Red Queen, White Queen by Henry Treece

Author:Henry Treece
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Childrens
ISBN: 9780861300204
Published: 1958-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19: Summer Pavilion

Three day’s ride north from the ruined city of Verulamium, which still smoked from her fires, Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, had caused to be erected her summer pavilion.

No monarch of the Eastern world would have dignified such a structure by such a grandiose name—but Boudicca called it so, and no man said her nay. Indeed, there were only two men living in the West who would have dared contest her on any point and they were far away; the General, the Legate Suetonius Paulinus, was crossing laboriously from Anglesey, with too much on his mind at that moment; and Nero was sitting on his basalt platform, devising a Triumph which should signalise the final defeat of the British. He too was extremely busy, for he could not make up his mind, try as he might, whether all the boys should be dressed as girls, or the girls as boys.

So no one dared to deny Boudicca her right to her summer pavilion.

It was a tall structure of blackened oak, built to represent a massive Greek temple. That is, it had many fluted columns, some of them with the bark still hanging on them, and a high domed roof, made of Norfolk reeds. Round that dome, on fifty rusting spikes, grinned the heads of Roman officers, veterans from Camulodunum, and collaborators from Londinium. The other heads, for which there were no spikes, were slung by the hair if they were British, and by thongs passed through the eye-sockets if they were cropped Romans, from the rude capitals of the oak columns.

Since by now the eastern winds were beginning to blow a little chill at nights, the queen had commanded that the spaces between the columns should be filled by hanging draperies. Though the Icenian needle-women had worked until their fingers bled, they could not provide enough material for this purpose; so cloaks, tents, deer-hides, blankets, had all been used to give shelter to the queen and her daughters, and to whichever court officials they decided might share their pavilion.

It was a chaos of colour and material; yet it was warm, and had a certain rude dignity.

Inside, a small marble altar, ripped out of the temple at

Verulamium, and rededicated to Mabon, bore three fires along its top. These fires were fed continuously by a half-blind Druid in filthy robes. The place swirled with black smoke, for the Druid insisted on. pouring the fat of sacrificial goats on to the wood, and no one, not even the Queen, cared to forbid him the right to do so.

At one end of the pavilion stood a long board table, with benches on either side of it. It was littered with drying crusts and half-gnawed bones, on which the flies settled in black hordes.

At the other end, the straw-beds of the Queen and her daughters were ranged, thick with wrappings of sheepskin and woollen blankets of various bright colours.

Heavy oaken stools stood here and there.

To this place came a messenger, shortly before dawn on the day after the Prince of the Brigantes had fallen beneath the hand of Bran.

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