by Manda Scott
The hind fed on a young larch, reaching up to tug on the new foliage with her tongue. Her breath warmed Bán, carried on an eddying breeze. A woodpecker drummed on the bark above his head. A magpie screamed obscenities from an upper branch. Hail shifted at his side, his tail thumping twice on the ground. The deer flicked ears as big as a boy’s hand. She stopped feeding. A spray of larch flicked upwards. The magpie screamed again.
A voice behind him said, “Do you not need a spear to make the kill, Bán harehunter?”
He had no need to turn. The voice was as familiar as the light, careful tread had been. “I have Hail,” he said. “And this.” He tapped the handle of his belt knife. It had long been a source of pride that he did not need a spear, that he could stalk closer to the quarry than any other and kill before it began its flight. He pushed himself clear of the holly bush under which he had been lying. The deer watched him with limited interest. Turning, he said, “I don’t hunt with three dogs to every spear as others do.”
The Roman sat with his back to a small ash. He looked tired. The crow’s feet at his eyes had deepened with the strain of the day. He nodded, as if a boy’s hunting were an important consideration in his life. “You mean as Dubornos does. I would not think that of you. But this deer lives.” He said it as a question, with a brief upturning of his brows.
“It’s Nemma’s friend. She raised it from a calf. To kill it would be like killing one of the horses.” Bán grabbed a branch and hauled himself to his feet. The deer flicked her ears, snuffing the breeze for a scent of barley meal, or salt. “See, she is not afraid of us. Not even of Hail.”
“I see.” The man made no move to stand. “So have you caught something else?”
“No. I followed another deer, a young buck, but it didn’t seem a good day to kill.”
Bán sat down with his back to the same tree as the Roman. The man did not question why it might not be a good day to shed blood without reason and Bán did not feel the need to explain. Today, such things were obvious. Hail lay between them. Remarkably, the man pulled a twist of smoked hide from his tunic and gave it to the hound. The cracking of dried skin filled the clearing. Bán watched, chewing on a nail until his impatience overcame him. “Why are you here?” he asked. “Is it over already? Have they decided?”
“Hardly.” The man smiled, crookedly. “They will be in there until night falls. It would not surprise me if they were still arguing at dawn tomorrow. I came away when I had spoken. It is better for Luain if he does not have to translate for me. I asked if I could come out for some fresh air. They trust me enough not to run now so they let me go.”
“But you could run. The horses are there. Today of all days you would be long gone before the hunt began. They would not know you were gone before they came out.” Bán did not have to say “I would not tell them”; that was understood between them.
“I could.” The Roman had thought about it; that much was clear. He stared at the hind, who stared back. As if to her, he said, “Where would I go?”
“South, to the Trinovantes. They are friends to Rome. The Sun Hound has returned lost seamen to Gaul before.”
“Perhaps. But it would not help the enmity that exists between the Sun Hound and his son and, in any case, I have given my word to abide by the ruling of the council. I would not go to the gods an oath-breaker.”
There was nothing to say to that. Bán sat awkwardly and dug his toe into Hail’s flank. The silence lengthened. In the clearing, the hind stripped off the last of the new larch and wandered, soft-footed, into the deeper wood.
The man stood. He peered south through the trees, angling his hand against the sun. “Why don’t we go and see the horses that came off the ship? The red mare is gentling now. She might let you mount her.”
It was something to do. They followed the deer track until it met the wide swath of the trackway leading south towards the horse fields. Hail led, searching out rats’ nests and deer tracks with unfocused abandon. The breeze was warm, lifting their hair and blowing away the clinging scent of smoke from the great-house. For Bán, it could have been an ordinary day, but for the knot in his stomach and the difficulty he had with swallowing. He asked, “What else did Caradoc say?”
“What he was always going to say: that it is not myself who is the danger but what I represent. He was very generous in his estimation of me. I was to understand that if I would agree to remain with the Eceni, or to travel west with him to the Ordovices, then he would vote for my life and the granting of land and horses.”
“Would you not agree to it?”
“To avoid the death they have planned for me, I would agree to anything asked of me by a man, but I would not swear it on oath before the gods and he knows it. He would not swear to stay in Rome if our positions were reversed.”
“Why not stay? You could be happy here.”
“Perhaps. But I would no longer be me. Who we are depends on where we are. Some people are not so readily transplanted.”
“So Caradoc will vote against you?”
“Of course. He was always going to do that. He was more pleasant about it than Dubornos.”
“Dubornos? Ha!” Bán grimaced. “You saved his life. He should be grateful.”
“I saved his life, therefore he hates me more than he has words to express. He was purple with anger. I thought he might fall into fits from the passion of it.”
“That would have been good.” In spite of himself, Bán grinned. “They might let you go if you managed that.”
“Maybe I should have smiled at him harder.”
