Red Queen, White Queen Read online

  The Tribune mused on the other side of the white wall, scratching his ribs reflectively.

  ‘Hm,’ he said, with a smile, ‘so you do not think we stand much chance of killing the Red Queen, eh?’

  The soldier said, ‘Saving your presence, Tribune, but I don’t. They have Drammoch behind them, the Brigantes to the north, and I’ll bet my best pair of marching boots that the news that they are out after Boudicca has already reached her by now. No, sir, they don’t stand a chance, poor devils!’

  ‘Poor devils!’ echoed the Tribune, smiling. ‘No, I did not think they stood much of a chance from the start, to be quite frank, soldier. But one must try these things, if only for the fun of it.’

  He strolled back to the place where the Lady Lavinia was draping herself to the best advantage and said, ‘I must return to the fortress, my sweet. There is apparently bad news. Your handsome Roman and his splendid half-brother, the bastard Duatha—you recall them, they fought behind the stables that night….’

  The Lady Lavinia suddenly sat up, forgetful in her excitement that she was displaying a little more of her charms than she had intended for the moment.

  ‘What,’ she said, her eyes wide, ‘are they—dead, Gaius?’

  The Tribune shrugged his bronzed shoulders and grinned. ‘One must fear so,’ he said lightly. ‘If not now, then very soon. Still, they probably got what they asked for.’

  The Lady Lavinia remembered the Decurion, Gemellus, as he had stood to attention before her that night.

  ‘That is the trouble,’ she said, ‘they did not ask for anything, poor devils.’

  ‘Hm,’ said the Tribune, slipping on his tunic. ‘Poor devils!’

  19: Summer Pavilion

  Three day’s ride north from the ruined city of Verulamium, which still smoked from her fires, Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, had caused to be erected her summer pavilion.

  No monarch of the Eastern world would have dignified such a structure by such a grandiose name—but Boudicca called it so, and no man said her nay. Indeed, there were only two men living in the West who would have dared contest her on any point and they were far away; the General, the Legate Suetonius Paulinus, was crossing laboriously from Anglesey, with too much on his mind at that moment; and Nero was sitting on his basalt platform, devising a Triumph which should signalise the final defeat of the British. He too was extremely busy, for he could not make up his mind, try as he might, whether all the boys should be dressed as girls, or the girls as boys.

  So no one dared to deny Boudicca her right to her summer pavilion.

  It was a tall structure of blackened oak, built to represent a massive Greek temple. That is, it had many fluted columns, some of them with the bark still hanging on them, and a high domed roof, made of Norfolk reeds. Round that dome, on fifty rusting spikes, grinned the heads of Roman officers, veterans from Camulodunum, and collaborators from Londinium. The other heads, for which there were no spikes, were slung by the hair if they were British, and by thongs passed through the eye-sockets if they were cropped Romans, from the rude capitals of the oak columns.

  Since by now the eastern winds were beginning to blow a little chill at nights, the queen had commanded that the spaces between the columns should be filled by hanging draperies. Though the Icenian needle-women had worked until their fingers bled, they could not provide enough material for this purpose; so cloaks, tents, deer-hides, blankets, had all been used to give shelter to the queen and her daughters, and to whichever court officials they decided might share their pavilion.

  It was a chaos of colour and material; yet it was warm, and had a certain rude dignity.

  Inside, a small marble altar, ripped out of the temple at

  Verulamium, and rededicated to Mabon, bore three fires along its top. These fires were fed continuously by a half-blind Druid in filthy robes. The place swirled with black smoke, for the Druid insisted on. pouring the fat of sacrificial goats on to the wood, and no one, not even the Queen, cared to forbid him the right to do so.

  At one end of the pavilion stood a long board table, with benches on either side of it. It was littered with drying crusts and half-gnawed bones, on which the flies settled in black hordes.

  At the other end, the straw-beds of the Queen and her daughters were ranged, thick with wrappings of sheepskin and woollen blankets of various bright colours.

  Heavy oaken stools stood here and there.

