by Manda Scott
Airmid asked, “If you are north of the sea-river, who will keep watch here for Rome?”
Caradoc did not rise. Quietly, from his place crouched by the rock, he said, “I will stay, and the oath-spears of the Catuvellauni; they are not needed at home.”
He led that people now, having been granted the blood-oath by his brother after the battle against Berikos. He had spent his last two summers amongst them and his daughter saw him only in winter. If her mother wished otherwise, none knew of it. Once, in a moment of careless inattention, Breaca had reminded him of a pledge that his child would grow knowing more of her father than Caradoc had known of Cunobelin. The strength of his anger had surprised her, and her response to it. In nearly four years, it was the only time they had argued. She had never mentioned the matter since.
Caradoc was looking at her, pensively, as if he read the stream of her thoughts. He said, “Those of the Atrebates who owe me allegiance will join us. They have few warriors and a great many who tend the fields. As, I think, does Mona?”
“Of course.” She nodded. He knew it, as did Togodubnos, but it needed to be said again, as often as was necessary, in front of those who might harbour doubt. “The elder council has given its word; the warriors of Mona will remain in the east until the war begins or winter closes the Ocean. We will return in the spring and each year until the threat has passed.”
“Thank you.” Caradoc smiled a little. To the wider gathering, he said, “Any others who choose to join us will be welcome. When the legions come, we will send runners. Then will be the time to arm yourselves and ride.”
Gunovic asked, “You still believe they are going to come?”
“Oh, yes.” His gaze was bleak. “They, too, are waiting for the harvest. When the corn is in and they can feed the legions on the profit of our labours, they will come.”
CHAPTER 26
The rain fell lightly, fine as mist. The dandelion seed-head trembled. A single wisp shook free and launched upwards, catching the breeze. Others jigged looser in their moorings. Breaca lay on her belly and watched them. The judder took on a rhythm, like ripples on still water. In the trees, a magpie shrieked alarm. Behind her, an owl called in daylight. At the sound of it, Hail flagged his tail from side to side and turned an ear backwards. Breaca wiped her palm clean on the grass and signalled the beech wood at her quarter. A shadow-mass of grass-stained lamb’s wool and muddied skin sprinted forward to lie panting at her other side: Braint.
“They’re coming.” The girl’s voice was hoarse with excitement and haste and the need for concealment.
“I know. I can hear them. How many?”
“Twenty riders with spears and swords and big shields. They guard as many others on foot armed with spears.”
“A hunting party?”
“It must be. You have left them nothing else to eat.”
“They can eat fish.”
“Exactly.” The girl grinned, teeth flashing white in the mud of her face. She was of the Brigantes, who ate only meat and corn, and she loathed the taste of fish. She squirmed back down below the brow of the slope and knelt up. “There were no hounds and no slingers,” she said. “Can I go?”
“Yes. Take Ardacos. He’s expecting you.”
The girl merged with the scrub. Presently, the dandelion puffball shuddered to a new rhythm. Breaca tapped Hail on the shoulder and they moved sideways and down to where the grey mare was tethered with the other horses, feet bound with sheepskin, harness and muzzle muffled with rags. She stripped the rags away and mounted. Hail ran on one side; Gwyddhien, quietly undemonstrative, took the other. The honour guard of Mona followed. They were thirty, twenty-two of whom had shared the choosing on Mona. The remainder came from the warriors’ school, picked to broaden and strengthen the skills of their peers.
They strung out in a line—grey-cloaked ghosts riding padded horses uphill through a quiet wood. In the month since the meeting on the salt flats, they had lived exclusively off the land, lifting the weight of their presence from their hosts, the Cantiaci. In that time, even more than the summer that had gone before, the sun and the wind had annealed them, forging a leathern uniformity that made each alike, but for height and the colour of their hair. They were well armed with fresh-bladed spears and good swords and shields of bull’s hide marked with the serpent-spear. Most wore iron helmets, save Breaca. From the beginning of the battle against Berikos, she had known that her hair was her best standard and that her warriors would fight strongest who could see her most clearly in the field. It was more striking now than then; the summer sun had burnished it to a fiery gold-threaded copper that flared even under cloud. In the brief time since their landing, the Romans had come to know and fear it.
