Dreaming the Eagle (76 page)

‘No. I raised it. It is mine to hold.’

‘Then I won’t leave. The children are safe. I’ll stay. Ardacos, too.’ He was hovering nearby, his hand on the bridle of a child’s pony. Breaca would have signalled but Macha restrained her.

‘Breaca, no. Do you still not understand? This is not about these children alone. It is about you and Caradoc and the child you carry from last night and the others not yet conceived. It’s about Airmid and Braint, Dubornos and Efnis, Gwyddhien and Ardacos and the others who will rear and teach them. Between you, all of you, you carry the seeds of the future. If you live through today there is hope that everything we are, everything we have - the dreaming, the gods, the songs of past and present - can survive. Without that, Rome will destroy everything until our children and our children’s children will know as little of us as we know of the ancestors - less because the dreams will have gone. It will be as if we were never here.’

‘That could never happen.’

‘It can. If you don’t leave now, it will. Even so, nothing is certain.’ Macha was serious now, not angry, but insistent. ‘Swear to me that you will fight them, in every way you can. That you will listen to the gods for guidance and follow the dreaming. That you will teach your children likewise.’

Breaca laid her hand on the hilt of her sword. ‘I swear.’

The mist held them close. To the north, it swallowed children in bites of ten and a dozen; dreamers and hard-faced warriors followed. Caradoc led them, far away at the front. Gwyddhien, Dubornos and Braint waited, gauging the distance to the Romans. Airmid was last, leading the grey battle mare. Hail ran at her heels. Gunovic stood at Breaca’s bridle, talking to her horse. She gave him the warrior’s salute. ‘Thank you for the bear-horse. He is the best I’ve ever ridden.’

He grinned, a great bear of a man, who had taught her what it meant to race with an open heart and fight to win. He said, ‘He will sire better if you put him to your grey mare - but only if you leave now and give him the chance. I would hate the Romans to reap the fruits of four years’ work.’

‘I’m going.’ Unforgivable on the field of battle, she was weeping. She reached down for Macha’s arm. ‘We will sing of you every winter for a thousand generations. Don’t let them take you living, either of you.’

‘It won’t happen. Now go.’

She turned the horse away. To her left, the last of Togodubnos’ honour guard died and the legionary line moved onward, swords clashing on shields, boots churning the ground. They were blind in the fog and came slowly, testing each step with care. Breaca pushed her horse to a trot. Airmid waited for her with the grey mare.

Breaca said, ‘Can she run?’

‘Yes, if you don’t load her. Come on, we must hurry-Gods! Cunomar, no-‘

Braint had been given charge of the child. His father’s prophecy had been forgotten, or was being ignored, and, alone of those on the field who bore the sun hound, he was being made to leave. He had refused at first then suddenly relented and had followed the young warrior sullenly past his father’s pyre. At its furthest margin, while she bent to lay her fire-spears on the ground, he wrenched himself loose, turned and, pulling a burning brand from the fire’s edge, kicked his pony past the others and into the fog.

The death-song of the sun hound carried in high treble, losing no force with the distance. As it reached a peak, red flame stained the fog. A horse screamed in terror. Men howled in surprise, cascading into panic. A child died on a dozen swords. Macha sang the invocation to Briga clearly, so that it carried through the fog; the sound of a wren at dawn’s first light. The hound bitch, Cygfa, joined, raising her muzzle in the damp air. Beside them, Gunovic swung his hammer and laid the first of his fire-spears in the pyre.

Breaca found herself at the back of a silent string of warriors. Known faces wavered in the mist ahead of her: Airmid and Gwyddhien, Ardacos and Braint, Dubornos and Efnis, Luain, come back to see that they had all left, half of the honour guard from Mona, a sea of blue-cloaked Eceni. She hefted her shield and held it to the sky. Closed fists were raised around her. Airmid pointed along the path through the marshes to where Caradoc led the way to freedom.

‘We must go.’

At the pyre, the first clash of warriors masked the noise of their leaving.

EPILOGUE.

MACHA.

