Dreaming the Bull

by Manda Scott

  Regulus was not, and never would be, a general and he was too old to respond to flattery. From behind the old man’s back, he gave a flat hand signal to Valerius. Aloud, he said, “Duplicarius, it seems they wish to surrender their weapons with some formality. We should allow them to do so, provided it offers no threat. You will take the men as we agreed and see to the disarming. Be courteous while they offer us no discourtesy. I will remain with the priest and take his hospitality.”

  The hand signal said, more privately, And he is our hostage for their good behaviour.

  Valerius nodded, crisply.

  Beside him, Sabinius raised a brow. “Do I signal the dismount?”

  “Not while the bastards are still mounted.” Valerius spun the pied horse out of line. Raising his voice to reach the most distant of the men, he said, “Re-form the columns until we’re through the gates, then break sideways again for a battle line. Keep it sharp and don’t move above a trot. The first one who touches his weapon without leave will regret it.”

  Sabinius still awaited his signal. Valerius raised his arm and led his men through the gap in the encircling rampart to face the waiting warriors. There, because he had to, he stopped.

  He had expected many things, but not a spectacle such as he saw now. He had forgotten, completely, the splendour of the tribes when they chose to display their wealth. The Gauls and the Thracians of the two cavalry troops sported their tribal brooches and some wore short-sleeved mail expressly to display the enamelled armbands beneath. Such things were allowed by their commanders provided they did not interfere with the men’s safety, nor become a focus for factions and in-fighting. To Roman eyes, and those who had spent too long in Roman company, they looked gaudy and not a little barbarian. Here, matched against the dazzling splendour of the Trinovantes, they looked simply impoverished.

  The tribes might have lost a two-day battle and, with it, a war, but they had not yet lost their pride, nor had they been required to melt down their armbands or torcs to cast into coins for the payment of taxes; they wore their wealth and their heritage on their arms with manifest pride. Their horses, too, were sleekly fit on a summer’s good grazing and polished to outshine their gold. At least half were better bred than the mounts of the cavalry. As Sabinius signalled the halt, Valerius saw finally that the warriors wore their hair braided on the left side, and woven into each strand were black crow feathers with fine bands of gold wire encircling the quills. Raw joy floated from his chest to his head, dizzyingly.

  “They’re wearing their kill-feathers,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The feathers in their hair signify a kill. The colour of the band tells you who died and how. A gold band signifies one or more legionaries; the width defines the exact number. They are letting us know that they fought against us in the invasion.”

  “Then they need to know that they will never fight again.” Umbricius, the actuary, was on his left. The man had a wound in the groin from a native warrior that had left him uncertainly potent and he both feared them and ached for revenge.

  Valerius motioned him forward. ‘You and Sabinius dismount and leave your horses here. As we agreed, mark a place where the weapons are to be left. We’ll call the smith to break them later; first, we need to see how they plan to hand them over.” An idea was growing inside him of what he would do in the same circumstances, knowing what the warriors must know. The threat of it left a taste like raw iron in his mouth. He swallowed, drily, and waited.

  The two officers marked out the rectangle five paces by ten as had already been agreed. Before they completed it, a single rider walked his horse forward from the centre of the warriors’ line. The man was huge, bigger than any of the auxiliaries, with the red-gold hair of his people and the bearing of an emperor. He wore the brilliant yellow cloak of the Trinovantes as his birthright and his blade was bright with the honing of generations. He balanced it flat across his palms and then, in a breathtaking display of horsemanship, pushed his horse to a full gallop and executed a perfect circle around the rectangle just marked out. At the end, he halted, dismounted, and knelt before Umbricius.

  “Jupiter, father of all the gods, I don’t believe this.” Sabinius was a chieftain’s son of the Parisii before he was ever a standard-bearer for the Quinta Gallorum. His eyes were wide and bright. “If he places that sword at Umbricius’ feet, he’ll find himself with his guts round his ankles.”

  Valerius smiled tightly. “Not unless Umbricius wants to spend the next two days watching his skin being flayed from his body he won’t.”

