by Manda Scott
The broken dreamer splayed her hand flat across the scars of her face. Her crooked mouth twisted, accentuating the scars. “Do you doubt it?”
“No. Of course not. I’m sorry. Your life is yours to cast to the gods as you wish.”
The rest gathered round: Cygfa who had been to Rome and stood in the shadow of her own crucifix and kept her damage to herself; Ardacos, who could yet go north and be an elder amongst the Caledonii; Airmid, heart of her heart, soul of her soul, who could have been Elder of Mona and taken the dreaming west to Hibernia.
Breaca said, “I would prefer that all of you left, now, with Dubornos and Lanis and the warriors, but I don’t have the power to compel you.”
They all knew it, and struggled to find the words. In the end, it was Cygfa who said lightly, “I don’t think the procurator would stop long at the steading if he found only one woman within it.”
Which was why, in a shorter time than any of them imagined possible, Breaca of the Eceni led half of her son’s honour guard and all but two of the men and women who held the strings of her heart down to the steading to which she had brought them two years before.
Shortly thereafter, as the trackway trembled to the hammer of incoming horses, she led them out again to stand before the emperor’s procurator of taxes and his three hundred mercenary veterans.
She left Stone at the gates so that he might not scent the enemy and attack them out of hand and rode the grey battle mare because it was the most reliable of all her horses, and dressed in a new tunic of Eceni blue with a knotwork of muted grey bordering the sleeves and neck and hem, because it looked least warlike. She left her hair unbraided to hang to her shoulder and her shield hidden and outwardly bore no knife nor anything edged that might conceivably be considered a weapon, nor any armbands that might show undue wealth, but only the corded gold torc of the Eceni that weighed like rope about her neck.
As she rode her mare forward to greet the head of the incoming riders, she sought through the voids of all-time for the grandmother, the ancestor, or Nemain. All were silent.
“It does us no honour and I regret it deeply, but we cannot feed three hundred men. Winter has left our stores empty and the trading has not yet begun.”
It was true, after its fashion. Certainly the steading had little by way of provisions and the two dozen she-bear warriors who had followed Breaca from the great-house had brought only enough from the great-house to feed themselves. As befitted a settlement in mourning, the she-bears wore tunics tied with unmade rawhide belts and no gold and their belt-knives were short and could not be challenged under Roman law. They occupied themselves with tending the horses or the fields and none welcomed the procurator, or invited him in.
Later, if they had to fight, there would be no risk that any of them had broken the guest laws and incurred the gods’ disfavour.
“Thank you. We bring our own provisions.”
Breaca had addressed the procurator in Latin and he replied to her in Eceni, through a youth of the Trinovantes who wound a finger in his hair and stared at the ground and would not look up.
Without waiting for the boy to finish, the procurator pushed his flea-bitten grey gelding through the gates. He was a man in a hurry; his eyes fed on the gold at the Boudica’s neck, not the quiet wool of her tunic or the carefully combed sheen of her hair. His men followed him, orderly as any legion.
Cunomar and his eight she-bears were in the second century, flanked by veterans from Camulodunum, men whom Breaca recognized by sight but not by name. She had traded with them in the time before Eneit’s death, swapping belt buckles for raw bronze, or an armband for iron; two had been present in the theatre to witness the spear contest with the former governor.
One of these nudged his neighbour and said something coarse in gutter Latin but Breaca’s attention had already passed behind to the rear of the column where rode a Coritani youth who bore in his topknot the trio of red kite feathers that marked him as a scout of the legions, and, more importantly, displayed openly the warrior marks of a fire lizard on his arms.
Each was both a warning and a declaration of enmity and each was unnecessary; his face, seen in profile, was a younger stamp of the slave seller Breaca and Cunomar had killed in the forest beyond the horse fair and she would have seen that in him anywhere, without need for reminders.
He rode at the tail of the second century and made no effort to hide himself; quite the reverse. Passing by, his eyes met Breaca’s, and he nodded a greeting that carried more threat in its cool, quiet understanding than all the procurator’s mercenaries put together. Because it mattered not to show the depth of her shock, she saluted him after the manner of the Coritani warriors and was surprised when he returned it.
A standard-bearer rode to the front of the column, holding aloft a banner on which weighing scales stitched in silver graced a scarlet background. He signalled with it and the rearmost century stepped out of line and encircled the steading. It was done smoothly, the product of much practice.
The remaining two centuries divided into eights; one group to guard Cunomar, another for all of his she-bears, a third to watch over Breaca and her family, except for Ardacos, who was a grown man and clearly a warrior and so warranted another eight guards on his own.
Those not called to guard duty spread out into a line that ran from one edge of the steading to the other. The standard-bearer signalled and they walked forward in perfect step. One man in every eight was armed with a stylus and tablet.
“The men will prepare an inventory. You will remain with us while it is done. Afterwards, you will be required to confirm it.”
The procurator spoke in Latin and the Trinovante youth translated into stilted Eceni and in either language what he said was unacceptable. Nevertheless, in the time it took to speak it, and to repeat it, another thirty warriors had run another hundred paces further away from this man and his mercenaries and all the machinery of Rome.
