Song for a Dark Queen Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Map

  1. Sword Song

  2. A Colt for the Breaking

  3. The Bride Cup

  4. The Sword on the Threshold

  5. To Be a King and Think Too Much

  6. Day Draws to Sunset

  7. The Queen’s Awakening

  8. Death on the Dancing Floor

  9. The Dark Queen

  10. The Hosting

  11. The Grove of the Mother

  12. The Washer by the Ford

  13. Londinium

  14. The Corn Dancing

  15. Red Harvest

  16. ‘Sleep Now, You and I’

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Copyright

  About the Book

  As harper to Queen Boudicca, Cadwan knows the dark queen better than most. Spirited and strong-willed even as a girl, Boudicca makes a powerful queen of the Iceni tribe: proud, determined and passionate with love for her people.

  But faced with the ever-increasing pressure from the Roman army and the sudden loss of her husband, Boudicca needs all the strength she can muster. When Emperor Nero rules that the Royal Line of the Iceni is to be brought to an end, Boudicca vows not to be broken and prepares to fight fire with fire – whatever the consequences. Cadwan longs for the day when he can sing victory songs for his queen but even he is unsure if Boudicca has the strength to win this, the greatest of all battles . . .

  Song for a Dark Queen

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  1

  Sword Song

  I AM CADWAN of the Harp. I am the Singer of Songs and the Teller of Tales. There are, there were, many harpers among the Iceni; but I am Harper to the Queen herself; to the Lady Boudicca, as I was when I was young, to her mother before her.

  That was long ago, before ever the Red Crests came, in the days when the enemy were the Catuvellauni, the Cats of War.

  Five lifetimes ago, ever since they hurled their spears against the first Red Crests who came following Julius Caesar, and the Red Crests went away again in a hurry over the Great Water, the Catuvellauni have followed the conqueror’s path. And the names of their kings – Cassivellaunus, Tasciovanus, Cunobelin, have been names that women use to frighten their naughty children. Many tribes, they overcame. Less than one lifetime ago, when Cunobelin was first a king, he overran the Trinovantes whose borders marched with ours in the south, and made his new Strong Place where their old one had been, at Dun Camulus, the Dun of the War God, less than a day’s riding across our frontier line.

  So always, from the first that I remember, we have known that one day, soon or late, it would be our turn. We prayed to the Lord of Battle, that our spears might be stronger than the spears of the Catuvellauni when that day came. We watched our borders and built great turf banks where the fens and the forest left us open to attack; and the women added the names of Cunobelin’s two sons to those they used for frightening naughty children, though they were but cubs themselves as yet. ‘Togodumnos will catch you!’ they said, and ‘If you do that again, Caratacus will creep in and snatch you out of your beds one dark night!’

  And always, there was un-quiet along our borders; a small flurrying warfare of slave and cattle raiding at the full of the moon.

  A day in hawthorn time came when the Lady Boudicca was six years old, and the King her father had moved down to his summer steading with all his household, as he often did at that time of year, to see how the foals on the southern runs were shaping. And in the lag end of the night, a man on a sweating horse brought word of raiders within our borders, loose in the grazing land between the forest and the fens. Then the King and his sword-companions came out from sleep, calling for spears and horses, and there were flaring torches and the trampling of war-ponies brought from the stables, and a yelping of horns to summon the fighting men from round about, just as I had known it all a score and a score of times before.

  But after all was quiet again, when the King and his war-band were away in a green dawn with the marsh birds calling, and the hawthorn blossom showing curd pale in the darkness of the hedge around the Royal Garth, it was found that the Lady Boudicca was not in her bed in the women’s quarters.

  Then there began to be another kind of uproar. Maybe there would have been less if the Queen her mother had been alive. But Rhun, her nurse, was ever like a hen with one chick and a hawk hovering over; a thing I have noticed more than once among women who rear a child some other woman bore, and have no child of their own. And soon, all the women of the household were in full cry, scurrying here and there, crying and calling, ‘Boudicca! Boudicca! – Stop hiding, I can see you! – Come out from there, child of blackness! – Where are you, little bird?’ And the slaves were sent flying to look in this place and that, in the foaling pens, along the fringes of the oak woods, in every pool of marsh water lest she be lying drowned among the reeds.

  I knew better than that. I hitched up my harp in its embroidered mare’s-skin bag – no harper worth the name is willingly parted from his harp, nor leaves her unguarded where even a friendly hand may come too near – and I set off along the way that the King and his companions had followed.

  The way ran along the rich grazing country between the wide salt marshes, and the tawny wind-shaped oak woods that are the outriders of the dark forest inland. Three times I asked horse herdsmen if they had seen a girl-child go by; and the first two had seen no one since the war-band passed in the dawn: but the third man said, ‘A little while back. She was dripping with mud and water as though she had fallen into a stream.’

  ‘And you did not think to stop her?’ I said.

  He scratched one ear. ‘Na. She would be from one of the villages round, I thought. She seemed to know where she was going, well enough.’

  ‘That would be her,’ I said, and pressed on.

