At first glance, Honey in the Mead appears to be a genre novel, a romantic escapist saga, with Caterin the beautiful spirited heroine battling against her growing love for Gort, the enigmatic and aristocratic Welsh stranger. At this level the story succeeds. It moves along at a great pace, full of love, treachery and adventure, set in Dark Age Alba, against a glowingly described background of idyllic scenery, seasonal weather and everyday life in Pictish times.

If this were all, I could recommend Honey in the Mead as a good read for those who enjoy that sort of fiction but there is much more to this book than the original poorly-designed cover and blurb suggested. Here is an excellently-researched attempt to portray life in the C6th, to put flesh on the bones of those people who are known to us only by name from the Lists of Pictish Kings or Adomnan's Life of Columba. Bridei, his magician Broichan, Cennelath, Aedan of Dal Riada, Artur his son and the Irish Kings march through these pages, along with bards and masons, warriors and monks, mothers and maidens, hillmen, cattlemen and huntsmen as seen through the intelligent eyes of Caterin, Bridei's daughter.

Although it is impossible for us today to perceive life through Pictish eyes, the author has created in the character of Caterin a credible attempt. She longs to love and to be loved. Above all, she is determined to be a great queen and mother to her people. To uphold the ancient traditions of her race, she enters a school for Druids where she learns the ancient history and pagan secrets of the past. While her father and her chosen husband-to-be battle with the Scots, she is captured and eventually sold as a slave in Ireland to a Viking family, where she learns degradation and humility. She visits great Tare, finds Columba, and is sheltered in a monastery, but has no great opinion of him, or of Christianity. She is protected by a Fife family, with whom she participates in the customs and festivals of village folk. From these adventures she grows up from being a wilful and arrogant child to become a wise and mature queen, in love with her victorious Welsh husband, the mother of his child and of her people.

The author deals credibly with the setting up of the symbol stones, the problem of language and the importance of the old religion and matrilinear succession. It becomes Caterin's ambition to banish slavery and to set up healing centres. She is finally immortalised as the Easter Ross Princess seen on the Hilton of Cadboll Stone.

Of course, one has to remember that this is fiction, and that Caterin has perhaps too modern an outlook to be truly a child of her times, but this is a novel to stretch the imagination, and ifit introduces the Picts to a wider readership, then it has succeeded. I look forward to reading The Flame Within second in this trilogy about Celtic Queens.

Elizabeth Marshall