mark sessnatz
Tribune
I’ll never forget the day the Invaders left our village. The events of that day burn as clearly in my mind now as they ever have—a dizzying mirage of blood and bronze and fire and bone. I’ve heard it said that our clan was the first to repel the strangers from our lands, though of course the deeds of the Queen of the Iceni became far greater known in the end. If you’ll kindly stoke the fire and allow me a seat, I’ll tell you the tale. Should only take until supper’s ready.
I was not nearly so old then, just a scrawny lad of eighteen years. Still had plenty of color in my hair if you can believe it—bright copper red. I’ll admit, though, not much more muscle on the bones than I have now. I had tried my hand rather unsuccessfully at a few trades but at that time I was apprenticed to the village potter, so I was always covered in mud.
I don’t remember a time before the Invaders. They came to our lands before I was born, terrifying with their swirling scarlet cloaks and snarling horses, shouting in a strange language. They surrounded our village with their banners, helped themselves to our crops and our wells; some even moved into our homes. Our clan had a Chieftain, but he was made subservient to their commander. They instituted a strange new order and imposed strange new laws. Our warriors were made to work for them. Their camp stood due west of our village, and each night the black silhouette of their command tent seemed to swallow the setting sun.
Over many years, their fast grip on our daily lives relaxed somewhat as their perception of us shifted and they stopped seeing us as a threat. Their presence, however, remained a constant. And that’s what I grew up with. I knew they weren’t us but I understood that they had to be there. I never knew anything different.
The day that all changed, I remember so clearly, was the first day of the year that felt like spring. The granite sky of winter still hung heavy and dark overhead, but it felt warmer, and a light, fresh mist hung in the air. You could finally shed your heavy cloak. It was also that time of year that makes people wild, drunk with lust, itching to do whatever it took to set their blood moving after the dark and docile winter. For the soldiers, that often meant helping themselves to our women and girls.
I was taking a fresh batch of bowls out of the kiln when I heard the screams. Being a hotheaded youngster, I didn’t think twice before springing into action. I dropped the bowl I was holding, shattering it on the ground, (had things transpired differently I would have been in big trouble for that) and sprinted out of the hut. Just around the other side of the hill, in the center of the village, I discovered the source of the distress.
One of the strangers, a stocky youth not much older than myself but about twice as large, had grabbed hold of a girl and pinned her up against the side of the Chieftain’s hut. She squirmed vainly in his grip as he lunged at her, repeatedly trying to kiss her by force. His colleague, taller and thinner than he was but not much less intimidating, leaned against the building, blocking her only pathway of escape. As I approached, she turned her face in my direction, and I froze, my stomach lurching.
The girl trapped in his swarthy, meaty hands was Mared, the girl I loved; the girl I had been somewhat unsuccessfully courting for years; the girl I intended to betroth myself to that wild, drunken springtime. There she was: a girl the same age as myself, her slender white arms pinned to her sides, her thick, jet-black hair tousled and bedraggled, her ice-blue eyes wide with terror, pleading with me to do anything to stop this strange foreign beast from defiling her. Over-stimulated and under-thinking, I simply charged at the soldiers, shouting in my own tongue (what must have sounded like gibberish to them) “Get away from her!”
I pummeled my fists into the taller man. He barely flinched. The stocky one took one of his hands off Mared to swiftly draw his short-sword and pummel me hard in the gut with the hilt. I doubled over, winded and nauseous. The back of the taller one’s hand collided with the side of my head and knocked me to the ground, black and white spots swirling in my eyesight. He put his boot on the side of my head to pin me down, helpless, while he took a rope from his satchel and bound my hands tightly behind my back.
Though Mared screamed and pleaded with them to leave me alone, she still had her wits about her, and seized on my momentary distraction. The stocky one let go just long enough for her to grab his other wrist with her free hand, lean in, and sink her teeth in.
