Other people began to come and go in the fiery mist that was all about me. The wild country was full of fugitives; never many together for on the run, especially in familiar country, a handful do better than a large band. A few joined themselves to us, all the same. None that I knew, and now I cannot remember their faces, and I am doubting if they will remember mine. We were shadows cast together, no more.
We pushed on, living on the country as best we could; a country that was already stripped bare; and lay up for a few hours from time to time, not because it was night, or because it was day, but because we had come to some spot where there was grazing for the two wretched ponies, or a corner of a ruined bothie to make a shelter for the Queen.
Sometimes, as my weakness grew on me and the wound seemed to strike deeper, I rode beside her for a while; the sledge was big enough for two, though it made hard work for the pony, and the men on the hauling ropes. I could earn the ride by holding her against the jolting of the rough way. And one day, as I crouched, holding her so, against my knee, I felt her stir, and when I looked down her eyes were open. She had opened them not long after we first set out, but they had been only holes in her face. Now she was looking out of them, looking up at me, not yet knowing where she was, or why; and the dark forests had gone from behind them, and once again she was the Boudicca I knew.
She stirred again, and felt my arm about her, and said, ‘Cadwan?’
‘I am here,’ I said.
‘Do you remember how you carried me home in your cloak, when I had run away to follow my father against the cattle raiders?’
The man leading the sledge pony looked back over his shoulder.
‘I remember,’ I said.
And after a while, she asked, ‘Where is my father’s sword?’
‘Here beside you.’ I lifted it and put the hilt in her hand, but she let it fall back into the bracken.
She looked about her, seeing the sledge and the wretched ponies, and the men looking like their own ghosts padding alongside. And her eyes came back to my face; a little frown between them. She did not ask of the battle. She had no need to. ‘The children? What of – the children?’
‘Dead,’ I said, ‘both dead. All dead. Sleep now, Lady.’ For she was still too near some shadowy borderland for the words to have full meaning for her.
I do not know if she slept, but she closed her eyes, and said no more for a long time.
We came at last, skirting the cold ruins of Camulodunum, across the frontier runs into our own land again. A land almost bare of people in its southern stretches, though at least we were able to get a few scrub ponies in place of our two that were almost done. Most of the people who were left had gone into hiding, driving the best of the herds with them into the forest fastnesses. And the few who remained seemed stunned, and looked at us with sullen and even hostile eyes; for the news of the battle had gone through days ahead of us. But they gave us food; warm water and fresh rags for our wounds; only no shelter anywhere, lest the Red Crests should come.
The sledge fell to pieces days ago; but by then, Boudicca was strong enough to ride again. We found her a mare with a foal at foot, and a woman at the door of a half-ruined steading gave us an old riding-rug to fling across her back. She was a valiant one, that woman, she helped the Queen to wash the dried blood from her hair and let us stay long enough for her to half dry it at the hearth fire. Then we rode on, Boudicca in our midst, her damp bright hair spread loose on her shoulders, looking always straight ahead of her towards the place where she would be.
We had thought at first to take her off into hiding, but she would not have it so. She would go back to the Royal Dun.
‘That is madness!’ I said. ‘Soon the Red Crests will be everywhere, but above all, they will be at the Royal Dun.’
And she smiled, gently, as though at the foolishness of a child, and said, ‘I shall be away before the Red Crests come.’
And so, yesterday, a little before sunset, we brought her home up the track to the empty gateway of the Dun.
Another stretch of the Hall roof has fallen in since we went south, and the Wild has flowed further in. There was a smell of fox about the place; but there was a little fire burning on the upper of the two hearths, and the feel of people about, and as we dropped from the backs of the weary ponies before the threshold, Old Nurse came through the doorway from the women’s quarters, like a withered leaf that a puff of wind might blow away.
Boudicca turned from the foal she had been fondling, and which instantly ducked its nose under its mother’s flank and began to suckle, and walked towards her, and Old Nurse opened her arms and gathered her in.
‘I have come home,’ Boudicca said.
‘Aiee! You have come home. The word went by many sunsets ago; and I knew that you would come. So I have made a fire for you, and spread fresh rugs on the bedplace.’
‘Have you any food for the few who come with me?’
‘Surely,’ said the old woman. ‘But I did not come back from hiding alone; others will see to their wants. Come now to the fire, and rest, and also eat.’
‘I will come to the fire,’ Boudicca said, ‘for I am cold. So cold. But it is not for food that I come home to you; it is that I may drink the Sleep-Drink in the place where I was born. You have the needful herbs? Go now and brew it for me, Nurse Dear.’
‘It is already brewed,’ said Rhun. ‘For that also, I knew.’
And she went back the way she had come. And the Queen sat down on the pile of skins beside the fire, holding out her hands to the warmth, for a faint mist was rising with the sunset, and the first chill of autumn was in the air. I bided on my feet beside her, with my arm round the nearest of the great roof-trees to hold myself from falling. For now that the journey was over, it was in my mind that if I once sat down, in my rightful place, the Harper’s place at her feet, I should never rise again, and I was still not quite done with my body.
‘Now you will never make me my Great Song to match with my Great Sword,’ Boudicca said, ‘my Song of a Queen’s victories.’
I shook my head, and the Hall blurred round me. ‘You have had the Great Sword. The Little Song will have to do.’
