Dreaming the Bull

by Manda Scott

  It may not have been widely known that the Quinta Gallorum took the Capricorn as its emblem, nor the Prima Thracum Aries, but anyone who had watched the governor’s arrival closely and seen the display of standards could have deduced it. Very few outside the legions should have known the significance of the bull, but the troops standing outside the hut knew exactly what it meant, both for themselves and for the ones who had cut and painted the image. Half a dozen gathered a spear’s length from the doorway, making the sign to ward off evil. None would go inside.

  Valerius stood closer, listening to the hounds within. His brand ached. Sabinius joined him. He was braver than most. “We should take some of the women and make them go in ahead of us,” he said.

  “No. It is safer if we go in alone.”

  Sabinius stared at him. “We?”

  Valerius smiled, a thing he had not done in days. “No, just me. Bring me a lit torch and then wait at the fires. If I don’t come out soon, burn the place without coming in. Whatever’s inside will be destroyed in the flames.”

  “Including you.”

  “Yes. You can come in and look for me if you want but I wouldn’t advise it. No-one will blame you if you don’t.”

  Sometime in the day he had remembered the words of Trinovantian that were used to calm hounds. He spoke them now. By the time Sabinius returned with the torch, the beasts within were almost silent. In the steading was an equal hush. Feeling the eyes of every woman in the tribe burn into his back, Valerius pushed back the mare’s hide and entered.

  It was not a big hut. The hounds were tethered on either side of the door. They strained against their collars, whining hoarsely, choking themselves in their need to reach him. Speaking softly, he loosed them one by one, ruffling his hands through the coarse hair of their necks, and they gathered about him, testing the smells of blood, hate and fear. They were bigger than any hound of the legions and had been kept fit. If the day had gone differently, he might have been able to trade for one. Now, the natives would cut the throat of any hound he asked for rather than let him take it.

  “Go now.” He said it in their own tongue, opening the door-flap, and the beasts spilled out in a joyful rush, not knowing that the world to which they returned had changed beyond all recognition.

  With the hounds gone, the place seemed bigger. The torch burned feebly, as if lacking air. Within moments, it went out. Valerius could have left the flap open for more light but did not. A fire was lit on the western wall. Thin smoke rose to the roof and passed out through a baffled hole. The flame gave light enough. Searching along the junction of wall and floor near the door, he found a knife honed to razor sharpness and put it to one side. Instinct, and three nights’ dreams, told him there was more than that to be found.

  “You should ask my leave, dreamer, before you take my blade.”

  He nearly killed her. His sword sliced through smoke and a brief, curling flame and stopped only because his mind caught up with his body and a single word of what he had just heard made no sense. Keeping his guard, he relit the torch to give himself more light and saw, hunched on the far side of the fire in the darkest corner, a woman older than any he had seen outside in the steading. Her face was the creased bark of the oldest oak, her hair had thinned almost to baldness, leaving white strands trailing from a pink scalp. Her eyes were oddly clear where he would have expected cloudedness. She was a true grandmother and there had been none like her amongst the gathered crowd. He should have noticed that and had not. He cursed his inattention.

  The old woman watched him with the sharp regard of a hunting bird, a thrush seeking beetles in dung. Unbelievably, she smiled. “Welcome, dreamer. I have waited since dawn. You are not in the hurry I had thought.”

  That word again, and a tone that came straight from his childhood. Your mark could have been the horse. Or the hare …The skin crept on Valerius’ neck. “I am not a dreamer,” he said.

  “Are you not, so? Your mother would be sad to hear it.”

  “My mother?” The sword quivered in his hand, a thing alive seeking blood. With effort he restrained it. “My mother is dead.”

  “As is her son in soul, it seems, if not in body.” The old woman grinned at his discomfort. “Why are you here?”

  “To gather weapons. Rome would have peace. This is a means to achieve it.”

  “If by peace you mean subjugation, yes.” She cocked her head. “So, if you will not answer clearly, I will ask it another way. Why do you gather weapons for Rome who was born to fight against it?”

