The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

to build Roman towns, Roman garrisons, Roman aqueducts, Roman roads. What was the choice now left them, really, as Britons? Only liberty or death.

With her daughters beside her in the chariot, as the horses stamped the turf and blew air through their nostrils, she stood in silence surveying the throngs below, all massed there in a broad circle around the borders of the vast open field, all gazing up at her—all waiting for what she would do.

When at last they fell silent, she knotted the reins on the pommel and opened the folds of her multicolored tunic. She lifted out the rabbit and held the creature high above her head for all to see. It was a snow-white sacred hare, bred and raised by the Druids for precisely this purpose. From the eighty thousand men, women, and children thronged there on the green, not a single breath was heard. Only the whinnying of a horse broke the endless silence. Then she released the hare.

At first the animal sat there on the grassy knoll in stunned confusion as thousands of humans stood below, planted like forests of stone, waiting in silence. Then it pelted in a wild burst down the knoll and made a beeline across the open field, a small white blur against a drop-cloth of green. The direction it ran was southwest—away from the sun—and when the crowds saw it, with one voice they burst into a warlike scream of cheers, tossing their tartans into the air like a blizzard of plaids from the sky.

For they had seen that the prophetic hare had dashed straight in the direction of Camulodunum. Boudica’s armies that were gathered here could reach it, on fast march, by nightfall. And by dawn, sixteen years of abuses against the Britons and their land would be washed away in an orgy glutted on Roman blood.

Mona Island, Britannia: Spring, A.D. 60

CONSIGNATIO

Here at the world’s end, on its last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day, defended by our remoteness and obscurity. Now the farthest reaches of Britain lie exposed … nothing but sea and rock and hostile Romans, whose arrogance you can’t fool by compliance or modest self-restraint. Predators of the world … [Neither] east nor west has satiated them … to plunder, butcher, steal—these things they falsely name empire. They’ve turned the world into a wasteland, and they call it peace.

—Tacitus,

Agricola

, quoting British chieftain Calgacus on the Romans

It is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.

—Winston Churchill,

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

It wasn’t merely a question of achieving short-term control or submission among the natives, as Suetonius Paulinus well knew. He’d begun his career in the Atlas Mountains putting down uprisings by the Berbers against Roman occupation. Having weathered many such campaigns, Suetonius was well prepared to wage warfare over difficult terrain, or to meet fierce hot opposition in hand-to-hand combat.

But in the two years since the emperor Nero had appointed him governor of Britannia, Suetonius had come to understand that these Druids were something else. As both rulers and seers, whether male or female, they held the highest priestly offices in the land and were regarded by their people nearly as gods. Suetonius knew without question that in the long run there was only one way to deal with them: they had to be utterly destroyed.

Their chief sanctuary was located just off the coast of Cambria on the isle of Mona—the cow, a nickname for Brighde, a Demeter-like moon goddess of fecundity. They believed they were protected by this goddess, and that their warriors who were slain in battle would be rejuvenated from her cauldron of rebirth. The underground passage to the cauldron was located beneath a lake that lay near Mona’s sacred grove.

It had taken Suetonius Paulinus two years of stealth and trickery to determine exactly when was the most propitious moment to strike at this offshore stronghold, without chance of defense or retreat. At last he learned that all the principal druidical priests were present each year on the first day of the Roman month of May. This was the day the Celts called Beltaine for the taine or fires they lit the night before to cleanse and purify the sacred woods in preparation for the Great Mother’s yearly visit to usher in the month of fertility. This was the holiest day of the year, when the Druids neither worked nor bore arms—and therefore, Suetonius could hope, the day they would very least be anticipating an attack.

He had a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats built to bring his troops across the narrow but often violent strait from the mainland. At dusk on May Eve they crept through the sea foam, rounding the coast along the southern tip of the island for a landing away from the mainland, in the west at Holy Head.

There, as their boats slipped soundlessly in toward shore, the ceremonies of the cleansing ritual were already under way, though it was not yet dark. Shadowy figures bearing flaming torches moved through the silent groves that ran the length of the strand. The sun was slowly sinking into the bloodred sea as the Roman troops beached their craft and splashed through the sweeping surf. But all at once they halted at the sight that confronted them.

A mass of people, all in robes of deathly black, came onto the beach, advancing like an implacable black-clad wall of human flesh. The male priests moved with their arms raised to the heavens, screaming curses and oaths at the top of their lungs. The women, with wild, disheveled hair, flitted among them like insects, with torches held aloft. Then in a sudden wave, the women rushed shrieking like furies across the pebbled beach, directly toward the Roman soldiers.

Suetonius’s officers looked on helplessly as their troops stood motionless on the beachhead, overawed,