Red Queen, White Queen Read online

  As they stood, or sat, here and there, in avenue and glade, by stream and under bush, they shook their heads as they gave another rub to the short-sword they were burnishing or the javelin-head they were hammering fast on to its ash-stave.

  ‘I saw such a dawn in Egypt once,’ said one. ‘That day we were cut to ribbons. Half the Legion went.’

  Another said, ‘I buried my last month’s pay and that little belt with the golden lion’s-head clasp that I was taking home for my son at the edge of the forest. At the place where that stream flows from the red rock shaped like a sitting hare. If I fall today, Cassius, find that rock and see that my son gets the belt. You can keep the money for your pains.’

  So such bargains were made between the thousands of Romans who waited in the Forest of Morrigue, after their long march from the far West.

  They knew that this could not be a good day for them, whether they gained the victory or not, for their spies had come in all through the night with grim messages of the vast hordes which were coming slowly towards them, under the command of the blood-crazed Queen, Boudicca.

  As the red-haired Legate had put it to them, the night before, while they lay about their smoking fires, exhausted, ‘When two bulls meet, whichever is the slain, the other carries away such wounds as will always remind him tearfully of the victory, he has won.’

  They had laughed then, as one always did when the Commander spoke, to keep one’s courage up, but as the slow night wore on, and the owls hooted from among the clustered oak-trees, many a Roman lad, chilled to the marrow with the British damp and his own fear, had prayed aloud, without shame, that if death came with the dawn it would be quick. And many an old veteran tried to recall what his home had been like, what his mother’s face had looked like, in that eternal summer of youth before the recruiting sergeant had stalked into the village with a blare of trumpets and a jingling of golden coins….

  As dawn broke, the tent of Suetonius Paulinus became crowded with officers, all trying to follow what the Legate was saying, trying to look over each other’s plated shoulders to see where his great forefingers drew themselves across the map. The grass beneath their feet soon turned to mud with their constant shuffling.

  At last the Imperial Legate stood on a battered gilt stool, so that all should hear him, the Tribunes and Senior Centurions of the three Legions who were there.

  His face was redder than usual for he had been drinking rough Gallic wine half the night, to keep awake. His eyes glared down on all, bloodshot and pink-rimmed with weariness. But his voice was as strong, as coarse, as brave, as any man had ever heard it.

  ‘Lads,’ he said, ‘there are some of you who will never see another sun rise, in Britain or anywhere else. That is a matter of no concern to me, and of little concern to you, if you are true Romans. I mention it only because I believe a soldier has the right to know what is in store for him.’

  The officers bowed their heads silently for a moment, as a sign of respect, then one young Tribune, a black-eyed Greek wearing a beaten silver helmet, shouted, ‘Life is short in any case, Legate! Lead us! Lead us!’

  The Legate gazed down on him, half-smiling, and said, ‘It has been truly said that the best Romans are those who have never been within a hundred miles of Rome! Yes, my lad, I’ll lead you, have no fear! But on your part, see that you keep on shouting like that when the British chariots drive in at you and the foam from their horses’ mouths spatter that fine armour of yours!’

  The others laughed then, a little self-consciously. The young Greek became silent.

  Suetonius went on, ‘If any of you have wives and families— and a Roman soldier who has is a fool, things being as they are in the world today—then let him put them out of his mind today. Today is the day of blood, not of love, not of tenderness. A man who thinks of his wife’s face as he makes his thrust will never live to see her again. Today, it is strike, strike, strike! Think of your dear ones tomorrow, if you are alive. But not today.’

  A grey-haired Centurion muttered, ‘Rome is my wife, my that adorned his white pony, wore a Roman helmet, garnished with the plumes of the eagle in place of the usual red horse-hair.

  A legionary of the Fourteenth who sat cross-legged in the first rank, waiting the, command to rise, spat on his hands and said grimly to his comrade, ‘That is the one I’d like to get close up to this morning. I think I could make a year’s pay out of that helmet, in the market back in Londinium!’

