Ravens of Avalon (25 page)

Her first reaction was revulsion. To return as she was now to that place where her marriage had truly begun, where she had felt such hope and known such peace, would seem a sacrilege. But as she thought about it, she began to realize that the lady of the holy well had wronged her by promising her so much and betraying it all. She should go, she thought grimly. She had a few things to say to the spirit of the spring.

They rode south from the dun on a smiling day when the first hint of autumn touched the air. Boudica made no attempt to discourage attendants. These days other people appeared to her as ghosts and shadows. If such wished to follow her, she could not summon the energy to discourage them.

A half-day’s journey brought them to the shrine. The place was full of pilgrims, some of whom were unceremoniously evicted from their shelters when the entourage of the queen of the Northern Iceni arrived. Boudica cared little where she slept, so long as it was not in the shelter she and Prasutagos had shared before. While the others arranged their bedding she walked among the trees. She ate the food they cooked for her, but it was not until the next morning that she went to the spring.

Morning was for hope, she thought as the path curved and she crossed the stepping stones through the marshy area below the spring. But to her the sunlight seemed thin and the gurgle of water a mockery. Bits of fabric, some old, some new, still fluttered from the branches of the hazel tree. She reached up and untied the riband she had put there almost a year before.

The cool breath of the water had not changed, and the water itself continued to well upward from unknown depths, sweet and clear.

“I would rather have come here to thank you for a safe delivery,” she said quietly. “If there is anything here to thank—” Her voice cracked. “If you even care whether I give you a riband or take it back, whether I give thanks or spit into your pool!”

But even in her anger Boudica could not bring herself to go that far. This might be no more than water, but it was no less, an element to be respected even now, when they had had so much of it. The Druids would have taken this as the cue for some mystic sermon, but at the moment their wisdom seemed worthless as well. All they had accomplished with their magic was to bring the Romans more quickly to Britannia’s shores. In fact, just now she could not think of anything in which she did believe. As if with hope she had also lost the power of motion, she sank down on a piece of log that had been set as a bench nearby.

“I would hate you, if I had the energy,” she addressed the pool. “They say your waters are bountiful as the Mother’s breasts.
My
breasts are dry. They say your pool is the womb of life.
My
womb is empty!” It was also said that the tears of the Goddess filled the spring. As she leaned over the dark water, her own tears fell into the pool.

When Boudica was here before, she had thought the Lady of the Well spoke to her. She would have resisted any such fancy now. But she could not resist the one thing the waters offered her … a place to at last be still. This was neither comfort nor forgiveness nor peace, but a place beyond them all. The sun moved inexorably westward; water continually welled upward and then trickled down the hill; reeds and grass and trees continued to grow. She lived.

For a time she sat without thinking, but presently she became aware of a sound that did not belong to this woodland harmony—an intermittent whimper, coming from a patch of reeds. With the first twitch of curiosity she had felt since the baby died she got up to see. A twist of dirty linen was moving, half in and half out of the water. She peeled the cloth back to reveal what looked like a drowned rat, if there had ever been a rat that was white with one red ear and absurdly large paws.

A puppy—someone had tried to drown a puppy in the sacred spring. Now that was surely a blasphemy! She felt her guts clench as the tiny thing wriggled in her hands. She wanted to be sick, and she wanted to kill whoever would do such a thing. But already she was stripping away the soggy linen, rubbing at the sodden fur with her shawl. She cradled the shivering creature against her breast and the small head turned and a very pink tongue licked her hand.

Boudica wrapped the puppy in her shawl and took a step down the path. Then she stopped, picked up her riband from the ground, and draped it back over a branch of the hazel tree.

When she returned to the shelter the relief on the faces of her servants made her wonder how long she had been gone. If any of them were curious about what she had wrapped so carefully in her shawl none dared to ask.

“Do you wish to stay here tonight, my lady?” asked Calgac. “If we left now we could be back at the dun before darkness falls …”

She stared at him. Go back to Eponadunon, where every sight would remind her of what she had lost? She could not do it. She wanted space, and light, and a bed where she had never lain in the deceptive shelter of her husband’s arms. There was a farm to the west of here that she had visited once with Prasutagos, when he was introducing her to his people and his land. According to the wedding settlements, it belonged to her.

“I will do neither …” she said slowly. “We will pack the wagon and take the road west to Danatobrigos. Go back to Eponadunon.” She nodded to the warriors. “You may tell my husband where I have gone, and that it is now safe for him to return to his dun. I will not be there to reproach him—”
or to be reproached in turn …

She did not expect to find happiness, but perhaps in time some healing would come. But first, she thought as the puppy burrowed against her breast, she would have to find some milk for the little dog.

THIRTEEN

now fountained as the puppy hit the bank, his pale form disappearing and then bursting free like some winter spirit manifesting in canine form. He slid a few feet, then leaped again, leaving a series of splash marks down the hill.

“How he loves the snow!” said Temella. With a shawl wrapped around her head, only the girl’s big gray eyes and the tip of a red nose could be seen.

“Bogle loves everything,” Boudica replied in amusement. When they had settled into the farmstead at Danatobrigos the previous autumn, bags and baskets and anything else within reach of his tiny teeth had become a plaything. As the puppy grew into the promise of his big paws he had found immense sport in the drifted autumn leaves. From his coloring they guessed him to be part hunting hound, but the other parent must have been something much larger. And now, as high as her knee and still growing, he had discovered snow.

The red mare stamped and snorted as the puppy slid under her hooves, barked, and was off again. But Roud was accustomed to his antics, since riding or walking, where Boudica went, the dog was never more than a whistle away. Temella was almost as constant a companion. The girl was the oldest of the children to whom Boudica had taken the soup the day she gave birth to her baby. She had appeared at the farm about a month after Boudica moved there and attached herself as maid, messenger, and shadow.