  There are many winding waters, poplar and willow fringed, among the horse-runs, and soon the way would turn inland; and I did not care to think of her once she came among the trees. The forest is good for a hunting party that knows its way, but not for one small girl-child alone. So I pushed on as fast as might be. But I had to stop and search as I went, and the sun was far to the west of noon, when I found her at last, not far short of the forest verge. She was sitting among the roots of an ancient willow tree beside one of the slow-flowing streams that vein and dapple all this countryside with winding brightness and sky-reflecting pools. And she forlorn as a fledgeling thrush new-fallen from the nest.

  She had walked until she could walk no more. There was blood on one of her feet, and her hair was matted with mud; and the mud had dried into a mask on her face, save where the tracks of tears cut through it. At first I thought that she was asleep; but when I drew near, she turned, showing her teeth like a small wild thing at the nearing of danger. Then, seeing that it was I, she loosened with a little sigh; and squatting down beside her, I saw that the tear tracks were still wet.

  ‘This is a long way that you are from home,’ I said, ‘and you with a cut foot.’

  And she said, ‘They would not take me. Still my father says I am too young. I thought maybe they would take me this time – now that I am nearly seven.’

  ‘And so you followed them.’

  ‘I thought if I followed them all the way, they would not send me back alone.’

  ‘But they rode swift as the wind on their war-ponies, and you have walked the soles off your feet,’ I said. ‘And one of them is cut and bleeding. So we will bathe it here in the stream, and then we will go home for this time. Truly the world is full of sorrow.’

  She tipped up her hea
d and looked at me, proud as any brave in his first warpaint, and let another tear run into her mouth rather than wipe it away.

  ‘I am not crying,’ she said.

  ‘Surely you are not crying. It is just the wind that has got into your eyes.’

  ‘I never cry. I am the Royal Daughter of the Iceni, and one day I shall be Queen!’

  I lifted her down the bank, where the sun-streaks dappled through the willow leaves, and began to bathe her foot. ‘I shall hurt you,’ I said, ‘but you will not be minding that.’

  She shook her head; and looking up, I saw that her grief was grown smaller: a little.

  ‘Now we will go home. See, I will carry you; and I will make you a song to shorten the way.’

  ‘Make me a sword,’ she said. ‘Old Nurse made me a sword out of two sticks, but she bound it together with wool, and it broke. Make me a sword, and then we will go home.’

  I thought of the hunting and calling that would still be going on, and the rings of search spreading wider and wider. And I was thinking it would do small harm to let them spread a little wider yet. It would not take long. I have always been a man of my hands, as well as a harper. I made her a sword of thick white willow rod split with my dagger, with a short piece laid crosswise to give it shoulders and mark off the hilt from the blade. But with what should I bind it? It must not break as Rhun’s had done. I pulled round the harp-bag from my shoulder and drew out a spare harpstring of red horsehair, the thickest string that yields the deepest note. Good harpstrings are not easily come by; but it was passably strong. She was watching me, her chin almost resting on my arm, as I cut the length I needed. ‘See,’ I said, ‘I am binding your sword with harp-song, so that it will never break. Let you give me three hairs from your head to use also, that it may be like your father’s great sword that has goldwork in the hilt.’

  She pulled me out three hairs and gave them to me, and I dipped them in the water to rid them of mud, and twisted them together with the harpstring, and bound her sword, and gave it to her.

  She looked at it, and sighed. She had known that it could only be a toy sword made of willow wood; but her heart had hoped for something more. ‘One day I shall have a real sword,’ she said; and then, ‘You could make me a real song, now.’

  She was growing a little sleepy, even then.

  ‘Surely I will make you a real song,’ I told her, and picked her up, muffling my cloak about her, for a small mean wind was blowing up off the marshes, and a silvery haze dimming the westering sun. And I set out, back the way that we had come. ‘I will make you the song I promised you for home-going. And one day, when you have a great sword like the King your father’s, I will make you a great song of the Victories of a Queen. But now, I will make you only a little song, to match with your little sword.’

  And I sang to her as we went along, taking the words as they came into my head:

  ‘Listen now, for your sword is singing,

  “I am the proud one, I that am sword to a Queen.

  The sun flames not more brightly than my hilt,

  The night cannot outshine my blade’s dark sheen.

  The earth shall tremble at our passing;

  We will make the warhosts scatter, she and I.”

  But now the light fades

  And the wild duck home are winging;

  And sleep falls like dew from the quiet sky.

  “Sleep now,” says your sword,

  “Sleep now, you and I.’”

  By the time I had done, her head was growing heavy in the hollow of my shoulder.

  So I carried her home to the household that was like a disturbed ants’ nest in the dusk, more than any other thing that I can call to mind. Rhun the Nurse came running to meet me with a white face that looked as though she had not slept for a hundred years. And I put Boudicca into her arms, still in her sleep holding to the play-thing sword that I had made for her.

  ‘Here she is,’ I said, ‘she had followed the war-band. Take better care of her another time.’

  2

  A Colt for the Breaking

  I HAVE NOT forgotten, in more than five and twenty summers. I have not forgotten, the great Song of a Queen’s Victories that I promised to the Princess Boudicca.