The warriors reached the edge of the beech wood and fanned sideways to make a single line abreast. Dismounting, they stripped the sheepskin padding from their mounts’ feet, discarding secrecy in favour of sure footing and speed. Breaca signalled and five of their number slung their spears behind, shook loose their slings and opened the pouches of river stones at their belts. They were her secret weapon, trained and led by Cumal, who was master of the sling. On a good day, they could fell a man and his mount in the space of two heartbeats. Leaning down, Breaca placed her palm flat on the serpent-spear painted in red on the grey mare’s shoulder and prayed to the elder grandmother for a perfect day.
The riders were Gauls; that much could be seen from their size and the sallow gold hair falling in long braids beneath their helmets. In all other respects, they were armed and armoured as Roman cavalry, with spears and long swords and curving oval shields painted black with thunderbolts and the mark of the eagle in gold. They saw Braint gathering wood in the open and thought themselves blessed by the gods. She had cleaned the mud from her face and unbound her hair and her tunic flapped in the wind above her belt, showing one brown-nippled breast as she bent for another branch. The Gauls yelled from a distance. The girl screamed and dropped her wood and sprinted for the beech wood, gathering her hair behind her as she ran. She was the best runner of her age group on Mona but the Gauls were mounted and she was not. Breaca, watching from her high vantage in the beech wood, clenched and unclenched her right hand, swearing a slow death to any one of them who touched her.
The girl scurried amongst the trees, and when the Gauls next saw her she was in the company of a man, her father perhaps or her brother; he was neither big nor obviously armed. They were both mounted and fled up a clear-felled valley with woods on either side and a steep rise at the far end from which there was no escape. The Gauls howled thanks to their gods. In the woods above, a grey mare stamped and was silenced. A white-flecked hound crooned a war threat, too low for hearing, and the hair rose on his neck like a mane.
The girl and her father reached the end of the valley and turned at bay. This late, it could be seen they were, in fact, both armed but that only added to the sport. The Gauls slowed and called to their comrades, the hunters, whistling them back from the trail of a deer. These were smaller, swarthier men and they swore viciously in Latin until they saw the girl. Then one of them made a jest in Gaulish about feasting on human flesh. On the slope above, a wheaten-haired youth of the Coritani bared his teeth and said, “That one is mine.”
The first of the Gauls was within a spear’s throw of Ardacos when the sling-stone spun down from the heights and dashed his brains. His companion took his eyes off Braint’s sword arm and died with his throat cut, whistling air. The would-be cannibal choked soon after on the end of a thrown spear from the neck of which hung the feathers of a red hawk.
The Gaul who led the group was not a stupid man; his was not the first patrol attacked and he had read the reports of those of his predecessors who had escaped with their lives. Shouting orders, he spun his horse to face the wave of grey-cloaked warriors, looking urgently about for the flame-hair who led them—and found it, too close. He raised his blade high to fend off a killing stroke to his head and saw it turn at the last moment to strike, imp
ossibly fast, for his neck. In a final act of stubborn courage, he looked beyond the blade to see whose hand killed him, and, wide-eyed, saw what none of those who had survived had been close enough to report. His last sight in this world was the face of the goddess, fiercely radiant, framed in wildfire, and the white-speckled hound who fought at her side.
