Song for a Dark Queen (6 page)

He reined in and got down from his chariot, stiffly, before the threshold where Boudicca waited for him. He was mired with long hard driving, his eyes red-rimmed.

She asked no questions, but he answered her as though she had. ‘The Red Crests stormed the defences. It was all over before we got there.’

‘What did you do, my Lord?’

‘I did what I could. There is some kind of patched-up peace. Pray to our Lady of the Foals that it lasts. At least we are still a free state.’

‘And the Governor’s orders?’

‘The Governor’s order still stands.’ The great weariness that was on him sounded in his voice.

The first of the appointed days came for the handing in of weapons; and each clan brought its war-gear in to the steading of its chieftain, where the officials and their Red Crests waited. And in the forecourt of the Royal Dun, Prasutagus brought his own sword, and broke it across his knee; and laid the pieces with deep and formal courtesy at the feet of the senior official. And behind him, one after another, the warriors of the Royal Clan did the like; until the pile rose so high and wide that the official must step back quickly to avoid losing a toe or two, and someone in the gathering laughed.

So it was done, swords broken, spearheads wrenched from their shafts and flung into the waiting carts. By evening, all was over.

I wondered if they must be fed and lodged in the Royal Dun for the night, as we had fed and lodged the tribute-collectors every year. But the Red Crests, following their usual custom, had made their own camp for the night; and I am thinking the officials felt safer within their stockade than within ours. And I am thinking that maybe for that time they were right.

Next day, after they were gone, and their laden carts with them, I took my harp and went away down into the marsh country, for my heart was sore within me, and I needed the space and emptiness, that I might make a lament to ease the ache, with none but the shore birds to hear me.

So towards evening I sat on the bank of a looping waterway, staring down into the water that riffled
through the tufted reeds, with my harp fallen silent on my knee. And as I sat there, there was a brushing and flurrying through the reeds, and Prasutagus’s two great hounds came along the bank, and lay down with lolling tongues beside me. ‘Greetings brother, greetings sister,’ I said. And Prasutagus came up behind them. At most times he was like the rest of his kind, a man who never walked when he could ride or drive. But there were times of darkness, he had, maybe times when the kingship irked him, when he would whistle up the dogs, and take a light hunting spear in his hand – for the look of the thing, even to himself, I think, for he never brought back any kill at such times – and walk until he had outdistanced the darkness in himself. He looked now as if he had walked from the world’s end to the world’s end, and floundered into a few soft patches on the way. Even the dogs were weary. Maybe, I thought, it was the same with him as with me, only that he had no harp-skill.

He thrust one of the hounds out of the way and sat down beside me, his arm across his knees. ‘No greeting for me?’ he said.

‘Greetings, brother,’ I said. A harper speaks to all living things as equals.

He reached out and touched the nearest horn of my harp with the extreme tip of one forefinger. ‘A new song for tonight?’

I shook my head. ‘I make only for myself today – a lament for broken swords.’

We were silent a moment, only the pale feathery tips of the reeds swayed against the drifting sky; and somewhere an oyster-catcher made his lonely whistling call. Then Prasutagus gave a little dry cough. Quite a small sound, but when I looked round, his eyes were shut,
and it seemed to me that there was a faint greyness round his mouth.

‘Is there something amiss?’ I asked, quickly.

He opened his eyes and smiled. Already the greyness was passing. ‘Nothing. A pain under my ribs and a moment’s darkness. It comes on me sometimes after a day’s hunting or the like.’ He turned back to the thing we had been speaking of. ‘A lament for broken swords. And yet it seems that yourself, you had no sword to lose, yesterday. Strange, I could have sworn that I have seen you burnishing an old sword before now.’

‘I carried a sword when Boudicca’s mother and the world and I were all young. Few people remember now. Few harpers are fighting men, and the Romans would expect no sword from me.’

‘And so you did not bring them one.’ He turned and looked at me; a long, hard look.

‘Like the Queen, who they would expect no sword from, either,’ I said, and wondered in that moment, where she had hidden her father’s great blade. Under the gowns in her clothes’ kist, maybe. No, she would have been more thorough than that.