  His comrade looked away as he replied, ‘Don’t talk like a fool, man. There’s no market left in Londinium now she saw to that, the woman who leads this lot!’

  ‘Well,’ answered the other, ‘I could always polish it up and use it for a bird-bath when I get my little farm in Alsium, after I’ve finished my time.’

  His comrade snorted, ‘The only farm you’ll get will be six foot of earth, somewhere at the back of this wood. And you’ll get that before the day’s out, I’m telling you, friend.’

  Two young men ran into the clearing then, carrying the horse’s skull that was the totem of the Durotriges. They set it up on a tussocky mound and then, laying down crossed swords, began to dance, wildly, their hair flying, their kilts swinging. Tribesmen clustered round them, crying out in high voices, snapping their fingers and working themselves up into a frenzy.

  A Tribune said, ‘I’ll give twenty denarii to the archer who brings down those two.’

  But a hard-faced Centurion who stood near him said, ‘I shall flog that archer to death, sir. We don’t see dancing like this everyday.’

  So, as the morning wore on and the shadows lengthened on the sward that was then green and was soon to become red, the men of the tribes filed into the clearing, laughing, half-drunk, sure of their victory; men of the Trinovantes, the Atrebates, the Silures, and the men of the Iceni. They rode proudly, leaders of men, followers of the Queen, the Red Queen, Boudicca.

  And then came the chariots, slowly, in double line stretching from one side of the clearing to the other; some decorated with flowers and tree branches, some with gay swathes of cloth. The chariot of King Drammoch, which rolled in the centre of the first rank, was not garnished. The King himself held aloft the ash staff on which the pale head of Duatha grinned. That was his answer to these Romans who had killed his son and had dishonoured his daughter, Eithne, the hostage to the Queen.

  Last came the wagons, long and unwieldy, drawn by panting oxen. Their solid wooden wheels churned up the ground already softened by the storms, and where they were drawn up, there they stayed, almost incapable of being moved without great labour. But who thought of moving them? Not the swarming families that, rode on them and played about them, among the garlands and the gay flowers. The families had come to see the battle, the last great battle, which would drive the Roman from Britain for all time, which would answer Nero for the shame he had brought upon Boudicca and her family. They had come to see Rome crumble that day, and there would be no turning back from such a sight.

  A little boy, playing with his shaggy dog beside one painted wagon, called up to his mother, who suckled a recently-born baby at her heavy breast, ‘Can I have the bright golden eagle that the man in leopard skin carries on that stick, mother?’

  The woman nodded, smiling down gently at her son, ‘Surely, Geromac, it shall be yours. Your father shall get it for you, sweetest. You will look fine leading the village boys with such a standard. I will call to him and tell him that you are to have it.’

  She called out to the long-bearded man who held in his prancing horses twenty yards away. He nodded and smiled.

  ‘We have a warrior for a son, Beth,’ he shouted. And they were all pleased, the three of them.

  At sunset that wagon lay smashed to firewood. The boy lay with his mother and her baby, still smiling. But not even the Goddess of War, even she of the searching eyes, could have found the laughing father, where he lay with his pair of horses, under the great holocaust of flesh and gilded wood.

  Boudicca strode from wagon to wag
on, from chariot to chariot, leather-breeched and wearing a heavy plaid of bright red wool. Her hair, bound tightly about her head, was covered by a helmet of hide, plated with strips of bronze. Today, for this occasion of destruction, she had painted her face and arms with blue streaks of woad-juice, so that from a distance, apart from the heaviness of her breasts within the deerskin jerkin, she might have been taken for a man.

  At each wagon she joked with the women and children, speaking such words that they might always remember that a queen had laughed with them on that morning. At each chariot, she called the riders by their first names and sometimes drank a horn of mead or barley beer from the same vessel which their own lips had made damp.

  And always she foretold that soon Rome would be no more, that they would become fat on the wealth of the Legions, and that she would march next year on Nero himself and bring him back to amuse the tribes, in a triumphal procession from one end of the land to the other.

