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had returned to its dust-dark forest green.
    Then as the women pulled back the heavy bed-rugs, Boudicca went to her clothes’ kist, and took up from itand unsheathed the old King’s sword. Some of the men drew a whistling breath through the teeth, but I am thinking that the women knew already what was coming now. She knelt beside the great bedplace and leaned far over, to lay the naked blade down the centre of it. I mind how the torchlight played with the grey burnished iron.
    Boudicca came back to her feet, and stood looking at her red-haired Marriage Lord.
    ‘My Lord Prasutagus, over there is your sleeping place, and over here is mine. Let you bide on your own side under your own cloak, until maybe I bid you come closer.’
    And he stood looking back at her, rocking gently, with his hands on his hips, and the corners of his wide mouth twitching into laughter. ‘No hurry,’ he said. ‘Boudicca, Honey-sweet, you are not the first girl that was ever under my cloak; but I never yet had a girl that did not come warm and willing; and I’ll not begin with my own Queen.’

4
The Sword on the Threshold
    LATE INTO THE next spring, when the swallows were at their nesting under the thatch, the thing happened that changed all the world.
    The Red Crests came again.
    Word of their coming reached us along the trade routes in the usual way of things; and suddenly the Catuvellauni were gone from our borders, as King Togodumnos gathered his War Host and swept south to meet them. There was a great battle, and the Catuvellauni were driven back to the Father of Rivers, and another battle for the ford above the trading post of Londinos and again the Catuvellauni were forced back, and Togodumnos was slain, so that Caratacus his younger brother was after that the lone leader of the War Host.
    A strange thing it must have seemed to the Cats of War, to be driven back in defeat; they who for so long had trodden the conqueror’s path.
    Then the chieftains and nobles and the mightiest warriors of the Iceni gathered to the Council Fire, and some among the young men, the hot-headed and hot-hearted, were for over-running the lands of the Catuvellauni while their spears were busy elsewhere; and some were for joining them to hurl the Red Crests back into the sea.
    But for the most part, the chiefs and the older men were of another way of thinking. And Gretorix Hard-Council stood up before the rest, twisting the ends of his badger-streaked beard round his fingers in the waythat he had, and said, ‘If we swarm into the Catuvellauni’s hunting runs, and their spears prevail against the Red Crests, then we shall have them to answer to afterwards, and they will still be a Tribe many times greater than we. And if the Red Crests prevail, then we shall have gained nothing, and may have lost much. If we join spears with the Catuvellauni to drive the Red Crests out, then we shall still have the Catuvellauni on our frontiers afterwards; and if it is we are driven back, then we shall join them under the Red Crests’ heel. And why should we risk that, we who owe nothing to the Cats of War? My counsel is that we bide quiet by our own hearths. And if the Catuvellauni have the victory, then at least the gaining of it may weaken them for a life-time or so, and we shall have lost nothing. And if it is the Red Crests who have the victory, then let us seek to make an alliance with them – so we may not stand alone against the War Cats in years to come.’
    Then there was much talk and argument round the Council Fire. Hot hearts against cool heads; until it came to the time for the Queen to speak. And she rose from her High Seat of piled bulls’ hides, and stood before all her chiefs and elders. And the silence was so great it seemed to me I could hear the air passing through my harpstrings. She was very white, and her eyes darkened as I had seen them do before; and said, looking round at them all, ‘Gretorix Hard-Council has said that we owe nothing to the Cats of