‘I wonder how many old swords are hidden in the peat-stacks and under the house-thatch of the Iceni today,’ Prasutagus said.

‘More than the Romans dream. Spearheads, too – though indeed there is none so great a difference between a war-spear and a heavy hunting-spear, when once the collar of heron hackles has been stripped away. They did not even notice that none of the women came in, for they do not train their own women to bear weapons in time of need.’

‘That is true. Maybe we are not so toothless as they think us.’ But almost as he said it, he struck his fist on
his knee. ‘Grief upon me! I speak comforting words to myself as though I were a bairn! The Horse People, I make no doubt, have good store of weapons yet, hidden in the dark. But in the daylight, before the eyes of Rome, before the eyes of other tribes, we are disarmed and dishonoured! And that is my doing.’

‘The order was from Ostorius Scapula,’ I said.

And again we were silent, hearing the wind in the feathered reeds. And Fand, the brindled bitch, daughter to one of the hounds who had come with him from his own hunting runs eight years ago, raised her head and whimpered softly, looking at her Lord.

‘The order was from Scapula, yes,’ Prasutagus agreed at last. ‘But it was with me to choose whether or no it should be obeyed. There was a moment – I could have set fire to the stubble. I could have had the whole Horse People out in revolt, and maybe driven the Red Crests back into the soft lands to the south.’

‘What happened?’

‘I started to think.’

‘What kind of thinking?’

‘That the Red Crests do not take easily to defeat, no more easily than the Tribes; and that they can always send for help from across the seas, for they are as many as the leaves of the forest, that though they fall in the autumn come again in the spring. I began to think of burned thatch and hearths left desolate with no man to come home to them.’

‘It is you that should be the harper, not I.’

‘I wish I were,’ Prasutagus said. And again he turned full face to me. ‘It is not easy to be a king and think too much. In another kind of world, maybe. . . . But in our world, a king should leave his thinking to his Harper and the Priest Kind. It would be easier to
bear. He might even be a better king, that way.’

‘Despite the burned thatch and the hearths left desolate?’

‘We should have gone down with honour, by the Warrior’s Road,’ he said. And then, ‘I do not know. Cadwan of the Harp, there are so many things that I do not know.’

THE WINTERS CAME,
and the springs woke in the alders, and the mares dropped their foals in early summer, all as it had been before the Horse People were stripped of the right to carry sword and spear. And year by year we paid our tribute of gold and horses and young men.

No more children were borne in the Royal Chamber; but the two Princesses grew and flourished. Essylt, the Royal Daughter, fair-skinned and freckled like a foxglove, blue-eyed and long-boned like her mother; like her mother in most other ways too, both within and without; only from Prasutagus her father she had her hair that was the colour of a bay horse in the sunlight. And Nessan, the little one, born while the midsummer fires were blazing. And Nessan was nobody but herself – unless she had in her some Princess of the Old People, the Little Dark people, who were here before ever the Horse Folk came; for there was never yet a conquering people that did not mingle their blood in some sort with the blood of the conquered. Old Nurse swore that it was so; but Old Nurse was of the Dark People herself. Nessan was bird-small, with black hair and huge rain-grey eyes, and her milk teeth came crooked, so that the teeth that came after them were crooked too, though it only showed when she laughed. I loved to see her laugh, the little dark one, just as I loved to hear her sing. She could sing like a bird in a white-thorn tree, less full than a blackbird, softer than a robin, a thrush maybe.

When ever she could escape from the Women’s
Side, Essylt would be away to the stable court, or watching the smith hammering out a hunting-spear, or down in the marsh making a fish trap with Duatha, whose father was chief of the household warriors, when she could persuade him to let her come. But Nessan would come to me and my harp; for she had the music in her. ‘Since you are not the Royal Daughter,’ I told her, ‘you should have been a boy, and then you could have been harper to a Queen.’

In the world beyond our frontiers, Caratacus, after nine years’ warfare in the western hills, had gone to walk in chains in a Roman triumph, betrayed into the Red Crests’ hands by the Queen of the Brigantes; but that is another story altogether.