Breaca nodded and said to the youth, “If the procurator would care to wait in the king’s chamber? It has not been used since his death, but I can light the fire and the damp will clear.”
The procurator was not comfortable in the chill damp of an unaired, unheated room. He chose to remain in the king’s chamber only for the time it took to overturn the coin-chest and reveal it empty.
“You have hidden his money. Where?”
“Why would I hide what we have to pay in taxes? If we had it, you could take it now.”
“Then how will you pay if you have nothing?”
The procurator was a man for whom food was never short over winter, and his life depended on making Britannia pay; she had to remember that.
Breaca said, “The money is not due until midsummer. By then, we will have traded enough horses and hounds to pay. I have a bitch due to whelp that will—”
“You would pay the emperor’s dues with hounds?”
“If the procurator had ever hunted, he would know the value of Eceni hounds.” The young Coritani hawk-scout leaned against the doorpost. He had been there from the start, an unobtrusive observer. He said, “My father’s people would pay the worth of a war-trained colt for a brood bitch of the Eceni. You should remember that in your inventories.”
She had killed his father and he knew it; how could he not when word of the Boudica’s kill had spread through every steading of every tribe in the east? There was, therefore, no reason for him to help her. Breaca nodded her thanks and it was gracefully received and her nerves jangled; an enemy who offers help is twice dangerous.
There was nothing she could do and the procurator was the present danger. He was staring at the wall where the king’s sword had once hung. The wood was paler by a whisper where it had been.
“Prasutagos was fighting with a weapon not legal under law,” he said. “Where did he get it?”
He was guessing. ’Tagos’ blade was with Breaca’s, hidden in the smithy by the great-house where only a search of utter destruction could find it; he could no
t possibly know its length. Even so, it did no harm to talk. Each passing moment was its own victory.
Breaca waited for the interpreter and said, “I have no idea what length his blade might have been or where he might have got it. He was the king. He did not share such knowledge with me and he is dead, and so cannot be asked. If you have the weapon, you could read the smith marks on it to find the source.”
The procurator stared at her and smiled, thinly. His lips were the bluish purple of a bad heart and his skin the sallow of an over-taxed liver. Without the legions of Rome to give him power, he would have made his money writing wills for small-town merchants and spent it in a brothel. “Later,” he said. “When the inventory is done.”
The air in the king’s chamber was musted from a winter of no use; they did not tarry there long. Outside, the line of walking mercenaries had crossed the steading. Half of them turned back through the gates and were working their way up through the horse paddocks, past the in-foal brood mares to the youngstock and geldings, to the three breeding horses kept apart on the slopes of the hill.
The last son of the grey battle mare was up there, product of a lifetime’s breeding. His sire had died, killed under Braint on Mona before he could truly be tested. The son he had left was not yet trained for battle, but had raced twice in the autumn and won. His first foals were due in the spring and would outrun the best of the best. He stood in the highest field and screamed at the strangers, who were not horsemen and dared not go close.
Next to Stone, who stood with his shoulder pressed to her knee, the grey mare’s son had been Breaca’s greatest beacon of how life had once been and might yet be when the legions had been destroyed. She was surprised, amidst all the turmoil, how much the sight of him lifted her, and the thought of losing him hurt.
Even so, it was important to keep speaking. “The horses are poor after a winter with little fodder,” she said. “They will be fit again in time for the autumn horse fair.”
The procurator did not break his gaze from the hillside. “By autumn, that will no longer be your concern.” The Trinovante interpreter could not bring himself to translate. Breaca did not remind him.
Another warrior another spear length away. It mattered not to rise to this. It mattered, instead, to know where each member of her family was, and to account for them, moment by moment, until the time came to act.
Cunomar was sitting on a log in the middle of the steading with his eight guards around him. He caught his mother’s eye and pressed his hand to his arm. He wore no tunic and so had no knife concealed beneath his sleeve, but he had seen, or guessed, where Breaca kept hers, far longer than was legal, bound to the inside shaft of her left forearm. He was unarmed, but he was a she-bear and could kill without weapons. She had seen Ardacos do so often.
Airmid, Cygfa and Gunovar were held apart, just outside ’Tagos’ chamber. Above everything else, it mattered not to be taken too far from them; Airmid bore no knife and could not be left alive for long when the fighting started. More than anything else, Breaca was grateful that she had not let Graine come.
“You have more horses than this.”
A man less desperate might have made it a question. There was no clear reason that Breaca could see why the procurator of the emperor’s taxes should be so driven, unless, unwitting, he felt the urgency in her.
Striving for calm, she said, “Through the winter, the horse herds are spread out across the land, to give least burden to each steading. We bring them in again after foaling in the spring.”
That made sense, at least. The procurator pursed his lips and said, “In that case, how many head have you altogether, that were the property of the king?”
“The king had no interest in horses. None of these were his.”
“Who owns them, then?”
“I do.”
“You are his wife.” The procurator looked at her flatly. “Therefore they were his and are now the emperor’s. How many?”
