So at first light, with the mist still hanging among the trees, we swept down from our ridge.
The outer skirts of Londinium were empty. No fighting from street to street as there had been at Camulodunum. Only one live thing I saw in those streets, save for the river gulls wheeling and crying like lost souls overhead, and that was a brindled cat who spat at us from the top of a wall. We quested down side-streets and into buildings as we went; but bathhouses and temples and the great Basilica and Forum stood up empty as though they belonged already to a city of the dead. Every living soul must have gathered to the supply depot. The river was empty too, no ships alongside the wharves and jetties; and the water was ruffled and blue under a fresh east wind that was rising.
So we headed for the great depot within its turf banks and palisades. And the only sound in all Londinium was the storm-roar of our coming.
Those who sought to defend the place had hacked down the bridge across the encircling ditch, and at the far side of the wreckage the gates stood up heavy-timbered and strong. But it did not take long to pull down the nearest wooden buildings, and fling in beams and shutters and roof-thatch to make a causeway. The defenders on the stockade-bank loosed off arrows and sling-stones at us, and in the dense battle-mass they could not fail to find their mark here and there; but few of them had good aim; and after we had flung in firebrands, and the smoke began to go up, where the stockade had caught, it gave us cover. The gate, too, we fired, piling burning thatch against it; but that was too slow, and a great beam torn from a nearby building served us better to batter the smouldering timbers down.
One man among the defenders on the stockade, we saw and lost and saw again, as the smoke drifted by. A tall man wearing a red leather cap such as some of the auxiliaries wear. He had a bow, and he knew how to use it, standing there on the crumbling breastwork between the smoke and the smoke, he loosed against the Queen herself, where she stood islanded in her chariot among the yelling hordes, and the arrow sped true, and would have taken her in the throat, but that her horses plunged sideways snorting from a firebrand even as it left the bow; so that it did no more than nick her upraised arm below the shoulder. It was but a wasp-sting, but those nearest to her saw the crimson line spring out on her skin, and the shout went up, ‘The Queen! The Queen is scathed! The Life runs out!’ And the whole War Host surged forward against the gate and banks like a storm-wave pounding on a shingle ridge.
When at last we broke in, and the red spear-mark was done and over, we flayed the man in the red cap. We flayed three men who chanced to be wearing red caps, among the few who we took alive, to make sure. But truly, I do not think any of them was the right one. He was a very tall man, and none of their skins would have fitted him. I think, I hope, he was one of the fortunate ones who died in the fighting. The other captives we crucified – that is a thing that we have learned from the Romans themselves – and left them pegged out for the ravens, for a sign to the Red Crests if they came that way again. We took no heads. Save perhaps for the head of the tall man in the red cap, there were none worth taking. No warriors, only merchants and Government officials, and men of the Tribes who had turned traitor and grown fat following their Roman masters, and their women and their screaming children. . . .
Then we stripped the weapon store. The doors stood open, and many of the spears and even the short Roman swords had been taken by the folk to defend themselves. But that made no difference save that we took them from the dead instead of from the racks along the armoury walls. We took grain and wine and leather tunics, and all things that might be of use to us, and loaded them into the waiting ox-carts that came down for them. And then we fired the place behind us, very thoroughly. So that Londinium was a lake of flame from end to end and the smoke rolled like black storm-clouds across the evening sky.
And we came back to our camps along the wooded ridges, singing songs like a wolf-pack under the moon.
Next day, fast riders came from Andragius. ‘Verulamium is burned. The Red Crests are away south. Wait you till I come.’
Two days, we waited, restless as ponies when the smell of wolf is in the wind; and in all those two days, no men, not even I who slept across her threshold, cared to risk our hides by speaking to the Queen. And then at evening, runners came with word that the Catuvellauni had returned and were making their camp to the west of us.