  To this place came a messenger, shortly before dawn on the day after the Prince of the Brigantes had fallen beneath the hand of Bran. This messenger was a serious fellow, a little over anxious to deliver his message to the Queen herself.

  He had raced through the encampment without meeting a guard, but as he mounted the first step of the summer pavilion, two Iceni warriors stepped from behind the heavy hangings and placed their javelins at his throat.

  ‘I come with news for Boudicca,’ gasped the messenger, trying to thrust the spear-points away. ‘Let me in to her, without delay!’

  The guards knocked him down the steps and stood over him, ready to stab him if he tried to escape.

  ‘Tell us your news, fellow,’ they said. ‘We will tell the Queen when she awakes. You should know that she has chosen a new Adviser and must not be disturbed until she has had the benefit of his wisdom.’

  The messenger said, almost in terror, ‘I must see the Queen. I cannot tell anyone but the Queen. It is something which concerns her person, I warn you! Let me in!’

  For a short while the two men pretended to consider this request, winking at each other secretly. Then they rolled the messenger over and tied his wrists with a thong.

  ‘Come with us for a little while,’ they said. ‘You will be safer where we are going to take you.’

  As they bundled him off between the tents, he tried to shout, but one of them clutched his jaws so tightly that the man feared that he would choke, and did not try to warn the Queen again.

  After they had stripped him of his rings and bracelets, his skinning-knife and his leathern jerkin, the guards flung him into a grain-store, two yards below the ground. There were a few sacks of half-mouldy barley for him to lie on, and a small square window-hole that would allow him air. He did not seem as grateful as they expected, so they decided not to give him water until the sun was high.

  As they strolled back to the summer pavilion, one of the men said, ‘He is of the Catuvellauni, King Drammoch’s man. He will sell for thirty sheep, at the next slave market, friend.’

  But the other shook his head. ‘Nay, lad,’ he said. ‘He is too small, like all those western tribesmen. Twenty sheep will be all we can expect from that little fellow,’

  Then they forgot him.

  An hour later Boudicca came raving from her bed and seeing them half-asleep on the steps, gave the order that they should be lashed to the wagon-wheels for a day.

  In the bright sunlight, without food or water, neither of them gave a single thought to the messenger who lay on the sack of mouldy barley, in the deep grain store. And by the time that day was out, he had lost all interest in the message which he had been at such pains to deliver to the Red Queen. He dreamed only of the river, which ran just below his village.

  20: Lindum Colonia

  The garrison of Lindum Colonia stood on a high hill, overlooking the flat marshland and the dense forests that surrounded it. To north and to south from the fortress ran a straight military road, the Ermine Street. It had been built by the men of Lindum, the Ninth Legion, nicknamed the ‘Hispana’, sturdy dark-skinned men from Spain, as able with pick and shovel as with pilum and gladius. The men of the Ninth, guzzling their raw vino rojo, that would have soured the stomachs of any other men, boasted that their soles were thicker and tougher than the boots of any other Legion. They had marched from Babylon and back, they said, before the other Legions had completed their preliminary training

  In their stone-built barrack room they sang a song which said;

  ‘The Fourteenth asks for glory,
/>   The Twentieth asks for meat;

  The Second asks soft slippers

  To ease its tired feet;

  ‘But the Ninth wants none of these things;

  It does not fight for gain;

  It only asks a pair of feet

  To march back home to Spain.

  ‘It only asks a pair of hands

  To dig a bloody road;

  And a pair of bloody shoulders

  To lift a bloody load;

  ‘It only asks a girl a day

  To help the hours to pass,

  And a well-shod pair of army boots

  To kick the Second’s arse!’

  Sometimes though, if the drill routine had been too strenuous, or the Commanding Officer had been over-strict in the allocation of leave-passes, these crop-haired soldiers from Spain would substitute the word, ‘Legate’ for ‘Second’ in the last abusive line.

  But generally, the Legate was a popular man, not because he was gentle or even generous to the men under his command; but because he was a man like themselves, a squat black-haired peasant from Iberia, with the table-manners of an ox, and the courage of a black Spanish bull.

