by Manda Scott
He pressed his thumb to the scar, tracing the outline in the fragile, healing skin. The flesh beneath was not hot but a perpetual flame burned in the cavity of his chest as a reminder of the night in the cellar. The god might not have visited him, but it was the god’s mark that kept the bad dreams from becoming disabling nightmares, or so he chose to believe. Lying in the dark, he would have liked to believe, as his fellow acolytes clearly did, that the brand gave him courage, that it made him one with Sol Invictus, that it joined him to an elite which those outside envied but did not fully comprehend. The last part of that might have been true—those who gave themselves to Mithras might possibly have become subject to the warped envy of those excluded from the god’s grace—but he could not believe the rest.
On a good day, Valerius could persuade himself that he had never desired unity with the sun and his obvious failure to attain it in the god’s ceremony was of no moment. This morning, with the new governor installed and the threat of an eastern war increasing, he would dearly have liked to feel a measure of blind, uncomplicated courage, or simply to feel warm.
He rose, stamping life into his feet and his feet into his boots. The water in the wash bowl was thickly iced. He broke it with rigid fingers and splashed the sleep from his eyes. He shared the room with three other junior officers of his troop: Sabinius the standard-bearer, Umbricius the actuary and Gaudinius the armourer. All three turned and mumbled restlessly in their sleep, but did not wake. Valerius was the only one of the four known for his early rising.
Beyond the doorway, the corridor lining the barrack block was more still than usual and lacked the customary draughts, as if, a full year after its construction, someone had finally found and blocked all the gaps in the brickwork. The night-time lamps had burned out long since and the space was darkly empty. Valerius stood a while, feeling the stillness. Asleep, night was his enemy; awake, it became his friend. It had taken him a long time to acknowledge it, but recently he had begun to realize how much he enjoyed the anonymity of the dark.
In a while, brushing his fingertips along the walls, he made his way to the outer door. The night was not like other nights. The crunch of his feet on the corridor’s gravel was muffled, folding in on itself and dying away too soon, and the air smelled clean and sharp so that, when he breathed in deeply, grains of ice formed in the hairs of his nose, and when he let the breath out it made white fog round his head.
Because it was dark and he was concentrating on finding his way without stumbling and was not keeping his mind in check, a twenty-year-old memory rose from nowhere of a night just like this, with a three-quarter moon hanging low over winter oaks, of himself as a small child, wrapped safe in the folds of his mother’s winter cloak, standing at the borderlands between the wild wood and the horse paddocks, with exactly the same feel of ice crystals forming and melting in his nose. Walking the length of a barracks corridor, he heard his mother’s voice whisper in his ear, showing him the hare that lived on the moon’s surface and was the god’s messenger to her people. He’d screwed up his eyes, staring hard until he saw the outline of the beast sitting side-on to the world. When he found it, his mother’s hands enfolded his and raised them, explaining how to make the salute the dreamers made to the moon so that he would always be able to ask help of that god when he was in need. In the world of the legionary barracks, his arm rose to shoulder height before it hit the wall.
It was an unforgivable lapse. Cursing aloud, Valerius spun backwards and jammed his shoulders hard against an upright oak beam. Urgently, pressing the back of his head on solid wood and his thumb on his brand, he called the images of Mithras that had been shown him over these last two months: the youth in cap and cape emerging fully formed from solid rock, the corn of his fertility, the serpent and the hound that drank on the bull’s spilled blood. In the stretches of time between heartbeats, Valerius built his god layer by layer in the air before him, manifesting by willpower alone the bull, most worthy of all opponents, to dance and struggle with its captor until the knife stabbed into its throat and a fountain of blood wept onto the earth.
The images worked, as they always did, slowly and imperfectly. Sweating, Valerius spoke the prayers to Sol Invictus aloud in his mind until they overwhelmed everything else. The power of the god had kept his mother from his dreams since the branding and it banished her now from his waking inattention, destroying every memory, down to the soft husk of her voice in his ears.
Her voice lasted longest and he had to chant openly not to let her words slide snake-like into his head and heart. He had once believed his mother dead, with his father and sister, and had sworn allegiance to Rome on the strength of it. Later, standing beside her newly slain body on the invasion battlefield, he had watched her soul cross to the otherworld and had tried to follow. His mother had forbidden it, cursing him with continued life. Before Mithras’ intervention, her ghost had returned to him nightly, standing in judgement of his deeds, taunting him with the many different pasts and futures that could have been his had he not chosen to fight for Rome: Valerius the dreamer, Valerius the warrior, Valerius, friend and lover of dreamers and warriors, nightwalker, hound-caller, hare-dreamer, hero of battles. Most often, she brought bright, vivid images of his sister, who, alone of all his family, was still alive. Word came daily of the resistance in the west and her part in it.
If his mother, who was dead, despised him, Valerius had no difficulty imagining the undiluted loathing with which his sister would view the man he had become. There were moments in the darkest nights when Valerius wished her dead and himself free of the consequences of her continued life—and hated himself for wishing so. More than anyone or anything else, it was to escape the living reality of the Boudica that Julius Valerius had first offered himself to the Infinite Sun.
