WERE I IF I COULD, I WOULD ERASE YOUR ARMOUR
RIGHT WHERE YOU STAND, BURNISHED HEAD TO HEEL
BY THE SUN, A VERITABLE GOD
I WOULD TAKE YOUR SPEAR
AND RETURN THE LYRE
RIGHT WHERE YOU STAND, BURNISHED HEAD TO HEEL
BY THE SUN, A VERITABLE GOD
I WOULD TAKE YOUR SPEAR
AND RETURN THE LYRE
In her homeland, they did not speak often of death. It was inevitable, and simplistic. For them, there are only two ways to die—with honour, or without it.
For the honourable, great pyres were built upon the black cliffside of her old city. They would dance beneath the night sky and wish them on to the Old Gods, where they could rest as all great warriors did, among their ancestors. For the dishonoured, they were sent to sea, as they had banished her, to be feasted upon by fish and never reach the sky. As she walks among the grieving and the living, she thinks of her father’s funeral upon those stark, unloving cliffs. Boudika had not cried but stood, instead, in her full battle dress. Her eyes had taken in his shape one final time, how he was dark and forlorn in death but his battle regalia somehow heightened him to the man he had once been, the man he would always try to be. She had carried the torch to set the dry wood aflame, and send him to the afterlife. Boudika had loved her father but, feeling the heat the pyre, she did not know if she had loved him enough.
Her eyes feast upon the scenes around her, the momentos and small monuments. Very few grieved alone and this, in her mind, highlights her own loneliness from the past. Vercingtorix had not come. Other friends had, and her father’s comrades, but she had been the last one standing there to watch the embers. A Khashran slave collected the ashes and presented to her in a golden urn which, she imagines, must still be resting on the mantle of their old home—
Boudika decides that is enough remembrance. She is no longer there, nor will she ever return--those chapters of her life have, in their own way, been laid to rest. She thinks of how this is the Night Court's festival of mourning—but equally, it is a festival of celebration, and acknowledgement of life. She drinks hot cider and listens to the music throughout the marketplace, wandering disembodied and… lost. Boudika has no one here to grieve, and although she is now the champion of this community, she has yet to feel a part of it.
First, it is the tigress that catches Boudika’s attention. Then, it is the red-winged girl. Lastly, it is the name. The name she has heard whispered for months, the name that belongs to a man she has never met but knows has caused great and terrible pain. Boudika approaches quietly, allowing the woman a moment to erect the portrait and then: "Why do you grieve him?" It takes Boudika a moment to recognise the woman as the Court Emissary, but she then she does, and for a moment... Boudika almost regrets her question.
She dismisses this, however, because it is genuine and heartfelt query. She knows, in her heart of hearts, there is a place she has left bare for Vercingtorix, a place that will forever be bare for him and him alone. It does not matter what he has done. A part of Boudika continues to love him.
Despite everything.
