Moving now in a kind of terror-stricken dream, her footsteps following one upon the other without volition, she walked forward towards the light and the indescribable noise, aware of the people around her now, looking at her and moving out of her way, until she stood in the forefront of the crowd, gazing on the sight from which her husband had sought to protect her. Though she had no memory of raising them, her hands were pressed tightly over her ears in a futile attempt to shut out the infernal noises. Yet she made no move to cover her eyes; if this was the truth her husband had tried to keep from her, she would know it.
The crowd had fallen back, away from the heat, and she could feel the flames searing her face even from twenty paces distant. Someone had dug an enormous pit in the centre of a vast, open space. It measured roughly ten paces to each side and extended four paces into the earth. As she saw it, a door to memory opened somewhere in her mind, and so she was unsurprised to see the enormous gallows frame that had been erected over it. She had once heard someone, either Ullic or Uric, talking about such a thing, although she had paid scant attention at the time. She remembered a description of wood soaked in pitch, of everlasting fires of Druid sacrifice.
The great gallows frame reared up six or seven long paces in height above the top of the pit, and from it, suspended by chains, hung three wooden cages. Each of these was tightly packed with men, some of them evidently dead or unconscious, but most of them still alive—and screaming. The flames from the pit beneath, fed by the tarry pitch, had reached the cages easily by this time, and the wooden frames were all alight, the middle one burning far more fiercely than the two flanking it. As she watched, stupefied, there came a loud, sharp crack, clearly audible above everything else and the middle cage broke apart, splitting into pieces and hurling its living contents down into the inferno underneath. The unfortunates in the remaining cages, seeing the fate that awaited them and recognizing its imminence, began throwing themselves against the burning bars of their cages in despair. In another cage one side fell away, and a knot of men threw themselves immediately outward and down into the pit, disappearing from view in the incandescent heart of the fire. The thrust of their leaping and the shifting of their weight threw the entire cage out of balance and it tilted violently, dislodging even more screaming prisoners, some of whom leaped frantically outward, vainly trying to leap over the fire and land in safety on the side of the pit.
Veronica watched them fall and disappear, melted into liquescent nothingness by the white heat at the centre of the furnace, and when she raised her eyes again towards the last surviving cage, all movement there had ceased. Everyone in that cage was dead, and it only remained now for the bars or the floor to burn through and release the bodies to tumble into the fire.
Unaware that the screaming had ceased, Veronica continued to press her hands over her ears, but now she looked at the people surrounding her, seeing them leering and gibbering and gesticulating like demons in the aftermath of the horrendous slaughter. The faces that she saw with her flat, emotionless gaze were without exception vacant and ugly, empty of any humanity, devoid of any trace of sanity. These were King Ullic's Celts, she thought numbly, the people amongst whom she would now live, the people she had travelled so far to meet in this bleak place called Tir Manha. These were her husband's kinfolk and her future neighbours. Her destiny now lay in sharing their lives and their activities, living in their midst, learning their language and their customs and rearing her future children to conform to their ways and to observe their traditions: burning their enemies alive in wooden cages suspended over an enormous firepit in the dead blackness of a moonless night.
She felt hands grasping her shoulders and turning her around, and then the searing heat was gone from her face, leaving her skin feeling stretched and taut as it was pressed gently into the front of a large man's tunic. She felt a hand cradling the back of her head gently, an arm stretching across her back from shoulder to waist and the breath from a man's lips soft against the top of her head. From the smell of the man's clothing, she knew it was her husband, Uric. She could hear nothing, and after a while Uric stopped trying to pry her hands from over her ears and simply held her close, rocking her gently for the longest time.
BOOK ONE
Childhood
Greetings, my dear daughter:
I have been thinking about writing to you for weeks now; making up snippets of things to tell you and composing entire passages in my mind as I go about my household tasks, but I sit down to it only now, almost afraid that I might be too late, and unpleasantly surprised, all at once, by how quickly time has passed since I last wrote! Last night, as we sat together before going to bed, staring into the fire, your father remarked that the leaves have begun to turn yellow, and pointed out that, before we know it, it will be winter, and both you and Picus's wife, Enid, will be facing confinement and childbirth. That shocked me profoundly, and my immediate reaction was to chide him for exaggerating. It seems like only yesterday that I was writing to you, describing my excitement over the newly delivered tidings that you were with child and would be giving us a grandson or a granddaughter at the start of the New Year. And now, so soon, your term is more than half elapsed! And that, of course, means that you have been a wife, a married woman and the mistress of your own household for almost two-thirds of a year, and for that entire time I have not set eyes upon you. How must you have changed in appearance, from the merry-faced, laughing little daughter whom your father and I loved so much and in whom we took such pride, knowing how close we had come to losing you completely when you were tiny.
I was interrupted between writing those last words and these, and a full day has elapsed in the interim. Writing is a slow and sometimes painful process, for the hand is unused to clutching a stylus for so long a time. And yet Publius writes every day, for long periods each time, so I must believe that the pain wears off with practice. I do hope you are thriving and that your pregnancy is causing you no great discomfort. As you know, I had not a speck of trouble with you or any of your sisters at any time, except for the anguish (merely occasional, thanks to your father) of having failed to produce a son to carry on the name of Varrus. It is too late for that now, and so the name will die, I fear, with my dear Publius, for I know of no other males of the family Varrus now alive. Let us pray, however, that we need not think of that for many, many years. In the meantime, your father's pride and manliness, his heritage and all his nobility will live on in your children, and although their name will not be Varrus, their mother's blood will make them both Varrus and Britannicus, and they will reflect, in their natures, all the elements that made their mother's father the fine man that he is. But I was speaking of your pregnancy and wondering how you are bearing it. Most women, God be thanked, take the condition in their stride, suffering no ill from it at all. Others thrive visibly, blooming while they carry the child and achieving a beauty they seldom recapture in fallow times. And then again, there are the others, poor creatures who cannot sustain the role that has been thrust upon them and who suffer untold agonies and endless sickness through their entire term of carrying. These are the ones who, all too often, have Harpies awaiting their delivery and who too frequently die in childbirth. I know that this is not the case with you, my dear Veronica, or I should have heard of it long since, and I would be there with you now, instead of sitting here writing you this long and rambling letter. Your father is calling me.