Dreaming the Bull

by Manda Scott

  Dubornos had no illusions as to his place in the arrangements. He was an accessory, his death an adornment to the main event, which was almost upon them. He existed in a place beyond fear, hollow and light, like a shell emptied of its snail that becomes later an echo of the wind. On this last morning, it was not the poppy that had achieved this, but time. For the past fifteen days, judicious use of the drug had dulled the stabbing aches of the broken collar bone and the splintered fingers of his left hand achieved by Narcissus’ questioners, but it had not, at any time, dulled his fear or emptied his mind.

  The awakening dawn had achieved what nothing else could. The closer they had come to the day appointed for the emperor’s procession and the death of his two most notorious captives, the greater Dubornos’ fear had been, until this last morning, when he had crested a wave of a terror so overwhelming he had thought that, like a shrew teased by a hound whelp, he might die of sheer fright—and had emerged beyond it, unafraid.

  Time nudged onward. The window was set too high to see the horizon, or any part of the blazing dawn, but the small square of black that had been night faded slowly to grey and then to a hazed blue threaded across with whispers of flesh-coloured cloud. A dovecote woke nearby. Squabs and adults roused with the light, warbling.

  This time tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, it will be over. The doves will call as they have called each morning and we will be gone.

  Dubornos could think this now without the words running dry in his head. It was a fact to be weighed with all the others and it counted for little against the greater fact of his soul’s loss, for his failure, on this last dawn as on all those before it, to connect with his gods. He leaned his head back against the wall and, closing his eyes, searched again in his heart for Briga who was mother of life and death and for her daughter Nemain, the moon, whose light had slid past the window in the night, casting the iron bars in muted silver. When these failed to respond, he cried in his echoing mind for Belin the sun and Manannan of the waves; being male they might find Rome more acceptable. None of them came to him.

  He remembered the spirits of the slain Roman legionaries, wandering lost on the battlefield of the Lame Hind, searching for foreign gods in a country not their own and finding themselves abandoned. He had imagined them weak, deficient in prayer, lacking the true connection that comes from a life lived under the eyes of the gods. Thus was hubris added to his inner list of failings.

  A grey-winged dove fluttered on the window ledge, pecked at the ridged mortar surrounding the bars and flitted away. Dubornos felt Caradoc stir and dared to interrupt his silence.

  “Do you feel the gods?” he asked.

  He thought for a while he had not been heard. Caradoc sat as he had all night with the elbow of his uninjured arm perched on his raised knees and his chin resting on the heel of his hand. The slow lift and fall of his breathing passed through his body to Dubornos’ but gave no indication of his state of mind.

  The patch of light on the wall grew brighter. Outside, at the front gates to the palace, one guard replaced another. Armour chinked and the night’s watchword was exchanged: Britannicus, name of the emperor and of the emperor’s only true son, final proof of conquest.

  More distantly, the earliest of Rome’s risers, or the latest of her retiring drunkards, called to each other across the streets. A handful of men shouted obscenities, their target silent and unknowable. Presently, a woman laughed and was answered by a single man. A dog barked and set off half a dozen more, all higher pitched than any hound of the tribes. The single lamp with which the cell was lit cast fewer shadows of its own.

  Caradoc was not asleep after all. Releasing his fingers, he stretched carefully, taking care for his ruined shoulder, with a rattle of cracking joints at the end. He turned sideways on the pallet, the better to see and be seen. The new light was harsh on his face, highlighting the greyed pallor of hunger and exhaustion. Night had been kinder. His eyes alone burned clearly as they had always done. It was impossible to imagine them lifeless.

  Dubornos caught his breath painfully. He said, “Breaca will continue the war. She has the weight of Mona’s dreamers behind her, and the gods behind them. It’s all that matters.” He could say her name now, at the end, without its damaging either of them.

