Red Queen, White Queen Read online

  Eithne gazed at him now with a faint smile. ‘I am not sad, husband,’ she said, ‘I am only thinking, that is all. My father was a rough man, but he meant well, I fancy. He has gone to the Feast Hall of the Warriors and no doubt will be happy there, drinking and boasting. As for my brother, Bran, I shed no tears because of him now, for a soul as pure as his would have found no rest, no happiness in this world of darkness and wickedness. Wherever he is, he will be happier. ‘

  She waited a while, regaining her breath. Gemellus placed her hands across her breast and drew the coverlet over them.

  ‘Keep warm, dearest,’ he said. ‘Keep warm and sleep. Tomorrow the sun will shine again, perhaps, and then these sad thoughts will trouble you no longer. ‘

  Eithne smiled up at him again and said, ‘No, I am not sad, husband. I have gone through my journey of sadness and have come out on the other side of it now, into the sunshine of my own heart. There can be no more sadness now, dear heart. ‘

  Gemellus bent and kissed her tenderly, as though she were a frail flower that might shrivel with rough handling. She put her hands behind his head suddenly and pulled his lips down on to her own, hard, kissing them again and again.

  Then, as he stared at her, half-amazed, half-angry that she should have shattered his dream of her weakness, she said, ‘It is not sadness I think of, but joy, husband. For now that my father and my brother are gone, you are the only man, the King of my folk. Now it will be you to whom my people will look to for their guidance in peace and in war. King Gemellus! ‘

  She paused a while, then said with a little smile, ‘No, that sounds too foreign, too Roman, does it not? King Gemel! Yes, that is better,…’

  Her hand slipped from the coverlet and fell like a white frond of fern against the brown bracken of her bed. Gemellus touched it with his lips,

  ‘My queen,’ he said. ‘My white, white queen. ‘

  He leaned over her and smoothed her flaming hair away from her face. She was already asleep, and smiling in her sleep. Gemellus rose and went silently from the little room, The Lady Centennial met him outside the door, her eyes wide with questioning.

  ‘All is well, Mother Centennial,’ said Gemellus. ‘Your herb potions have done their work at last. Eithne has remembered what has happened and what is to happen. She knows who I am now and has kissed me.’

  The woman took him gently by the arm and unfastened the bandages about it.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘and your own broken wing is mending well, my son. Soon the eagle will be able to fly again. King Gemel will hold a sword once more and lead his people.’

  Gemellus looked away from her, his face dark with sorrow. ‘That is all past, Mother Centennial,’ he said. ‘My people shall be a people of peace. At last I have learned what I must do.’

  The woman said gently, ‘At last you have come home, my son, my other son.’

  Then she kneeled before him simply, and touched the hem of his tunic with her forehead in sign of obeisance.

  ‘Hail, King Gemel of the Catuvellauni,’ she said. ‘I salute you.’

  Then Gemellus raised Centennial to her feet, as his father the

  Centurion might have done, or as his brother, the horseman Duatha, might have done, and kissed her on both freckled cheeks.

  ‘God help us in this dark world,’ he said, ‘if we do not love one another. That is the only sword we have, Mother, and the only shield.’

  Nor did he care that his tears ran down his grizzled cheeks like British rain now. This, at last, was home, the place where his white queen slept like a smiling child, on the broad bed of life now; not on the narrow couch of death.

  42: Summer Orchard

  Knee-deep in the lush grass of Summer a man stood, his legs planted wide, swinging a scythe. Above his head the boughs hung, heavy with russet apples. From time to time he stopped and wiped his bronzed brow, for the sun was very hot that year; and usually when he halted in his work, he would flex his right arm again and again, looking at it and smiling, as though he was well-satisfied with the strength that now flowed through its muscles.

  Behind him, moving as he moved, and lying down in the grass when he stopped, was a dog, a grey and shaggy Celtic sheepdog. It was past its prime now and panted in its heavy coat under the broad dock-leaves, the only shadow it could find.

  The man turned to the dog, grinning, and said, ‘Why, you lazy old sinner, Shoni! You behave more like the King of Dogs than a simple, silly old hound!’

  The dog wagged its stump of a tail and seemed to grin back at the man, with its gentle hazel eyes, from under the thick grizzled fringe which hung down over its face.

  The man kneeled and patted the dog. ‘I do declare, you are saying that that is just what you are—the King of Dogs, eh?’

