Red Queen, White Queen Read online

  Gemellus was lying in a warm bed, drinking thick meat broth out of a wooden bowl. He was very thin, and pale, and his beard had grown long, a grizzled black now. He looked old, or rather, ageless, a young old man. He held the bowl in his left hand, for the other would not obey him, though the pain in it had stopped since the woman had tended it for him.

  She was bending over him, watching him drink the broth, her face working with every movement of his own, as though she were helping him to swallow.

  When he had handed back the bowl, he smiled and said, ‘Where is this place? How did I get here, Lady?’

  The woman patted his head. ‘You are safe,’ she said. ‘Our little house is in Queen Boudicca’s kingdom, but no one troubles us here. We live in a free valley and owe no homage to any lord. My husband, who brought you here, when he found you a week ago, is a free man. He once did the Queen some service and was pronounced free for all time. You are safe here, Gemellus.’

  He gazed at her weakly and said, ‘You spoke my name. How do you know my name, Lady?’

  The woman smiled and said, ‘How should I not know it? Why, you have been shouting it out twenty times a day for the past week, and the number of your Legion! Even when you were close to death!’

  Gemellus was silent for a while. Then he regained some strength and said, ‘Did I mention any other names, Lady, in my sick dreams?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you often spoke tenderly of Eithne. And once you called out for Duatha, who was your dear brother, you said. Though it is not a Roman name, is it?’

  Gemellus felt the tears welling up in his eyes. He shook his head.

  ‘No, not a Roman name,’ he said. ‘My brother’s name.’

  The woman went away then and drew a curtain across the window so that he should sleep again. He went to sleep, still weeping quietly for the losses in his heart.

  When he awoke once more the curtain had gone from the window, but it was still dark, for night had fallen. A man came in holding a rushlight. Gemellus noticed that his nose had been broken and set crookedly. This gave him a sinister look, but when he spoke his gentle voice belied his appearance.

  ‘Hail, Decurion,’ said the man, holding up his right hand in the Roman salute. Gemellus tried to acknowledge the salute, then remembered that his own right arm would not move when he willed it.

  Solemnly, the man said, ‘Gemellus Ennius, late of the Second, you won’t make a very good soldier any more, will you, friend?’

  He waited while Gemellus wrinkled his brows and thought of this. Then he went on, ‘A Decurion without a right arm to flog his men along would not be of much use to the Legion, would he, friend?’

  Gemellus half-turned and looked at his right arm as it lay stretched out on the bed. He tried to move it, and then turned away from it, his heart sad within him.

  The man said, ‘The sinews have been cut, Decurion. You understand that? You should do, you have seen a bit of action. You spoke of it in your sickness. You see, when the sinews are cut, the arm may look all right, but it will not work properly,’

  Gemellus bit his lips and said, ‘Someone slashed at me in the summer pavilion of the Queen.’

  The man nodded. ‘Yes, I heard of the affair,’ he said. ‘A man who farms down the valley was there and saw it happen. You burned a hole in his new plaid when you kicked the altar over, he said. But he bears you no ill will. Like me, he is a lordless man, and does not side one way or the other. All men are good to him, if only they behave themselves. Like me, he picked up a little of the teachings of the Christ man, while he was with the Legion in Palestine.’

  Gemellus said, almost aghast, ‘You are a Roman, then? A man of the Legions?’

  The man nodded. ‘A Roman only in so far as I served my time with the Fourteenth. But I was born in Gaul, in the far south. My own grandfather fought with Vercingetorix against Julius. But what does it matter, Roman or barbarian? They are all men. Now I have left the Legion I am no longer a Roman in my own heart. I am a man, a farmer, a father, a husband. That is good enough for me. I grow my barley and feed my cows; when lambing time comes, I am up all night, for week after week. That keeps me busy enough, without bothering my head about Rome or Britain, Nero or Boudicca.’

  Gemellus whispered, ‘Why does not Boudicca kill you for being a Roman?’