  Caradoc smiled at the sound of it. “I know. But we are not abandoned.” He turned his face to the window. The colourless light bleached his hair to the white of old age. In profile, he was austere, not worn. The rents in his tunic had been mended and the serpent-spear brooch glistened on his shoulder, a statement of defiance that would continue beyond death. He said, “Do you fear the coming day?”

  “No. Not any more.”

  “Then we have all we could possibly ask for. The opportunity to face death knowingly, to see ourselves tested in the way that we face it. The rest is ours alone. Afterwards, when it’s over, the gods will come.”

  “Are you sure? The Roman dead wander lost in our land. Is there a reason why we should not do the same in theirs?”

  From the doorway, a dry voice said, “They did not have anyone waiting who could restore their souls to the care of their gods. Your dreamers will know how to do it and when. It is a skill that has largely been lost in Rome; the gods here are worshipped for their ability to generate money and power for the living, not their care for the dead.”

  “Xenophon!” Caradoc, delighted, rose in greeting, as he might have done had Maroc entered, or Airmid. “I had not expected to see you again. Your work here is done, is it not? We are alive. We have not died of foul blood or broken bones. We will remain in fair health until the emperor chooses otherwise, at which point your intervention would not be politically wise, or, I fear, effective, however famed the teachers of Cos.”

  It was said lightly, but not taken so. The emperor’s physician was not a man to deal in trivia. He drew bony fingers down his long, bony nose. “Many things are taught on Cos,” he said. “Not all of them are to do with preserving life.”

  He stepped over the threshold into the room, making the cramped space tighter still. They had come to know the man well, this last half-month. Since the audience with the emperor, they had been his main charge, after Claudius, Britannicus and the Empress Agrippina. He had dosed them with poppy and infusions of leaf and bark until, if the broken bones and torn joints had not mended completely, at least the bruising around them had lessened and the skin healed. They had come to welcome the sight of his lean, stooped frame in the doorway, as much for his company and the sharpness of his conversation as for the medications he brought and the orders he gave that they be permitted use of the baths and provided with clean clothing. When a junior officer of the horse- guards had argued this last, he had turned on him the weight of twenty years’ study and said starkly, “You can’t crucify a man if he’s died of blood poisoning beforehand. Did you want to take his place in the procession?” There had been no further objections.

  The frequency of his visits had long ago numbed the horse-guards to his presence. If they had searched him at all this morning, they had done so with their eyes closed. He bore two small flasks, one in either hand, and a full pouch hung from his belt. Leaning the flasks against the edge of the pallet, he sat down.

  “Healing is not always about saving life. Every physician knows that there are times when it is better that the soul be allowed to depart cleanly. To learn the rites of that passage, we of Cos travel to Mona if we can, or listen to those who have learned there. I have sat at the feet of dreamers older than any now alive and learned only enough to be certain that it would take me another lifetime to learn those things they know and I do not.” He pressed the bridge of his nose. “My memory is not what it was and much of the teaching is lost, but I remember enough to send you freely to the river when the time is come. Before that, we have those things I have learned from Rome. What will happen today is not an uncommon event. There are as many ways to die as there are men to hammer nails into flesh. Some are faster than others.”
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br />   He looked up at the window, frowning. Footsteps trod the paving outside; a heavy, masculine step, lame in one leg. When they had passed beyond earshot, he said, “I have spoken to the centurion of the Praetorians who has charge of … the necessary details. He fought against you in the invasion battle and served at Camulodunum after that. He is a soldier and respects his enemies. He cannot go against Claudius’ orders, but he has some discretion as to their implementation. You will not be stripped but left in full barbarian battle dress, at least as Rome perceives it. I would advise you not to refuse. It may not in any way resemble what you would actually wear in battle but I doubt they’ll agree to hang you wearing a shirt of stolen cavalry mail. Whatever, it is the weight that counts. The heavier you are, the faster the death.”

  He was a doctor, and could say such things without rancour or affected delicacy; in his presence, two days of drawn-out dying were reduced to a problem of engineering.

  In this spirit, Dubornos said, “If we’re that heavy, the nails will tear out.”