  He swayed on his feet. In the darkness was the echo of the god’s silence of the wine-cellar crypt. In a voice below the threshold of hearing, his mother spoke the litany of his nightmares. You are forsaken. The gods condemn you to life.

  Hoarsely, he said, “I have no choice.”

  “Ha! There speaks a man of the bull.” She was laying fine, dry twigs on the fire. Small flames danced in the rolling shadows. Smoke rose to Valerius’ nostrils. An old, forgotten part of him coded its separate strands: hawthorn, rowan, yew. He sneezed on something harsher than any of those and was confused until it came again and he recognized the bitterness of singed hair. No grandmother burned animal hair without evoking the strength it offered.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “See for yourself.”

  She passed him a handful of twigs from the pile at her side. He used its light to seek out those bound with hair. Unwinding one, he found what he already knew would be there: curled hairs in red and white taken from the poll of a red and white patched bull. He dropped them all on the fire. Thick smoke fanned up to fill his head. In the density of it, he heard many women’s voices, laughing, and the bellow of a bullock at castration. The bones of his skeleton crept from his flesh. He tasted death and a fear that battle had never brought him. Again, more desperately, he said, “I have no choice. I had none in the time of battles and I have none now.”

  “You are wrong. There is always choice and no oath is binding but we make it so.” Her voice was clear and louder than the rushing in his ears. She waved her hands through the dense air. “See, I offer another choice clearly now. Turn round. There is a cloak behind you. Take it and put it on.”

  He had not seen the cloak. The folds hung softly, of finest wool. Lifting it towards the firelight, he found it was blue, the colour of the sky after rain, with a border worked in russet. His sister had worn a cloak of exactly that colour the last time he had fought at her side. She wore the grey of Mona now, and despised him. The gorge rose in his throat. In his hollow heart, his mother said a second time, You are forsaken.

  With shaking hands, he returned the cloak to its peg. Like a child, he said, “I can’t wear this. If I walked out with it on, they would hang me.”

  The grandmother mocked him. “There are other choices, dreamer. You can wear it openly or in your heart. Either way you would find the welcome you crave.”

  “I crave nothing.”

  “Liar.” She was standing now, a small thing, barely up to the god’s brand on his chest. Her voice carried the power of centuries. No man could withstand it. “All your life you have craved but one thing—a true belonging to your people and your gods. I offer it now, a gift freely given. Leave here now, knowing it possible, or know yourself by your own hand for ever cursed.”

  “No.”

  The one thing the god had taught him was how not to hear the voice of deity. In the darkness of the crypt, that voice had not been directed solely at him. Here, in the bitter blackness of a place his mere presence defiled, he was the single point on which it focused, resounding in his soul. The brand on his chest burned as if new, holding him captive in his body. His mother’s voice was silent, withdrawing even that support. He put his hands over his ears and blocked out the gods, the crackle of the fire, the voice of an old woman, weaving him to a death beyond which was only desolation.

  “No.” It came the second time through tight teeth, robbed of conviction. The bull-smoke wreathed h
is head, holding him as ivy holds oak. Tendrils invaded his mind, eating at his sense of self. The old woman loomed over him, crooning in the tones of an elder grandmother, of the elder grandmother. “Take it, child. It is your birthright. The man who made it was a dreamer before he was a warrior. It will sing for you.” She was not speaking only of the cloak. Something greater than bull-hair burned on the fire.

  “No!”

  In her desperation, in her flagrant use of power, was the strength he needed. Thrusting her away, he kicked the fire apart, scattering hair and hide and burning embers across the floor until the smoke billowed thick and clean. It caught straw and flared up. By the new light he saw that, where the heart of the fire had been, the earth was not packed flat, but friable, as if newly dug.

  He looked up at the grandmother, his eyes squeezed against the smoke. Suspicion filled him where before had been only resistance. “What are you protecting?”

  “Nothing of yours.”

