Dreaming the Serpent-Spear

by Manda Scott

  Valerius had not been one of those, and Cunomar’s growth to adulthood had been the first of several surprises that had greeted his return to the Eceni.

  The youth who had faced him in the meetings of the past month, who had returned the night before to the council circle reeking of smoke and victory, was not the child he had so pitied on a beachhead in Gaul. The voice that had spoken against him until dawn was no longer strident with the arrogance of youth, but the clear product of Mona’s training, incised with the clarity of rhetoric. More than that, somewhere in the harsh mountains and caves of the Caledonii, the elders of the she-bear had taught Cunomar patience and a quiet, prideful dignity that had given his words a weight beyond his years.

  He stood now beside his mother in front of five thousand warriors, many of them older by a decade, and that same dignity let him bear the disfigurement of his wounds as if they were honour scars; his missing ear flowered in its ugliness at the side of his head and his back was a mess of part-healed wounds that would never knit cleanly and even so, there was not one amongst those watching who did not either wish him as a son or desire him as a lover.

  “…we have languished twenty years under Roman rule, forbidden to train our warriors in the arts of battle. Thus we must find ways to confront them that allow the youths amongst us to learn from the battle-hardened. Above all, we must not, yet, face the legions in a full-pitched battle. To give them such an advantage would be to wreak our own destruction and we…”

  Valerius closed his eyes and gave thanks to both his gods. That had been the hardest part of the night: to sit in the presence of Cunomar and his smoke-filled victory and say over and over, “The Ninth are behind us, Camulodunum in front. We cannot allow them to come at us from two sides and we cannot, we must not attempt to take them on in full battle. We are not yet fit. We never will be.”

  Quietly, Cunomar had said, “We are nearly five thousand, the strength of a legion, and growing daily. Soon we will outnumber them.”

  “And we could be ten thousand, or twenty, and we would still lose. We are not the strength of a legion, we are five thousand poorly armed, untrained warriors fighting on tales of past glory. This is what Rome does best. This is what the legions are for; they train for it from the first day of their recruitment until the last day before they retire; to stand in line with their shields locked and their gladii in the fine gaps between and walk through and past and over the bodies of those foolish enough to think they can break a Roman shield wall. Even when they have civil war, their generals do everything they can to avoid setting one legion against another. To attack them with anything less is suicide. While I live, I will not see it happen.”

  Valerius had been tired, still caught in the feeling of the gods’ pool, or he would not have said that last. Cunomar had not challenged him on it, or offered combat to the death, only stared impassively from the far side of the fire, and touched a single finger to his missing ear. Even if Graine had not spoken of it earlier, Valerius would have known him in that moment as an enemy, and would have regretted it as deeply.

  There was no time, then, to remake and mend a relationship gone sour, and no time either, now, before the war host, to question the wisdom of the Boudica as she stretched out her other arm saying, “…such a thing can only be done by my brother, Valerius, who was once Bán, son to Luain mac Calma, Elder of Mona, who sent him back to us to be our aid against Rome.”

  He had no choice but to go to her side, to stand there with his Roman helmet on his arm and his Roman chain mail bright in the sun and let the gathered warriors make what they would of the contrast between the Boudica’s son in all the naked glory of his wounding and her once-enemy brother who, almost alone of her council, was whole and unharmed by Rome’s assaults.

  Nobody threw a spear at him; that much was good. A great many turned openly to spit against the wind and more made the sign against evil. He might have stepped back, but that Cygfa came uninvited to his side, and the mood of the host changed again at the sight of her; even more than the Boudica’s son, the Boudica’s elder daughter was known to them all, and what had been done to her.

  She smiled at him with evident warmth, as if he were a trusted friend, which was an entirely new experience. Through it, she said, “Do as I do,” and began to unfasten her belt.

  Caught, he did so, and hid his surprise when, in a gesture as laden with meaning as any that morning, Cygfa swept off her sword and handed it to him, exchanging her weapon for his.

  The crowd approved that, if not rapturously, then at least without the frigid mistrust of before.

