Song for a Dark Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

us, I warmed to the man.
    There were as many Kings gathered there as there are fingers on my two hands, counting the small with the great. And each had a man, most often a merchant, to stand beside him and the Emperor when they spoke together, and turn their spoken words to and fro, from the tongue of the tribes to the tongue of Rome and back again. Only one or two of those from the south, where there had been coming and going for many years between themselves and Rome, could speak the Roman tongue, and carried themselves tall, accordingly. Cogidubnos of the Regni was chief among them, having been almost a Roman princeling before ever the Red Crests came. It is in my mind that if he had chosen, Prasutagus could have been another, for the Parisi have ever been strongly linked with Gaul, and in Gaul all men speak the Roman tongue. But he was there to speak for the Iceni, and he had his merchant to stand beside him like the rest.
    Three days we remained in Dun Camulus – Camulodunum, the Red Crests had begun to call it, in their own tongue. And I saw the great war-beasts that Claudius had brought with him. Elephants, they are called; and they are not magic, only strange to us. Mighty indeed are those beasts, and their drivers sit astride their necks behind their great flapping ears; and on their backs in battle they carry things like wheel-less chariots in which archers and javelin men ride. Yet out of battle they are oddly gentle, and if their driverlies down in front of them, they will feel for him as delicately as a maiden picking flowers, with the tip of the long waving thing that grows from their heads where their muzzles should be, and step over him not harming a hair of his head. And I have heard it said that their great hearts fail with fear at the barking of a little dog. Sad it is for the Catuvellauni that they did not know that thing.
    So the days of the great Council went by, with feasting at each day’s end; and the Kings and chiefs made their peace and swore alliance with Rome.
    And then we took the road north again.
    Boudicca stood in the gateway of the Weapon Court to greet her Lord. ‘Are we a free people yet?’ she asked, as he reined in and dropped from his chariot.
    He said, ‘While we pay a yearly tribute of gold and horses and young men to serve beside the Red Crests.’
    ‘Then we are not a free people.’
    ‘We are what the Emperor and his Ministers call a free state. Gretorix Hard-Council will tell you what that means; and Cadwan of the Harp will make you a harp-song of the splendours that we have seen in Caesar’s camp. I am very tired, my Queen.’
    The Emperor Claudius went back to Rome at summer’s end, leaving behind him orders for Dun Camulus to be rebuilt as a Roman city, and giving it all the special rights of a colony, a place for his Red Crests to settle on the land when their years with the Eagles were over. Leaving also men to see that the work was done.
    But up in the horse country, we had other things to think of; for with the harvest over it was time to be rounding up the herds, and cutting out the yearlings forbranding and the half-wild two-year-olds to be run up to the corrals for breaking and making.
    And on a day of soft fitful wind and the changing lights of. early autumn weather, Boudicca and Prasutagus with some of the companions rode out to see the first of the herds brought in from the upland pastures. The thunder that had been muttering low over the marshes all day, had begun to circle to the south, where the land was shadowed under banks of flat-topped anvil-cloud. And as we came down towards the place where the oak scrub fell back, and the droveway broadened and ran out into open pasture, there came a flick of lightning bright enough to make a blink in the daylight, and then from above the woods inland, a whip-crack of thunder that boomed and rumbled away hollow over the marshes towards the sea.
    We were riding well strung out, and, not aware of it, I had drawn some way