The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

a skin of fresh water and handed it to the messenger. When he’d drunk and cleared the dust from his throat, the governor nodded for him to continue. But the chap still seemed crazed. Though of course all his men were seasoned soldiers, he wondered if perhaps the sight of these corpses that they were practically wading in, male and female, might not have driven his senses momentarily from him.

“Come now,” Suetonius said firmly. “You’ve traveled all this way—over two hundred miles at what was clearly a breakneck pace. You’ve something urgent to tell me about Camulodunum.”

“All dead,” the messenger croaked. “Thousands—tens of thousands—all dead. And the city, the Claudian temple—all of it burned to the ground!” The man began weeping.

Suetonius, at first astounded, quickly turned furious. He drew back his hand and slashed the fellow brutally across the face. “You’re a soldier, man!” he reminded him. “In the name of Jupiter, pull yourself together. What’s happened at Camulodunum? Has there been an earthquake? A fire?”

“A native uprising, sire,” the messenger said, gulping for air. “The Iceni and Trinovantes—perhaps some tribes from the Corn Wall as well—we’re not yet sure—”

“And where was the ninth legion Hispana all this while?” demanded Suetonius with ice in his voice. “Was the commander mending his toga while tribes of barefoot natives were burning the cities he’s supposed to be defending?”

“These are no barefoot provincials, sire, but fully armed troops—perhaps two hundred thousand or more,” the soldier told him. “It’s commander Petilius Cerialis himself who sent me to you, just as fast as I could traverse the country and get here. Half the ninth legion has been destroyed: twenty-five hundred of the men I was with, who went in to attempt a rescue of the town. The Roman procurator Decianus has fled with his officers to the mainland, and Petilius is barricaded within his own fortress awaiting the reinforcements he prays you will bring.”

“Nonsense. How could a handful of uneducated, primitive Britons destroy half a Roman garrison and drive out the chief colonial administrator?” Suetonius said, not even trying to disguise his contempt for a people he’d come to loathe. He spat on the ground and added, “They don’t even make good slaves, much less good soldiers.”

“Yet they possess many weapons, full horse and chariot,” the soldier told him. “Their women fight alongside the men, and are far more vicious. At Camulodunum, the atrocities I’ve witnessed, sire, are nearly beyond comprehension. They slaughtered old and young, civilian and soldier, mother and child alike, with no distinction, so long as those they were killing were Romans or our collaborators. I saw the corpses of Roman women with suckling babes pinioned to their breasts! And men who were crucified along the streets—the gods forgive me to say it—but they had their body parts cut off, and stitched to their lips while they were still breathing.…”

The messenger fell silent, eyes glazed over with a look of terror that clearly his arduous journey had done little to assuage.

Suetonius sighed. “And what paragon of a commander am I to guess they’ve found to lead them in this expedition?” he asked in disgust.

“It is Boudica, queen of the Iceni, sire, who is their leader,” said the messenger.

“These savages would follow a woman into battle?” said Suetonius, exhibiting real shock for the first time.

“Please, sire,” said the messenger. “Commander Petilius begs you to make haste. From what I’ve witnessed myself, the rebellion is far from over; it fattens, the more blood it’s fed. Camulodunum is lost. They are headed now toward Londinium.”

Londinium, Britannia: Early Spring, A.D. 61

COMMIXTIO

Very many types of mass-destruction of human beings have taken and will take place, the greatest through fire and water, other, lesser ones, through a thousand other mischances

.

—Plato,

Timaeus

Londinium had not been the largest town in Britannia, nor the oldest or most important, as Joseph of Arimathea knew. But it had once been one of the loveliest, situated as it was on the broad, placid bosom of the great mother river. Today, as he walked for the last time along the riverbank, there was no Londinium: what had been a thriving colony was reduced to nothing but a layer of thick red ash.

Joseph watched the Romans across the river as they drove their chain gangs of native laborers through the rubble. And he understood exactly how much had been lost through the destruction of this city—and exactly how long this act of British vengeance, however justified, would be paid for by the Britons. The Romans, realizing the town was indefensible, had abandoned it until they could amass a larger force. Now, with three Roman cities including Verulamium destroyed, the rebellion had been crushed. The rebels, wholly unequipped to contend with fully armored and trained Roman legions, had been pinned against their own wagons and massacred—methodically butchered along with their own horses and pack animals.

Boudica and her daughters were dead, poisoned by their own hand, choosing the forgiveness of God rather than a future at the hands of the Romans. But because the rebels had abandoned their homes last spring, before sowing their crops, to pursue vengeance and war, the land was barren and famine had raged all winter.

Now there was an endless supply of native slave labor available to the Romans, which would encourage any colony to wax and grow fat, with more settlers than ever there were in the past. The Romans would rebuild Londinium soon, Joseph knew, this time with stone and brick for stability and strength, rather than clay and wattles. There would be fortifications and garrisons. Any meager pretenses of civility they might formerly have shown the natives could be abandoned to the winds.

That night of death in the sacred groves on the isle of Mona—when Joseph had thrown his own hallowed objects, the Master’s objects, into the Llyn Cerrig Bach along with those of the Druids and had watched them vanish beneath the dark waters of the lake—he’d known it was the end of an era. But what had