  She joined in the lewd jests which the charioteers made about the Emperor, capping them herself with some rough joke made at the expense of his person.

  Then, when she had let herself be seen by the tightly-packed horde of Britons, she went back to her own small chariot of beaten bronze and copper. Her two daughters sat obediently at her feet, black cloths over their heads as a sign of ritual mourning for their honour, neither speaking a word nor looking towards the enemy.

  Their mother had said, ‘When we have broken the Legions, I will give you the Red Fox and twenty of his Tribunes as your playthings. Silence and mourning now will make your revenge the sweeter, my chickens.’ So Gwynnedd and Siara were content to wait in silent darkness, their mouths wet for vengeance.

  The Red Fox, Suetonius Paulinus, had had a dais built for himself, overtopping the heads of the foremost ranks, so that he might observe the movements of the Celts with his own eyes. His stallion champed at the bit beside the dais, already harnessed for war. It had never been the Legate’s custom to stay out of any battle where there was a chance of excitement, and today he was most excited. Nevertheless, as runners came to him from time to time, carrying the Tribunes’ suggestions that the Romans should start the attack at once, while the Celts were still forming, he shook his head.

  ‘Wait, wait, brothers,’ he would say. ‘Soon they will sit on the ground and drink wine and play with their children. Later, when they are tipsy, they will rise and get into their chariots. It is then that we must attack, not before.’

  And as the Legate had said, the Celts squatted on the ground, their cups in their hands, the mead flowing. Children ran about the seated warriors, knocking their wine over, twitching off this man’s helmet, pulling that one’s plaits, smudging another’s warpaint. And all the time the Celts laughed, and wrestled with the children, or chased them back to their wagons, pretending to strike at them with their long leaf-shaped swords. And the children laughed back, and called the warriors by their pet names, usually the names of the animals in whose month they had been born—the bears, the badgers, the stoats, the pine martens.

  Beyond the furthest wagons, on a little hillock, the Druids stood, their heads crowned with newly plucked oak garlands. There were five of them, the old man who had poured the fat on the altar and four others, noviciates from other tribes. They did not speak, but made ritual gestures of the arms and body, like dancers in a silent dream. And as they postured, a raven came down from the morning sky and sat near them on the hillock; then another, and another, until the priests stood within a black ring of those birds.

  ‘Look, look,’ cried the children, The ravens of Morigu, the God of War! Today we shall have victory!’

  An old woman who walked among the horses with an apronful of corn said scornfully, ‘Speak after sunset, bairns! The ravens came down for Caratacus when he stood against Rome near Vricon. But the Romans took him, all the same.’

  The children threw things at her, mocking her, calling her a coward and a Roman witch. But she went on feeding the horses without becoming angry, for she had seen this happen in her dreams already, and she knew how it would turn out.

  Though she did not dare tell the Queen what she had seen. Not now that Boudicca had become so confident of victory.

  Then, when the sun stood overhead and the men were so forgetful and heated in wine that they began to climb into the wagons to be with their women, Boudicca blew the hunting horn and called out, in her strong man’s voice, ‘Make ready now, warriors! The prize will be the sweeter for the waiting!’ The men shouted out to her, good-humouredly, making certain offers which the Queen heard and acknowledged with a mocking smile. ‘What would your wife say, Baldoc?’ she called out to one of them. ‘And you, Gwyn!’

  Then they went to the chariots, shouted out their war-cries, and stepped on to the tailboard. Each chariot had a centre-pole, which lay between the two horses. On that pole stood a javelin-man, whose job it was to make the cast when the chariot came within range. With each leader, on the tail-board, stood an archer with a quiver full of arm-long arrows. King Drammoch’s chariot stood in the centre of the foremost rank, for he had demanded that he should be allowed to prove his loyalty by leading the charge.

  And at last, when the Romans felt the bitter sweat running from beneath their tightly-clamped helmets into the comers of their eyes and on to their parched lips, the Imperial Legate screamed out, ‘Stand! Make ready! Close-lock your shields!