Breaca had been an elder in the council of Mona, she could school her face to her will whatever the chaos within. She said, “After the winter we have had? It’s hard to tell. If the mares have lived and carry foals to term, if the foaling goes well and the youngstock thrive, then, including the foals, we will tally over one thousand. If the foaling goes poorly and we lose mares and foals as we have done in some years, perhaps as low as seven hundred. Such things are in the hands of the gods.”
“From today, they are in the hands of the emperor,” said the procurator, “which is more certain than any god.” He turned on his heel, still counting numbers. His eyes fell on Stone who lay at her side. “If the hounds are of value, we should include them. How many have you?”
She could school her face from a Roman, not her soul from her hound. Stone was dangerous when he growled, but lethal when silent. He rose to his feet now, without a sound. Breaca laid a hand on his neck and felt his mane grow stiff along the length of his spine. She said, “The hounds of the Eceni are traded only at need, and only those surplus to our own breeding. Until the whelping is over, there are none to spare.”
The procurator ran his tongue round the upper arcade of his teeth and a vein pulsed at his temple. He spoke crisply to the interpreter. “Ask again. She does not understand. How many hounds were in the king’s household? How many in the outlying lands?”
Sometime in the past few breaths, it had become clear that battle, and death, were inevitable. If she were going to die, Breaca wished it to be over something worthwhile. Before the interpreter had taken breath, she said in Latin, “I understood fully. The hounds of the Eceni are not for sale, nor will they be given in payment of tax.”
The procurator answered her directly this time, and it pained him to do it. Spacing his words, he said, “You do not understand. This is not a tax. This is an assessment of the emperor’s property. Your king is dead. What was the king’s has become the emperor’s: his lands, his wealth, his horses, his hounds, his wife and his daughters. Everything that was Eceni is now of Rome.” He smiled, tightly. “It is of no consequence to me whether you answer freely or under duress, but you will answer. I will ask you once more, and only once; how many hounds?”
If she remembered the thrush that had woken her in the morning, she might remain sane. Breaca said, “The king wrote a will. It was witnessed by the last governor.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cunomar shake his head.
The procurator saw it too, and claimed his victory. “Your king left half of his estate to his emperor, as is proper. The other half he left to his daughters, clearly intended as dowry.” His gaze roamed to Cygfa and back. “I am told that one of the king’s daughters is a child and yet I see no children. Where is she?”
Too many people held their breaths. Locked in a wasteland of false calm, Breaca said, “The king’s daughter died over winter, of cold and hunger and grief at her father’s death. I could take you to her grave, if you required to see it.”
The procurator pursed his lips and studied her and could not find the hole in the lie. “No matter. That saves some senator’s son from the duty of taking a native to wife, although I have been told that the savages of the north mature early and it would have been—No!”
It was not Cygfa who broke, or even Cunomar; not Gunovar or Airmid or Ardacos and the she-bears, but Breaca. It must have been her, however hard she tried to hold it, because Stone lived to serve her and it was Stone who attacked the procurator first, and it may have been that Cunomar was trying to pull the hound back, not to further the attack, but the mercenaries were not paid to watch and report what may or may not have happened, only to keep order and collect gold and goods and, at all costs, to protect the life and person of the man who paid them.
Stone was struck and then Cunomar was struck and then the she-bears, howling, were uncontrollable, which had always been the risk when they were there and Cunomar was in danger.
They fought better than Breaca had imagined. Against overwhelming numbers, armed with knives barely
long enough to cut through a cheese, with woollen tunics as their only protection they hurled themselves at the veterans of the colony of Camulodunum in their legionary mail and leather armour and oval cavalry shields and the short blades of their days in service, which sang gladly to their hands and made short work of killing.
Eight Eceni died in as many heartbeats and three others were clubbed unconscious and Breaca had barely time to crack the point of her elbow against the nose of the veteran to her left and bring the long-bladed knife from its place on her arm, had not begun to think if there was time to kill the procurator or any of his men before she must turn it on Airmid, when she heard Cygfa shout the war cry of Mona and someone else scream in a voice she had never heard before, splitting the air with his pain.
She killed the veteran who stood to her right, because he was closest and the scream had taken his attention, and by the time her knife was free of his throat it was clear that it was not Cygfa or Airmid who had been taken, but Cunomar, who had fought without weapons and lost. Her son was held between two men, with his ear cut from his head and blood sheeting down the left half of his face.
“Stop! Stop now. His life is mine. Do you know how long a man may take to die?”
The shout was in perfect Eceni, not from any of the mercenaries, or the Trinovante interpreter, but from the Coritani scout who bore the mark of the fire lizard crawling up his arms, and who brandished Cunomar’s severed ear on the tip of his knife.
“Don’t stop!” Cunomar kicked and fought the two men who held him, and half a dozen of the she-bears took him at his word, but the momentum had gone from the bulk of them and another of the veterans took hold of Airmid and pressed the tip of his sword to her eye and that brought everyone to a halt.
There was a crystalline moment in which Breaca could have stepped forward and rammed her knife to the hilt in the living flesh of her dreamer’s heart and Airmid, holding her gaze over the cold iron of the blade, would not have stopped her; only somewhere quite close, a thrush chucked in the thorns as it had in the morning and the space in her mind that the torc had newly opened was open again, and filled with a certainty that stopped her.
