Читать книгу Red Queen, White Queen - Henry Treece - Страница 4
ОглавлениеThe Village
The village of Venta Icenorum, the tribal settlement of Boudicca, lay so near to the sea that the smell of seaweed was as familiar as that of bread.
It was a grey place, of round stone huts with their reed-thatched roofs, set in a little hollow and surrounded by groves of oak-trees. The men of that village were proud of its main street, made after the new Roman style. It was a short street, hardly more than a hundred paces long. To make it so, many of the older huts had had to be torn down. At first the men of the Iceni had not liked this, for their fathers and grandfathers had lived in those huts. Many of them had been buried beneath the cow-dung floors of the huts. Their bones were the gods of the houses.
But times change, and the Romans built straight streets. What the Romans could do, the Iceni could do, they thought. So they built a straight street through the village, pointing in the direction of the sea, so that travellers from the outer world might find the way easily, might bring trade and Roman wealth to the place.
At the seaward end of the street stood the Queen’s house. It was a great place, for it would shelter five families and had three long rooms, each with a fire-hearth and a chimney-hole in the reed-roof. Since the King’s death there had been no fires in the house, as a sign of lamentation. But the early Spring had been a warm one and no one felt the cold. Though, in any case, the Queen, Boudicca, was a kindly woman, one of the plump sort, who would not let her housefolk suffer too greatly in the cause of grief. She saw to it that though the fires were out, the ale flowed freely and the beds were well covered with sheepskin and deer hide.
She had said, in the hearing of any who were about, that though Prasutagus was dead now, there was no reason why anyone should suffer for that. The Druids had made their usual sacrifices in the oak groves, and that was the end of it. Now the villagers must look forward to a pleasant year.
She had even said that she thought Rome was not as black as she had been painted; that the Emperor Nero was a reasonable fellow, just another chieftain, like herself. She said that he would see her point of view, as a man who had a kingdom to rule himself, and would realise that one in authority had obligations to his own folk as well as liabilities to those higher up the scale.
So Boudicca consoled her people and went about her life. Since her villagers knew little of Nero, they did not question her—though, as was the Celtic fashion, all had a right to stop her in the street, to slap her on the broad back, if they must, and to talk to her without elaborate terms of rank, and so on. A woman was a woman, after all; you stroked them, then bedded them, then went out to shoot a deer to feed them while they fed the baby with the milk from their breasts. Boudicca was a woman, though the folk called her ‘Queen’.
Boudicca was interested in being alive. She liked to eat and drink, and she liked to go hunting in the oak forests that swirled about her village. She was not a good marksman, for the bows of her people were too unwieldy for use in the saddle; but she was a good horsewoman. And often she would tell her daughters that the horse was the only creature worth worshipping.
The two daughters of Boudicca were gay, laughing girls, almost as plump and as flaxen-haired as their mother; Gwynnedd and Siara, they were called. They often teased their mother, thinking that they knew a little more than she did—for she was over thirty now. They told her that the bull was the only creature a woman could respect.
‘Was our father like a bull, Mother Queen?’ they would say, laughing behind their hands.
In the saddle, Boudicca would strike out at them with her willow-withy whip, hoping to miss them.
‘I tell you, the horse is the thing,’ she would say, laughing.
The girls, Gwynnedd and Siara, would smile secretly and tell each other that there must be something about a bull, or the men of Crete would not have prayed to one for so long.
But all ended well, usually. In the old fashion, after Prasutagus had gone, the Queen slept with whoever pleased her, and left her daughters to do the same. Though they shared the long bedroom, the three women, they made a point of not seeing each other after sunset, though they passed so closely that their skirts almost touched.
The Queen and the two Princesses took life as it came, took strangers as they came, and did not offend each other.
No children were born in the royal house of the Iceni in the year after the death of King Prasutagus. The new Roman god, Mithras, was to be praised for this, for children were a burden at first. The old gods, those mentioned by the Druids, were less thoughtful. They filled the cottages with brats; but one must move with the times, with Rome.
Yet there was a night when things seemed different.
At first the villagers could not understand it. Later, they understood it only too well.
Just before sundown a man strode into the place, his dark eyes burning, his Roman toga swinging in the sea-breeze.
‘That is the tax-collector,’ said Sian Crack-brain, who lived in the end cottage. ‘He is up to no good.’
His wife skelped him away from the open window with a skillet-spoon. It was a bad thing to speak ill of Rome. Her brother had lost the thumb of each hand for less.
An hour later, five Companies of horse cantered into Venta Icenorum, their swords already at the high-port.
Sian said, ‘I do not dare to say that there is trouble brewing, dear one.’
He paused a while and blew into his broth-dish.
Then he said, ‘But I do not like the look I saw in the eyes of those Romans.’
His wife stirred the porridge and clucked with slow impatience at the stupidity of the man she had been forced to marry.
In the morning, the villagers of Venta Icenorum were summoned by the chief Druid to go to the yard of the royal house. They went, protesting that the meat would burn, or the logs not be chopped.
But when they had got there, they were glad that they had been called.
Even the young women, who envied Boudicca her breasts, shrank back with horror at the ghastly red wounds across her back.
And the young men, who had prayed nightly for the bodies of her daughters, leapt forward in rage to see them so mauled, so tumbled, so wasted.
But of the man in the toga there was no sign. And the horsemen had left before dawn.
Boudicca, still hanging from the post outside her own door, turned in agony to the old man in the white gown who stood by her, wringing his thin hands.
‘Druid,’ she said, ‘get a knife and cut me down. They have gone now, the Romans. You will be in no danger.’
And as he cut the thongs she said gently, ‘So Nero has replied to my letter! Well, he shall have another one soon—but it will not be written in words.’
The old priest bowed his head as he said, ‘I sometimes think that the old ways have finished. We must change our ideas, Boudicca.’
The Queen stretched her arms and said, ‘You have the oak groves to think your thoughts in. Do not bother me with them, old one. I have things to do.’
Then she went to the room where her daughters lay, moaning and torn.
‘So,’ she said gently, as a mother should, ‘now what to the big bulls of Crete?’