‘Go then, and fetch the Prince Andragius to me,’ said the Queen, standing beside the fire that burned in the entrance to her black horse-hide tent. It was raining, I mind, and the horsehides were wetly shining, and the fine mizzle made a golden smoke as it eddied hissing into the fire
‘No need for that,’ said a voice, and Andragius with the blurred traces of the warpaint still on his cheeks, stepped with his light wildcat stride into the clearing.
The Queen turned on him. ‘What means this message of yours? You let the Red Crests break clear of your net?’
Andragius said, ‘No, for they never walked into our net. They never came to the place beyond Verulamium where the road is cut. Maybe the eagles of the sky told them of our war-bands on the move. They turned aside, somewhere up in the mid-lands, and went south through the gap in the High Chalk, heading for Calleva of the Atrebates.’
‘Did the eagles of the sky tell you all this?’ the Queen said.
‘We also have our Eyes and Ears out beyond the Host, to see and bring back tidings.’
‘Why did you not follow them up?’
‘Lady, so deep into enemy territory?’
There was a silence. Only the drip of wet from the broad leaves of summer. Then Boudicca shook her head. ‘Na, that might well have been to run into a net in our turn. . . . You have not left the way open to them, if they should double back?’
He gave a snort of laughter, harsh and mocking behind his nose. ‘Lady, I was not chosen by the Catuvellauni to lead their war-bands because I could play the flute or weave rush baskets. The pass through the Chalk is held fast, until I give the word to pull back the men who hold it; and they are in fine fighting spirit, their heads high and hot within them because we have laid flat to the blackened ground the city which the Romans raised upon the ruins of our own.’ But he spoke on a note of scorn for his own kind. And at a sudden roar of song and laughter from some distant part of the camp, he cocked his head. ‘As high as, it seems, are the hearts of the Iceni.’
‘Surely,’ the Queen told him. ‘For Londinium also lies flat to the ground, and the wolves and ravens make merry in the streets. Go now. Eat and rest. Tomorrow we will call together the chieftains, to decide the thing next to be done.’
But after he was gone back to his own men, the Queen stood looking after him. And she said, broodingly, part to herself, part, I think, to me, ‘Their hearts are high and hot within them. They are drunk on revenge. Too drunk to know as I know, as Andragius of the War Cats knows, that we have been already twice too late. Too late to take the Governor in Londinium, too late to bring the Red Crests to battle in time and place of our choosing.’
And then she laughed, flinging back her wild wet hair. ‘Yet what have we to fear? We have ten men to their one; and the Mother will not deny us the victory, for it is she who demands it!’
Mother dear, it is not many days since I last added to this letter; but it seems a very long time.
We pulled out of Londinium, and halfway down to Noviomagus along with the refugees. And the Governor sent urgent messages on with them, as a back-up to those he had already sent by galloper, appealing to Cogidubnos to raise as many ‘friendlies’ as may be, and send them on up to us. They’ll be only rough-riding cavalry and a few bowmen, but every little helps. Then we came back on our tracks, and here we are, encamped about eight miles south of Londinium and waiting for them to come; and, even more, waiting for reinforcements from Gaul, The Twentieth and Fourteenth have got through to us, by a roundabout way through friendly territory. So now our strength is up to something over eight thousand; but even so, we are many times outnumbered, and can
only hope the Gaulish reinforcements come soon.
When I say we are encamped south of Londinium, we are encamped south of where Londinium used to be. It’s just a vast blackfire scar now, tastefully decorated with the remains of crucified men. Our scouts report that by the look of things the people in the depot must have put up quite a fight for it! Nothing moving now but the ravens and the carrion gulls. I suppose it makes a change from fish-guts. Oh Mother, I’m sorry; I only wrote that because I feel sick every time I think of that sprawling prosperous town. And now, if ever you read it, I shall have made you feel sick too. No I won’t, I’ll cross it out. When the legions got through to us, their scouts reported Verulamium in like case. That’s three cities, and the gods know where it’s going to end.