‘A little song, and a sword made of white willow wood,’ she said; and began to sing, very softly as though to the fire:
‘ . . . Now the light fades
And the wild duck home are winging,
And sleep falls like dew from the quiet sky.
“Sleep now,” says my sword,
“Sleep now, you and I.”’
The rough curtain over the entrance to the women’s quarters was drawn aside, and Old Nurse came back, carrying the wonderful cup of Roman glass that had been Prasutagus’s third Bride Gift.
It was half full of some colourless faintly cloudy liquid, and the Queen rose, and took it between her hands, and stood a few moments gazing-down into the depths of it, beyond the dried hemlock flowers that floated on the surface. And as she did so, I saw the light from the little fire catch and kindle the sleeping flame in the heart of the cup, so that from its dark, dusty, end-of-summer green it flowered into a glory of shadowy gold and flame, all the smouldering colours of a wild sunset.
Then she raised it, and drank to the last drop, and let the cup fall with a crash on to the hearth stone and shatter into a hundred fragments.
She stood very still, as though savouring what she had done. Then, to Old Nurse, she said, ‘Go now. And presently, bring the other women you have with you to the Royal Chamber.’ And to me, she said, ‘Do not think me greedy that I have drunk it all. Old Nurse will go back to her own kind. And you? You have no need of the Sleep-Drink. Do you think I do not know how you have fought to stay in your body all these journey days, that you might be with me while I still had need of you? You have only to cease the fighting and go free.’
Then she put her hands on either side of my face, and kissed me on the forehead. I felt her lips already cold through my own rank sweat. ‘The sun and the moon on your path, C
adwan of the Harp. When you hear the women keening, you will know that I have made my peace with the Mother. You will know that I am beyond the Red Crests’ reach, and shall not be dragged in chains like Caratacus, to add splendour to a Roman triumph. Then go free, and be done with the weariness and the pain.’
And she turned, gathering her father’s sword once more into her arms, and walked away, like a Queen still, up her ruined Hall. In the doorway of the Royal Chamber, she swayed a little, then steadied herself and walked on, and the rough curtain fell to behind her.
Then I took the last of my strength as it were in both hands, and dragged my way out here into the apple garth, where I have made so many songs to sing by firelight, and shall make no more. And let myself lie down at last, in the long grass against the little that is still left of the old half-fallen tree. The mist was wreathing up from the lowland pastures, and the little white moon-moths fluttering star-pale among the branches in the dusk.
That was a long while ago, when I was still Harper to a Queen. Or maybe not so long. I do not know. A while since, I heard the women keening.
Not any more.
Nothing any more.
Author’s Note
It was in two books of T. C. Lethbridge’s, Witches and Gog-Magog, that I first came upon the theory that the Iceni were a matriarchy: the royal line, and with it the life line of the tribe, descending from mother to daughter. So that Boudicca was their Queen in her own right, and Prasutagus their King only because he was her husband.
That was often the way, among the older Iron-Age peoples. And if it was so in this case, then, to the tribe’s way of thinking, it would turn the Romans’ treatment of the Queen and princesses from brutal tyranny into something much worse, into sacrilege against the Life itself. And it would turn what followed from tribal revolt into Holy War; which of all wars is the most savage and merciless kind.
Also, in some odd way, it seemed to me to turn Boudicca into much more of a real person. And real people, lost behind their legends, have always fascinated me.
The result, many years after first reading Witches, is Song for a Dark Queen.
Of the books I searched through, trying to get the story straight, Lewis Spence’s Boadicea gave me the most help with the actual revolt, and the Roman campaign that finally crushed it. And from Agricola and Roman Britain by A. R. Burn, I learned what I think I should have known before: that Gneus Julius Agricola, who, nearly twenty years later, was the greatest Governor Roman Britain ever had, was a young tribune on the staff of the Governor Suetonius Paulinus, in fact his ‘tenting companion’, which is to say his personal aide-de-camp, throughout the campaign.
One thing more. Alas, there were no scythe blades on the wheels of the British war chariots. When one comes to think of it, in a mêlée they would have removed the legs of their own side just as efficiently as they would have removed those of the enemy.
About the Author
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in 1920 in West Clanden, Surrey. With over 40 books to her credit, Rosemary Sutcliff is now universally considered one of the finest writers of historical novels for children. Her first novel, The Queen Elizabeth Story was published in 1950. In 1972 her book Tristan and Iseult was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and in 1978 her book, Song for a Dark Queen was commended for the Other Award. Rosemary lived for a long time in Arundel, Sussex with her dogs and in 1975, she was awarded the OBE for services to Children’s Literature.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Armourer’s House
Beowulf: Dragonslayer
Bonnie Dundee
Brother Dusty-Feet
The Capricorn Bracelet
The High Deeds of Finn MacCool
The Hound of Ulster
The Sword and the Circle
The Light Beyond the Forest
The Road to Camlann
Knight’s Fee
The Shining Company
Sun Horse, Moon Horse
Tristan and Iseult
The Witch’s Brat
Eagles’ Honour
SONG FOR A DARK QUEEN
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17310 5
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
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This ebook edition published 2013
Copyright © Anthony Lawton, 1978
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox 9780099527916 1978
The right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Rosemary Sutcliff, Song for a Dark Queen
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