‘Cearan?’
The spoon froze midway between mouth and bowl. In the seconds that followed the silence stretched out until it was as taut as a bowstring. When the Iceni spoke at last, the words were so garbled it took Valerius time to recognize the language as Latin.
‘It is a long time since anyone called me that,’ the Briton slurred. ‘Scum. Filth. Monster. They are the names I answer to now. Or traitor, should I be unfortunate enough to fall in among my own people.’
As the words trailed away Cearan descended into some kind of reverie. Valerius resisted the urge to reach out and touch him. His head filled with a nightmare vision of the moment Boudicca’s champions smashed their way into the Temple of Claudius. A flare of light and glittering iron coming at him from every side and then only darkness. Cearan had stood over his defenceless body, though Valerius had no memory of it, driven to mercy by the knowledge that Valerius had saved his grandson from drowning. Yet – Valerius winced at the familiar sting where his wrist had been – life came at a price. The strong right hand that wielded a sword for the hated Romans would wield one no more. A vivid image of the terrible moment the blade fell and his life changed for ever flashed through his head like a lightning bolt.
Cearan’s mumble brought him back to the present. ‘I remembered your face … I remembered your face and I had to tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘That I …’ His voice altered, became clearer and harder. ‘They killed Aenid. They killed my beautiful wife. A centurion ran her through with a sword. When I tried to protect her, this was my reward.’ His hand reached up to touch his scars and a tear ran down his cheek from the single eye. ‘Then they scourged Boudicca, till the bone of her spine shone through the tattered flesh of her back, and violated her daughters, Banna and Rosmerta. Yet even a man without a face can ride and carry a sword and she took me into her company; me, the man who had trusted and befriended the Romans. I exulted when they burned and butchered and impaled and when the wrath of Andraste consumed Colonia. I saw you among the defenders of the temple and thought to kill you. But, when it came to it, something stayed my sword.’
‘I owe you my life,’ Valerius conceded.
‘No,’ Cearan hissed and the single eye flared like a glowing coal. ‘You owe me a life. That is what I came to tell you.’
Valerius stared at him. ‘I don’t understand. I saved your grandson.’
‘But you did not save Aenid, or Boudicca, or Banna or Rosmerta.’
Another long, unnerving silence that stretched out until Valerius felt compelled to break it.
‘I need to know what happened after you left me.’
Cearan closed his eye and drew a long breath as if trying to conjure the answer from within, but reluctant to find it because of the pain it might cause.
‘We reached Boudicca’s camp before dawn the next day along an avenue of captives screaming in torment and lit by the fires that consumed Londinium. Word had just reached the queen of a great victory in the north, a legion wiped from the earth and its standards taken. Volisios, chief of her advisers, urged her to march north-east, to join forces with Mab, who had commanded the ambush, but the bloodlust of Londinium was still on her. She ordained that she would only take counsel from Andraste. The way to Verulamium lay open and the goddess commanded that it be destroyed.’
A servant entered with a jug of wine. Valerius poured two cups, but Cearan ignored the one offered to him.
‘You think kindness can overcome seventeen years of hatred, contempt and suffering?’ The single eye glared. ‘You think you are doing me a service by placing me in these fine clothes and food in my belly? Do you believe any man will give bread to a well-dressed beggar? All the food will do is make my hunger harder to bear. You have always been weak. A strong man would have persuaded Paulinus of my case to become king when Prasutagus died. You did not have the courage. You as much as any of them are responsible for what came after, Gaius Valerius Verrens. Maeve saw it.’ Valerius flinched, knowing what was to come. ‘You could not protect her, so she came to me. Does your wife know about her? Are you too frightened to mention her name?’
Valerius shook his head. ‘She did not want my protection. Her people appointed you her guardian and you taught her to hate me.’
‘No,’ Cearan rasped. ‘You are wrong. That was the Romans who killed her father.’
‘So you followed Boudicca to Verulamium?’
The slurred voice took on a note of triumph. ‘We stood at Boudicca’s side as Verulamium burned and listened to the screams as she showed the Roman-lovers the true meaning of the wrath of Andraste.’
