The islanders opposite used to whisper that Cwen was guarding a giant’s hoard of gold in that mound of hers; that one day they would come over and fight her for it. But Cwen knows what it contains – all the songs these people ever sang, the words of love they whispered, the caresses they gave each other, the stroke of a mother’s hand on her daughter’s hair, the hope that still exists for this species. She is as sure of it as she is sure of anything. Which is nothing. All the rest – the martial shrieks, children’s whines, gods’ names taken in vain, cries of humans in their death throes – all that floats upwards with the firesmoke. When it returns to earth, it does so harmlessly transfigured, as the rain itself, or snow, or small, hard balls of hail.

Sitting with her back against the door-stone, Cwen hears the women’s shouts. She feels their power. On good days, when the sun falls full on her face, warming her after the cold nights, she can hear the histories, whispering to her. She knows what they are whispering: It will start from here.

Here in her island’s fastness, with the sun on her face and the birds overhead and the sea below as defence and larder, Cwen feels the strength of her body and her mind. She feels the strength of Eva. They are mingling into one. Anu, Eva, her.

Here alone they are Cwen.

But out beyond their island, they have gathered their forces.

cwēn old English

queen modern English

quine Doric

Note on Sources

Page 5: I have adapted the words I quote from Strabo’s Geographica using Horace Leonard Jones’ translation in Strabo: Geography, Books 3–5, Loeb Classical Library edition, 1923.

Page 19: For Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia I have adapted F. E. Romer’s translation in Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Page 39: The quotation from Agricola is taken from Cornelius Tacitus, The Complete Works of Tacitus, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, edited by Moses Hadas, The Modern Library, 1942 (1876). The quotation from the Annals is taken from Tacitus, Annals: Books 13–16, translated by John Jackson, Loeb Classical Library, 1937.

Page 61: The words I quote from Dionysius Periegetes are inspired by J. L. Lightfoot’s translation in Dionysius Periegetes: Description of the Known World with Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary, Oxford, 2014.

Page 81: The quotation from Procopius is taken from H. B. Dewing’s Procopius with an English translation, in seven volumes: History of the Wars, Books VII (continued) and VIII, Vol 5, London/New York, 1928.

Page 111: The quotation from Voyage of Bran (Immram Brain) is from Kenneth Jackson, A Celtic Miscellany, Penguin, 1951 (1971). The quotation from The Adventures of Connla the Fair (Echtra Condla) is from the translation by Tom P. Cross & Clark Harris Slover in Lebor na hUidre, Henry Holt & Co, 1936.