He let go and recoiled, yelping angrily. She bolted away from him, but the taller one caught her in his arms and trapped her, one arm around her middle, the other clutching her hair. Nursing the bite mark on his hand, the stocky one turned to Mared with fury in his dark eyes.
“Feral little bitch!” he exclaimed. He spoke his own tongue, which I couldn’t speak myself, but I had picked up enough over the years to understand him.
“You’ll need to break the beast before you can ride it, Blandus,” his friend laughed.
“I’ll break her alright, Petronius,” Blandus growled. “Hold her there. I’m getting the scorpion.”
Time slowed to a crawl then. I watched, helpless, my face in the mud, as the soldier went and took from his saddlebag the most terrifying instrument of torture I’d ever seen. It was a whip, of sorts, made of six heavy rawhide cords bolted to a wooden handle. The cords were knotted, and through some of the knots were inserted tiny jagged bones or shards of broken pottery. With a rush of sickness. I wondered if any of the shards were from pots I had made.
Petronius spun Mared around, holding her tightly in place even as she fought against his grip with every ounce of her strength. Blandus came up behind her, grabbed the neckline of her woolen dress, and ripped the entire back apart with an awful rending sound. Her bare back shone ethereally pale in the grim gray daylight. She screamed and cursed them, then the curses dissolved into pleading sobs as her blue eyes settled on the terrifying “scorpion”.
More people surrounded us now. Invader soldiers watched bemusedly, lounging against walls or tree trunks. My fellow villagers meanwhile, emerged onto the green trepidatiously, their faces
overcast with mixtures of confusion, fear, and grief. The aged Chieftain didn’t intervene, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him murmur to a young man, who promptly ran off toward the river.
“Hold her still!” The stocky soldier commanded. He stepped back and raised the whip. The shards of clay and bone rattled ominously.
With all of his considerable strength, he swept the evil cords down in a savage blow across Mared’s back. She immediately convulsed, staggering forward into Petronius’ grip. The lash carved a wide, ragged streak of parallel scarlet lacerations across her back, as though some ravenous animal had clawed open her skin. She howled—a piteous, unending, almost childlike howl. Tears gushed from her eyes and with a start I realized they were falling from mine as well. She looked at me as she struggled to stand, her gaze pleading with me to do something, anything to stop them.
Instead-- and it’s taken me many years to get over the shame enough to admit this—I simply stared back, frozen, not knowing what I could possibly do.
Fortunately, (or unfortunately) I didn’t have to decide.
You see, in addition to being the object of my every waking desire, Mared was special in another way. Her mother was Rhianon, the Chieftain’s daughter, leader of the warrior caste and the fiercest soldier in the clan. We called her our Warrior Queen. It was said that Rhianon was the only one of us the Invaders’ commander truly feared. I don’t know if it was true, but it would explain everything that happened next.
It seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. One instant, Blandus was twirling the flagrum in his hands. The next, he suddenly had a spearpoint pressed to his throat and the whip was on the ground.
“Release my child now,” hissed Rhianon, holding the spear, “or I will gut and flay the both of you where you stand.”
She had been bathing at the riverside when the Chief, her father, had sent the young man to find her. She came quickly, dressing only as much as needed—she wore only loose wool trousers under a medium-length underdress, and she was barefoot—and taking time only to grab her spear. Nevertheless, she was a fearsome presence, tall, toned, and powerful. She looked much like her daughter. Though around twice our age, she had the same raven-black hair, piercing blue eyes and high, noble cheekbones.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
“Do you think I’m playing with you?” she roared, digging the spearpoint in and drawing the tiniest bead of blood from his stubbly neck.
He nodded silently to Petronius and stepped back from the spear. Petronius let go of Mared, who collapsed onto the grass, curled in a ball. She had not stopped sobbing. Rhianon ran to her daughter’s side, dropping her spear, and knelt. She murmured soft words of comfort and stroked Mared’s hair, while simultaneously keeping her eyes on the soldiers, her gaze full of venom and steel.