  For a long time after he joined the legions, Valerius had not understood the true value of discipline. Here and now, it came home to him, perfectly. Umbricius the Gaul, humiliated beyond all endurance, would undoubtedly have done his best to kill the red-haired giant who knelt at his feet in an exact parody of Vercingetorix’ surrender to Caesar in the time of his grandfathers—and would have died for it. Umbricius the trained auxiliary, in testament to a dozen floggings and an uncounted number of nights’ fatigues, remained standing at perfect attention while the giant surrendered his spear and his battle knife, either one of which would have killed the Gaul before he could raise his sword. Smiling, the red-haired warrior stepped back.

  Amongst the ranks of the auxiliaries, men who had not been breathing breathed. Valerius found his hands sticky and refrained from wiping them on his thighs; he, too, could hold his discipline.

  Longinus was beside him, dependably solemn. Looking down to adjust his horse’s harness, he murmured, “There are over a hundred of them. We can’t let them all do that.”

  “We don’t have to. See? The others are dismounting. They’ve made their point and they know it. There isn’t a Gaul in the entire wing who hasn’t been reminded of how his ancestors were conquered by the army for which he now fights. The first Thracian who finds this amusing will have his skull crushed and his balls ripped off. Make sure your men know that.”

  “I think they do. Look at them.”

  Valerius turned. Along the lines of horsemen, the air was crisp with the threat of violence. Not a single Thracian auxiliary smiled.

  Valerius turned to the men of his own command. Now that the time for action had come, he found he could immerse himself in that and not think ahead. To Sabinius, he said, “Signal the dismount. Break into fours, one to hold the mounts, the three others to take the weapons. Split the natives into groups. Don’t let them bunch. Confiscate their weapons but leave their shields. Only if they rebel will they forfeit those as well.”

  It was what they had planned, if not exactly how they had planned it. The men worked, as they slept, in groups of four. They spread out along the line of warriors and divided them into groups, herding them back towards the roundhouses and workshops. A handful of children came to take the natives’ horses and it was clear that this, too, had been planned. The warriors simply knelt now, and placed their weapons at the auxiliaries’ feet. It was not the exact mimicry of Vercingetorix’ surrender that the red giant had enacted, but a close enough shadow. Moreover, by retaining their shields, the warriors held on to a sense of security. It was not good but it was the governor’s command.

  The troopers were efficient, as their training required. They were still outnumbered but not at such a disadvantage as they had been. They could call on five hundred more horse and as many legionaries at need and both sides knew it; in this lay their true strength. Alone of his command, Valerius remained mounted and back from the groups in a place where he could keep watch over all of them. The first of his fears had been realized. The rest might yet be.

  He knew the worst when he saw the remaining children return. A small crowd gathered to the left of one of the roundhouses. They were boys and girls in equal numbers, dressed alike in their gorse-yellow cloaks, all brooched and banded, all too young to wear kill-feathers but old enough to have been at the invasion battle, if not fighting, then carrying water or holding the horses or mending broken weapons behind the lines. The
y were of that age, coming up to their warrior’s tests, when insecurity plays against bravado and both overwhelm reason.

  Gaudinius, the troop’s armourer, had stooped to take up a blade when a tall, skinny, dark-haired girl advanced on him. Hatred splintered clear in her eyes and leaked from the sheen on her skin. The notches of ancient use showed clearly on the surrendered blade, honed down through the generations but never ground away. Like a warrior’s scars, they were a constant source of pride; to lose them at any age was unbearable, to lose them within sight of the long-nights, and adulthood, was something to kill for, whatever the cost. Valerius saw the rock in the girl’s hand, raised to strike.

  “Not now, damn you.” He had been holding the reins of his company’s horses. He threw them to Umbricius, who was near. “Hold them. Be ready to mount.”