‘And Maeve endured this?’
‘Maeve gloried in the slaughter.’ The Briton’s right cheek developed a spasmodic twitch and Valerius knew he was lying. Suddenly he felt nothing but contempt for this loathsome barbarian, so consumed by hate that no man must be left with even the illusion of love.
‘You took my hand.’ He shook the battered wooden fist on a leather stock that fitted over his right wrist. ‘Is that not enough for you?’
‘What is a hand?’ Cearan leaned across the table so the spittle from his ruined lips spattered Valerius’s cheek. ‘If I can live without a face you can live without a hand.’ The growing force of his hatred seemed to make the single eye glow all the brighter as he continued his story. ‘We rested for a day as the ashes of Verulamium cooled. The queen’s spies reported that the nearest Roman force was more than a day’s march away, but within hours we were in contact with auxiliary scouts. Again, Volisios urged a link with Mab, but the druid Gwlym mocked his timidity. Boudicca was so thirsty for Roman blood that even double the lake she had spilled would not have satisfied her. She knew she outnumbered the Romans by ten to one, so she ordered her scouts to harry them and force a battle.’
‘You walked into a trap.’
Cearan’s head snapped up and the eye glared. ‘We were betrayed.’
‘Boudicca may have been a leader,’ Valerius heard the scorn in his voice as the glow of his anger expanded inside him, ‘but she was no warrior queen. She should have listened to her counsellors. Only a fool would have sent her warriors up that slope with nowhere to manoeuvre on either flank. Only a commander who had lost control would have allowed her baggage to block her only line of retreat. Paulinus played with her as a cat plays with a mouse. He goaded your rebels into attacking him and his legionaries slaughtered them like sheep.’
‘You were there,’ Cearan hissed.
Valerius leaned across the table so he was staring directly into the ruined face. ‘You should have killed me, old man. I set the trap.’
Cearan leapt out of his seat and his hand snatched up the cup to smash it into Valerius’s face, but the fingers of the Roman’s left hand clamped on the bony wrist and twisted until the cup fell free. Cearan subsided back into his seat, but Valerius was not finished with him. ‘I set the trap with the information Maeve gave me when we parted. Avoid Verulamium for your life, she said. So of course I knew where Boudicca would go.’
‘She died hating you with a Roman sword in her guts,’ Cearan sneered.
‘No.’ Valerius’s voice was as bleak as a northern ice field. ‘She cut her wrists with the knife I gave her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I buried her.’
The anger seemed to have drained all the strength from the Iceni. As he pushed himself to his feet he seemed to have aged ten years in as many minutes.
‘There is no more to say.’ The rasping voice was empty of feeling. ‘I will leave now. Have your mercenaries return my clothes. Better Celtic rags than Roman silk.’ But Valerius noticed he picked up the cloak Shabolz had provided.
He followed the old man through the house to the street door, calling on a servant to bring the verminous, stinking rags. Cearan snatched them up without thanks and stepped into the street. When he’d trudged a few paces he turned, and the expression on his shattered features sent a shudder through Valeriu
s. It was the broken, jagged-toothed caricature of a smile.
‘Know this, Gaius Valerius Verrens,’ he called out. ‘In the name of Taranis I will take from you that which you most hold dear, dearer even than the hand I left you. This I swear.’ He shook his head, but the single eye never left Valerius. ‘You should have killed me, but you were always too weak.’
He turned away, leaving Valerius frozen in place and feeling as if someone had run an ice spear down his spine. Cearan’s threat had been almost a perfect echo of the witch’s curse … from an old friend and an old enemy.
XXX
There was no sign of either Iceni or threat when Valerius returned to the basilica the next day at the centre of his escort. Yet the feeling that his life was being disturbed by forces beyond his control or comprehension remained. Fear was too strong a word for what he felt. Why fear the threat of an aged beggar so weakened by privation he could hardly stand?