Before anyone else could move, a thunder of hooves from over the hill announced the Commander of the strangers, riding up on his gray horse, accompanied by two lieutenants. He had thinning hair and pudgy, ruddy cheeks, and concealed his short stature by remaining on horseback as often as he could. He whistled to halt his mount and gestured briskly.
“Petronius! Blandus!” He barked. “What’s the meaning of this?”
The two youths stood sheepishly before their commanding officer. They spoke in hushed tones for several minutes, gesticulating feverishly, as the Commander listened and frowned, occasionally glancing over at Rhianon and the rest of the village.
“I see,” he finally said. “You will both be confined to barracks for the next fortnight.” The two men slumped, embarrassed. “And I’ll take over from here.”
As Blandus and Petronius were relieved of their weapons and sat down on a log under guard, the Commander dismounted and stepped into our midst, the other soldiers falling into formation around him. He looked around at the scene, then clicked his fingers.
“Get them up,” he said simply. The soldiers hoisted myself and the still-sniffling Mared to our feet. Rhianon shrugged off their hands and stood on her own. The Commander then spoke to the Chieftain, switching to our own tongue, heavily accented.
“I am placing these three under arrest,” he said. The men began to bind Mared and Rhianon’s wrists.
The Chieftain looked outraged.
“They have done nothing but defend themselves!” He cried. “These…boys…attacked them! They beat my granddaughter without any cause.”
“And they will be disciplined according to our procedures,” the Commander explained. “As for these three…” He drew his short-sword and gestured at us with the blade. “They are still subordinated of the Roman Empire and will be punished as would any colonial subject. This woman,” he jabbed the sword at Rhianon, “assaulted two legionaries of Rome, and as such—”
“She is chief of our warriors!”
“She is an insurgent and a criminal,” the Commander insisted, irritated, “and as such, I order her forthwith to be flogged!” He clicked his heels and marched back to his horse, ignoring the protestations of the Chieftain.
I turned to Mared with a knot of dread twisting in my stomach. She reached out with her bound hands and took hold of her mother’s arm, her lip trembling in terror. Rhianon pulled the girl close against her side.
“Mother, please!” Mared cried. “You mustn’t let these monsters hurt you! I won’t allow it!”
“Hush now, my girl,” Rhianon said softly. “I will not debase myself groveling before these small men. And I won’t let you suffer any more either!” Her blue eyes stared into the distance, her jaw tightly set.
It took a dozen of the burly foreign lads a mere matter of minutes to haul three tall, straight timbers from the edge of the camp, plant one end of each into the soft ground, and assemble them into a tall, pyramidal structure, lashed together with cords at the top. When they had finished, the Commander, once more sitting on horseback, barked an order to his nearest Lieutenant.
The gruff-looking officer hopped down and removed his helm, revealing a head of matted sandy-blonde hair. He retrieved the “scorpion” whip from the ground and approached the triangle. Rhianon’s two guards drew their swords and took hold of her arms to lead her away. Mared continued to cling to her mother’s arm.
“Please no, please no…” Mared whimpered.
Rhianon said nothing but shook off the soldiers’ grip, slipping out of her daughter’s fingers as well. Facing straight ahead, upright and proud, she walked herself slowly and deliberately to the posts. I moved close to Mared and took her hand in mine. Her fingers were cold and her hands shook. She squeezed my hand so tightly that mine went numb.
Rhianon closed her eyes and didn’t resist as the soldiers grabbed her shift and tore it callously to pieces in their hands, discarding the rags on the ground. She was naked to the waist then, wearing only her loose woolen trousers. Her skin was pale-white like the summer clouds, the breasts that had nursed Mared still firm, and she had the wiry, toned physique and proud shoulders of a warrior. The soldiers lifted her arms up over her head and bound her wrists securely to the timbers on either side of her. I saw a nearly imperceptible shiver run through her, and gooseflesh dotted her powerful back and arms. The effect was a curious mixture of power and vulnerability.