She was there, far more clearly than she had ever been in the visions. Ban could see her, standing with Gunovic the travelling smith, and a hound bitch he did not recognize; with Togodubnos and Odras and a child who bore the blond hair of one and the wide brown eyes of the other and who sat a small grey pony, smiling his battle challenge. She was there in spirit, as Ban had seen her these past six years, and yet her body, newly dead, lay charred and smoking on the remains of the pyre. The hammer blow that had killed her was clear on her head, the silver wren sagging in molten waves across her breast. Gunovic, whose hammer, in mercy, had made the blow and whose hands, in honour and grief, had laid her on the pyre with the hound bitch at her side, had died nearby on the swords of a dozen legionaries and had sent twice as many, maybe more, to the other world ahead of him. These, too, Ban could see, but more dimly, more wraith-like, as he had once seen his mother and his sister, believing both dead when one, at least, had still been alive.

The knowledge of his error and its magnitude came to Ban slowly and against great resistance. He had not taken part in the systematic slaughter that was the battle of the second morning; that had been reserved for the II nd legion, a gift from Aulus Plautius to their commander Vespasian to assuage the humiliation of the first day’s defeat. The auxiliaries, Ban among them, had been called across the river later as the fog began to lift, to scour the battlefield for wounded, to slay any of the enemy that might lie feigning death and to ferry the wounded legionaries back across the water to the ministrations of Theophilus and his helpers. From the first, passing through the fallen lines of Trinovantian dead, the auxiliaries had found the shields bearing the newly painted serpent-spear and had remarked on it - the Gauls, too, had their ancestors and knew of their marks. Ban alone had been silent, shielding his mind from his heart’s fear, from the terror that had touched him on a hillside the day before when a red-haired warrior had led the charge in the rescue of Caradoc and Togodubnos.

Only when he found the pyre, when he knelt, retching, in the acrid smoke of his mother’s body, when he looked at what had so recently been alive and now lay, stripped of half its flesh, in the embers, when he raised his head and saw his mother’s soul shining and radiant before him - only then did the shields disintegrate and the truth flood in.

‘Macha!’

He called her name and received no answer. In the silence of the passing ghosts, Ban wept as he had never wept in his life. Pain unmatched tore through him, the storm of the gods, wrenching his soul from its moorings. Corvus was forgotten and all that he stood for. Death was his best and only hope, his deliverance. The knife at his belt bore the mark of the falcon god, Horus. It had been a gift from Corvus early in their days together, a promise and an offer that neither had expected to be fulfilled. Ban’s fingers closed on it as if they belonged only there. Sweetly, it sang from its sheath and he swept it, point first, towards his breast. The pain was dull and hard but not deathly, the pain of impact as an iron knife-blade strikes a medallion of solid gold and does not penetrate. His fingers, numbed, sprang open and his mother’s shade reached down to sweep the weapon from his grasp. Even in the confines of Amminios’ slave-boat, he had not known her so close, or so real. Looking up, he read only contempt in her eyes. His soul cried to hers. ‘Mother! I want to join you.’

You cannot.

‘Why?’

That is for you to find. You are forsaken. The gods condemn you to life.

She left him to join her people and Ban was not one of them. One by one, he watched as the dead of two days’ battles - Eceni, Trinovantes, Brigantes, Votadini, Coritani, Catuvellauni, Silures, Ordovices - filed across the river into the care of their gods. Their names came to him, and their titles, their loves and their deeds, each one etched on his mind as on marble. At the end there was emptiness and the knowledge that the one who, next to his mother, he sought most had not passed him by. Macha had waited at the side, alone. She smiled at him, coldly, and nodded. ‘Breaca lives,’ she said. ‘Your sister is Boudica, Bringer of Victory. With Caradoc she cares for the children. Remember that.’

The green and gold fields of the other world beckoned. Macha turned and walked into the haze. The last Ban saw of his mother was the flat rejection of her back and the wren that circled over her, singing.

AUTHOR’S NOTE.

THE PEOPLES OF THE LATE PRE-ROMAN IRON AGE IN BRITAIN DID NOT maintain written records of their histories, dreams or oral teachings. We have no contemporary records save those written by the enemy - Rome - with all the political, cultural and social bias that implies. Of the woman we know as Boudica, very little is known beyond her role in the events leading up to and during the revolt of AD 60-61 as recorded by Tacitus. Of the preceding years, particularly the events surrounding the Claudian invasion, we have only the incomplete histories of Cassius Dio, written nearly two centuries later. Concerning her early life there is no written record and thus everything contained in these pages - the people, their life and their dreams - is a fiction. As far as is possible, I have woven my imaginings within a framework of contemporary archaeological theory but it must be stressed that this interpretation of the jigsaw of pottery fragments, midden debris, experimental archaeology and numismatic theory is entirely my own.

