Etain the Brigante. As a child she had witnessed her mother ..... then killed with her father, by the Romans. She went to seek refuge further north. In Caledonia, where the Picts were fighting a defensive guerilla war against the Romans.
Led by warriors Vortix & Aeron, the Picts had attacked & basically massacred a full Roman garrison at the Roman outpost of Pinnata Castra, at the southern border of the Scottish Highlands. But they took second-in-command Quintus Dias prisoner because he could speak Pictish, and took him to Gorlacon the Pictish king. But he somehow escaped after a brutal interrogation.
Gnaeus Julius Agricola the governor of Roman Britannia sent General Titus Flavius Virilus to lead the 9th Legion on a punitive cum search & rescue expedition to get Dias back, providing Virilus with a captured Brigantian lass as a scout to guide the way. Big mistake. She was none other than the .... with the big axe to grind against the Romans, Etain.
Well, what else. She led them into another ambush, another massacre. Beginning with pitchwood flaming 'boulders' rolling down the two hillsides onto the road which the Picts & Brigantians had blocked by felling a tree across it.
Etain later had the satisfaction of killing Virilus in a fair fight, driving a spear straight into his heart.
This story became the subject of the 2010 movie Centurion.