  The man shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I don’t think she has ever told me why—in fact, I don’t think it has ever occurred to her to kill me. She knows that I have never done her any harm, and Boudicca is a fair-minded woman, despite what her enemies say about her. After all, what has she done but try to gain revenge for what was done to her? Rome is always doing the same thing, but Rome always says it is in the right, Boudicca used to be a very amiable young woman, years ago. When she was out hunting, she would often call here for a cup of milk, or a horn of mead, to quench her thirst. And she would never leave until she had given the children money, or some little present. “Tell them that the Queen left it for them, ” she would say. She knew all their names, and asked after them when they were ill. I once had the good fortune to drag one of her daughters, Siara, it was, out of. the river at the bottom of the valley. Boudicca came to see me afterwards and thanked me. “Roman, ” she said, in her joking way, “always remember that Boudicca pays her debts. For what you have done for me today,

  I shall always thank you. No man shall harm you while you live with us. The valley is yours from now on. ” That is the sort of woman she is.’

  Gemellus said grimly, ‘That is the sort of woman she may have been—but I do not think she is so now.’

  The man with the crooked nose answered, ‘All people act stupidly when they are hurt. She will settle down to peace again, if they will let her. If Nero is sensible, he will order Suetonius to call a truce, and talk it all out with her. Nothing worse will happen if only the Legate can be controlled. But if he will persist in beating her to her knees, well, he will ruin Britain and beggar Rome in the process. That is my opinion?

  Gemellus slept even as the man spoke. The man saw this, smiled, and went out, leaving the hut in darkness. To his wife he said, ‘He is much like the son we lost at the Battle of Penrhyn, wife. He has the same expressions, the same Roman, point of view. They all get it when they have marched a thousand miles or so under the Eagle. It leaves its stamp on them.’

  The woman said gently, ‘It has not left its stamp on you, Moriog. You are as silly as ever.’

  The man nodded. ‘No, wife,’ he said, ‘but then, I was never a real Roman, only a barbarian dressed up in a helmet.’

  As they got into their own bed, the woman said, ‘What will happen to him, husband? Will he go back to the Legion?’

  The man with the crooked nose said, ‘Aye, no doubt one day he will struggle back to them, like a half-dead dog to the master who beat him, and the Legion will not want him, a man with only one arm. He’ll go on half-pay and be the lackey of any man with two arms for the rest of his service. He should do as the others do, find a new life.’

  ‘Do you mean he should desert?’ the woman asked.

  The man smiled and nodded in the darkness. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And what is so terrible about that? Hundreds do it every year, and I don’t blame them. What is waiting for the legionaries at the end, only citizenship and a patch of eczema under the chin where the helmet strap has rubbed a hole in their jaw!’

  The woman waited a while and then said, ‘But what would he do, if he left the only trade he knows, husband?’

  As he rolled over to go to sleep, the, man said gently, ‘Why, wife, there is always a home for him here. I don’t mind having a son with only one arm. He could drive cows with one arm as well as with two, couldn’t he?’

  Then he went to sleep. But his wife lay awake for a long time, thinking joyfully of her new son.

  But when they woke in the morning, Gemellus was not there. His bed was empty and his door left ajar.

  And they were sad because they thought that he despised them. Had th
ey known, they might have been content, for he already loved them for their gentleness; but if he had stayed to tell them so, they would have kept him from doing that which he felt he must do.

  38: Lonely Journey

  The Golden Eagle, poised up near the sun, glared down on Britain, seeing all with his diamond-pointed eye, so high, so high, that all the coloured scroll was laid before him —each river, stream and tiny spring, each mountain, hill and hummock; each plain and paddock, forest and grove, city and lonely hovel—everything.

  And the Golden Eagle observed that the land had suddenly become a teeming ant-hill; a place of hurrying, scurrying, swarming creatures.

  The Golden Eagle speculated for a while, letting the scene glint through his cold prismatic eye on to the white sheet of his cold brain. The smaller birds were glad of this respite.