  The pied horse was already moving. Valerius pushed forward and the crowd, as a mass, edged back. There were more of them now; men and women who were not warriors had joined the throng, watching in silent accusation. The girl thought she could still throw her stone, even having been seen. Valerius leaned down and caught her arm before she could raise it high enough. A tall, lean woman with the same black hair was already at her other side. In formal Trinovantian, Valerius said, “They have orders to make examples of the troublemakers. If your daughter wishes to die, she might choose a way that will not cause her family also to suffer.”

  He had not been sure he could remember the language until the need came. They stared at him, mother, child and the crowd behind, disbelieving their ears. The girl tipped her head back. In the same tongue, Valerius said, “If she spits, I will have her flogged. She will not survive it.”

  The woman wore eight kill-feathers, all broadly banded in gold, and had just laid the blade of her ancestors at the feet of the enemy with all the dignity she could muster. She could, it seemed, control her daughter as well as she controlled herself and that without words. The crowd parted and let them through and, when Valerius looked round, the other children, too, had gone. He drew his horse back and circled it to where his men waited. Stooping, he retrieved the reins from Umbricius, who stared at him. “Why did you do that?”

  Valerius had acted on instinct and surprised himself. She reminded me of someone I once knew. Aloud, he said, “She’s a child. If we had flogged her, she’d die.”

  “So? A child doesn’t pay taxes. Myself, I think she is exactly what the governor had in mind when he—”

  He stopped. Valerius had said nothing, nor needed to. Umbricius had crossed him only once and would not forget it. Frustrated, the man said, “So who do we take as an example when every one of the bastards kneels at our feet and gives us what we ask?”

  Valerius smiled grimly. “Be patient. There will be one. They won’t all give up that easily.”

  He believed it, although it was still not clear who amongst the Trinovantes might be prepared to take a risk. The tension increased after the children dispersed but the desperate theatre continued, as if each warrior had been schooled to the part. In a while, when the pile of gathered weapons had reached knee height, Valerius ordered the smith to bring his forging block into the open and break the blades.

  Big, broad and red-headed, the smith was the exceptional horseman who had first laid his weapons at Umbricius’ feet. He had seemed the most likely to rebel but even when ordered to break what his ancestors had made, he did not do so. Sabinius, who had once been armourer to the troop and understood the value of what was being destroyed, said, “He would make a good auxiliary, could we persuade him to fight for us.”

  Valerius said, “His grandsons maybe, or those who come after. This one will never be anything but an enemy.”

  Enemy or not, the giant was a methodical man. He broke each blade exactly in half, laying the hilts with their decorated pommels to one side and the blade-tips to the other. It was not fast work. A blade that has seen the wars of five generations, that has been tempered in the blood of a hundred enemy warriors, does not break easily. Some had to be heated before they would break and that took time. The harshness of burning metal caught at the throat and stung the eyes. The auxiliaries coughed and wiped their faces and continued with the work. Only the natives remained dry-eyed.

  The change came at the final roundhouse. A young warrior with startling corn-gold hair knelt and laid his sword at the feet of Gaudinius, the armourer. It was a good blade; the weld-patterns woven in the metal stood out proudly from nights of polishing and the hilt was tightly bound in copper wire, but the pommel was plain, lacking enamel, and, while the warrior wore four gold-banded kill-feathers, the blade itself bore no notches to show it had been used in battle.

  Valerius was already behind Gaudinius when the warrior rocked back on his heels and it was to Valerius that the youth’s eyes rose. They held a defiance, a guarded question and perhaps, in their depths, a plea. Word had passed, then, that Valerius spoke their language. What had not passed with it, because it was not known, was the depth of his loathing for their people and the identity of the man who had spawned it.

  The moment of decision was not without turmoil; Valerius still believed in the laws of honour and maintained an abiding respect for personal dignity. Had the warrior’s hair been other than gold, had his nose been less distinctive, had his eyes not been that particular iron-grey so that one could less readily imagine Caradoc’s smile beneath them and Caradoc’s soul within, what followed might have been different. They were not. The Crow-horse pushed between the man and the crowd.

  “Stop.”