  When Quintus Petillius Cerialis opened his broad mouth, his politer Tribunes, young men of good family, held their breath in case he once again said something about which their own fathers would be asked in the Senate.

  ‘Nero,’ he had said, at one public function when the emissaries from Rome lined the room, ‘Nero is a fat-gutted layabout who needs three months with the Ninth! I would relish the pleasure, gentlemen, of putting him on to the Square in full marching order for a month. I’d get his belly off him a damn sight quicker than the Syrian Necromancers he employs, I warrant you! I’d give him little boys, I tell you! He’d spend a week in the cells on bread and water if I saw as much as a twinkle in his little eyes when a boy passed! A damned fraud, that Nero! We want a soldier as Emperor, gentlemen, I tell you. Suetonius would be the man for the job, if he had a bigger brain.

  Then he had looked round the room, his dark eagle’s eyes flashing, and had said, ‘Yes, gentlemen, you can cough behind your hands, but I do not care. What I say to you, I would say to the Caesar himself. But he knows better than to fetch me back to Rome to say it! And if any of you like to tell him that, then do so, with my compliments!’

  Quintus Petillius Cerialis was not afraid of Nero, or of anything. But now he was a sick man.

  He lay on a narrow wooden bed, his right leg drawn up under him, twisted with pain and gasping for breath. The Camp Doctor, a Spaniard like himself, bent over him, shaking his head. The young Tribunes lined the room, waiting for any orders the Prefect might feel strong enough to give.

  The Doctor turned to the Senior Tribune and whispered, ‘The Legate will not be well enough to ride against Boudicca tomorrow, sir. The tendons of his leg will not heal; a fever races through his blood. He may never ride again, or walk again. Indeed, we shall be lucky if we can get him out of this bed again.’

  The Senior Tribune put on an expression of concern. Yet his secret hope was to command the Legion himself, and only Quintus Petillius Cerialis stood in the way.

  ‘What do you advise, Doctor?’ the Tribune asked, lowering his eyes.

  The Doctor raised his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

  ‘Who am I to advise anyone?’ he asked. ‘I only tell you that the Legate may never command you again.’

  But when the Tribunes had withdrawn, treading softly, their eyes averted from the figure on the hide-thong bed, Quintus Petillius Cerialis grunted and struggled on to his right side.

  ‘Where is that damned Doctor?’ he gasped. ‘Where are you, you lazy devil?’

  The physician hurried to the bedside and tried to push the Legate back into bed. But the officer was suddenly amazingly strong and would not be treated like a child.

  ‘Take care, sir,’ said the Doctor. ‘You will do yourself an injury.’

  ‘I will do you an injury if you do not get out my way,’ said The Legate, his yellowing eyes glaring from beneath the thick and grizzled brows. ‘Here, get linen bandages and bind up my leg so that it will stay straight. And get my helmet; we’ll see if I I can still wear the damned thing. And get me a big bowl of broth, with meat and barley grains in it. A big bowl, I said. None of those baby’s pots I’ve been having. I want no more milk, do you hear? No more milk, if I live to be a thousand.’

  The Doctor moved towards the door, shaking his head.

  The Legate called after him, ‘And fetch a bottle of wine. A big bottle of wine. The reddest rawest wine on the Camp, I say.

  If it is not just that, I will stuff it up…’

  But the Doctor did not wait to hear the rest of the threat. He had a fair idea what it would be; and he knew that the Legate was a man of his word.

  Outside the door, the harassed physician ran into the Senior Tribune, who seemed to be waiting for news, bad news.

  ‘What have you to tell me, Doctor?’ asked the officer.

  The man flung up his hands in bewilderment.

  ‘Only that the Legate will ride tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I think he will ride strapped to the saddle if he dies in the night!’

  The Tribune scratched his chin and said softly, ‘Is there nothing you can—give him, Doctor? It hardly seems right that he should put the flower of the Legion in danger on this crack-brained scheme to support the assassins of Boudicca.’ The physician shook his head mournfully.