At the moment it seems that this Boadicea (that’s the Queen’s name) is encamped among the upland forests north of Londinium. She can’t come south into enemy territory after us, and we haven’t enough men to go north after her. It’s like one of those horrible games when you get into a position where you can’t make a move either way and you can’t win. Though I suppose time is, if anything, on our side. At least we are likely to get the auxiliaries from Cogidubnos, and grow stronger, while if Paulinus is right, the Celts need to be used in hot blood to fight their best, and if kept waiting too long may even start to melt away. There are reports, too, that her people sowed no corn this spring, vowing to feed fat on our stores and harvest. So I suppose hunger might driver her from cover eventually, but it’s not easy to feed even an army the size of ours, for long, sitting in one patch of country, with no depot and precious few lines of communication. So it looks as though we shall go nearly as hungry as she.
Later. Much later. It must be 2nd August I think. Still no reinforcements from Gaul. Seemingly there’s some trouble and they can’t easily be spared. I wish I knew if all is well with you; but they say the trouble isn’t in the south.
I hope you can read this, my ink-stick is almost gone and I’ve mixed it weaker than usual to make it last out a bit longer.
14
The Corn Dancing
YET AGAIN THE Council Fire was lit, and the chieftains and war-captains gathered; and standing before them, Andragius of the Catuvellauni told again what he had told to the Queen beside her tent fire.
And when he had spoken, and the thing had been exclaimed at and snarled at and talked over – for the older I grow the more it seems to me that we of the Tribes must at all times do a great deal of talking – a chief of the Trinovantes said, ‘But what the Lord Andragius and his war-bands could not do, surely the whole War Host is strong enough to do! Now, therefore, let us harness up and cross the Father of Rivers and press on south after Suetonius Paulinus and his Red Crests!’
But Gretorix Hard-Council shook his grey shaggy head. ‘It is true that we outnumber the Red Crests many times; but even so, what gain shall it be for us to go hunting them into the territory of our bitterest foes? It would take us far from our own land, and if the Second Legion which is still in Glevum were to thrust eastward they could cut our road home behind us.’
‘What need have we of a road home?’ demanded another chief. ‘Until all roads are free to us, and the Red Crests have been driven into the sea?’
So they talked on, one against another, until the Queen, who had sat listening, her eyes going to each speaker in turn, but saying no word of her own, spoke up at last. ‘Long have I listened to your words, O lords and chieftains and war-captains of the Tribes, now let you listen to mine. If we bide here, we can keep watch on all that the Red Crests do, and on every move that they make. Between the Father of Rivers and the Great Water, Paulinus must know that he is shut up as in a holding-pen. He must know that if ever his kind are to be the Lords of Britain again, he must come north of the river once more. Then we shall have him in our own hunting runs.’
‘How long can we bide?’ a war-captain growled. ‘A War Host such as ours needs feeding.’
‘The land north of the river is empty of men but rich in corn and cattle,’ Boudicca said. ‘Rich pasture and good hunting shall feed the War Host as long as need be.’
Then Tigernann of the Brigantes said, ‘The Bearers of the Blue Warshields fight best in hot blood.’ And his voice was insolent, and his thumbs again in his belt.
The Queen turned on him like a she-wolf, ‘Do we not all know the fighting ways of the Bearers of the Blue War-shields? All warriors of all tribes fight their best in hot blood! – Then let them bank up the heat, as the Women’s Side smoore the fire at night for use again in the morning! Have we not learned to wait, we whose life is the corn and the herds? Who can hurry the growth of the seed-corn in the ground or the young in the belly of its dam? Yet the corn comes to harvest and the foal to birth in their own time – in the Mother’s time. So shall it be with this waiting, and the red harvest that shall end it when the time of the Mother comes!’
And so, for upward of two moons we held our camps in the forest clearings, much where Caratacus must have waited for that last great battle with the Emperor Claudius, eighteen summers ago. We lived well enough at first, on the spoils of Londinium and the flocks and herds and garnered grain of the abandoned farms; and on the hunting, which is rich in those parts also.