  Gaudinius had stooped to pick up the sword. He froze and then stood, empty-handed.

  Valerius said, “He’s giving you a false weapon. This is not the blade of his ancestors.”

  He said it in Latin, as was required, and then repeated it in Trinovantian. The scuffle had been noted. Already, Longinus was at the pied horse’s shoulder. Others ran to assist, forming a defensive knot. Valerius registered their presence as he would register the arrival of reinforcements in battle—distantly and without taking his attention from the enemy who would kill him. His gaze was locked entirely with that of the young, corn-haired warrior who had just tried to save the blade of his ancestors.

  The youth was a good actor; he could control his face, but not his eyes. Anger followed shock and was followed in turn by a brief, swamping despair. Valerius knew that feeling intimately, the desolation of the soul when what one has most feared becomes reality. He knew also where it led. He was ready long in advance for the moment when the warrior took refuge in action.

  The blade lying flat on the beaten earth was not the one with which the corn-haired man had grown to adulthood, not the one with which he had killed so often in battle, but it was good and he had used it enough to have the feel for its weight and swing. Certainly it was enough to kill a young officer who had lost his battle-sharpness. Gaudinius died where he stood, spraying blood from his opened throat. A Thracian auxiliary would have been next if Longinus had not slammed into the man’s shoulder, hurling him sideways so that the killing blow cut only the flesh of his upper arm.

  The warrior backed against the wall of the roundhouse and was joined by two others and, yes, finally, as had been clear all along, the red-headed smith was one of them. Valerius felt a moment’s exhilaration, tainted with an unexpected sorrow that one with such dignity should choose to die in such a manner, and then the Crow-horse, following a barely articulate thought, rose above the gathering mêlée and drove a smashing forefoot down in a blow not even a giant could resist. The beast relied on his rider to block the weapon that would slice open its guts and Valerius did so, wielding a cavalry sword that was the best Rome could offer and did not come close to the quality of the blades that it met.

  Yet it was enough and the sparks flew high over the thatched roof of the roundhouse and Regulus was yelling, “Don’t kill them all. I want one to hang,” and then, too soon, it was over, with the corn-haired warrior alive and the smith and a woman dead, but not one with da
rk hair and an unruly daughter, for which, surprisingly, Valerius found he was grateful.

  The governor had wanted an example and he was given it. They flogged the corn-haired warrior before they hanged him and it seemed likely he would have died of the one if they had waited too long for the other. A half-troop of auxiliaries took a pole from the wood store and balanced it on two uprights between the harness hut and the granary and raised the man until only the tips of his toes touched the ground. In the time that he took dying, which was not short, Regulus divided the auxiliaries into three groups and sent them out: one to guard the natives, one to collect and burn their shields—now forfeit on the governor’s orders—and the third to search each of the roundhouses and huts for other weapons.

  Sabinius said, “One of the roundhouses belongs to the priest. He’s a citizen.”

  Regulus spat. “And one of his warriors murdered my armourer. If he resists, hang him alongside his man.”

  All pretence of civilization, of dignity and courtesy, was gone. The search was brutal and effective. For each weapon already surrendered, they found spear-heads, battle knives or full blades hidden in the thatch, under the beds, in the small, secret places in the corners.

  Valerius, who knew better than most where to look, took Sabinius and Umbricius and searched the granary and the harness hut where he found a cache of spears bound up in leather hidden beneath a stack of stiff, unworked hides. Out in the open, the auxiliaries broke the hafts and threw them on the fire made of the shields. The spear-heads were added to the bundles of broken blades to be taken away by the auxiliaries when they left.

  One place remained untouched, a small hut on the western edge of the enclosure. Half a dozen hounds bayed from behind the black mare’s hide that blocked the doorway but that was not the reason the men were reluctant to enter. On the lintel, the marks of Nemain and Briga were clear; a crescent moon hung above the sinuous waves of a river, a wren circled above a foaling mare. Newly carved and dyed in red, a she-wolf stalked a skinny goat, a ram and a bull.