  “If they do, it will be the first time. The Praetorians have had more practice in this than any of us would care to imagine. They use squares of pinewood as washers to spread the weight and drive the nails between the bones of the forearm. You can trust that they will be secure.”

  “If death comes faster, then the pain will be greater.”

  “No. That is, potentially yes, which is why I have also brought you this…”

  The pouch he freed from his belt was of old, weathered doeskin with a drawstring of plaited linen, dyed a deep blood red. Stilted, side-on figures painted in blue and yellow ink processed across it. Some were recognizably human, most were not. “Alexandrian,” said Xenophon. He prised the neck open as he might the mouth of a patient. “The pharaohs, too, knew what it was to lose their way home and have to find it again in the dark.” He drew out two twists of vine leaf, each tied with the same red linen thread as formed the drawstring. Opened, they contained a fine-ground powder, as much as would fit in the hollow of a cupped palm.

  He held one out with great care, away from the draught of his breathing. “Each of these contains a mix of belladonna, poppy and aconitum. The one weakens the heart, the second, as you know, numbs mind and body to pain and the third brings slow paralysis to the legs. If you cannot take weight on your legs, the pressure on the arms and so the heart is greater and, with the belladonna, death comes more swiftly. The poppy, if dosed right, befuddles the soul, carrying it out of the body. There is not enough of any to cause outright death—I cannot do that unless I wish to join you in death and my admiration for your minds and hearts does not extend that far—but it is the closest I can reach. The poppy will take effect soon. The others will be slower, but you will be in the company of your gods by nightfall, I swear it.”

  It was a gift beyond price—and not one they could accept in good conscience. Dubornos felt his mouth grow dry. “Xenophon, this is too much. We’re in your debt for your care of us this past half-month. You must not put yourself in this danger.”

  The old man laid his treasures on the pallet and leaned back on a wall, his arms folded across his chest.

  “The danger is in my being here. If you take this before they come for you and the vine leaves are secreted under the pallets, away from searching eyes, it will not be any greater. Take it with my blessing. The flasks contain Batavian ale, which I am assured is to barbarian taste. If you mix the one with the other, the taste will not be any worse than the ale alone.”

  His lips were pressed tight, and his eyes had narrowed to slits, as if staring into the sun. A lesser man might have been thought to weep.

  Dubornos took the offered flask. “Thank you,” he said. “In that case, we accept.” He turned, his heart light, offering peace and oblivion to a man he had come to admire above all others. “Caradoc?”

  Caradoc sat again on the pallet. The deepening light from the window made spun gold of his hair. His features were still, carved in marble and very white. He stared at the open vine leaf as a man might stare at a poised snake, awaiting the strike. His breathing was shallow, an afterthought to the struggle within. Presently, lifting his gaze from the fistful of powder, he said to Xenophon, “Can the poppy be taken out of the mix?”

  “Hardly. I ground them together myself. Even the monkey servants of Anubis who can discriminate the sands of the desert couldn’t separate them now.”

  “Then, no. Thank you, but no. Dubornos should take it—must take it—but I can’t.”

  “Really?” Xenophon studied this new phenomenon. His tears, if they had been real, were gone. “You have a need to experience such extremes of pain? I had not thought you afflicted with Roman vices.”

  Caradoc laughed, a quick bark drawn from somewhere beyond himself. “No, assuredly not. It would take longer than a month, I think, to acquire that one.”

  “Then why not the poppy?”

  “Because this is not over yet. I need, at the very least, to have a clear mind and to be seen to do so. If I take poppy, I will fail in that.”

  “Oh, my dear man.” Xenophon folded his long limbs and sat, all straight lines and angles, like a cricket, on the pallet that had been Dubornos’. In the days they had known him, he had been brisk and dry and they had thought him a rationalist to the core. Here and now, in the tone of his voice and the unashamed, undeniable tears that did, indeed, fill the corners of his eyes, they saw the depth of his care.