  He spoke a rustic dialect of Celtic, the sort that the peasants, the Catuvellauni of those parts, understood. The dog seemed to understand it too, there was no trace of a foreign accent in the man’s voice. Nor should there have been, for he had spoken that dialect day in, day out, for eight years now. It was his language; he no longer even dreamt in Roman. Indeed, he found it difficult to believe that he had ever read the De Bello Gallico, in the military school in Rome, or had ever marched those twenty blistering miles each day under the Eagles, carrying his helmet and a cooking-pot on the end of a javelin…

  He sat on a stone to sharpen his scythe. The grass was really over-long for easy cutting, he thought. It could do with a drop of rain on it to make the blade bite. Yes, he had let it go when he should have been out knocking it down. But what could he do? It was a bad time of the year, for the men were always calling for him to go hunting with them, or to ride out to village festivals of this and that sort.

  And there were always Council Meetings. They took a lot of time, arguing about this and that with the chieftains, some of whom were still a bit old-fashioned and needed a deal of persuading when it came to digging ditches or fencing pasture-land.

  Still, a king is required to do these things, or folk begin to ask themselves whether he is doing his job properly.

  He bent down to the dog and said, ‘I wish you could take a turn with the scythe, Shoni! I hate to see anyone sitting down as often as you do, with no work to do! Since we got the two young dogs, you’ve led a life of luxury, you old Nero, you! I’ll get one of the boys to take you for a walk. That should get a bit of the fat off your lazy carcass!’

  He rose and put his fingers to his lips. But before he could whistle, a boy came running through the long grass, calling.

  ‘Father Gemel, Father Gemel!’ he shouted, his long golden hair flying behind him. ‘My mother Queen says you are to come at once! Folk on horses are coming down the valley towards the house. They are not our folk; they wear funny clothes.’

  The man hung the scythe carefully in an old apple-tree.

  ‘Do not touch that scythe, Duatha,’ he said to the boy. ‘It is a dangerous weapon and you might cut yourself. Remember how long it was before my arm got better?’

  The small boy nodded, his wide blue eyes twinkling. ‘You always say that, Father,’ he answered. ‘But you did not cut your arm with a scythe, did you? A bad man did it with a sword, didn’t he? That is what old Gandoc the cowman says.’ The King, Gemel, who had once been Gemellus the Decurion, said in pretended fierceness, ‘Just you wait till I see old Gandoc! I’ll give him a piece of my mind for filling your head with his old nonsense of wars and wounds!’

  Duatha, the boy, said, ‘But I like tales of war and wounds, Father Gemel! We have not had a good war for many years, have we? And wounds are all right if you get over them, aren’t they? A Prince must be a warrior, and a warrior is sure to get wounds sometime or other. Then he can show off his scars and boast about how he got them at the feasts.’

  The man ran his fingers through the boy’s sunlit hair.

  ‘You are as bad a barbarian as any of them, Duatha!’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I shall do with you!’

  The boy grinned, showing his brok
en front tooth, where he had fallen out of an apple-tree when he was four.

  ‘Send me to Rome, Father,’ he said. ‘You are rich enough, they say. Then I can wear a golden helmet like the other princes and learn to be a Centurion.’

  The man looked away, a cloudy expression coming over his thin face. He did not answer, but turned from the boy and went towards his house to see who the strangers might be, for it was a king’s right and duty to know what went on in his village.

  At the door of the long steading, where the old oak-trees leaned over the honey-coloured thatch, a woman stood, suckling a small baby. Its thin hair was red, exactly the red of the woman who held him in her bright shawl.

  A boy of three stood behind her, hiding his face in her skirts, a black-haired boy with big bright eyes.

  The man bent and picked him up and set him on his shoulders. ‘Let us go and see the strangers, my Emperor,’ he said.

  The little boy tugged at his father’s hair and said, ‘My name is not Emperor. It is Gemellus Ennius, King father. Call me by my proper name, or I shall not know what my name is. Mother Eithne says so, don’t you, Mother? You said so last night, when King father kept calling me Legate, didn’t you? Our father says silly things, doesn’t he, Mother Eithne?’

  The red-haired woman nodded, and said with a smile, ‘Yes, Gemellus Ennius, he does. We must stop his pocket-money, mustn’t we?’

  The little boy nodded. Then he said, as though relenting, ‘But only for one day, Mother Eithne, because he is really a good boy. No, we will send him to Grandmother Centennial and let her smack him on the bottom. Shall we do that?’

  The man began to jog across the meadow, away from the house. The little boy shrieked with excitement as Gemel snorted and pretended to be a war stallion going into battle.

  ‘You’ll drop me! You’ll drop me!’he shouted, enjoying every moment of it.

  ‘Nay, Prince, I’ll not drop thee,’ said the man, in the village dialect. ‘These shoulders have carried three times thy weight in iron and leather before now—and no iron and leather was ever as precious as thee!’

  The boy did not understand what his father meant, and was not interested in any case. He was staring at the two strangers who had set their fine horses at the dry-stone wall at the bottom of the paddock and were now racing up the slope, their hair and cloaks flying behind them.