  Swords at the low port! Stand!’

  Like men in a dream, the iron-clad legionaries moved, suiting each action to the word as it was spoken. Long lines of iron men, forming wall after wall at the edge of the Wood of Morigu, waiting to defend Rome.

  Then the chariot lines began to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster, like a giant wave gathering impetus as it rolled along the shore,

  A legionary in the centre of the front rank licked his dry lips and said to his companion, ‘Why the Hades I’m not in my father’s tavern, serving wine to the merchants of Brindisi, I don’t know! ‘

  The man beside him yawned and said, ‘This is child’s play, soldier! They’re so drunk they’ll fall off their bloody carts before they get half-way to us, just you see!’

  But they did not. The horses grew larger and larger, their flanks gored by the goad, scattering blood about them as they came; the wheels rumbled louder and louder, until they filled each man’s mind like thunder. Then the great wave burst on to the iron-clad rock that should have stood against it, but did not.

  The first three ranks went down, the locked shields scattered, the helmets tumbling, rolling like balls under the hooves of the stallions. The men, crushed and wriggling in their heavy armour, tried to avoid the plunging hooves, the crushing wheels.

  A javelin struck against the stool where the Legate sat, almost transfixing his right leg. He rose and shook his fist at the chariot line, smiling grimly and telling them that he would pay back that cast if it was the last thing he did. Then below him, his waiting stallion gave a high whinny and began to buck madly, a dart piercing its rump.

  Suetonius Paulinus no longer smiled. This was his favourite mount, a horse that had carried him through fifteen battles. This was the first time it had been wounded and the Legate’s heart was full of hatred for the men who had hurt his battle-friend; He hurried down the steps to pull out the dart.

  Then the chariot line had turned and was cantering back towards the wagons. Women and children ran out to meet their warriors, blind to the plunging hooves and the prancing of the war-mad stallions. Their men waved them back, warning them that now the battle had started they must keep clear.

  As the Legate stood fuming, casting his experienced eye over the ranks of tumbled legionaries, two tribesmen ran out from the enemy ranks until they were almost within a bowshot of the Romans. One man was crudely dressed like a Roman, with a metal helmet and a wooden shield. He had stuffed rags and grass into his jerkin until he had the grotesque appearance of Nero himself. The other man wore a horse’s-head mask and swung a rope tail
between his legs.

  In the middle of the field, they enacted the chariot charge again, in derision, the horse pushing over the ‘Roman’, and then chasing him back to the wagons, roaring like a lion. As the ‘Roman’ shambled away, he shouted in a high-pitched voice, ‘Alas! Alas! I am undone, Rome is finished! Mercy! Mercy!’

  This pantomime caused great gusts of laughter among the chariots. Only the Queen, Boudicca, seemed angry.

  ‘This is war now,’ she said. ‘And it is a bad thing to mock an enemy too soon. Such mockery puts another weapon into his hands and fresh courage into his heart.’

  But she did not say anything to the two buffoons, for they were of the Brigantes, a notoriously stubborn folk, and not of her own people, the Iceni. She had no jurisdiction over them and could not have prevented it even if they had walked from the field of battle. So she was silent to them.

  And while the chariots were turning, and their leaders were drinking once again from the victory cup, the Romans moved forward, twenty paces, no more, stepping over the ranks of their fallen comrades.

  Once more they locked shields, but this time at the high port, so that they formed a screen, hiding the men behind them.

  And then, when the little engineers of the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, men of Spain, the road-builders, had done what the Legate had commanded and had withdrawn, the Romans turned about smartly and withdrew for twenty paces.

  The men in the chariots peered at the low wall of the dead which had been built up and laughed loudly. ‘They will not stop us from reaching you, Roman!’ they shouted out.

  And so the second charge began. But this time the chariots did not reach their enemy. For as they broke through the heaped bodies in the madness of their onslaught, they saw, too late, that a ditch now faced them, and there was not time to rein in the blood-maddened stallions that drew these carts of death.