Title: Defy the Eagle
Author: Lynn Bartlett
ISBN: 978-0263850765
Publisher: Mills & Boon (19 May 2006) – re-issue. (Originally published by Worldwide Library (1986))
It’s not an erotic novel per se, but if you have a bit of a thing for capture/slave fantasies and enjoy historicals, I think it’s highly likely that you’ll enjoy this book.
Defy the Eagle wasn’t the first romance I ever read but it’s most definitely the one that’s stuck in my head over the years and set the standard for all that have followed. Highly implausible plot? Check. Uber Alpha hero bordering on total wanker? Check. Cover art embarrassing enough in execution to make me hide behind a crate of avocados in order to read it (more on that later)? Check.
The official synopsis from the 2006 edition:
62AD
And Britannia is at war…
Queen Boadicea and her fearless Iceni troops face the disciplined Roman Empire and her sworn enemy Emperor Nero in their fight for freedom. The battle begins in the town of Venta Icenorum, where the beautiful and rebellious Jilana waits to be married and fulfil her duties as an honourable Roman wife and daughter.
Everything changes when Jilana meets Caddaric, an Iceni warrior, who takes her as his slave. Separated by their blood allegiances but brought together through their mutual desire, Jilana and Caddaric are unwittingly caught in a battle of their own.
As Boadicea’s army rages through Londinium and finally on towards Rome, politics and passion collide as Jilana and Caddaric race to stay together and survive the ever increasing threat of the Roman army.
My 14-year-old self stumbled across this doorstop of a novel whilst staying with my dad during the summer holidays. He was renting a furnished flat at the time and Defy the Eagle was languishing on a bookshelf, hidden amidst a seemingly endless row of The Reader’s Digest. Unable to stomach the latter (pun intended), I did what any self-respecting adolescent girl would do: I grabbed the book with the cover that featured a red-haired woman in a ‘toga’ – read: pink mini dress that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Ann Summers catalogue – languishing in the arms of a guy whose stomach appeared to be stuffed with paint rollers. (Interestingly, he also seemed to have had a run-in with a vat of St Tropez, although, I’ll hazard that as advanced as the Romans were, they hadn’t discovered the joys of fake tan.)
The plot centres around the heroine, Jilana, a high-bred Roman lady trashing it up in the wilds of Albion (England) and her subsequent enslavement to Caddaric, an Iceni warrior under the rule of Queen Boadicea. When Caddaric and Jilana first encounter one another, the latter has no idea that Caddaric is not Roman, but in the first few chapters of Defy the Eagle an Iceni uprising takes place in Jilana’s home town of Venta Icenorum and she soon discovers that not only is Caddaric other than who she thinks he is, a centurion of the auxiliary, but the person most likely responsible for killing her immediate her family.
In the aftermath of Venta Icenorum’s destruction, Jilana is devastated by the loss of her mother, father, sister and fiancé and begs Caddaric to kill her. But despite his hatred of Rome and her people, he refuses and instead takes her captive, forcing her to march with the Iceni war band as they move to confront Nero’s army, who are under the leadership of General Paulinus.
As a people, the Iceni are hell bent on rape, pillage and ousting the hated Romans from Albion once and for all, but Caddaric in particular has a very large axe to grind. His mother and sisters were slaughtered by Claudius, his father made a slave to General Aulus Plautus, and he himself taken and forced to serve as part of the legion. Consequently (and understandably), he hates Rome with a passion. But Jilana is somehow different to her countrymen and he cannot bring himself to end her life – in part because his feelings are clouded by the dreams he has had about her prior to their first meeting. Caddaric is unsure what his dreams mean but, despite being the equivalent of a modern day atheist, he is unable to completely discount them as superfluous – mainly because he is influenced more than he wants to be by his father, Clywd, a Druid priest.
‘For what seemed an eternity Caddaric gazed at the delicate face so close to his own. Fascinated, he watched the point in Jilana’s throat where her pulse beat, even while he steeled his arm to drive the dagger into her heart. Caddaric was no stranger to death, yet he found his hand refused to obey his commands when it came to this woman. She was his enemy; she had sworn vengeance against him—and she was his destiny. No matter what his soldier’s instinct told him, Caddaric could not kill Jilana. With a snort of disgust over his own weakness, Caddaric sheathed his dagger …’
Defy the Eagle unfolds over a whopping 600+ pages and the reader is taken on a hugely eventful journey filled with war, human sacrifice, Druidism, burned wheat cakes, and the tying up and shackling of the heroine. (At one point, she is even tethered to a cart as punishment for a transgression; the cornerstone of any capture fantasy, obviously.) The detail in this book makes it virtually impossible to summarise the plot in just a few paragraphs – there are so many threads in play – but suffice to say the pace is relentless. The level of detail is superb and Lynn Bartlett paints an amazingly vivid picture of Roman Britain. I’m in no way an expert on this period of history so can’t claim to know whether her depiction of the era is 100% accurate but, regardless, her descriptions of cooking utensils, Roman bathhouses, saddles, food – you name it – are incredibly captivating. And the textural detail doesn’t detract in any way from the storyline. The tension between Jilana and Caddaric is first-rate and doesn’t let up; it’s a love-hate relationship with a master and slave dynamic at its core and the pair don’t easily come to terms with one another.
‘Her arms were pulled behind her back and her wrists bound by the same length of rope which tied her ankles. In the space of a few minutes, Jilana was trussed in a manner that left her immobile. Even as Caddaric rose, Jilana could feel the strain in her muscles and joints as she was arched backwards over the rope.
Caddaric tested the knots at her wrists, ankles and the small of her back and then, satisfied, he unfolded a blanket and tossed it over Jilana. She had to strain in order to turn far enough over her shoulder to see him, and when she did he smiled mockingly. ‘Wait for me, Jilana.’
With those sarcastic words he was gone and Jilana was alone in the dark tent. Wait for me. Jilana laughed a trifle wildly. As if she could do anything else.’
You can definitely tell this book was written in the 1980s – it was first published in ‘86 – but the story is engaging enough to carry the book more than twenty-five years later. There are some weak points, such as the wildly excessive use of the word ‘’Twas’ (we get that it’s a historical, okay?), the morally dubious sex scenes in the first half of the book, and the meandering and somewhat unbelievable conclusion but, on the whole, it’s one of those stories you just can’t put down once you start. I had a summer job grading avocados and Defy the Eagle was compelling enough to make me hide behind a crate of them during tea breaks to read it (there was no way I could work up the courage to display the train-wreck of a cover in mixed company).
Some stand-out secondary characters come to mind: the psychotic Druid priest – not Caddaric’s father – who spends the majority of his time sacrificing Romans, and a primipilus named Hadrian who dreams of having a horse farm. (I remember his occupation causing me a great deal of consternation upon my first reading: wasn’t he supposed to be building a wall?)
So, to summarise: heroine wears a dodgy toga (on the original cover, at least), burns wheat cakes, and is subject to pseudo-BDSM bondage and shackling. Hero is a barbaric Iceni dragging aforementioned enslaved heroine on a war campaign across Roman Britain.
Two words: bloody awesome. And just in case you think I’m remotely exaggerating re. the original cover, here it is:
St Tropez, paint roller city. (And the cover model seems to bear a disturbing resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger, too …)
Sound like something you’d like to read? Click on the following links to purchase Defy the Eagle from: Amazon.co.uk ; AbeBooks
Editor’s note: brand-new copies of Defy the Eagle are not in short supply and, unfortunately, this title is not currently available as an eBook.