  ‘One is a man, and one is a woman,’ said the Prince Gemellus Ennius. ‘They are splendid folk, aren’t they, Father? I wish I had a horse with golden harness like those two. I wish I had a big golden helmet like that man, with red horse-hair for a plume. I wish I had.

  But the man was not listening now. He put the boy down and ran through the tussocky grass towards the visitors.

  ‘Greetings, Lavinia! Greetings, Gaius!’ he shouted as the two thundered up to him, reining in their horses so hard that the magnificent beasts almost sat back on the ground.

  ‘Why did you not write and tell me you were returning to Britain?’ he said. ‘We thought you had settled for life in Rome!’ The Lady Lavinia swung, her leg over the saddle, for she rode as Celtic women did, like a man.

  ‘Well, King Gemellus!’ she said. ‘How good to see you again, you old sheep-rearer! But we couldn’t let you know because it all happened in such a hurry. Gaius has got the Command at Uriconium for a term. Quite a step-up, isn’t it?’

  Gaius Flavius Cottus leaned down from his horse and clasped Gemellus by the hand.

  ‘We did not write because we thought you’d probably forgotten how to read by now,’ he said, grinning. Gemellus pretended to drag him from the horse.

  The little boy gazed on with excited glee. Then Lavinia bent down and picked him up, ‘Why, little Prince,’ she said, ‘how like your father you are! How like your father!’

  The boy shook his head solemnly. ‘That is not true, lady,’ he said. ‘My father’s hair is grey and he has a beard. I am not grey and my beard has not come yet.’

  They laughed at him, and Lavinia opened her saddle-bag straightway to find the present she had brought him, all the way from Rome.

  It was a model of gaily painted wood, a Centurion in full marching-order. The wooden man stared imperiously up, his chin high, his eyes dark and piercing.

  The boy gazed at it in amazement, then clutching it to his chest ran helter-skelter to show his mother what he had been given.

  ‘Can’t you even say thank you?’ called his father, after him, smiling.

  The boy stopped for an instant and looked back, ‘Thank you,’ he said, and then rushed away among the oak-trees calling out, ‘Look what I’ve got! Oh, Mother, look what I’ve got!’

  Lavinia said, ‘I have another one for Duatha. It is a great war-lord with homed helmet and long sword. The man who carved it said that it was meant to be Vercingetorix, but we can tell Duatha that it is his old grandfather, the King Drammoch.

  They must have looked very much like one another, those two. ‘

  So they walked up to the house. Eithne came out to meet them, and then they all talked at once, Lavinia admiring the new baby, Eithne anxious to know what sort of house they would have at Uriconium, Gemellus eager to know what happened in Rome, Gaius Flavius Gottus asking a hundred questions one after the other about the habits and customs of the tribes among whom he was to live now.

  And when they had asked and answered their fill, the friends sat down in the orchard, outside the house, and drank some of Eithne’s mead from the best horn beakers, which only came out for special guests.

  And the Lady Lavinia said, with a twinkle in her dark eyes, ‘You grow more beautiful with every baby, Queen Eithne; if only our Roman ladies-of-fashion could see you, they would take a tip from you and the population would shoot up! ‘

  Eithne gazed down in love at the child at her breast.

  ‘Why don’t you try my method, Lavinia?’ she said, roguishly. ‘I must speak to your husband, Gaius, about it tonight.’

  Gaius bowed his head and said, ‘You will speak too late, Queen Eithne ! Lavinia is already in process of beautifying herself after your manner!’

  Then Gemellus said gravely, ‘Well, she must stop riding that horse of hers, from now on, Gaius. That is no way for a mother to carry on, you know.’

  Lavinia slapped him on the hand and said, ‘There, you old raven! Always croaking! You haven’t changed a bit. Never fear, I shall take care. But I had to ride to see you today. What would you have thought if I had come in a litter, like all the other careful Roman women? You’d have had something sharp to say about me to Eithne when we had gone to bed, I’ll warrant.’

  Little Duatha looked round an apple-tree at them, shyly clutching his toy. He caught Lavinia’s eye and looked away.

  The Roman lady said, ‘If my child is like that one, I shall think that the gods have been indeed generous to me. ‘

  And Eithne said simply, ‘I think the gods have been generous to us all, already, friend.’

  Then she rose lightly and went towards the house, the baby asleep in her arms.

  ‘I must see that little Boudicca gets her proper rest,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, Grandmother Centennial will never let me hear the last of it! A rare tyrant she is, Grandmother Centennial. She will ride over here, unexpectedly, to see how we are looking after the children. To hear her talk, you would think they were her children, not mine!’

  And Gemellus, leaning back and staring up at the blue sky, said lazily, ‘They are, I suppose, in a way. At least, she has always set a very good example in that direction!’

 

 

 
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