Valerius continued to chant, not trusting silent prayer alone to keep the phantoms at bay. When he was calmer and could see only Mithras and the bull in the worlds beyond the one around him, he levered himself carefully away from the oak upright and continued to feel his way down the corridor. At the far end he found the door and pushed it open.
Outside, there was snow. He had known there would be from the cold but the depth of it surprised him. It came to his knees, with a crisp skin on top that crackled under his weight.
If he had slept without dreams and woken free of memories, the beauty of the night would have left him silent with awe. The vast area of the fortress and the land around it had been brought together under a bear’s pelt of unmarked snow so that Roman land and native land were one. Above, the sky had emptied itself and the clouds had gone, leaving the god’s arc purest black. A million scattered stars reflected snow light so that, even without the moon, he could see clearly the outlines of the barracks stretching in all directions. On the eastern horizon a finger’s breadth of not-black presaged the dawn. For an ordinary man in ordinary times, it would have been a night to find a hound and go hunting, to take a spear with a good blade and seek out the wry-tusked yearling boar that had evaded the best of the legions’ trackers all through the summer, a night to fire the blood and pump the heart and remember what it was to live.
Were Valerius younger and still in love, he might have done exactly that, deaf to the responsibilities of rank. Youth and passion had protected him once from the realities of life, but he was no longer in thrall to either of these things and his promotion to duplicarius was a recent one, long sought and much cherished. Now he ignored both the beauty and the potential for joy in the world around him, and looked instead for the many and varied chances of disaster.
He did not have to seek far. The pipes leading to the latrines had frozen; he found that almost immediately. He used them anyway, knowing that what he deposited would sit and stink until the flow of water could be restored. He was not the first; someone else had risen early and had the same need. They, too, had come after the last fall of snow. A pair of boots had left clear prints and Valerius followed them for a while until the two paths separated
: the boots to go left, to the eastern gate and the annexe beyond that housed the latest wing of cavalry to arrive from Rome; Valerius to go right, to the horse lines, where his duty lay.
The lights at the stables had not gone out overnight; two men would have been flogged had they done so. By their pooled light, he could see that the mounts of his own command were quiet and none of the stable roofs had collapsed under the snow’s added weight. That had been his greatest fear and he was grateful not to find it realized. He took a fistful of corn from the feed room and walked down the line, doling it out sparingly. At the end, separated by a gap from the other mounts, stood an oddly marked pied horse, all black with streaks of white running down from poll, withers and croup as if the night sky had been laid on its hide and then the gods had splashed it with milk, or shards of ice.
This one horse did not lean out and lip at his palm for the corn as all the others had done but plunged forward, straining over the door to snatch with bared teeth at the edge of Valerius’ cloak. He knocked its head away with the balled edge of his fist and it came back faster a second time, head snaking and ears laid flat with the whites showing round its eyes and its teeth agape.
He was already sliding sideways between the oncoming teeth and the door when a voice said, “He is as evil as they say, then?”
Valerius had believed himself entirely alone. The shock of finding it otherwise stopped him just long enough for the horse’s bared teeth to meet the flesh of his shoulder, stunningly. He fell as if struck by a lump hammer.
It would have been hard to say who was the more shocked. The horse jerked back, flinging its head high. It spun in the box, crashing against the walls so that the whole line became restless. The stranger was calmer but more aware of his fault.
“I’m sorry. I should have waited before I spoke. They told me his name is Crow, which means death, and I thought it a wine-fuelled jest. Clearly I was mistaken. Are you hurt?”
“No. I always fall at my mount’s feet first thing in the morning. My physician recommends it. Thank you.”
Valerius took the offered hand and pulled himself upright. His shoulder boiled as if filled with liquid lead. Many years ago, he had taken a sword wound in exactly that place and the flesh bruised more easily than elsewhere. He rolled his arm a little, feeling if the bones had broken and, hearing no grating, nor feeling any, chose for the moment to ignore it and deal with the more pressing matters of the foreigner—he must be a foreigner; not a single member of the garrison would have been so carelessly familiar—and the pied horse.
In the world of Valerius’ priorities, horses always came before men. He lifted the catch on the door and slid inside. The Crow, whose name did indeed mean death, turned to kick as he entered the box, which was a good sign that the horse was not as shocked as it had looked. Sliding past, Valerius grabbed for a hank of mane near the top of its neck, then crooked his arm under its throat and across the bridge of its nose as a makeshift halter. Between them, it was a signal that the man had won and the beast could accept his gift of corn with its pride intact. It did so and he walked it to the door, easing out before it could strike again.
“Thank you. I believe he—” He was speaking to empty air, and so stopped. The foreigner was further down the line, leaning over a box door talking to the chestnut mare inside. He was a man of Valerius’ own age, old enough to have been a warrior amongst his own people and then to have trained with the cavalry and risen up from the rank of trooper, but not so old that he had seen many battles. He was half a head shorter than Valerius, which still left him taller than most Romans. In the light of the stable lamps, his hair took on the russet brown of a stag at the rut and it hung thickly to his shoulders without the plaiting or adornment that would have been usual in a Gaul. He wore horseman’s boots, not caligae, which meant he was cavalry, not infantry, and the trail of prints from one stable to the other matched exactly the trail Valerius had tracked from the latrines. Valerius set himself a small and silent wager as to the man’s rank and nationality.