They reached the paddocks. An old yew trunk as wide as Bán was high blocked the entrance to the first field. Great plates of orange fungus grew from the bed of furred moss and lichens that patched its surface. They clambered over and walked up the hill to the last and largest of the paddocks. A beech tree, generations old, stood in the centre amidst the scattered leavings of such mast as had not been stolen by squirrels or collected by the children in the autumn. The herd grazed nearby, or stood in its shade. Bán and the Roman strolled up to sit beneath it. The red Thessalian mare saw them coming and raised her head. She had rolled recently and was coated in mud. At Bán’s whistle, she left the safety of the herd and trotted over to meet them. As always when he saw her move, the boy was speechless. Even on that first night as she came out of the sea, her stride had been longer than any he had seen and she had floated across the shingle on cushioned air. Now, with the winter behind her, she matched his dream so closely that it raised the hairs on his arm.
The Roman sat on the turf, watching. “She’s learning to trust you,” he said.
“I think so.” Bán nodded. In the beginning, newly off the boat, she had rolled her eyes and kicked at the sight of him. For half a moon, Luain mac Calma and—oddly—Airmid were the only ones she would have near her. All through the early part of spring, Bán had sat still in the slush and the mud with barley meal scattered around him, waiting for her to take the first steps in his direction. Recently, she had begun to come to his whistle. He carried a twist of salt and a comb inside his tunic. Sitting beneath the beech, he emptied the salt onto his palm and held it tight in a fist so she had to tease his fingers open to reach it. When she was done, he brought out the comb and began work on her mane; it was not as tangled as her tail so he was less likely to scare her. Hail quartered the empty field behind them, searching for mice. The Roman lay back on the grass, cushioning his head on his hands and closing his eyes to the sun.
Bán asked, “What did Breaca say?”
He did not necessarily expect an answer. For a while, it seemed he would not get one. He worked on with his grooming. The mare grazed peaceably and did not kick as he moved to her hindquarters and drew the comb down her tail. Each day, he passed small boundaries such as this. Beside him, the Roman stirred.
“Your sister said that if they condemn me for what I am, not who I am, then your people will have sunk to the level of Rome and the taint will never clear.” The
man opened his eyes and stared at the open sky. “She insults me and still votes for my life. I think she hates me as much as Dubornos does, but what she does with it is different.”
“She doesn’t hate you. She is not Dubornos. You saved her life, too.”
“True. But she has a particular sense of honour and I have offended it.”
Bán did not ask how. He would get it later from Breaca if it mattered. He pulled a handful of grass, twisting it into a wisp, and began to work the mud from the mare’s hide. Since the winter, she had not been fully clean. It seemed a good day to change that.
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
“What?” Bán looked down, surprised.
The Roman was lying with his head beside the mare’s hind leg, staring up at her udder. “The mare,” he said. “She’s pregnant.”
“Oh. Yes. To a black Pannonian horse with a white star. Luain mac Calma told me. She was in season when he bought her and he took her to be covered straightaway. The foal will be born in the month after midsummer. Airmid says it will be black with white on its face and I will ride it in battle.” He did not mention his dream.
“Then she must be right.” The man grinned, suddenly. “You might do better to ride the mare. She has seen enough battles.”
“How do you know?”
“She has the brand of a legion, see?” He reached back to point out a mark on her neck; a jumble of angular lines and cross bars showed sketchily through the mud. “LVIIIA—the Eighth Augustan. If you clean all the mud off her sides, I’ll bet the white flecks on her flank there will turn out to be the spur marks. She has been ridden hard. Either her rider hated her, or he had trouble on the field and needed to leave it quickly.”
Bán ran his fingers across the flank that was closest. There, behind her ribs, he felt a ridge of tissue. The mare flicked her tail and stamped and he took his hand away. He worked his grooming wad down, freeing the clotted mud. The scars, thus revealed, stood out like chalk marks against the rich red of her hide. It was a wonder he had ever seen beyond them. He passed his hand down again, feeling the extent of the damage. “Did you know her?” he asked.
“No. I’ve never been with the Eighth. But I have known many like her. They live short lives and brutal ones. She is better off where she is. You could…” He trailed off. In a quite different voice he said, “A crow. How very tactless.”
He named the bird in Eceni although they had been speaking Gaulish. Bán had been working under the mare’s stomach. He straightened. The Roman had moved. He was lying with his back against a small knoll, his fingers laced loosely behind his head and his eyes open, staring in grim fascination at a crow that hopped across the turf a spear’s throw from his feet. As Bán watched, the bird jabbed its beak into a pile of decaying horse dung and dragged out a worm.
“Shoo it off.” Bán lifted his arm, to throw the grooming wad.
“No. Leave it.” The Roman lay very still. Small pearls of sweat stood up on his temples. Tracks of it threaded down to the rim of his tunic. His jawline was tight, cording the muscles on his neck. For the first time, Bán saw fear in a way he understood. The implications of it sent a slick of cold down his back. Abandoning the mare, he walked carefully to the man’s side and sat down. He put a hand on the shoulder beside him and felt the muscles flinch.
“How did you know the name of the bird in Eceni?” he asked, gently.
“Your sister told me.” The man made no move to throw off his hand. “We saw one this morning, riding up to the great-house, and I asked her. It’s my name, or something like it. In Latin: Corvus, the raven. It’s the name of my house.”
“So we could have called you Corvus instead of ‘the Roman’ or ‘the foreigner’ all this time. Why did you not tell us?”
