Elodie Harper

They'd got all the wagons because they

had a very different concept of warfare and perhaps also because it was a rebellion.

They'd got wagons full of kids and families and grandmas and granddads all having their picnic for the day, looking forward to watching Rome be defeated.

But what it meant was they couldn't then retreat.

They were penned in by their own wagons and unable to withdraw.

And so it was a particularly horrific slaughter of everyone that the Romans could kill at that point.

Yes.

I mean, Tacitus says that she took her own life.

Either she was killed or it was incredibly common in the ancient world.

That was something the Romans and the Iceni seemed to have had in common, was this notion that it was better to take your own life than be defeated.

So yes, I mean, the majority of my novel actually is not with the rebellion.

That's really just the first third.

The other two thirds are the aftermath in Britain and then the aftermath in Rome at the imperial court of Nero.

Because as often happened, a very realistic outcome for a daughter of a high profile warrior like Boudicca would be that Selina would be taken either in triumph or as a kind of war booty gift.

For the Emperor Nero.

So that's the route that I decided to go down.

That's what happened to Caraticus, for instance, an earlier rebel who managed to avoid execution when his freedom to live as a kind of, well, I imagined him almost

without wanting to spoiler it, but yeah, how would he then live having gained his freedom and being given a pension in Rome, this rebel?

What sort of life would he build himself?

I mean, there's a whole other fascinating book that I could have written about Caraticus, but I wanted to think about Boudicca's daughter in that terms and the dynamic of being a woman.