  It was enough. They stepped apart and Cunomar was there, this time, to find a graceful way to help his mother dismount.

  Left alone with Cygfa and the eyes of the host elsewhere, Valerius said, “Why did you do that? You have as much reason to loathe me as Cunomar does.”

  “But I don’t want to lead the war host. And I do want it to be led by someone who understands what it is we face. I love my brother, and respect him as a warrior, but he is not yet fit to lead us to victory against the legions.”

  Valerius said, “Breaca will do that.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Cygfa was daughter to Caradoc, and bore his stamp far more than Cunomar. Her hair was the colour of the noon-sky sun and her eyes the grey of new iron. Nothing was hidden in them. She was in pain and had been and would continue to be; and it was overridden entirely by the strength of her hate.

  She said, “I saw you fight on the beachhead in Gaul,” as if that answered more than it asked.

  Gaul: the land where her father lived in exile; the land from which Valerius had fled, taking Caradoc’s place on the boat.

  He said, “I think Gaul is best forgotten.”

  “Which is why it never will be.” Her gaze was not kind. “You were half drunk and rotten to the core with self-hate. Half the time you were riding a horse you had never seen before and you had a child clinging on to your back and you still fought as if the gods inspired your blade. Breaca fights like that, when she has the heart for it. My father might have done once, before the emperor’s inquisitors broke him. I have never seen it in anybody else. They say you are a dreamer, given to Nemain, but I think you are a warrior first and that you were born for this. You have lived with the legions and know them as no-one else does, and now you are here, bringing all of that knowledge to us that we may use it against them.”

  “You trust me not to betray you,” he said, in wonder. “There are very few others amongst the war host who do.”

  “I have seen the lengths to which you will go to keep an oath. That, too, was a part of Gaul.”

  Her horse was there, the bay colt he had begun to help her train. She mounted it neatly and swung it round to face him.

  “If we did not need you so very badly, I might hate you, but Rome takes up all of my hating. I will do what I must, support whom I must, to rid my land of that evil. Afterwards, maybe, I can hate you. If I am alive to do the hating. If you are alive to take it.”

  She gave the salute of the warrior so that all watching could see it and spun her horse away from him. Valerius watched the place where she had been for a long time before he broke the seal on the messenger’s satchel and read the message from Camulodunum to the legate of the IXth legion. Presently, when no-one came to disturb him, he searched for and found the spare vellum and ink that was always kept in a messenger’s pouch, knelt on a patch of clean turf and began to write.

  The messenger lay at the edge of the path, stripped naked now, as the gods had made him. Cunomar and a girl warrior of his she-bear strapped stones to his elbows, knees and belly and lifted him up and swung him sideways. The marsh took his body, sucking it down to a cold and quiet rest.

  Valerius listened for help in the soft sounds of the death-wash and offered the necessary prayers to both his gods, that carried in the wake of the dead, and might be more easily heard.

  A horse shifted restively behind him. A shadow crossed his path. Wi
thout turning he said to his sister, “That was well done. They’re different when you’re with them. If I don’t return—”

  “You said there was no risk.” There was a thread of fear in the bluntness of that.

  He stilled the flutterings in his own belly. For Breaca, if for no-one else, he could be confident. “There has to be some risk or your warriors will not believe I have offered my life in their cause. But I don’t intend to die, I swear it; in you, in this war, I have found a reason to live that outweighs everything. The Ninth legion must be brought south by a route that leaves it vulnerable. That won’t happen unless they are led into it by someone they trust.”

  “And if they don’t trust you? If they recognize you and crucify you for twice-treachery? What then?”

  She had asked the same, with the same urgency, in the counsels of the night. The answer was no more easily found now than then. Valerius touched the crook of his thumb to the brand on his sternum that was his first link to the bull-god. He felt no warning there, nor any intimations of death approaching unseen. The gods did not always show such things, but there was a measure of expectation which needed him to act with courage to sway the order of things.