Ostorius Scapula was gone, too, and we had a new Governor, Suetonius Paulinus; a great soldier, so said his reputation, following him from the ends of the Empire; but a hard man like an east wind and a hammer.

And in Rome, the old Emperor was dead; some said by poison at the hands of his wife; and a new Emperor reigned in his stead: a man with music in him, even as I, but possessed by spirits of darkness. It is far, from Rome to the frontiers of the Horse People, but we began to feel his darkness hovering over us. We felt it through new laws and regulations that ate away our remaining freedom, through the officials and the money-lenders. The harvests had been poor for three years running, and many of the great chiefs were in debt – yet it was more than these things, and it lay over more tribes than the Horse People. An unease, a sense of dread like the silence that comes over the furze beneath the shadow of a wheeling hawk.

But still, the ordinary things of life went on. And the
time came, when Essylt had seen fifteen summers, and Nessan two summers less, to be holding the Choosing Feast for the Royal Daughter. So the feast was held, and Merddyn Oak Priest, who began to be too old for such duties, slept his night on a freshly-flayed horse-hide in the apple garth; and the choice fell upon Duatha, he that was son to Arviragus, chief of the King’s companions. A tall, hot-blooded lad he was, with his manhood scars still fresh upon him. And for Essylt and Duatha the choice was a happy one, for they had been close to each other since the fish-trap days, though I have sometimes thought more in the way of brother and sister than in the way of two who will one day be man and woman to each other.

Grief upon me! It all seems so long past, and it is just one year ago.

One day, not long after the Choosing Feast, Roman officials came to the Dun when it was not time for the collecting of taxes, on some private business with Prasutagus. And in the evening of the next day, when they had gone again, I walked in the in-paddock, which has always been dear to me on early autumn evenings, when the brood mares are gathered close with their foals, and the dusk lies like smoke under the alder trees, and the smell of the first frost is in the air. And Prasutagus came by, driving a new chariot that he had been trying out. He reined in and got down when he saw me, and we began to walk back towards the Dun, leaving the charioteer to take on the team.

‘So – that is over,’ said Prasutagus.

‘The Romans?’

‘The Romans.’

‘What did they come for?’

‘I have been making my will. That is what they call
it, among the Romans, when a man has it written down before witnesses, what is to be done with his goods and gear, after he has gone beyond the sunset.’

‘Was that needful?’ I asked.

‘I think so, yes. Since my father died, I am a rich man, my horse-herds as big as those of the Queen herself, maybe bigger, if the mares do well this year. And I have done what a great many rich men do in these days; I have left half of what I possess to the Emperor – in the hope of buying his favour, so that my wife and the young ones may keep the other half in peace.’

‘You have not a grey hair as yet, in that red poll of yours,’ I said quickly.

And he laughed, ‘And there may be a score more Emperors come and gone in Rome before my time comes for the Long Journey.’ Then he grew sober. ‘But these are uncertain days, and the Emperor Nero is not the Emperor Claudius. It is better to make plans for the night while the daylight lasts.’

The smoke of the evening cooking-fires was hanging low over the roofs of the village and the Dun as we came to the small side-gate into the chariot court.

Prasutagus swung away to see his team stabled, walking proud with life, then he checked an instant and put out a hand to the corner-post of the long chariot shed, and I heard again that small dry cough. Then he walked on into the gathering dusk.

On a day towards winter’s end, Prasutagus and his hearth companions called for their horses and whistled up their hounds and went hunting.

It was a day that started fair, but turned to wind and sleety rain; and they returned at evening with a couple of red forest deer slung across the backs of the carrying ponies, but themselves drenched and wild and
sodden as though they had been hunting with Blue Haired Mananon along the seabed.

They dismounted in the chariot court, and Prasutagus looked round for Fand, who was daughter to that other, old Fand, and his favourite bitch as her mother had been before her. She had not gone out with the hunt, being heavy in whelp and near her time. But always she would come running to him when he had been away, to bury her muzzle between his hands, whimpering with delight at his return. But this evening she did not come, and he called for her, and then for the chief of the kennel slaves. ‘Baruch! Where is Fand?’