  Leaning over, he took one of Caradoc’s hands in both of his own. “My friend, you have more courage than any man I have ever met, but you have to learn, even this late, when to accept that you have lost.”

  With his chin, he gestured to the wall above where sunlight slashed citron across the plaster. “They will come for you before the sun reaches the far edge of your window. You have that much time to drink and no longer. I cannot reach the Praetorian centurion in time now to change his plan. He will carry out his side of our agreement and that is not something I would wish on any man. Please, I urge you, for your own sake and that of your friends, take what is offered.”

  “No.” It was easier to say it a second time. They could both see that.

  “Why?”

  “Because even this late, when I have lost—and I do know that—the children and Cwmfen are still my responsibility. We have not yet received word from Mona guaranteeing the emperor’s life. Until we do, their lives depend on my keeping my bargain with Claudius, clearly and openly. I have sworn that I will do nothing to impede his plans for today. What you are suggesting steps beyond my oath, in spirit if not in word.”

  “You think Claudius will keep his side of any pact with such exactitude?”

  “I don’t know, but if he believes he has been deprived of his just vengeance, he certainly won’t. I will not give him that excuse.”

  On battlefields, in the preparation for war, in nine years of constant armed resistance, Dubornos had watched the breadth and scope of Caradoc’s will. Never before had he seen the sheer immovable strength of it so plainly displayed. He stared at the twin flasks and the mouthful of powder that would have changed the manner of his dying.

  By this time tomorrow, or maybe the next day, it will be over.

  More likely tomorrow, without the powder, unless the centurion was less than Xenophon believed him to be, but the space between would be worse than he had ever imagined. With a regret as profound as any he had known, Dubornos pinched the vine leaves together again, tying the linen thread at their necks, and set them on the old man’s knees.

  The physician’s gaze stitched through his own. Xenophon said, “Claudius has no pact with you.”

  “No. Mine is with myself alone. And Caradoc.”

  Caradoc flinched. Colour flooded his cheeks. “Dubornos, you don’t—”

  “Yes, I do. And you have no power to stop me. Don’t try.”

  The strength of his own conviction surprised him. All the dishonours of his life, small and large, linked together to point him to this: one
final act of true worth. He smiled broadly and it was not a sham. “I, too, have pledged my life to the care of the children,” he said.

  Xenophon rose, his nostrils pinched tight. “You’re both mad—and that is a professional opinion as well as a personal one. I have no gods but I will pray to yours for a swift passing.”

  Caradoc offered his hand to be shaken, Roman fashion. “We thank you sincerely for all you have done. The risk you have taken today is no less because we can’t accept. If we had a way to repay you, we would do it.”

  The old man hesitated. “Then, for my sake, would you accept a visitor?”

  Dubornos felt the hairs rise on his neck. The gods may have abandoned him, but he had not lost his ability to read a man’s intent. In panic, he said, “Xenophon, no! Not now. Have you lost all humanity?”

  “Not at all,” said a voice he had heard only in dreams for half his lifetime. “He thinks we will make a tearful reconciliation. He knows us all that poorly. It’s a failing of Greek physicians; they believe they can alter the fates of other men and that they have the right to attempt it.”

  The morning paused in its progress. In the free world beyond the window, a dove bathed in a fountain. Water sputtered finely on the outer wall of the cell.

  Caradoc turned with exceptional slowness. The cell was not built for four. Julius Valerius, decurion of the first troop, First Thracian Cavalry and, next to Scapula, the most reviled officer of the invading army, stood just beyond the threshold. He wore full dress armour, his mail polished to silver fish-scales, his cloak the black of the Thracians. His sword and belt were of cavalry style, embossed with images of the empire’s heroes. No man, seeing him thus, would have deemed him other than Roman. Only the small insignia of the bull at his shoulder, drawn in the way of the ancestors in ox-blood red on a grey background, marked him as something apart; that, and the searching black eyes, which mirrored ones they had seen daily for nine years on Mona.