cry like a hunting hawk. We all howled after her, screaming to split the heavens, and I realized tears were streaming down my face. I let them come, weeping bone-deep joy as the lines around me steadied to charge, and my queen pulled a heavy tunic and a mail coat over her scarred back. I felt the usual mix of terror and exhilaration that comes before a charge; the urge to sprint into the enemy's arms before the carnyx even sounds, and the countering urge to take a piss at the rear. I let it all wash over me—I had fifty summers to my name, and battle jitters were nothing new, just notes plucking at my bones like nervous fingers on a harp. Boudica was taking her shield from her shield bearer and summoning her usual charioteer; Sorcha had descended to a chariot of her own and sent Keena back to where the women and children watched. The young Druid Yorath was stalking up and down the battle line as naked as a new infant, a wreath of mistletoe around his brow, shaking the Roman head on its spike as he called prayers. I bent forward for his blessing, then called my charioteer to take the reins as I loosened my sword in its scabbard. The blade was hungry, singing for Roman blood, and I kissed her hilt and crooned that I would feed her soon.

  Then I saw a familiar dark plait down a man's lean back. "Andecarus!"

  My son kneed his mount toward me through the throng: a pony, too small for him. He wore Iceni mail and a Roman cavalry helm, and I wanted to chastise him for the latter, but for once, I let it go. It was a well-made helm. I called for my shield bearer, who had been hanging back all morning while I held my own shield. The man came forward with a clop of hooves. "For you," I told Andecarus gruffly and waved at the big red mare with her mane falling like flame along her arched neck.

  The look on his face was worth the hours I'd tramped around the war band on my aching knee. Worth the haggling I'd done against the chief who'd claimed the mare in Londinium. Worth the price I'd paid for a Roman cavalry saddle like my son was used to riding, and a bridle and harness all mounted in silver. That mare was decked for glory, but she wasn't all I had to give him. As my son jumped off his pony and went to stroke the mare's nose with a disbelieving hand, I pulled off the heaviest of my gold arm rings. All warriors collect arm rings, one for every battle, but my son's years with the Romans meant he had none.

  "This is for you, too." I held out the ring. "Well-earned at Verulamium. You fought bravely."

  "I killed my foster brother after Verulamium." Andecarus' smile disappeared. "I know you cannot forgive me for that."

  "He was a brute with a sword—I valued the sword, not the brute. You are my son." I took Andecarus' hand roughly, sliding the ring up around his forearm. "No man could have a braver or a better."

  He stared at me. I cleared my throat, wanting to say something more—but I didn't know what. I just commented inanely, "Glad you don't lime-wash your hair into spikes like some of these young bloods. Too damned hard to fit a helm over it—"

  Andecarus vaulted up into his Roman mare's saddle, maneuvering the beast alongside my chariot. He reached out a gold-decked arm and touched my shoulder, and his radiant grin speared my soul. I could see the boy he'd been, the one I'd told gruffly to be brave as he went off to serve as hostage to the Romans. Why had I ever let him go?

  Never again. I would not be parted from Andecarus now for any reason on this earth.

  I smiled back, near to tears again, and my son reined his mare into line beside my chariot as the spears went up, as the howl of carnyx horns sounded down the battle line, as the distant bugling of the Roman trumpets echoed across the broad plain ahead. As my breath caught and my spear
leveled, and the world of my youth was just a breath away.

  As we charged.

  VALERIA

  Valeria looked at herself in the polished bronze mirror and felt a thrum of shock. The woman reflected there wore a green silk stola; her hair was coiled; her chin modestly lowered—but she was not Valeria of the Sulpicii, demure wife of Catus Decianus. This woman was hard as flint, gripping a bone-handled dagger as though she knew how to use it.

  The whisper came harsh in her mind. Duro's words, from the most venomous of their quarrels, but spoken in her mother's voice. What happens to you if Rome wins? For the rest of your life, you'll be known as the woman who flopped on her back and played whore for a barbarian rather than fall on a blade.

  Valeria eyed the dagger, pulse beating loud in her own ears. The camp outside with its few remaining slaves and old folk seemed eerily quiet. Her mother's voice came again. Honor demands death, Valeria.

  "Honor—is—shit." She enunciated the profanity precisely. It was a bad habit, the swearing, but she really did not think she would be able to give it up. "I am still Valeria of the Sulpicii, honor or no, and I am not falling on a fucking blade."

  Not now that she was starting to suspect she was perhaps seven months away from bearing a half-Iceni, half-Roman child.

  Her own harsh laugh surprised her, bursting out of her throat like a sob. Her husband had always wanted a child. Her mother had always told her she had failed in her duty to give him one. Well, she'd done her duty at last. Meet your grandchild, Mother. He plays with skulls and was weaned on the blood of his enemies.

  As to what Decianus would think . . . well, who knew?

  Valeria heard a distant roar and shivered. She clutched the bone-handled dagger tighter. Thrust hard into the throat, then twist to free the blade against the suction of the wound, Duro's voice came to her. Thrust—then twist.