The man smiled. His lips stretched tight over white teeth. There was no humour in his face. His eyes stayed on the bird. “With what is coming? With your dreamers seeing messages in the flights of birds and the patterns of leaves on the grass? Do I look insane?”
Numbly, Bán said, “They don’t see messages like that.” He was beginning to feel sick and had no knowledge of what to do about it.
“I know that now. I didn’t know it when I first came. Caesar wrote it and I believed him. I’m sorry…” The man rolled his shoulders. It did nothing to ease the stiffness of his muscles. The crow speared another worm and tore it in two. The Roman shuddered, like a horse shaking off flies.
Bán said, “Who told you what is coming? Not Breaca?”
“No. She is more generous than that.”
“Dubornos, then?”
“Of course. He said the last man condemned by the elder council lived for a day and a half before the birds finally killed him.” His voice was oddly hollow.
Bán wrenched himself upright. “He said what?”
The crow fled into the upper reaches of the beech, croaking displeasure. The Roman craned his neck to watch it.
Furiously, Bán said, “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know. He couldn’t. It happened in his grandfather’s time. He wasn’t born then. His father wasn’t born then. It’s not true. And it won’t happen now. They will let you fight Caradoc, they must do.”
“Must they? I don’t see why. I wouldn’t.” The man’s eyes, unseeing, rested on the crow. As one emerging from a dream, he said, “The dreamers broke his limbs and bound him to the platform and opened his abdomen with a knife, crossing the cut so the crows and ravens could feed without hindrance. They said he lived a day and a night and on until dusk of the next day, that he died only when one of the birds tore at his liver and made it bleed. Even then—”
“Stop it!” The gorge rose in Bán’s throat. Swallowing hard, he said, “Dubornos may be mad but you don’t have to join him. It doesn’t matter what happened then. It was different. Verotagos had betrayed us to the Coritani. Six warriors died because of what he did, his father and his sister amongst them. We were in a war and losing badly. There were others who might have followed his lead. The dreamers were making a point.”
“And what are they doing now, if not making a point?”
Bán was weeping. Hot tears of anger and frustration streaked his cheeks, pooling at his collarbone. “It’s not like that. You have done nothing to offend the gods. You even stopped Dubornos from falling into the pool. They would have skinned him first, before they broke his limbs for the platform, if he had gone into the water. He was trying to upset you. Don’t let him do it.” He made himself think, seeking a source of reassurance. Only one came to mind. “Have you spoken to Airmid?”
“No. It hurts her to look at me. She does it, but the effort is painful to watch. I don’t think it would help either of us to start threshing through the details.”
Bán knelt. He took the man’s hands in his own. He made himself look through the eyes to the soul that rested inside. The will that it took made him calmer. “Corvus, listen to me. They will not do that. If you have to die, it will be fast. There are ways to angle the knife so that it pierces the heart before anything.” He had never been told it, but in the deepest part of his soul he knew it to be true. He made a cutting motion upwards to the base of the breastbone and felt the short shock of the other man’s breathing. His hand moved on down to where he knew the old wound to be, at the side. Touching the pit of it, he said, “I promise you, it will be faster than a spear in the side could ever have been. Was that so bad?”
The man twitched a small smile. “No. I didn’t feel it until later. But then I was busy and I didn’t expect an attack from that side. My Vexillarius was supposed to stop it coming but he was already down.”
“What happened to him?”
“He raised his arm too high. A spear took him in the space beneath it, where he had no armour.”
“Did he die?”
“Eventually. The field medics had him for a day or two first.”
“A day or two?”
“Four.”
“And this would be worse?”
; “Maybe not.” The man laughed, short and hard and bitten off before the end. “Thank you for that.” He freed his hands from between Bán’s palms and lay back on the turf where he had been before.
Looking up, Bán saw that the crow had gone. He closed his eyes and felt the warmth of the sun and tried to be calm.
“At least you don’t have prisons here,” the Roman said, dreamily. “I couldn’t bear that, not being able to see the sky, or hear the birds. They say Julius Caesar kept Vercingetorix in an underground dungeon for years before he had him killed. The man was broken long before they brought him up into daylight.”
Bán shuddered. The red mare moved around, grazing near his feet. He reached out and touched her, for the feel of something real beneath his fingers. “Why would he do a thing like that?”
“Because he could. Because he wanted to make a point. I suppose because he was a general and he had seen enough men die in the field to know that there are few things you can do to a man that war cannot do worse. It’s true. I had forgotten…” The man sat up, slowly, and looked round. “Do you hear a horse?”
Bán did. They turned together, sitting on the knoll. The figure that emerged from the forest was too distant to see clearly but a banner of red hair and the reckless speed marked Breaca as clearly as if they had recognized her face. The Roman pulled himself to his feet and watched her go. “It’s your sister,” he said. “She’s borrowed your dun colt again.” He spoke lightly, as if her choice of horse was the most interesting point of it. Breaca reached the corner of the wall and gave the colt his head. He was half-brother to the filly that had been taken by Amminios. He wasn’t as good, but he was close. He ran almost as fast as the grey mare.
“She’s very angry,” said the Roman. He stood very still.