The inheritance dispute took less time than expected as one party said he had lost the papers he claimed entitled him to a share of a prime housing site. Valerius suspected its absence had more to do with the fifty aurei fine imposed on Priscus over the forgery claim than any carelessness. He was prepared to give more time to the case of the missing wife, but the evidence was almost non-existent. A woman had gone to the river to fetch water and not returned. Her husband, another former legionary, claimed his neighbour’s son had either abducted or killed her, on no other evidence than that she was comely and he’d seen the boy looking at her. Valerius listened to his pleas for as long as was polite before dismissing the case for lack of evidence.
It meant they were ready to leave for Lindum at the second hour the next morning. The north road from Colonia only travelled as far as Venta Icenorum, which meant a long detour back to Londinium. Valerius suggested Tabitha and Lucius might wish to remain there while he prepared the ground for a new veterans’ colony, but Tabitha wanted to explore more of the country and, in any case, Lucius was inseparable from Didius.
They rode out from the west gate the next morning after a farewell ceremony from the ordo. Unseen by the escort, a shadowy figure watched the procession of riders and wagons out of sight from amongst the huts of the industrial area. When they were gone, Cearan led his horse a little way from the settlement into the trees before mounting and cutting a path parallel to the road. Valerius would have been surprised to see that he wore the new tunic and cloak provided by Shabolz, and by the quality of the gelding, on loan from a sympathizer of the anti-Roman cause. There were many such men among the native tribesmen, many more than the Romans would have suspected, and from all classes. Cearan kept his horse to a walk. He was in no hurry. He had business in the west and it pleased him to stay close to Valerius. He knew that his curse would have unsettled the Roman and who knew what opportunities the journey might bring? He’d already made one contribution to Gwlym’s conspiracy, and he intended to make at least one more.
Valerius only rode a few miles before joining Tabitha and Ceris in the carriage. It came as a relief to put Colonia, and more especially Cearan, behind him. It was an ordeal which had had to be faced, but once was enough. Now he could truly forget the past and continue with his life. With the first court in Britannia behind him he felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. There would be more, probably many more, challenges ahead, but he felt he had a certain measure of the province and its people. Or peoples.
For there were two Britannias.
‘What are you thinking, husband?’ Tabitha smiled drowsily.
Valerius glanced at Ceris, sleeping in the corner of the opposite bench seat, with her arms folded and her head nodding to the bounce of the wheels. He kept his voice low, so Tabitha had to lean towards him to share it. ‘Oh, I was pondering on the changes here since my last visit. Colonia is much less of a frontier outpost than it was in Nero’s day. You might call it an entirely Roman town, with all the institutions you would expect of a similar sized place in Latium or Etruria.’
‘That was my impression,’ she agreed.
‘Even the villages we pass appear Roman, with main streets and shops and workshops, when once the people in them would have lived in scattered roundhouses.’ He paused, trying to marshal his thoughts. ‘Yet for all they look Roman, they’re not. The reality is that places like Londinium and Colonia are islands in a sea of Celts, just as they were eighteen years ago before Boudicca.’
‘You’re not saying it could happen again, surely, Valerius?’ She frowned. ‘The people treat us well everywhere we go.’
He smiled. ‘No. The day of the warrior is past, at least in the south. They no longer have the weapons, the armour or the will to do what they did. Paulinus, for all his faults, literally put the fear of death into them.’
‘Then why so serious?’
‘Because the weapons may not be there, but the resentment remains. All the tiny irritations that combined to create Boudicca – the taxes, the surveillance, the overbearing military presence and the arrogance of conquerors over conquered – still exist.’ He looked towards Ceris again, but she showed no signs of waking. ‘The seed corn of rebellion, should someone care to nurture it. Think, if I’d found against Tasciovanus the news of his humiliation would have spread among the native tribes like ripples from the stone you throw into a pond. All it would take would be one tribal leader to say “Enough”. In the old days a man like that could command the loyalty of thirty thousand warriors from the sub-tribes and clans of his confederation.’
‘But, as you said, there are no warriors.’
He laughed. ‘You’re right. I worry too much. It comes with the passing years. Do you know I am the same age now as my father was when he saw me off to Britannia, full of dreams of glory and all shiny in my new armour. I thought him very ancient then.’