Seeing him coming, the foreigner turned from his preoccupation with the chestnut mare in the box. Without saluting, he asked, “Is your shoulder damaged?”
No-one ranked lower than duplicarius would have spoken with such easy familiarity, anyone higher would have demanded some kind of acknowledgement. The foreigner’s rank, then, was equivalent to the master of horse; first part of the wager won.
Valerius said, “No. At least, not badly. The Crow has spent the past eight years trying to bite me and that was the first time he’s ever succeeded. I was afraid he might feel he had reached the zenith of his life and should lie down and give himself to the god. He seems well, however, for which I am duly grateful. Without a horse to fight, what would a man do in the long days of the governor’s peace?”
It was a test, of sorts, and was recognized as such. The foreigner’s mouth twitched in the beginnings of a smile. “Polish his armour, perhaps? And await the call to war?” The answer was a safe one, saying all that was needed. Neither was about to compromise himself before the other in a way that could be considered treasonous, but each hated equally the tedium and inactivity of life in the fortress.
Valerius walked on to the next stable block in which the horses of the second troop were housed. They were not strictly his responsibility, but he did not fully trust the one who should have cared for them, the one who was clearly still asleep, unaware that it had snowed through the night. He reached the first box and gave the last of his corn to a roan gelding who liked him.
He was halfway down the line when the foreign horse-master caught him up. The second half of the wager remained outstanding. It was part of Valerius’ pact with himself that he could not ask any question outright. He said, “You are with the cavalry unit that came over with the new governor—yes? The one camped in the annexe alongside the bath house. Are your horses settling in after the sea crossing and the ride here?”
The foreigner shrugged, loosely. “They’re settled and resting although they weary of the cold, as I do. In Thrace, it snows, but the air is not so wet and the cold does not eat so at one’s bones. And we were told it would not snow here for a month.”
In Thrace? Hah. Thracian! It had been an unsettling night but the day was proving better. Valerius had won a brief skirmish against the Crow, or at least had not lost; had unequivocally won the wager he had set himself, and the god had kept his horses from ruin in the snow. Feeling better than he had since waking, Valerius said, “It doesn’t usually snow this early. This is unfortunate.”
“Or perhaps fortunate? The gods have sent it as a gift to the new governor. The natives will be as cold as we and will not press their rebellion.”
They were walking together, with an ease of old comrades. Without thinking, Valerius said, “If it is a gift then it has been requested of their gods by the tribal dreamers and granted by them as evidence of good will. Have you ever been in a native roundhouse?”
“Not such as you have here.”
“No, well, you will have to believe me when I say that we may have brought them civilization in the form of freezing barracks with four men to an unheated room, but the natives will have slept the night in a roundhouse the height of ten men, with forty families within, and a fire that was banked high and gave heat all night. They will have slept with their hounds at their backs and their lovers close and they will not have needed to wrap up in their cloaks, or even to wear a second tunic, to have slept well and woken rested. They will have risen this morning to warmth and food and the companionship of their families and, if they choose not to read the signs sent by their gods the night before, they won’t know it has snowed except by the smell of the air and only then as they lift the door-flap. I wouldn’t say this is a gift from Roman gods and it will certainly not quench the fires of rebellion.”
He stopped, biting his tongue. The Thracian stared at him thoughtfully. Another man might have asked how a junior officer in the Gaulish auxiliary had come to be so famili
ar with the interior of a native roundhouse in winter, or at least would have asked the questions that confirmed the rumours or denied them. This man rubbed the side of his nose a moment and said only, “I have heard that you lived for a while amongst the Eceni. Is it true that their women lead the warriors into battle?”
The charge from the west was led by a woman. The name they are calling is Boudica, she who brings victory. The voice was Valerius’ own, younger and still mercifully unaware.
His mother, coming later, knew everything and judged him for it. Her mark is the serpent-spear, painted in living blood on Mona’s grey. Once, it was red on Eceni blue. Yours could have matched it, the horse or the hare painted on blue. You could have been dreamer to her warrior. With you at her side, she would have been…
“No.”
For the second time that morning, Valerius turned his back on the foreigner and walked away. In front of him, the principia dwarfed the buildings around it. Only the governor’s house came close in grandeur to the great quadrangle of the legion’s assembly hall and at that moment Valerius was not concerned with the governor’s peace and comfort. He had the responsibilities of his rank. In honouring them was his best, possibly his only, defence.
Speaking over his shoulder, he said, “We should finish our inspection of the stables and then check the principia. Did the tavern rumour-mongers tell you also that the roof caved in last winter under the weight of the snow and was not rebuilt until after midsummer? Our recently departed governor, may the god grant him long life, wished to display to the natives the full splendour of Rome. There are tiles under that snow so bright they would make your eyes water if you had to stare at them under a full sun.”