  Then the Golden Eagle seemed to recognise some purpose in all the movement below him on the earth. To the west, long lines of ants, glistening silver in the morning sun, proceeded relentlessly in a straight course towards the centre of the land. To the east, a much vaster, almost black mass of ants moved this way and that, halting for a while, then scurrying on faster than before, then slowing down, then running on. Behind this confusion of creatures burned many fires, which sent up their black clouds into the blue air of late summer. Where they had trod, the grass was brown.

  ‘Somewhere, in the middle of the land,’ thought the Golden Eagle without passion; ‘the ants will meet, the shining ones and the black ones. And when they meet, neither will give way, for both colonies are determined, stubborn, head-strong, mad. They will overrun each other until there are none left. Then all this hurrying and scurrying will have been wasted. Still, the birds of the air will have good pickings from them…. And I will have good pickings from the birds of the air. Who am I to judge? I shall profit whatever happens.’

  Then the Golden Eagle swept round in a great circle, until the smaller birds lost him behind the sun. They thought that he had flown away to the Western skies, towards the Happy Isles, and they rejoiced, twittering and curvetting in the air.

  But he was only waiting, and today, tomorrow, next century … what did it matter? It would come at last. The picking would come.

  Gemellus was one of those ants, but a smaller one, who moved somewhere between the two great armies, his journey seeming without purpose, and lonely.

  A sad-eyed shepherd had given him a flask of milk and a broken loaf of bread. A wandering beggar-woman had bound up his hanging arm with a strip torn from her own black skirt. An Irish goldsmith, travelling with a small anvil and a goatskin furnace-bellows, had taken him for some miles on his little cart, drawn by a flea-bitten donkey. He would have taken him still further, but the donkey had protested at the extra load, and the Irish smith had been too kind-hearted to punish the dearest member of his family.

  Besides, this smith was a gentle-hearted man who could not bear to become too deeply involved in the sufferings of others. And to hear Gemellus repeating, again and again, ‘My wife, Eithne! My brother, Duatha! I must find them! I must find them!’ had upset the Irishman so greatly that for a few moments he even considered the possibility of knocking Gemellus on the head with a gold-beater’s hammer, to help him, to put him out of his misery.

  But then the donkey had begun to protest, so the man had tipped Gemellus off the cart, telling him to make his own way to Heaven from then on.

  All this was a confused dream to the Roman, Men and women floated in and out of this dream, without purpose or interest. Sometimes places seemed vaguely familiar to him, and sometimes he seemed to come to the same place a number of times before he could break through that part of the nightmare and strike off afresh.

  There was, for example, a little gully where lay the bones of a horse. The birds of prey rose from these bones as Gemellus approached, and then sat watching him, wondering whether he too might fall into the place and break his neck. The bones of the horse reminded him of someone, but he could not remember of whom. He only knew that he felt sad after he had seen them, and walked off again in the opposite direction.

  And another time he came to. a hut; a little hut of boughs and bracken, in a sheltered spot, where a clear rill flowed between two oaks, and a great moss-grown boulder acted as a wind-break.

  And here he sat down by the clear rill, under the two oaks, and wept, he knew not why. And afterwards he went into the little hut of boughs and bracken and lay down on the fern-covered floor and called out for Eithne.

  It seemed to him that Eithne stood in that room looking down upon him, smiling and shaking her red head. But when he opened his eyes again from sleep, she was not there; and he knew that she had not been there. He knew that he had been dreaming.

  And when he left that house of sadness and staggered away over the hill once more, two women came out of the little wood that lay a bow-shot from the hut. They walked cautiously, timidly, like forest deer who smell a wolf.

  The taller one said, ‘Marissa, the man has gone now. We can go back to the hut. We are safe for the moment.’

  The other woman, smaller and with a black face, said tremulously, ‘Oh, Mistress Lavinia, he frightened me so much; he looked so old and grey, and mad. Such men should be killed, like grey wolves, before they fall on innocent folk like us and tear them to pieces.’