  “Of course not. None of this is mine, is it? None of it has been about me.” The truth, so obvious once revealed, destroyed the last shreds of his pride. “I should have known you would only call on your gods to protect your own, not to seduce an enemy.” Resentment needled him into action where fear had not. He used her skinning knife to push aside more of the fire. The earth beneath was not as newly turned as he might have thought, but lines clearly showed where a hole had been dug. If he had to guess, he would have said it had been done four years before, at the time of the invasion, when an emperor came to Cunobelin’s dun and was welcomed by the treachery of an elder—a man who might have betrayed his gods and his people but who would never enter this one place from which he had always been forbidden. Valerius, who believed he had lost the last of his scruples, stabbed into the centre of the hearth and heard the knife hit iron.

  “Leave it! What harm it has done you is past. Leave it and go!”

  The old woman was clawing at his arm, her fingers bird-boned to go with her bright, sharp eyes. He grasped both of her wrists in one hand and held her at arm’s length. With his other hand, he began to unearth the linen-wrapped blade the fire had hidden. It was longer and broader than any that had yet been broken on the smith’s anvil. When he grasped the hilt, the power of it raked like lightning up his arm, close to the threshold of bearing. The pain was cleansing, as the brand had been.

  Speaking through it, Valerius said, “You offered me a choice that was no choice. My path was set long ago and not one step of it has been of my choosing. I take now what life I can and make the best of it, the very best. If there is a curse, then it came in childhood at Caradoc’s hand. I cannot escape it.” It hurt even to speak the man’s name aloud. He gave it as an offering to the dark and did not know why he did so.

  She said, “It was not Caradoc branded you or killed your soul-friend. Was the brother’s death not vengeance enough?”

  One other living man in all the world knew how Caradoc’s brother had died and he was not of the tribes. Swallowing, Valerius said, “Amminios did not pretend friendship and then betray it.”

  Scathing, she said, “And so you take vengeance against those whom you do not know, in order better to attack the one whom you can never reach?”

  The blade lay across his knees, liquid in the firelight. The hilt was bronze, of the oldest design, and the pommel bore the mark of the sun hound, carved in the time of his great-grandfather. In a wash of recognition that assuaged all the hurt, he knew exactly whose blade it was and why they had valued it so highly, risking everything on its protection. Joy, or something close to it, enwreathed him. His blood ran thin in his veins, leaping at his temples. He said, “I take no vengeance. I carry out the orders of those who command me. That is enough.”

  “Then let it be enough. You are cursed, Julius Valerius, creature of the bull-slayer, servant of Rome, cursed in the names of the gods you have forsaken to live barren and empty, to know neither true fear, nor love, neither joy nor human companionship, but only the dull reflection of these; to kill without care, to hold the dying without grief, to find no satisfaction in the pure moments of your hate, to live only to carry out the orders of those who command you and to dream at night of what you have lost. The gods know you deserve it. They alone will know if it can end.”

  She was shrill in her anger, old-woman-voiced, no longer the mouthpiece of the gods, but Valerius held the blade of Cassivellaunos, ancestor to Cunobelin, forerunner in lineage and in heart to the man he most hated of all those still living. He could have asked for no greater gift. The joy had run out of him, leaving him clear as a blown reed.

  He cocked his head as the grandmother had done. “Do you wish to die by this blade, or another?” he asked.

  She spat at him. Gobbets of phlegm sat proud on his cheeks. At his feet, embers of the swept fire smoked in the straw. Flames devoured it.

  Valerius had control of himself now, had no need of further vengeance. Reasonably, he said, “If you walk out, they will hang you for fear of who you are and what you might do. If I leave you in here, they will let this place burn and you will die by the fire. If either of those is your choice, I will honour it. I am offering you a cleaner death.”

  “Fool.” She whispered now. He could barely see her through the smoke. “Do you as you wish. I am already dead.”