“By the power invested in me by the Emperor,” the Commander bellowed, his voice reverberating all around the village, as a funereal silence had fallen over us. “I sentence this mutinous woman to be flogged with forty-nine lashes of the scorpion! Lieutenant, execute.”
(continued)
I was not nearly so old then, just a scrawny lad of eighteen years. Still had plenty of color in my hair if you can believe it—bright copper red. I’ll admit, though, not much more muscle on the bones than I have now. I had tried my hand rather unsuccessfully at a few trades but at that time I was apprenticed to the village potter, so I was always covered in mud.
I don’t remember a time before the Invaders. They came to our lands before I was born, terrifying with their swirling scarlet cloaks and snarling horses, shouting in a strange language. They surrounded our village with their banners, helped themselves to our crops and our wells; some even moved into our homes. Our clan had a Chieftain, but he was made subservient to their commander. They instituted a strange new order and imposed strange new laws. Our warriors were made to work for them. Their camp stood due west of our village, and each night the black silhouette of their command tent seemed to swallow the setting sun.
Over many years, their fast grip on our daily lives relaxed somewhat as their perception of us shifted and they stopped seeing us as a threat. Their presence, however, remained a constant. And that’s what I grew up with. I knew they weren’t us but I understood that they had to be there. I never knew anything different.
The day that all changed, I remember so clearly, was the first day of the year that felt like spring. The granite sky of winter still hung heavy and dark overhead, but it felt warmer, and a light, fresh mist hung in the air. You could finally shed your heavy cloak. It was also that time of year that makes people wild, drunk with lust, itching to do whatever it took to set their blood moving after the dark and docile winter. For the soldiers, that often meant helping themselves to our women and girls.
I was taking a fresh batch of bowls out of the kiln when I heard the screams. Being a hotheaded youngster, I didn’t think twice before springing into action. I dropped the bowl I was holding, shattering it on the ground, (had things transpired differently I would have been in big trouble for that) and sprinted out of the hut. Just around the other side of the hill, in the center of the village, I discovered the source of the distress.
One of the strangers, a stocky youth not much older than myself but about twice as large, had grabbed hold of a girl and pinned her up against the side of the Chieftain’s hut. She squirmed vainly in his grip as he lunged at her, repeatedly trying to kiss her by force. His colleague, taller and thinner than he was but not much less intimidating, leaned against the building, blocking her only pathway of escape. As I approached, she turned her face in my direction, and I froze, my stomach lurching.
The girl trapped in his swarthy, meaty hands was Mared, the girl I loved; the girl I had been somewhat unsuccessfully courting for years; the girl I intended to betroth myself to that wild, drunken springtime. There she was: a girl the same age as myself, her slender white arms pinned to her sides, her thick, jet-black hair tousled and bedraggled, her ice-blue eyes wide with terror, pleading with me to do anything to stop this strange foreign beast from defiling her. Over-stimulated and under-thinking, I simply charged at the soldiers, shouting in my own tongue (what must have sounded like gibberish to them) “Get away from her!”
I pummeled my fists into the taller man. He barely flinched. The stocky one took one of his hands off Mared to swiftly draw his short-sword and pummel me hard in the gut with the hilt. I doubled over, winded and nauseous. The back of the taller one’s hand collided with the side of my head and knocked me to the ground, black and white spots swirling in my eyesight. He put his boot on the side of my head to pin me down, helpless, while he took a rope from his satchel and bound my hands tightly behind my back.
Though Mared screamed and pleaded with them to leave me alone, she still had her wits about her, and seized on my momentary distraction. The stocky one let go just long enough for her to grab his other wrist with her free hand, lean in, and sink her teeth in.
He let go and recoiled, yelping angrily. She bolted away from him, but the taller one caught her in his arms and trapped her, one arm around her middle, the other clutching her hair. Nursing the bite mark on his hand, the stocky one turned to Mared with fury in his dark eyes.
“Feral little bitch!” he exclaimed. He spoke his own tongue, which I couldn’t speak myself, but I had picked up enough over the years to understand him.