  To Breaca, quite reasonably, he said, “You’ve just finished explaining to the war host how much honour this brings on your family. They’d tie me to a tree and throw spears at me for cowardice if I backed out now. For that alone, I can’t. And I truly do think I am safe. Petillius Cerialis is legate of the Ninth and he has been in Britannia less than a year; he knows nothing of a decurion who once served in the Thracian cavalry. The men he leads have been stationed north of here since the invasion, keeping watch equally on the Eceni and on the northern tribes; they don’t know any more than he does of the politics of Camulodunum and the west. I am nothing to them, just a messenger.”

  He touched the vellum that lay drying on his knee. “The message says what we need it to say. I’ve copied the best flourishes of the original. Listen—”

  Valerius smoothed out the perfect, unblemished kidskin, best of the Emperor’s office, and read, “From Titus Aquilla, primus pilus of the Twentieth legion, in the governor’s absence acting commander of the colony of Camulodunum, site of the temple to the deified Claudius, site of our unblemished victory over the native Trinovantes—et cetera et cetera. A man promoted above his abilities and certain of it, clearly—to Quintus Petillius Cerialis Caesius Rufus, legate, the Ninth legion. Greetings.

  “War is upon us. A watchtower is burning even as I write, the men within it dead and defiled. The emperor’s procurator of taxes is missing and our veterans fear for his life. The Eceni king is dead, and his people remember who they were in the times before we blessed them with peace. We are not in a position to remind them of their folly. Camulodunum is stripped of its defences and its men. I have less than one century of acting legionaries, and three thousand veterans whose courage is beyond reproach but who are no longer young men, fit for sustained battle. If it please you to remember the emperor’s justice, we will offer whatever aid we can.”

  With cautious optimism, Valerius said, “The legate of the Ninth is known across the empire for his impetuosity. Men say he prays daily for the chance to march his men into battle. He’ll weep tears of raw frankincense when he reads this. He’ll offer his worldly goods to the gods as a mark of his gratitude. He’ll have the Ninth legion at muster and marching down the ancestors’ Stone Way before they have time to kiss goodbye to their lovers. All we have to do is contrive some visible injuries so that I look as if I’ve fought for my life. Could you bring yourself to hit me, do you think?”

  CHAPTER 5

  It was raining, and the mule was stuck.

  The beast was young and had never been in a pack train before. Broken to harness at the end of autumn, it had spent the winter in the store paddocks at Camulodunum, knee deep in mud and snow, and fed on musty hay, with no exercise to keep it fit.

  The recruits who drove it were every bit as raw and as green and they, too, were on their first campaign. They had no real experience of how to load the packs, and the mule was lame on one hind leg and had open sores along its back where a pad had been badly placed.

  To Titus Aelius Ursus, decurion of the second troop, the Fifth Gaulish cavalry wing, assigned to care of the men and their mules for the entirety of their month-long journey west to join the governor’s campaign against Mona, all of these things were regrettable, but inevitable. None of them explained why the beast had planted its feet on the first planks of the bridge and was refusing to move.

  “Hit the bloody thing. What are you waiting for?”

  Ursus shouted it from half a cohort away, urging his horse past the muttering mass of men spreading out along the riverbank. They were glad of the rest, and had broken formation, dropping their packs without orders. The indiscipline of it was terrifying; they were young and had been recruited straight from the back streets of Rome, which was a relatively safe place to live, and had trained in the east of Britannia, which was almost as safe, and had no notion of what it was to march through land held by unconquered tribes, where the bones of legionary dead lay thick as pebbles among the heather.

  A battle-served centurion stood on the far side of the river, marshalling the forty men who had already crossed. Tardily, he put his hand to his mouth and called back to the rest of his century; “Get back in formation! I will personally flog any man who steps out of line!”

  Men shuffled and cursed and picked up their packs and were no more ready to meet the enemy than they had been before.