  It was not true, although he made it so, using the blade of Cassivellaunos, who had once surrendered to Caesar, laying another man’s blade at his feet. The grandmother died without resistance or sound. He laid her on her left side on a bed of straw with her head towards the west. “Go to your gods. Tell them I serve another now and am content.” He believed it. He had rarely felt so calm. The flames were eating her feet when he left.

  Outside, it had begun to snow again, the gift of one god or the other to cover the destruction. The body of the gold-haired warrior had been cut down and laid on the pile of the burning shields; fragments of greasy smoke fluttered up past falling flakes. A warrior among the women saw the man leave the hut and what he carried and raised a cry that was keener and carried more pain than the ululation for the dead. In a cacophony of women’s voices, Valerius walked forward and offered the blade to Regulus.

  “This belonged to Cassivellaunos, ancestor to Caradoc, who leads the uprising in the west. They have kept this blade in the hope that the last living son of Cunobelin will return and lead them to freedom. Longinus Sdapeze is both armourer and master of horse for his troop. His father was a smith. He will be able to break it. I thought you might like to see it happen.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The snow continued, fitfully. beneath its shroud, the disarming of the tribes progressed. Troops rode out fresh each morning and returned each evening smoke-stained and bloody. Word of the events of that first day spread amongst the natives and the men alike and all pretence at courtesy vanished. Roundhouses were stripped and searched. Within three days, the second of the women’s places had burned to the ground and the hidden weapons had been raked from the ashes as puddles of waxen iron.

  Soon, the killings began. In one steading, where armed warriors had been waiting for the auxiliaries and killed three before the troops retreated and called in aid, every adult male was hanged. The women were spared; to have hanged them would have been to acknowledge their status as warriors and if Scapula was not ready to do that, then neither were his subordinates. News of the savagery of the reprisals spread but did not stop others from rebelling. In places where fear constrained the adults, the children staged their own revolts, hurling rocks and sticks at the auxiliaries. Always it was the youths near to their warrior’s tests who broke first, those who had grown in a free land, who had dreamed from infanthood of becoming heroes and wielding the blades of their ancestors and could not bear to watch both hopes and blades destroyed. Orders had been given that children were not to be harmed, but the line was fine and both sides knew that it was only a matter of time.

  In the middle of the month, after a fifth trooper had died to a grief-stricken warr
ior, Scapula ordered that the executed natives should be denied their burial rites and their bodies hung instead outside the steadings as a warning. Neither he nor any of the officers specified the height at which they should be suspended and the auxiliaries, acting in haste, did not hoist them high, so that, by the old moon, wolves from the forest had migrated into the pastures, seeking easy meat. Soon, places which had been safe became unsafe and four men of every troop spent each night protecting the horse paddocks where the remounts grazed. The troops grew impatient and edgy. Roundhouses began to burn as well as the women’s places. Smoke rose to the sullen sky and gathered there. Breathing became a chore.

  Valerius’ rank exempted him from night watch on the paddocks but it did not free him from responsibility, nor smooth his sleep. On his return from the raid on Heffydd’s farmstead, with the grandmother’s curse loud in his ears, he had gone alone to the consecrated cellar beneath the centurion’s house in Camulodunum and had spent the hours of darkness alone in prayer. It had not been a quiet night and at no time had he felt the true breath of the god, but he had believed afterwards that he had been heard. At the very least, Mithras kept the many and multiplying dead from invading Valerius’ dreams. Mithras’ powers did not extend, apparently, to keeping at bay the recurring faces of the living: of a dark-haired girl with a rock in her hand; of her mother, pulling her back; of the endless storming sea of women staring their accusations and their hatred.

  Nor could it remove the constant flicker in his arm, as of lightning, that had come from Cassivellaunos’ sword. The grandmother had been right in that much: the blade had sung to him and what was left of his soul sang back its regret that the song had been broken and would never return. Each night, lying awake, he remembered the grandmother’s curse and did not know if he should welcome the death-within-life that it promised or fight against it. Either way, by the end of the month, when the killing was at its height, he was too short on sleep to care.