Druid's Sword Read online

  For all my fellow London map enthusiasts on ebay, without whom I could never have written this book, and also (although I doubt she wants this) for my editor, Stephanie Smith, without whom there would be almost no books at all.

  Thanks Stephanie.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Abbreviations Used In This Book

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Two

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Three

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Part Four

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Part Five

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Part Six

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Seven

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part Eight

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  More Great Reading from Sara Douglass

  Darkglass Mountain

  The Axis Trilogy

  The Wayfarer Redemption

  The Crucible

  The Troy Game

  Threshold

  Beyond the Hanging Wall

  About the Author

  Books by Sara Douglass

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THIS BOOK

  ARP: Air Raid Precaution (i.e. ARP wardens, stations or shelters)

  BBC: British Broadcasting Commission

  GPO: General Post Office

  IB: Incendiary bomb

  IRA: Irish Republican Army mph: miles per hour

  PM: Prime Minister

  RAF: Royal Air Force

  UXB: Unexploded bomb

  We are in the middle of a conflagration which is not just a struggle between two countries. It is the struggle of two different worlds. There is no way for these worlds to exist side by side. One of them must perish.

  Adolf Hitler, speech of December 10th 1940

  Prologue

  Epping Forest, AD 61

  The woman knelt keening in the sacred glade. She was strikingly handsome despite her griefstricken face smeared with thick lines of blue woad war paint. She wore a chest plate of metal over a robe of sweat- and blood-stained tartan wool. A red woollen cape lay on the ground just behind her. Her dark hair, laced here and there with silver, was twisted into a plait that hung over one shoulder, and her bare arms glittered with metal armbands.

  A sword lay discarded to her right, a gourd beside it.

  Before the woman lay the bodies of two adolescent girls, one of whom was heavily pregnant. Their bodies were still warm, the tears on their cheeks still fresh, but whatever beauty they may have possessed was disguised by their twisted limbs and faces, a legacy of the poison they had ingested a little time earlier.

  The clearing was encircled by two score of warriors, most of them wounded, all of them droopshouldered with despair and bitterness. Some leaned on spears thrust into the ground, others on the shoulders of comrades.

  They were the remaining remnants of the woman’s army. Twelve hours ago that army had been more than sixty thousand strong. Now it was reduced to a few desperate score, and even they would not survive much longer.

  The sound of the Roman centurions could be heard to the east as they fought their way through the forest towards the sacred glade.

  Her army had not been able to stop them, but Boudicca—the mother who wept over her daughters and the sad loss of her country to the invader—knew that the forest would keep them at bay long enough for her to do what she needed.

  A year ago all had been well. True, her beloved land had been invaded by the Romans, but Boudicca and her husband, Prasutagus, who ruled over the Iceni, had spent months in careful negotiation with the Romans trying to come to a mutually agreeable settlement. Then, ten months ago, a terrible wasting sickness struck Prasutagus and reduced his tall, strong frame to a skeletal, shaking weakness in a few short weeks. He died, leaving a desolate Boudicca regent of the Iceni and guardian of her daughters’ inheritance.

  For no reason that Boudicca could understand, the Romans attacked as soon as they heard Prasutagus was interred in his hill grave. They ravaged the lands of the Iceni, whipped Boudicca, and raped her daughters.

  They took all night over those rapes, and so far as Boudicca knew most of the Roman soldiers within twenty miles had enjoyed her daughters during that time.

  The child that her eldest had been carrying was a Roman bastard.

  Boudicca had been so devastated by their unwarranted attacks on her, her daughters and her people, that for weeks she had been incapable of doing anything.

  Then anger took over and, backed by the Iceni and many of their neighbouring tribes, Boudicca raised a mighty army of over sixty thousand warriors, both men and women, and attacked the Romans.

  She had stunning success. Death abounded. With Boudicca at their head, the Iceni decimated Camulodunum Colonia, and then Londinium, slaughtering any they found in their path. Boudicca took particular care with Londinium, causing it to be razed to the ground. For some reason which she could not articulate, but which she felt in every fibre of her being, she blamed the city for all her troubles. Perhaps if she razed London all might be well.