  It is all here, garnered within me, the things that should go to the making of such a song; the things that I have known with my own eyes and ears, the things that have come to me through the eyes and ears of others, the things that my own heart within me tells me must have been in this way or that way. All the things that make up the life pattern, the life song, of Boudicca the Queen of the Iceni.

  How should I begin my song?

  I would sing first of the King’s high Hall in the midst of the Royal Dun, the fires burning always down its length, and the paved space between the fires, where the women made the Corn Dance at harvest time. And the warriors gathered to the evening feasting, with their weapons laid behind them. And the skulls of ancient enemies daubed with red and yellow ochre, grinning along the great tie-beams where the firelight scarcely reached; and the laughter, and the harp-notes flying like sparks from the fire in windy weather. And the women’s quarters ranged behind the Hall, where the women wove scarlet and purple on the standing loom, or sent for me to come and play to them while they sat combing their hair; and where, in the Royal Chamber, on the bedplace piled with goose-feather pillows of embroidered green and crimson and blue, on a night that smelled outside of grass and elderflowers and thunder brewing over the marshes, my Lady Boudicca was born.

  I heard her first cry, squatting in the little side doorway that gave out into the chariot court, with my harp silent across my knees. And a woman of the Kindred came to me and said, ‘Still there, Watchdog? The Queen has borne a Royal Daughter to her Lord, and so the line goes on.’ For we are an old People, and among us the Kingship goes not from father to son, but down the Moonside, the Womanside; and the King becomes King only because his sword is strong and he is wedded to the Queen.

  So I was the first to know, even before the Priest Kind sounded the moon call on the sacred oxhorns, that was taken up and sent on and on from end to end of the land, telling the People of the Horse that a new Royal Daughter was born to carry forward the life of the tribe.

  And I took my harp and went and walked a while among the half-tamed trees of the apple garth, making a small music just between myself and the stars.

  I would sing of the horse herds grazing in the broad pastures between the forest and the fen lands; the proud-necked stallions and the leggy two-year-olds and the trained chariot teams and the mares in foal. And the wide-winged sunsets over the marshes, caught and flung back by the reedy lakes and winding waterways until it seems as though earth as well as sky is turned to fire. I would sing of wild geese flighting down from the north in the autumn nights, and the thick green-smelling darkness of the forest verges in high summer when the cuckoo’s voice is breaking; and the swirling pattern, red-enamelled on the bronze face of the King’s warshield, that I have seen her tracing with one finger, as though she would find some secret in it.

  I would sing of all these things, for it seems to me that all these things gave something of themselves to the making of the Lady Boudicca.

  When she was four years old, her mother went beyond the sunset, taking with her the seven-month man-child who had never drawn breath in this world. So I would sing of the death-fires for a Queen; and how, after they were cold, the People of the Horse had no Queen anymore, but a Royal Daughter who carried the Queenship within her, as seed time carries harvest, for a future day.

  Four is over young for long grieving, so when the Lady Boudicca had wept a while, she grew happy again, trotting like a hound pup at her father’s heels whenever she could escape from the women’s side, save for the times when she came trotting at mine.

  The years went by, and the years went by, and the wild geese came flighting down the autumn gales, and the mares dropped their foals in early summer. And still we looked to our southern and o
ur western borders, and felt to be sure that our swords sat loosely in the sheath.

  And the year came when Boudicca was thirteen summers old, and it was time for choosing who should be her Marriage Lord and take up the old King’s sword when he must lay it down. Then, when the harvest was over, the King called out the Oak Priests from their sacred clearings in the forest, and summoned the chiefs and nobles of the tribe to the Choosing Feast. Chiefs of the Parisi, too, the chariot warriors who had spread along the coasts to our north and become bound to us by blood ties so that now we counted almost as one people. Almost, but not quite.

  The chiefs and the nobles gathered. Too many for the guest-huts, too many to crowd within the Hall, and so the black horsehide tents were pitched in the in-pasture below the Royal Village, and the great fires were made in the King’s forecourt. The Weapon Court, we called it, from the tall black stone that stood there for the warriors to sharpen their weapons on in time of war. And for three days and far into three nights the feasting went on, and the King and the chiefs and the Priest Kind took council together, while the Princess Boudicca and the women of the Kindred remained shut away in the women’s quarters.

  And on the first morning of the Choosing Feast, the King sacrificed a young black stallion to Epona the Lady of the Horse Herds, the All Mother without whom there can be neither children to the tribe nor foals to the herds nor barley to the fields. And on the first night of the Choosing Feast, the freshly flayed hide was laid out in the midst of the apple garth, and Merddyn, chief of the Oak Priests, lay down upon it to sleep the Choosing Sleep, that Epona might come to him in his dreaming, and give him of her wisdom to carry back with him to the Council Fire.

  And on the third evening of the Feast, the Choosing was finished; and after, as it seemed to me, the choice had hovered around half the young braves of the tribe, it fell at last upon one, Prasutagus, son of Dumnorix, who was of the Iceni on his mother’s side, but his father a chieftain of the Parisi.