The leader’s horse was a bay of strong Gaulish blood, well trained to steadiness in battle. Breaca marked it in her mind as she dragged her blade from the neck of its rider and turned to confront the remaining enemy. Their numbers were thinning fast. Hail and the grey mare killed one of the Roman hunters between them and Breaca took his Gaulish shield-mate with her blade. Her palm thrilled to the action, but only mildly. It was the second ambush of the day, the sixth since the legions had first landed; killing came easily. The air hung thick with the moans of the dying and the stench of lifeblood and void faeces and she barely noticed. Two of the hunters closest to the edge tried to escape up the slope into the wood and found themselves facing Braint, who had abandoned her horse in the valley and run through the trees to outflank them. Shock slowed their reflexes—they had never faced a woman in battle—and they died before they had time to think past the impossibility of it. The wheaten-haired warrior of the Coritani hailed the girl for her first taste of true Roman blood. She saluted, grinning, and bent to cut a lock of hair from each of the dead men, adding them to her bulging belt pouch before running down the slope to help with the rounding up of the enemy’s horses.
When all was clear, the enemy dead were dragged to the wood’s edge and skewered to the tree trunks with their own spears, their throats cut and their manhood severed in warning. The Coritani youth stripped the shirt from the leader and carved the sign of the serpent-spear on his chest. Breaca saw it and did nothing to stop him. It had been done five times before.
The remaining Roman weapons were divided amongst the warriors. The grey cloaks of Mona left as they had come, silently, on padded feet. Behind them, carrion birds were already gathering. Far back towards the coast, the smoke of a thousand campfires stained the sky.
A small stream ran on the far side of the beech wood. They dismounted beside it and washed themselves, and ate goat’s cheese wrapped in nettle leaves and cold meat that had been a gift from a family of northern Atrebates. Breaca sat with Hail at her feet and bathed a graze on his foreleg. He pressed his head on her arm with the teeth tight against her skin and crooned as he did when they were playing. She found it hard to remember a time before she had loved him and he her. She closed the wound with spiders’ webs and fed him meat from her saddlebag. Downstream, Ardacos tended to one of the honour guard who bled from a spear-wound above the knee. Others bathed their own wounds or stood in the stream with their sword hands immersed in the water to take down the heat and swelling of the battle. Dubornos, once of the Eceni and now of Mona, brought a flask of water and came to sit at her side.
“There were more this time,” he said, “and they were better armed than the last. The next group will be greater still.”
It was not an accusation; that was no longer his way. Dubornos was one of those she had chosen to make up the honour guard’s strength, recognizing the change in him. It had begun immediately after the battle with Amminios, in which Dubornos had brought disgrace on himself and his family by feigning death in the face of the enemy. Because of it, he had been the first of those to change and the one in whom the difference was most marked. In shame, he had renounced his warrior’s spear on the first night of their return and had pledged himself to hunting and the provision of food for the people. Later, when eyes were elsewhere, he had given away his gold ornaments and his styled cloaks to the families of the dead and had taken to wearing coarse-woven wool and a single armband made from the pelt of the red fox, which was his dream, although he had paid it no heed before. He had become a good hunter, but no-one remarked upon it. Then, in the spring before Breaca had been chosen Warrior, he had gone to Macha with a dream and she had named him a singer and sent him west to Mona for training.
He had been there nearly a year before Breaca had noticed him. In the autumn after her choosing, on her return from the Sun Hound’s funeral, Maroc had asked her to school the singers in use of weapons and she had found that the singer of the Eceni was also a fighter of quietly consummate skill. He fought without arrogance with no wish to win, and so won against all but the few whom the gods had set apart as true warriors. In the wake of the victory over Berikos, she had chosen him as one of eight to make up the numbers of the honour guard. She had never regretted it. On the battlefield, he fought with a controlled passion, self-lessly. Off it, he sang as well as Gunovic, and possibly—although Breaca was not the best to judge—as well as Graine. In council, Breaca trusted his judgement.
She accepted the water he offered and let it wash the taint of blood from her throat.
“You think we should not be doing this?” she asked.
“No. It is necessary. It pricks their morale and makes them realize they are in enemy territory; it deprives them of food so they must live off the sea, and each one dead is one less to fight when the army moves against us.”