  Over a hundred thousand died in the resulting conflagration.

  From Londinium, Boudicca hardly paused for breath as she drove her army towards Verulamium, where more than seventy thousand died.

  The Romans were stunned by the success of Boudicca’s advance and appalled by her savagery. One of them wrote back to Rome that the pagan queen appeared bent, not on taking prisoners or on amassing booty, but on slaughter, the gibbet, the fire and the cross. All she wanted, he wrote, was to create a wasteland of death.

&nbs
p; Boudicca had ravaged south aided by surprise and a lack of any substantial Roman force to stand in her way. But eventually the Romans rallied, and the previous day the two forces had met in battle atop an ancient fort in the centre of Epping Forest.

  The Romans had the better of the battle, and routed the Iceni during a desperate struggle which took the entire day.

  As the Iceni fell about her, Boudicca retreated a mile or two away, to this sacred glade. Whatever else, Boudicca was determined that the Romans should take neither her nor her daughters alive.

  Her daughters had willingly taken the poison—the night of their rape was still violently fresh in their minds.

  Now Boudicca raised her face to the men and women who surrounded her.

  “I will drink of the gourd now,” she said. “Witness my death, and burn my body and that of my daughters. Then flee, if you wish. You do not need to follow me into death.”

  She reached for the gourd, and none of the warriors moved or spoke to stop her. But as Boudicca raised it to her lips, a murmur of surprise and fear rustled about the circle, and Boudicca lowered the gourd to see what had disturbed them.

  Pray to the gods that the Romans had not arrived yet!

  A pillar of light—faint and hazy, almost a thin fog—had appeared to one side of Boudicca.

  She gasped and, along with every one of the warriors, bent forward in honour before the apparition.

  Was it one of the gods, come to save them?

  “Nay,” said the apparition, now forming itself into the recognisable form of a man, “only me, your beloved husband, come to guide you.”

  “Prasutagus!” said Boudicca, setting the gourd aside and holding out her arms towards the ghost. Now her initial shock had passed, Boudicca was not surprised to see him. Prasutagus had been a great king, but he had been a far more powerful druid. How like him, she thought, to oversee her journey to the Otherworld.

  He drifted close to her, his insubstantial hand caressing her cheek, then he looked at the bodies of their daughters. “They have passed gracefully, Boudicca, and are now happy in the Otherworld.”

  Boudicca’s eyes filled with gratitude. “Prasutagus, will you oversee my own—”

  “Boudicca,” he said, interrupting her. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Name it.”

  “In death,” Prasutagus said, “I have become aware of many things. Terrible things.”

  Boudicca’s eyes widened in distress, but she did not otherwise respond.

  “Evil besets our land,” he said.

  “The Romans,” Boudicca said, glancing behind her as she spoke, as if expecting the centurions to burst through the shrubbery at any moment.

  “No,” her husband said. “They are evil enough, true, but there is a far deeper evil which has spoiled this land.”

  “What?” Boudicca said.

  “A foreign corruption,” Prasutagus said. “Something brought here many lifetimes ago, which has taken root in the soil of our land and infected it with utter malevolence.”

  About them the circle of warriors shifted and muttered.

  “It is like a great poisonous spider,” said Prasutagus, “ensnaring the entire land in its web. This spider seeks fulfilment, and we must do everything in our power to stop it, for if it achieves its goal, then, oh, then the sky itself will fall, and the land will be buried under a mountain of tears.”

  “What can we do?” Boudicca said. “What do you need me to do?”

  “In death,” said her husband, “I have met a strange little girl. She has black curly hair and dark blue eyes, and rustles about in silken garments the colour of night. Her face…” He hesitated. “Her face is cold, and she has an icicle for a heart.”

  Boudicca stared up at her husband. She knew him so well, and could see the doubts that beset him.

  “You don’t trust her,” she said.

  “She is our only hope,” Prasutagus said. “She has agreed to aid us. She says she will be our sword, the land’s sword.”