She leaned closer and whispered in his ear. ‘You did not seem at all ancient last night.’
‘That’s because I have you to keep me young,’ he grinned. Ceris stirred and yawned and opened her eyes, blinking. ‘And the baby?’ His eyes drifted to the swelling beneath Tabitha’s dress.
‘The lady is past the time of the first threat,’ the Corieltauvi girl informed him with all the authority of a legionary medicus. ‘I think she may be allowed to eat meat today. But if she is sick again we will return to soft eggs and porridge. I have also put together a balm of oil, quince and roses which we will apply every night.’
‘Ceris says it keeps the skin supple,’ Tabitha laughed. ‘When she’s not looking I rub it on my face.’
‘This is no laughing matter, mistress,’ Ceris said sternly. ‘We must take every sensible precaution.’ The coach bumped over a large rut and all three were momentarily lifted into the air. ‘Including spending much less time on the road in bumpy carriages. Can you not persuade her to stay in Londinium, lord?’
Valerius shook his head. ‘She will not be moved, Ceris, but perhaps you can persuade her it would be in the best interests of the child.’
Tabitha’s eyes narrowed dangerously, so he did the sensible thing and settled back into the cushioned seat and closed his eyes.
Lucius wove his pony through the trees with the gentlest touch on the reins, the animal’s flank brushing bark at a pace Didius struggled to match on his sturdier mount.
‘Slow down, you little …’ The cavalryman let out a roar of frustration as a patch of bog slowed him again. Didius loved the boy as if he were his own son, but he struggled to deal with his growing confidence in the saddle and the fearless sense of adventure of which the legate had warned him. He caught a fleeting flash of pale flank off to his right and hauled his horse in that direction, ducking to avoid low branches.
‘Lucius, get your arse back here.’ If he had his way he would have tanned that arse, but he didn’t dare risk the mother’s wrath even though he knew Valerius would heartily approve. All the beauty and grace of a Greek goddess, but those dark eyes saw too much for Didius’s liking.
Lucius grin
ned as he heard the shouts and dug his heels into the little mare’s flanks, urging her on. He loved the freedom of the saddle, the breeze in his face and the feel of a glorious, biddable animal under his control. He felt a little sorry for old Didius, but the feeling was overcome by a wildness that sometimes filled his head.
‘Come on,’ he encouraged her, reckoning that the cavalryman would be able to hear them even if he couldn’t see them in this thick forest undergrowth. A fallen branch blocked his path and he sucked in his breath and gave the horse her head. Three strides later he was flying, half out of the saddle and shrieking with delight, before they were over. On and on, the madness fading as he reached a stream and brought the mare to a stop. She snickered, breathing hard, and he patted her on the shoulder.
‘I beg your pardon, Khamsin,’ he said gravely. ‘I promise you an apple when we get back to the others.’ He dismounted and led her down to the water’s edge, allowing her to drink from the clear waters. He crouched to dip his hand into the river. It was only then he sensed the other presence.
He looked up to see a cloaked and hooded man on a pale horse on the other side of the stream. His hand flew to the little knife at his belt, and he stood, shaking, but resolute. He thought he recognized the cloak and for a moment he wondered if one of the escort was playing a trick on him. Then the man spoke.
‘You needn’t be frightened of me, boy.’ The words came out in a strangely slurred, sing-song Latin. ‘But you’re right to be wary. These woods can be dangerous.’ He moved his horse a little closer to the stream edge. ‘Bandits, wolves.’
‘Stay where you are,’ Lucius warned him in a voice he hoped carried his father’s authority, but was in reality a nervous squeak. ‘I’m not afraid of bandits or wolves. I’m not alone. Didius isn’t far behind me.’
He sensed the man smiling behind the hood and he felt a red surge of anger. No man mocked a Verrens. ‘Who are you? Take off your hood so I can see your face. An honourable man does not hide his features.’
Glory of Rome: (Gaius Valerius Verrens 8) Page 25