Boudica took a deep breath of crisp air. Some snow was to expected at this season, but a blizzard of the size that had kept them indoors for the past three days was unusual. Field and pasture had been transformed by the snowfall, all irregularities smoothed to an expanse of pristine white. Even the leafless branches of the ash tree that shaded the ritual hearth were mantled in white, and the ancient trackway that ran toward the coast was no more than a depression in the snow. Beneath that white blanket many things lay sleeping, from the body of her child to the seeds of next year’s grain.

In the months since she had come to Danatobrigos, there had been times when she wanted to lie down beneath just such an obliterating coverlet, without thought or movement, until all feeling also disappeared. Even her husband’s rare visits had not disturbed her lethargy. It was Bogle, thrusting his shaggy head beneath her palm to be petted, or dropping some amorphous slobbered object in her lap to be thrown, who had kept her connected to the world of the living. Sometimes, she even laughed.

She watched, smiling, as he dashed past a stand of leafless oaks down the road, barking furiously.

“Someone is coming,” said Temella as the dog bounced back toward them.

“Bogle! Be still!” Boudica reined in and whistled, and the dog slowed, a low growl vibrating from his throat, plumed tail waving gently. He was uncertain, not alarmed, though at his age, she wondered, how would he tell the difference between what was dangerous and what was merely new? Still, it was unlikely any enemy would be abroad in this weather, especially now, when they were safe beneath the protecting hand of Rome.

On the heels of her thought came the strangers themselves, Romans by their gear, moving in good order past the trees. As they drew closer she recognized Pollio with his escort, all mounted on native ponies whose shaggy coats shrugged off snow.

“Well met, my lady!” he called, his breath making white puffs in the chill air. “But I did not expect to meet you so soon! I was on my way to the ferry—I have a mission to the Brigante lands—and regretted not being able to break my journey at Eponadunon. Are you and your husband visiting hereabouts?” He drew up beside Boudica.

“The king is at Eponadunon,” she said flatly. “I live here.”

His dark gaze grew more intent. “Truly? Then fortune is with me.”

She lifted an eyebrow, wondering what he could possibly wish to say to her rather than to the king. “Temella, ride to the steading and tell them we will have guests.” The girl nodded and urged her pony into a trot. Bogle lurched after her, circled her pony, and then skidded back to Boudica.

“Will you ride with me a little up the road?” Pollio asked, moving his mount closer to hers. “Our horses should not stand in this cold.”

That was true. She loosened the rein and let Roud fall into step beside his gray.

“Winter agrees with you, lady.”

“You do not seem to be suffering, either,” she observed. The cold had brought an unaccustomed color to his sallow cheeks and brightened his eyes, though she noticed that even Romans grew out their beards in this cold. “I suppose this is very different from your home.”

“Not as much as you might ihink—I was born in Dacia, and the winters there can be bitter indeed.”

“That would explain how you come to be traveling in this weather. I thought you Romans spent Britannic winters stoking the furnaces of your hypocausts and cursing the cold.”

This time he laughed out loud, a surprisingly pleasant sound. “No doubt they are doing so in Camulodunum, but even your dog knows there is sport to be had in the wintertime …”

Her gaze followed Bogle, who had flushed a hare from the woods and was pursuing it through the snow, barking ecstatically, though it was not clear whether he was trying to hunt or to play.

“My mother was a noblewoman in Dacia.” Pollio’s eyes flicked to her face and then away. “My father married her when he was stationed there. This is how the new provinces become part of the Empire.”

I already have a husband—why is he saying this to me?
But she herself had told him that she and Prasutagos were living separately. She had heard that divorce was easy among the Romans. Perhaps he did not consider her married state an impediment. She glanced at him, seeing him for the first time as a not ill-looking man who clearly enjoyed her company. As if he had felt her gaze he turned to her once more, and she looked away.

As they passed through the wood, the horses, sensing their riders’ inattention, had slowed. Pollio reached out and took her hand.

“Boudica, you are like a flame, burning in the midst of the snow. I thought so when I first saw you, glowing like a torch in the imperial purple gloom, but you were still a child. You are a woman now, and you are magnificent!”

Since that day she had borne and lost a child. If that was the qualification for womanhood she wondered how the race could survive. And how could she be a flame when she felt frozen inside?

Or was she? Pollio had slid off his glove and now was easing his fingers beneath the woolen mitten that covered her hand. The touch was surprisingly intimate. She felt a sudden rush of heat, as if he had put his hand beneath her gown.

“You are a princess of your people as I am a lord among mine. Together we could do so much for this land …”

The horses had stopped. She trembled as he began to trace small circles in the sensitive center of her palm.

“I have dreamed of you, my lady,” he said softly. “Sweet and ripe as one of the apples we grow in the southern lands. I dream of tasting that sweetness, as I dream of warming myself at your fire. Blessed Boudica, fairest of women, welcome me to your hearth …”

Bogle was barking, but the sound seemed to come from somewhere very far away. Pollio leaned forward, his other arm reaching up to draw her to him. Her lips parted, awaiting his kiss.

And the dog, yipping gleefully, bounded beneath the bellies of the horses. Pollio’s mount bucked, kicking, and the red mare shied.

Boudica grabbed a handful of mane and righted herself. The Roman was half off his horse, swearing as he tried to retrieve his reins. Bogle, apparently believing he had at last found a playmate, bounced in and out, dodging the hooves, and then dashed away again, barking in the tone that meant,
“People are coming, come see, come see!”

She straightened, squinting against the glare of sun on snow as a group of riders approached from the other direction. A big man on a big horse led them. With some sense that went deeper than vision Boudica knew him. She sat back, willing her heartbeat to slow.