  ‘I do not think that anything I could give him would have the slightest effect. I think that at the moment he could be stung by a legion of vipers, and still live to tread them into the ground.’

  A bull-like roar came from within the sick-room.

  ‘Can I hear you still gossiping away, Doctor? You old washerwoman, if you do not go about my bidding this instant I will have your essentials cut off and stuffed into your…’

  Once more the Doctor hurried on.

  The Tribune mused for a while.

  ‘Well, who knows,’ he said to himself. ‘He may collapse on the way…. In any case; we will ride in full force, so as to run no danger…. A vexillation of two thousand men should do the trick…. But not a man less. No, not a man less!’

  As he passed on down the corridor to tell off the Centurions to make ready, the voice of the Legate still echoed behind him, roaring threats to all and sundry, from the Senior Tribune to the women who scrubbed the floor of the Decurions’ mess.

  ‘You boor,’ said the Tribune to himself. ‘You complete and utter boor! You have no right to command the Second, you— you peasant!’

  Then he glanced behind him to make quite sure that the Legate’s door had not been open,

  Quintus Petillius Cerialis was not such a man as would welcome any such comment; not even from a young man whose father sat in the Senate and had three gold-filled teeth

  21: The Sword Bargain

  The prefect of the Second Legion at Glevum sat in his office, at the marble table, biting his finger-nails until they bled.

  Why wasn’t life straight and easy, he thought? Why did things always get out of hand? For three days his stomach had been tormenting him till he had almost suspected the Celtic cooks of trying out some new poison on him. He had been laid up nearly ten years ago by a mixture of foxglove and hawk’s droppings, and this felt almost the same sort of pain—on the right side, just below the ribs, coming and going in spasms. He had examined his motions but had found no blood in them, as he had done ten years before. All the same, perhaps the cooks had discovered a new poison now, that left no traces. One could never trust these Celts, even when one paid them on the Auxiliary list.

  Besides, his daughter, Lavinia, had been a real trial since the Roman Decurion Gemellus had been sent on his mission to Boudicca. She wouldn’t eat or sleep, and was drinking far too much. He knew that, but couldn’t stop her; she was too much like her mother to be controlled by any one man, even if that man was her father, and the Prefect of a Legion.

  Only that m
orning she had stormed in at him, her face white with fury, and had said, ‘When that Roman comes back, if he does, I shall insist that he is given the command of two maniples. You shall not fob him off with a mere century of men, Father.’ Trying to control himself, in spite of the sudden twinges this conversation had brought to his stomach, he had answered, ‘But, my pet, he has only been promised rank as a Centurion. We cannot go back on an official promise, sanctioned by the Senate and ratified by the Emperor.’

  She had made a rude noise, not at all as a Patrician lady should do, and had said, ‘Why my mother ever married you, I shall never know, Father. You are not a man, you are a doting figurehead of a Legion which has never done a stroke to preserve itself, to fulfil itself, to justify itself. And why that young Decurion allowed himself to be posted from the Imperial Guard to serve with a lot of ninnies such as we have here, I shall never understand. But I tell you this, Father, on my honour as a Patrician, unless this young man is suitably rewarded, I shall walk naked through the streets at Glevum and shall offer myself to the first ten men I see.’

  The worried Prefect had passed a grey hand across his lined brows. He had had just about enough.

  ‘What must be, daughter, must be,’ he had said with a resigned shrug of his slack shoulders. ‘But for the love of Mithras, choose a warm day for it; I don’t want you to catch your death of cold.’ Then she had flounced out, swinging her many skirts like a Cretan dancer.

  ‘One would think she loved the young fellow, Gemellus,’ said the Prefect to his inkstand. ‘Well, perhaps she does. Though I had thought she was in love with that young Tribune, what’s his name, Gaius Flavius…. Not a bad match that, with those city connections…. Besides, I owe his father rather more than I can ever live to repay…. Now if she takes up with this young Decurion, I shall never get straight again…. But she won’t…. He will never come back from his mission.’