But as time went by our foraging bands must push further and further afield for the lowing wild-eyed cattle that they drove back to the camps, and the hunting parties must quest deeper and deeper into the forest after deer and boar; and the granaries were low before ever we came to them, the year being close to harvest time again.
The harvest promised well enough, in the untended fields, but when the grain was heavy in the ear and beginning to turn colour, there came three days of wind and rain that tore and battered it down until much of it was scarce worth the gathering. We harvested the fields that were near enough, all the same, bringing in the draggled shocks of spelt and barley in the lightest of the big ox-wagons. They made a poor thin showing, and would not fill the bellies of such a War Host for long; but at least we could say that we had reaped and gathered in the captured harvest of the south. We who had sown no corn of our own in the spring.
And the women garlanded the wide horns of the oxen with scarlet poppies and corn marigolds and daisies of the moon, and danced before the ox-carts as they have always done. And when the last sheaf was cut, it was bound about with green leaf-sprays and coloured ribbons and drawn home in a lurching and swaying wagon by itself and with all honour as befits the Corn King.
In the days of our mothers’ mothers the Corn King was a living man bound into the midst of the barley sheaf. But in these softer days it is most often only the shock of corn that is lauded and called King and then hacked to pieces by the women and ploughed back into next year’s furrows. So it is at least with the Iceni. Other tribes, other customs.
So the Corn King on his wagon was drawn through the Queen’s camp, and set up on a mound of turfs in the central clearing. And from all over, the Horse People gathered to the feasting. Some to the Royal Fire where the Corn King lolled on his turf throne, others to the lesser cook-fires scattered throughout the camp where the carcases of oxen slain that morning were roasting. And presently the folk feasted and the drink went round – wine from rich men’s deserted farms, and barley beer that the women had brewed as best they could; raw stuff with a kick to it like a stallion. And throughout the camps of other tribes along the rolling forest country, much the same thing would be going on.
Some of the older warriors wagged their heads at so much feasting when there was no knowing how much longer we had to wait with our belts pulled ever tighter, before the Red Crests moved.
But food stored for the future is not the only thing needed to keep heart in a long-waiting War Host. Even I, who am no warrior but a harper know that. Maybe a harper knows it best. . . .
But that was no evening for waking the harp. Harping is for a Royal Hall, or for a few gathered beside a hunting fire under the stars, or for a Queen in her tent. You cannot harp to a
War Host. And after the eating was done and the drink jars going round, the women began to spill out on to the open space about the Royal Fire, where Boudicca had come from her long horse-hide tent to sit with the Princesses beside her. They joined hands, circling in the old secret patterns of the Corn Dance, to the music of reed pipes that grew always wilder and more shrill. And the quickening rhythms and the barley spirit set the blood on fire, and the pipes were calling, calling, until the Princesses left their places before the long black tent to join the dancers, eyes bright and hair and arms flying.
And then the wolfskin drums of the Men’s Side took over from the flutes, and young braves sprang into the open space and began to whirl and stamp with upraised spears; and no one cared that it was a war-dance they made, and no dance for the Corn King at all; nothing mattered but the twisting and stamping and wild cries, and the fierce rhythms mounting like fever in the blood.
They laid bright patterns of naked swords on the turf that by now was almost trampled bare, and danced among them where one false step would have meant the loss of a foot. They pulled blazing branches from the fire crying, ‘We are the Sun that ripens the grain. Come, Harvest!’ and drew the women out to join them in bright spinning sun-wheels of flame. I have seen many Corn Feasts in my time. But never the like of that Corn Feast. It seemed to me that the throbbing of the drums was the throbbing of my own heart, and the shrilling of the flutes made a white fire in my head; and the shadows of unknown things crowded out from the blackness of the trees, to make their own dark dancing just beyond the reach of the torches.