  “You don’t trust her,” Boudicca said again.

  Prasutagus sighed. “No. I don’t. But if we don’t accept her offer, I am afraid that the land will wither and die under this evil. It grows stronger every day. It is…vile.”

  “Who is this girl?”

  Prasutagus took a long time to answer. “The spirits call her the White Queen for the coldness that besets her. Who is she? I don’t know. But she is powerful and she loathes this evil and wants it gone.”

  Boudicca wondered about that. Every instinct within her screamed to not accept what her husband said. But she trusted his judgement so greatly that if he said this strange girl was their only hope, perhaps she should believe him.

  “If this White Queen is so powerful,” said Boudicca, “and wants this evil gone, then why does she need us?”

  Again Prasutagus took a long time to answer, and Boudicca wished he’d hurry up for the Romans sounded even closer. Maybe Prasutagus had no sense of time and urgency now that he was dead.

  “She says she needs to be bound to the land—” Prasutagus began, and suddenly Boudicca, horrifically, knew what her husband was going to say and what he needed of her.

  “No!” she said.

  “She is not bound to the land,” said Prasutagus, “and needs to be if she has any hope of—”

  “Prasutagus, you want me to use my death to construct a Seething?”

  A Seething was the most potent of rituals a druid could construct—and Boudicca could construct it, for she was as much druid as was Prasutagus. A Seething could be used to bind anything to any cause, and if this strange little girl could help, and she said she needed to be bound to the land in order to be able to do so, then a Seething would do that magnificently.

  But a Seething needed a death to make it.

  No wonder Prasutagus had appeared to her just as she was about to take her own life.

  Boudicca didn’t know what to say. The fact of her own death did not trouble her at all, but to use it to bind the land to this unknown White Queen? What if she was as bad as that evil which Prasutagus said had infected the land? What if, by constructing the Seething, Boudicca bound the land to an even more terrible fate than the one it already faced?

  “Boudicca,” said a new voice, a small child’s voice, and Boudicca’s head whipped about as the circle of warriors murmured again and, one by one, melted into the trees.

  The child Prasutagus had spoken of now stood a few paces away. She was just as he’d described her. A beautiful face, framed with dark curls that tumbled down her back, and eyes so blue that Boudicca thought the sky must spend its days in envy of her.

  And yet she was so cold. Her heart was ringed with icicles, and Boudicca wondered why.

  “No one has ever loved me,” said the child, and Boudicca felt the breath of her speaking as keenly as she would the wintry Arctic winds that blew down from the north.

  “We do not trust you,” said Boudicca. “Why should we trust you? And what is this evil that—”

  The child slid forward, grasping Boudicca’s wrist.

  Boudicca gasped and tried to pull back, but she could not. She felt as if she were frozen.

  A vision consumed her.

  She saw a naked man with dark curly hair just like this girl’s, and six gleaming bands about his limbs, dancing through a labyrinth atop a hill.

  She saw a young girl run out from the witnesses who stood about, and plunge a dagger into the throat of a heavily pregnant woman who stood to one side of the labyrinth watching the dancing man.

  She saw fire and death and destruction at the hands of an invader, and for a moment she thought that it was he who was the terrible evil.

  “Not he,” whispered the cold-faced child. “Watch.”

  Boudicca saw bodies pile atop the labyrinth, then, as if years passed in an instant, she saw the bodies decay into dust.

  The labyrinth sank into the hill, and Boudicca saw the roots of trees become ensnared in it, and the bur
rowing creatures of the land become its slave.

  “We need to stop the labyrinth,” said the little girl, “before it overwhelms the entire land.”

  “And why should you care?” said Boudicca, finally managing to wrench her wrist free. “I can sense that you are not of this land, either. Why should you care?”

  “Because I loathe it,” said the little girl.

  Then she smiled, and Boudicca’s heart flipped over in horror. For an instant a death mask had replaced the girl’s cold beauty.

  There was something about this girl. Something about the White Queen. Something that Boudicca could not identify, but something which screamed at her to trust this child.