“You’ll need to break the beast before you can ride it, Blandus,” his friend laughed.
“I’ll break her alright, Petronius,” Blandus growled. “Hold her there. I’m getting the scorpion.”
Time slowed to a crawl then. I watched, helpless, my face in the mud, as the soldier went and took from his saddlebag the most terrifying instrument of torture I’d ever seen. It was a whip, of sorts, made of six heavy rawhide cords bolted to a wooden handle. The cords were knotted, and through some of the knots were inserted tiny jagged bones or shards of broken pottery. With a rush of sickness. I wondered if any of the shards were from pots I had made.
Petronius spun Mared around, holding her tightly in place even as she fought against his grip with every ounce of her strength. Blandus came up behind her, grabbed the neckline of her woolen dress, and ripped the entire back apart with an awful rending sound. Her bare back shone ethereally pale in the grim gray daylight. She screamed and cursed them, then the curses dissolved into pleading sobs as her blue eyes settled on the terrifying “scorpion”.
More people surrounded us now. Invader soldiers watched bemusedly, lounging against walls or tree trunks. My fellow villagers meanwhile, emerged onto the green trepidatiously, their faces
overcast with mixtures of confusion, fear, and grief. The aged Chieftain didn’t intervene, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him murmur to a young man, who promptly ran off toward the river.
“Hold her still!” The stocky soldier commanded. He stepped back and raised the whip. The shards of clay and bone rattled ominously.
With all of his considerable strength, he swept the evil cords down in a savage blow across Mared’s back. She immediately convulsed, staggering forward into Petronius’ grip. The lash carved a wide, ragged streak of parallel scarlet lacerations across her back, as though some ravenous animal had clawed open her skin. She howled—a piteous, unending, almost childlike howl. Tears gushed from her eyes and with a start I realized they were falling from mine as well. She looked at me as she struggled to stand, her gaze pleading with me to do something, anything to stop them.
Instead-- and it’s taken me many years to get over the shame enough to admit this—I simply stared back, frozen, not knowing what I could possibly do.
Fortunately, (or unfortunately) I didn’t have to decide.
You see, in addition to being the object of my every waking desire, Mared was special in another way. Her mother was Rhianon, the Chieftain’s daughter, leader of the warrior caste and the fiercest soldier in the clan. We called her our Warrior Queen. It was said that Rhianon was the only one of us the Invaders’ commander truly feared. I don’t know if it was true, but it would explain everything that happened next.
It seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. One instant, Blandus was twirling the flagrum in his hands. The next, he suddenly had a spearpoint pressed to his throat and the whip was on the ground.
“Release my child now,” hissed Rhianon, holding the spear, “or I will gut and flay the both of you where you stand.”
She had been bathing at the riverside when the Chief, her father, had sent the young man to find her. She came quickly, dressing only as much as needed—she wore only loose wool trousers under a medium-length underdress, and she was barefoot—and taking time only to grab her spear. Nevertheless, she was a fearsome presence, tall, toned, and powerful. She looked much like her daughter. Though around twice our age, she had the same raven-black hair, piercing blue eyes and high, noble cheekbones.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
“Do you think I’m playing with you?” she roared, digging the spearpoint in and drawing the tiniest bead of blood from his stubbly neck.
He nodded silently to Petronius and stepped back from the spear. Petronius let go of Mared, who collapsed onto the grass, curled in a ball. She had not stopped sobbing. Rhianon ran to her daughter’s side, dropping her spear, and knelt. She murmured soft words of comfort and stroked Mared’s hair, while simultaneously keeping her eyes on the soldiers, her gaze full of venom and steel.
Before anyone else could move, a thunder of hooves from over the hill announced the Commander of the strangers, riding up on his gray horse, accompanied by two lieutenants. He had thinning hair and pudgy, ruddy cheeks, and concealed his short stature by remaining on horseback as often as he could. He whistled to halt his mount and gestured briskly.