  Ursus was tired and saddle sore and thick-headed from lack of wine. He had ridden for thirteen days in the wind and pissing rain, with poor food and his bedding rolls damp through the night and not able to drink into warmth and forgetting because his bastard of a prefect had forbidden them to touch the wine supplies from the moment they rode out of the winter quarters. He wanted either to be in battle or out of it; safe in Camulodunum or committed to the western wars, not babysitting a cohort of helpless, hopeless children, half of whom would be dead by the month’s end.

  He reached the bridge and let fly at the nearest of them. “If you don’t get that bloody beast moving, I’ll have you carrying its pack for the rest of the journey west.”

  The pink-faced boy who should have been across the bridge and halfway into the valley beyond raised the rod in his hand, and the mule flinched and set its ears back and brayed as it had been doing for far too long, and Ursus finally came close enough to see the welts on its back and haunches where it had been hit often and hard, and so to recognize that hitting it more was not going to make any difference.

  Cursing, he threw himself from his horse. “Leave it. There’s no point.” A junior officer stood close by, old enough at least to be shaving. To him, Ursus said, “Has it done this before?”

  “Never. We’ve never had any trouble. It’s the bridge; it doesn’t like it.”

  Ursus rolled his eyes and sighed, pointedly. “Obviously. They never do. Nobody with any sense walks onto a strip of swaying planks stretched over a twenty-foot drop with rocks and running water below, and mules have their own weight in common sense. That’s why you’re here to—”

  He stopped. Sweat pricked sharply along his neck. A horse was coming along the riverbank at speed, from the left. He knew the sound of it as he knew the sound of his own heartbeat.

  Without turning, Ursus said stonily, “Stand to attention. That’s the prefect. How he knows we’ve stopped is beyond me but you can pray now to whoever you like that his mood has improved since last night.”

  Behind him, the incoming horse drew to a halt, almost within reach. A quiet voice observed, “You’ve stopped.”

  Quintus Valerius Corvus, prefect of the Fifth Gaulish cavalry, could cut a man’s soul with the knife of his voice if he chose to do so, and he chose it now. Quietly, with balanced precision, the words were at once a question and an accusation and an assessment of worth, or its lack. Faintly, there was disappointm
ent, which was hardest to bear.

  “It’s the mule. It won’t…” Ursus abandoned the sentence, unwilling to state the obvious; that he was in enemy territory with a full cohort of untested legionaries and he had allowed a new-broken mule to halt the progress of his unit. He felt the prickle of sweat run to a scalding flush and hated himself and everyone who saw it, including—particularly—the prefect.

  “Yes, I saw.”

  Corvus had dismounted and was examining the mule. The godforsaken beast had stopped braying, as if it were indecorous to holler in the prefect’s presence. It stood mutely, watching with everyone else as the company’s most senior officer knelt in the oozing mud at the edge of the bridge and, laying his cheek flat, peered along the planks, then under them. Corvus sat back on his heels, ignoring the filth on his knees, nodded to something unseen in the damp air and then turned to Ursus.

  “Find a man with a head for heights and have him look underneath the bridge, about a third of the way along. Keep him well roped. I don’t want to lose anyone now. And get the rest of your men into armed formation. This place is an ambush waiting to happen.”

  “Sir.”

  When he tried, Ursus could make things happen fast. When his own men, the cavalrymen of the second troop, with whom he shared the shepherding of the legionary recruits, understood that his honour was at stake, they gave him their hearts and were glad of it. It was this that had won him promotion to decurion and might keep him that post now.

  Flavius was there, the troop’s standard-bearer, with two other junior officers. They had heard the prefect’s order and knew how to bring their men most swiftly to battle formation. At Ursus’ nod, each gave orders, quietly and crisply. Booted feet rocked the morning. The loose rabble of polished iron and helmet-bronze that had been their cohort became a shining line, not one man out of place.

  Abruptly, the rain stopped and it was possible to believe that the gods approved of what had been done. The men certainly thought so; in the stillness of the lines, small handfuls of cornmeal were scattered as offerings to Jupiter, Mars, Mithras and the more minor gods of hearth and home. Murmured sacraments hung like smoke in the air.