  And Mistress Lavinia sighed, and said, ‘When we find the great Decurion, Gemellus, he will protect us from such wild beasts as that man. Then we shall be safe again. With Gemellus and my father the Prefect, we need never be afraid again, Marissa!’

  But to Gemellus there was always fear, fear and uncertainty, that clouded his thoughts even when the sun shone down on his head and gave him the impression for a while that he was young again, walking to find his mother in the little wood above the farm at Asculum. Even when his heart was suddenly gladdened by the song of a bird, or the memory of a little tune that the peasants used to play on their bagpipes after the vine-harvest was gathered in, Gemellus sensed that despair was not far away —the broken pipe, the blackened vine, the tolling bell…

  At last, when night was falling, and a grey mist began to rise from the ground, the child of sun upon rain, Gemellus found himself in upland country, bare of all trees save the wind-swept hawthorn and an occasional holly tree. He climbed higher and higher, not knowing where he went, his head full of the bitter longing to find those he sought so aimlessly.

  And as dusk fell like a purple shadow across the land, he sat down on a boulder, beside the rough road, in a sunken place where the lichened rocks rose like walls on either side of him. Here he ate what remained of the food the shepherd had given him a day beforehand drank the sour milk from his flask.

  Down below him, the land was covered in. the rising mist. And as the moon came out, casting a faint silver light on Britain, Gemellus realised that now he could see the tops of the hawthorn trees. They seemed to be floating, trunkless, on a sea of white.

  And as he watched, he saw the trees disappear as the white sea rose above them, engulfing them. Then, in the distance, and gradually coming nearer, he was aware of a faint reddish glow, a long glow, that stretched backwards like a winding, luminous snake, vague and ill-defined beneath the sea of mist. And with this glow came the rhythmic rumble of wheels, the clopping of the hooves of many horses, the shuffling of many feet, the sound of many voices, laughing, singing, shouting out strange cries. All below the mist.

  For a while, Gemellus sat and wondered what this could be. There was something terribly familiar about it which nagged at the outer fringe of has mind, like a great rat gnawing at a door to enter by night.

  Then, with horror, he realised that these lights, these sounds, were no longer below him, safely remote, but almost on his own level, mounting the sunken road up the hill. Soon they must pass where he sat.

  Despite his useless arm, Gemellus scrambled up the rocky side of the sunken road, and stood, looking down at the spot where he had been sitting. Now the mist had risen almost to his
feet. He stood in moonlight, while the world below him lay shrouded in white.

  And as he stared wildly down, the glow of the many torches filed below him, the wagons rumbled, the voices shouted. With a fearful recognition, he heard a high-pitched cry, ‘Up Boudicca! Hail to the Queen! Down with Rome! Down with the dogs of Rome!’

  And then, as his pulses surged and his heart fluttered wildly against his ribs, he saw a terrible vision.

  Duatha came towards him up the sunken road, his head visible above the layer of white mist. Gemellus wondered why Duatha should stand taller than all the other men, the men on horses…. He wondered why Duatha’s face should look so bloodless, his lips so pale, his cheeks so shrunken. He almost shouted out the name of his brother, to see if the sunken blue-rimmed eyes would open and look at him, if Duatha would wave his hand towards him, as people did in processions sometimes to those who watched from high balconies.

  But a strange fear stopped Gemellus from shouting out. A fear that there was no hand to wave, that the eyes behind the blue lids were sightless.

  And as the head drew level with him, it swayed towards him, until he could have touched it. But he drew away from it in loathing, for he saw then that it was held on a stick.

  Then Gemellus ran away from the road, down’ a gorse-covered hill. And King Drammoch, who carried the head of the traitor as he rode in his gilded chariot, never suspected that the Roman had been within a javelin’s cast of him.

  39: The Last Great Battle

  That morning the sun rose as though it expected death. The leaves of the oak forest where the Legions lay, the forces of the Legate, Suetonius, were tinged with a strange reddish glow which troubled the older ones, the soldiers who had seen service under the Eagles half-way across the world.