“But?”
“But we are thirty and most carry wounds. We should know in advance the numbers against which an ambush will not succeed and be prepared for it. There are some amongst us who would die for the chance to kill another Roman.”
“Braint?” It was obvious. Breaca had seen it before, and again in the flanking move on the two Roman hunters.
He nodded. “And, I think, Ardacos. He has taken the invasion as a personal affront.”
“He understands what they will do if they gain a foothold. He will not be alone in that.”
“No. But that is the reason we cannot afford to lose him.”
They looked along the stream. Ardacos finished his bandaging and rose smoothly to his feet. More than ever, the last few days had made clear how strongly ran the blood of the ancestors in him, in the lithe movements and the fierce, unyielding battle anger. Watching him, Breaca felt her heart lift. For nearly a year after Berikos’s defeat they had been lovers and she still felt the world brighter in his presence.
He caught her eye now and, smiling, she raised a hand to beckon him over—and stopped because his gaze had moved beyond hers and his face grown still. She turned. Braint was running at her without caution or quiet, waving her arms to show danger. When they were close enough to hear her over the song of the stream, she straggled to a halt, saying, “They’re coming. I saw their standards from the top of the rise.”
“Who are coming?”
“The legions, the cavalry, the Gauls, the Germans…all of them. They’ve struck camp and they’re moving west.” She looked up. Her eyes were wild with hate and impotent anger. “They are thousands. Tens of thousands. The line goes back all the way to the sea. We can’t stand against them.”
A shadow passed over the group. Dubornos made the sign against evil. The girl paled and put her hand to her mouth. “I meant, we who are here cannot—”
Breaca put a hand on her arm. “I know what you meant. We can stand against them only if we stand together. We have always known this. Call the others to mount. We will go back and join Caradoc and his warriors at the eel-spate.”
The eel-spate was the largest river the Romans had to cross as they moved in from their landing on the far eastern coast. Tides moved at its mouth, making the land treacherous on either side, but it narrowed quickly so that, by half a morning’s ride inland, there was a place where a horse could ford it easily and a warrior standing on one side could cast a spear to the other and expect to make a kill. It was the obvious place for the legions to cross, and Caradoc and his mixed troop of Catuvellauni and Ordovices had been preparing there since news of the first Roman landings. He had not brought them all, by any means; if the warriors of both tribes were counted together they came to over five thousand and he had brought less than a thousand, enough to guard a river crossing but not so many that
if they were overwhelmed they would weaken the main force. To these was added the bulk of the warriors of Mona, acting under his orders; they would not be separated from their Warrior, except for minor skirmishes.
In all, the defenders made nearly three thousand and they had been working for three days without break. The result was as good as it could be, better than Breaca had expected. Riding down from the hills behind, she could see the rows of fire-hardened stakes that reared out of the water to point at the enemy. Boulders as big as swine littered both banks, making a cavalry nightmare of the terrain so that no horseman could readily approach the water for a spear’s throw on either side of the ford. Mats of woven branches covered narrow trenches that would delay both infantry and horse. Behind the defenders, a long wooded hill stretched to the south and west, making a wall at their backs and hiding their full strength, or lack of it.
Breaca had led her thirty across the river far upstream and looped back to come down through the trees. Emerging now, she saw below her mounted warriors racing their horses along the western bank, hurling shouts and taunts at the enemy. She barely looked at them. On the far side, the army of Rome was gathering. So many men, so well armed, so rigidly disciplined; it was easy to see why Braint had lost her courage on seeing them for the first time. Rank upon rank, line upon line, six deep in their centuries, the first two cohorts of the XIVth and XXth legions waited, resting on their javelins, easing their swords in their sheaths. Rain pearled on shoulder and helm, making jewels of dulled metal, creating uniformity where it might otherwise have been lacking. They were inhuman—or Breaca would have thought so, had she not slain a score of their brethren in the morning.