“Petronius! Blandus!” He barked. “What’s the meaning of this?”
The two youths stood sheepishly before their commanding officer. They spoke in hushed tones for several minutes, gesticulating feverishly, as the Commander listened and frowned, occasionally glancing over at Rhianon and the rest of the village.
“I see,” he finally said. “You will both be confined to barracks for the next fortnight.” The two men slumped, embarrassed. “And I’ll take over from here.”
As Blandus and Petronius were relieved of their weapons and sat down on a log under guard, the Commander dismounted and stepped into our midst, the other soldiers falling into formation around him. He looked around at the scene, then clicked his fingers.
“Get them up,” he said simply. The soldiers hoisted myself and the still-sniffling Mared to our feet. Rhianon shrugged off their hands and stood on her own. The Commander then spoke to the Chieftain, switching to our own tongue, heavily accented.
“I am placing these three under arrest,” he said. The men began to bind Mared and Rhianon’s wrists.
The Chieftain looked outraged.
“They have done nothing but defend themselves!” He cried. “These…boys…attacked them! They beat my granddaughter without any cause.”
“And they will be disciplined according to our procedures,” the Commander explained. “As for these three…” He drew his short-sword and gestured at us with the blade. “They are still subordinated of the Roman Empire and will be punished as would any colonial subject. This woman,” he jabbed the sword at Rhianon, “assaulted two legionaries of Rome, and as such—”
“She is chief of our warriors!”
“She is an insurgent and a criminal,” the Commander insisted, irritated, “and as such, I order her forthwith to be flogged!” He clicked his heels and marched back to his horse, ignoring the protestations of the Chieftain.
I turned to Mared with a knot of dread twisting in my stomach. She reached out with her bound hands and took hold of her mother’s arm, her lip trembling in terror. Rhianon pulled the girl close against her side.
“Mother, please!” Mared cried. “You mustn’t let these monsters hurt you! I won’t allow it!”
“Hush now, my girl,” Rhianon said softly. “I will not debase myself groveling before these small men. And I won’t let you suffer any more either!” Her blue eyes stared into the distance, her jaw tightly set.
It took a dozen of the burly foreign lads a mere matter of minutes to haul three tall, straight timbers from the edge of the camp, plant one end of each into the soft ground, and assemble them into a tall, pyramidal structure, lashed together with cords at the top. When they had finished, the Commander, once more sitting on horseback, barked an order to his nearest Lieutenant.
The gruff-looking officer hopped down and removed his helm, revealing a head of matted sandy-blonde hair. He retrieved the “scorpion” whip from the ground and approached the triangle. Rhianon’s two guards drew their swords and took hold of her arms to lead her away. Mared continued to cling to her mother’s arm.
“Please no, please no…” Mared whimpered.
Rhianon said nothing but shook off the soldiers’ grip, slipping out of her daughter’s fingers as well. Facing straight ahead, upright and proud, she walked herself slowly and deliberately to the posts. I moved close to Mared and took her hand in mine. Her fingers were cold and her hands shook. She squeezed my hand so tightly that mine went numb.
Rhianon closed her eyes and didn’t resist as the soldiers grabbed her shift and tore it callously to pieces in their hands, discarding the rags on the ground. She was naked to the waist then, wearing only her loose woolen trousers. Her skin was pale-white like the summer clouds, the breasts that had nursed Mared still firm, and she had the wiry, toned physique and proud shoulders of a warrior. The soldiers lifted her arms up over her head and bound her wrists securely to the timbers on either side of her. I saw a nearly imperceptible shiver run through her, and gooseflesh dotted her powerful back and arms. The effect was a curious mixture of power and vulnerability.
“By the power invested in me by the Emperor,” the Commander bellowed, his voice reverberating all around the village, as a funereal silence had fallen over us. “I sentence this mutinous woman to be flogged with forty-nine lashes of the scorpion! Lieutenant, execute.”
(continued)
