“Who’s trying to kill you Daniel?”
“Whoever killed Costa. And whoever took the ketuba from him.”
On the other side of the field, they climbed the fence again to find themselves on a narrow country road, wide enough for cars to pass each other with difficulty, but with no pavement to speak of. But a distance of about a hundred yards, separated Sarit from the men. Only when she had led for a few more minutes did she relent and turn round to see where they were. The distance was too great to carry their voices and she didn’t want to attract attention, so she waved to them to catch up.
But at that point they heard the thing they most dreaded: a helicopter. They all knew what this meant: the police were on to them. But this did not mean that they knew it was Daniel. Sarit had rented the car and Ted’s car was still at the motorway service station. The police would have had no way to link up the missing accident victims with any wanted persons. All they would know was that the people inside the overturned car had crawled away alive.
Of course leaving the scene of an accident was a crime and the police would certainly be looking for them. But if the police were basing their search on information that there were three people — two men and a woman — then the separation would work to their advantage. Daniel realized that their best bet for avoiding attention was not to be together.
Instinctively they knew what to do. Sarit turned and looked away from them and crossed to the other side of the road, like she had nothing to do with them. Ted and Daniel turned round and started walking back along the road in the opposite direction, so that in effect they would be walking towards the scene of the accident, if not actually following a path that would take them all the way there.
It occurred to Daniel that if anything the helicopter should be on the lookout for the truck. A vehicle fleeing the scene of an accident in which a car had been driven into a ditch was far worse than the passengers making their way away — especially as they might be seeking medical assistance. But maybe they already had the truck and were now free to focus their attention on the occupants.
At any rate, as the helicopter was in the distance when they first turned, they knew that they hadn’t been spotted already. They walked slowly and gesticulated freely, waving their hands in an animated fashion, as if they were not trying in any way to avoid being noticed. Obviously, they could not walk down onto the motorway, so after they were confident that they had been seen and dismissed from the police helicopters reckoning, they turned off into another side street and Daniel called Sarit from his new mobile phone to arrange a rendezvous.
It was a family-friendly pub/restaurant. Ted, who had already eaten, was limiting himself now to a salad, but the other two hadn’t eaten a proper meal since yesterday and were tucking into grilled steaks with pepper sauce. Daniel had chosen the fries, while Sarit had opted for a baked potato.
As Ted was eating the least, he was in the best position to be talking the most.
“So if Lanevshiah was Lanosea, then we could be talking about the daughter of Boudicca. And Farashotagesh, you said the F could be a P the S-H could be a plain S and some of the vowels could be misplaced. So I’m thinking… Prasutagus?”
Daniel nodded.
“It could be. Even though there isn’t a second vav to act as a placeholder for the second oo sound, there is a kind of soft double o sound that’s pronounced like in book rather than soon — and that softer vowel doesn’t need a placeholder.”
“So Prasutagus fits perfectly.”
“But who was he?” asked Daniel.
“He was the King of a Britannic people called the Iceni — Ikeni as the Roman’s called them. He was the husband of Boudicca.”
Now that, at last, was a name that Daniel recognized.
“The queen with flaming red hair who wore a golden torque and fought against the Romans.”
“Exactly Daniel. And damn near won!”
“I have to admit that I don’t know the story as well as I should.”
“Well for that you have to understand the background. Prasutagus was the king of the Iceni people in east Anglia until round about 60 or 61 AD. He was a client king or vassal of Rome. The custom was for client kings to hold their kingdom in their lifetime and then bequeath it to Rome upon their death. But when Prasutagus died, he left only half his kingdom to Rome and the other half to be divided between his wife Boudicca and their two daughters. Needless to say this outraged such a patriarchal society as ancient Rome.”
“So they seized the lands?”
“Well more than that. First they called in their loans — and it has to be said that Prasutagus and the Iceni nobility had been living on huge loans. One wealthy Roman creditor alone, Seneca the Younger, had lent them something like forty million sestertii — that’s a about fifty million pounds.”
“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head there Daniel. And the first thing they did to show their outrage was demand the money back — with interest!”
“And presumably the Iceni couldn’t pay it.”
“Obviously not. So the Romans seized all the lands and effectively enslaved the Iceni, including the nobles.”
“But how did a woman get to be their leader? I mean even if she was the king’s widow.”
“You have to bear in mind what the Romans did in addition to seizing the land. They had Boudicca publicly flogged. And they raped her daughters. And that was an act of defilement that the Iceni could not forgive. They were already a proud people who had rebelled against Rome once before when they were forced to disarm and now the Romans were defiling their queen and her daughters and this was all too much for them.”
“So they rallied under the banner of their queen.”
“Yes.”
“She must have been a pretty good military strategist — even if she did lose in the end.”
“Actually, she wasn’t. She just had demographics on her side.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well the Romans had decided that the druid priests were a major threat to them — far more so than the nobles or kings — because the kings and nobles were corruptible by bribery, but the Druids lived up to high ideals.”
“It’s always the clergy,” said Daniel with a wry smile.
“Exactly. But the druids were concentrated in what was then called Mona — modern day Anglesey in north Wales. And so the Romans had most of their army concentrated there on a systematic campaign of genocide to wipe out the druids. In fact this might have been the real reason for the conflict with the Brythonic peoples. It was Tacitus — and later Cassius Dio who told the story of Boudicca and neither of them were there at the time, although Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola was.”
“So are you saying the whole story of the uprising is a myth.”
“Oh no, although the Roman sources certainly exaggerated the scale. But they may also have gilded the lily when it comes to the causes. Was it the flogging of Boudicca and the rape of her daughters or the massacre of the revered druids? Or maybe it was the rape and flogging in the case of the Iceni but the massacre of the druids that gave them the support of other tribes. But whatever the cause or causes, there certainly was a revolt. We know that from the archaeological records.”
“And what exactly did they do? I mean if they were in East Anglia and the Romans were in Anglesey, who exactly did they fight?”
“Basically, Boudicca and her rebel army — if one could call them an army — attacked those towns that were deemed to be representative of Rome, even if they were populated by their fellow Britons. The first place they attacked was the Roman town of Camulodunum. That’s modern day Colchester.”
“And that was originally a Roman city?”