Song for a Dark Queen by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online Page B

ours. And I am thinking that maybe for that time they were right.
    Next day, after they were gone, and their laden carts with them, I took my harp and went away down into the marsh country, for my heart was sore within me, and I needed the space and emptiness, that I might make a lament to ease the ache, with none but the shore birds to hear me.
    So towards evening I sat on the bank of a looping waterway, staring down into the water that riffledthrough the tufted reeds, with my harp fallen silent on my knee. And as I sat there, there was a brushing and flurrying through the reeds, and Prasutagus’s two great hounds came along the bank, and lay down with lolling tongues beside me. ‘Greetings brother, greetings sister,’ I said. And Prasutagus came up behind them. At most times he was like the rest of his kind, a man who never walked when he could ride or drive. But there were times of darkness, he had, maybe times when the kingship irked him, when he would whistle up the dogs, and take a light hunting spear in his hand – for the look of the thing, even to himself, I think, for he never brought back any kill at such times – and walk until he had outdistanced the darkness in himself. He looked now as if he had walked from the world’s end to the world’s end, and floundered into a few soft patches on the way. Even the dogs were weary. Maybe, I thought, it was the same with him as with me, only that he had no harp-skill.
    He thrust one of the hounds out of the way and sat down beside me, his arm across his knees. ‘No greeting for me?’ he said.
    ‘Greetings, brother,’ I said. A harper speaks to all living things as equals.
    He reached out and touched the nearest horn of my harp with the extreme tip of one forefinger. ‘A new song for tonight?’
    I shook my head. ‘I make only for myself today – a lament for broken swords.’
    We were silent a moment, only the pale feathery tips of the reeds swayed against the drifting sky; and somewhere an oyster-catcher made his lonely whistling call. Then Prasutagus gave a little dry cough. Quite a small sound, but when I looked round, his eyes were shut,and it seemed to me that there was a faint greyness round his mouth.
    ‘Is there something amiss?’ I asked, quickly.
    He opened his eyes and smiled. Already the greyness was passing. ‘Nothing. A pain under my ribs and a moment’s darkness. It comes on me sometimes after a day’s hunting or the like.’ He turned back to the thing we had been speaking of. ‘A lament for broken swords. And yet it seems that yourself, you had no sword to lose, yesterday. Strange, I could have sworn that I have seen you burnishing an old sword before now.’
    ‘I carried a sword when Boudicca’s mother and the world and I were all young. Few people remember now. Few harpers are fighting men, and the Romans would expect no sword from me.’
    ‘And so you did not bring them one.’ He turned and looked at me; a long, hard look.
    ‘Like the Queen, who they would expect no sword from, either,’ I said, and wondered in that moment, where she had hidden her father’s great blade. Under the gowns in her clothes’ kist, maybe. No, she would have been more thorough than that.
    ‘I wonder how many old swords are hidden in the peat-stacks and under the house-thatch of the Iceni today,’ Prasutagus said.
    ‘More than the Romans dream. Spearheads, too – though indeed there is none so great a difference between a war-spear and a heavy hunting-spear, when once the collar of heron hackles has been stripped away. They did not even notice that none of the women came in, for they do not train their own women to bear weapons in time of need.’
    ‘That is true. Maybe we are not so toothless as they think us.’ But almost as he said it, he struck his fist onhis knee. ‘Grief upon me! I speak comforting words to myself as though I were a bairn! The Horse People, I make no doubt, have good store of weapons yet, hidden in the dark. But in the