Daughters of Fire. Barbara Erskine

Prologue

      She had demanded initiation. Without it she could not be queen.

      And now she was afraid. For the first time in her life she was really afraid.

      Not of the ancestors amongst whose bones she sat in the dark, but of the others, the shadows, the voices, the faces from the future. Those, she had not expected.

      As the last remnant of light disappeared she had crouched quite still, the only sound in the silence beyond the settling of the stones and earth with which they had blocked the entrance tunnel behind her, the thudding of her heart. She had imagined she would hear the Druid priests’ footsteps as they withdrew, perhaps their whispered voices dying away in the distance, but there was nothing save an awareness of the weight of rocks and soil over her head and of the presence of the bones somewhere near her feet. Cautiously she stretched out her hands, feeling around her in the darkness. As her fingers at last met those of the woman with whom she shared the grave there was no sound but the rattle of dried bones.

      Taking a deep breath she sat down, her back against the wall of limestone, and closed her eyes, waiting for something to happen. What. She didn’t know.

      Outside, the moors grew dark. There was no guard outside the living grave. There was no need. No one sane would stray there by day or night. It was the place of the ancestors. A place of the gods. When she was released, if she was alive and in her right mind, she would be an initiate. A member of the élite. A woman who could mediate the gods and rule the people. A woman fit to be queen. If she was dead her bones would join those around her and her spirit would roam the fells until it was called to the place of rest beyond the western seas, the land of the ever young, and thence once more to the world of men to live again.

      At first the voices were indistinct – a mumbling out of the darkness. She clenched her fists in terror, straining her ears to make out the words. Slowly the meaning came and with the meaning, pictures. She saw men with war chariots forming up on the edge of the hills, their eyes cruel, their hard bodies cased in armour; she saw women weeping. She saw swords and fire and blood. She saw the landscape change – from forest to heather moor and back to forest again. She saw men plough the land, their ploughs pulled and pushed by men, and then pulled by oxen, then horses, and then strange chariots which smoked above their huge wheels. She saw flocks of gulls following the furrows age after age through famine and plenty; through war and peace. She saw her people live. She saw her people die. She saw them laugh and she saw them weep. And one voice above all others came to her clearly out of the shadows. It called her name, Cartimandua, Sleek Pony, with an accent strange to her ears. She shook her head, trying to see more clearly in the swirling mists and a woman’s face swam into focus. A woman who held out her hands. Who stretched out across aeons to touch her mind. Who wanted to know who she was and what she had done. A woman who had chosen her above all others as a lesson and a story.

      The tomb was growing colder. Outside, the sun was sinking into a bank of cloud. Soon it would be dark. She shivered suddenly and the mind that had reached out to touch hers drew back.

      ‘Where are you?’ Carta called out. ‘Wait. Are you one of the gods?’

      There was no reply.

      Somewhere near her feet she heard something rustle and click amongst the bones and she gritted her teeth against a scream. For the first time she wondered if anyone would come back to release her, or would they leave her here to lie amongst the dead whilst another took up the mantle of leadership?

      Another, more fitted for the role because he was a man.

       1

      I

      ‘Have you any idea of what you have done to this department?’ Professor Hugh Graham threw the magazine down on the desk in front of him. It was folded open at an article entitled, ‘Cartimandua, the First British Queen?’ ‘You’ve made us a laughing stock! And me! You’ve made me a laughing stock in the academic community.’ He spoke with the soft lilt of the Scottish Borders, usually scarcely noticeable but now emphasised by his anger.

      Behind him the sun, shining in through the office window which looked out onto Edinburgh’s George Square, backlit his thick, unruly pepper-and-salt hair and cast the planes of his weather-beaten face into relief. ‘I don’t think you and I can go on working together, Viv. Not when you clearly hold my views in such low esteem.’

      ‘Rubbish!’ Viv Lloyd Rees was thirty-five years old, five foot four, slightly plump and had short fiery red hair which had been cut to stand out in a hedgehog frame around her face, emphasising her bright green eyes. In spite of the Welsh name her accent was cut-glass English, another fact that irritated intensely the nationalist that resided deep in the professor’s soul.

      ‘Are you telling me that suddenly no one is allowed to have their own opinions in this place?’ she went on furiously. ‘For goodness’ sake, Hugh! We study Celtic history. We are not a think tank for some politburo!’

      ‘No.’ He leaned forward, his hands braced on the shambles of papers and open books which lay strewn across the desk behind his computer monitor. Somewhere under there, presumably, lurked a keyboard and mouse. ‘No, you are correct. We study. We examine facts. We spell them out –’

      ‘That’s all I’ve done, Hugh. I’ve spelled out some facts. Interpreted them …’

      ‘Your own interpretation, not mine.’

      The atmosphere crackled between them.

      ‘Mine, as you say. It is my article, Hugh. Not yours.’

      ‘Fictional twaddle!’

      ‘No, Hugh. Not fictional.’ Her temper was rising to match his. ‘Intuitive interpretation.’

      But there was more than that, wasn’t there, if she was honest. He was right.

      ‘Intuitive!’ He spat out the word with utter disdain. ‘Need I say more! And your book. Your much vaunted – hyped – book. Do I assume it will be along these same lines?’ He gestured at the supplement lying on his desk.

      ‘Obviously. Haven’t you been sent a copy to review yet?’ She met his eye in a direct challenge.

      She had fought it. She had fought it so hard, that strange voice in her head, the voice she had conjured from her research. The voice that had wanted her to write the book, and now wanted her to write a play. The voice she could not tell anyone about. But its promptings had been too subtle, its information too specific to pretend it wasn’t there. She hadn’t managed to catch the information, to keep it out of the book, the book which was going to be published in exactly four weeks’ time on 14th July. She had tried to sieve the facts, separate the known from the unknown. She had failed.

      She waited miserably to see what he would say next, as she did so staring fixedly at the small box lying in a ray of sunlight in his in-tray. She did not want to meet his eye.

      There was a long silence as Hugh tried, visibly, to calm himself. In his early fifties, of middle height and with deep-set, slightly slanted hazel eyes, he was a strikingly handsome man. Today he was also formidable as he glared at the woman who stood before him on the layered threadbare rugs which carpeted the floor of his small, overcrowded, first-floor study.

      ‘Your by-line here,’ he went on at last, ignoring her question, ‘ ‘‘Viv Lloyd Rees of the Department of Pan-Celtic History and Culture at the University of Edinburgh’’,’ – the last dozen words, normally abbreviated to DPCHC by its members and students, were heavily emphasised – ‘I trust that will not be appearing on this famous book of yours. I am withdrawing the funding for your research facilities. And your post here will not