A little more is known of Boudica’s contemporaries: Cunobelin and his three sons are mentioned in the classical sources and some details may be inferred from the existence and spread of the coins of the time, although only with due reservations. Most is known about Caradoc/Caratacos and he was undoubtedly a charismatic and intelligent war leader. Webster states that, ‘If Cunobeline [sic] can be said to have been the first British Statesman, Caratacus [sic] was certainly the first great British Commander.’
Graham Webster, The Roman Invasion of Britain (Routledge, 1999).

Others for whom we have credible authority are Berikos (Verica), Beduoc, Cartimandua of the Brigantes (her name means ‘sleek pony’), her consort Venutios and her charioteer Vellocatos. On the continent, Julius Civilis was known to command a cohort of Batavian auxiliaries and claimed during a later revolt to have known, and consider himself a friend of, the future emperor Vespasian. My assumption that they met during the invasion of AD 43 is entirely unfounded but is not, I think, unreasonable.

The tribe who occupied the lands immediately to the west of the Eceni are currently known as the Corieltauvi. However, after due consideration, it seems that for the reader unfamiliar with local archaeology this name is too readily confused with the Catuvellauni, who lay to their south, and so, for purely editorial reasons, I have reverted to their former title, the Coritani.

With respect to the Roman aspects of the narrative, the sources are many and varied. In researching the character of Gaius/Caligula and the events in the winter of AD 39/40, I have chosen to accept the interpretation of Anthony Barrett in his book Caligula - The Corruption of Power, particularly with respect to the events surrounding the ‘surrender’ of Amminios.

The character of Corvus is entirely fictional but his military career is based loosely on that of Atatinus Modestus, a commander cited by John Spaul in his book Ala,
John E. H. Spaul, Ala. The Auxiliary Cavalry Units of the PreDiocletianic Imperial Roman Army (Nectoreca Press, 1984, 2000).
whose career began in Augustan times in the Ala II Gallorum and went on to sixteen years in the Legio X Gemina.

Finally, on the Roman side, I have followed Webster’s depiction of Galba as L. Sulpicius Galba in the light of Suetonius’ contention that he did not take on the name Servius until he took the throne in the year of the four emperors.

Details of the invasion itself remain a source of contention amongst professional archaeologists. Dio outlines two battles, both taking place at a river, but does not give us either the exact number of legions which took part or the geographical location of the landings, both of which are vital to an understanding of the events of this period. From a study of military records in the post-invasion period, it is generally accepted that four legions, plus their attendant auxiliaries and cohorts, took part - a total of around forty thousand armed men, twice as many as Caesar brought in 55 and 54 BC. Best estimates suggest that a thousand ships would be required to transport them from the continent - nearly ten times as many as took part in the Spanish Armada.

At the time of writing, two schools of thought exist concerning the site of the landings. The first is that they landed at Richborough in Kent (the geography of the coastline was somewhat different to that which exists today) and marched west to meet the native forces, first at the Medway and then at the Thames. This theory is backed by the fact that the landing site is a six-hour sail from Boulogne - the shortest possible route - and archaeological evidence of Roman military activity, which has been fixed at around the time of the invasion. This landing site has the advantage of being close to the Thames and Trinovantian territory, both of vital strategic importance.

The second theory has the invaders landing on the south coast at or near Fishbourne - this being supported by the fact that the Roman excuse for invasion was to return Berikos (Verica) of the Atrebates to his home kingdom. This gives the invasion the advantage of a landing in friendly territory and access to food, water and fuel while establishing bases. Against this is the fact that the crossing from Boulogne takes twenty hours and must run against two tides.

For the novelist who is required to build a fictional reality, it was always going to be necessary to choose one or other theory, until a paper published by Black,’ examining other classical sources, proposed a third theory - that two separate landings took place, one at each location. We are unlikely ever to resolve this but, given the logistical nightmare of landing a thousand ships at any single location, this third theory makes more sense than either of the other two and is the option I have chosen. You, of course, are free to imagine your own alternative, as with all the rest.