The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy

by Jules Watson

  Samana’s mutterings were shattered by a violent oath, as the bone needle missed the edge of her hem and stabbed her finger. She cursed again, and sucked at the bead of blood that appeared. ‘Whore-son …’ She glared down at the needle, gleaming quite innocently now among the folds of her dress.

  Sewing! Samana had never done her own sewing, but as the supply of servants and bolts of cloth had abruptly dried up since her banishment, there was no other way to keep her two dresses in some kind of repair. As if called forth by her curses, the dark, greasy head of Agricola’s body-slave appeared around the doorway of the bedchamber. ‘Lady,’ he murmured, his fat, sleek body following the head.

  ‘What?’ Samana cocked one sharp eye at him from the bed. She and the slave had at last formed an uneasy alliance, after some years of profound hatred on his part, and condescension on hers. Yet now, after this winter, the little fool had seen for himself the depth of control Samana wielded over his master. It was bizarre that at the very moment Samana lost her own tribal power, the slave decided to court her favour.

  ‘The soldiers are massing on the parade ground for inspection. The others have arrived. All of them.’

  Samana’s finger popped from her mouth with a small, sucking noise. ‘All?’

  The Britannia legions had arrived back from winter quarters days ago, and Agricola’s missing men from the east were also expected from Eboracum by sea. So, they must have arrived. Trust Agricola not to think of informing Samana of a group inspection. Well, she wasn’t missing that. She had sacrificed much to bring this about.

  Samana threw down her torn dress, and groped for her cloak, hanging on a peg near the bed. ‘Perhaps,’ she took a breath, ‘perhaps you would escort me.’ She tried not to make it a question, but an assumption, verging on a command. Luckily, the slave grinned, his plump cheeks bunching up like a squirrel’s. He would not be able to go to the parade ground alone, and neither would she.

  With a peek outside, Samana saw that though it was a cool, windy day, the sun was bright in a clear sky. Pausing at a chest of her own belongings, she extracted her parasol, the Greek fancy Agricola had given her years ago. When he gifted her with things. When she had information to give him.

  Crushing that line of thought, Samana flicked the parasol open and took to the path outside, the slave trotting in her wake. The parade ground was on the flat land to the south of the camp, and while they passed few soldiers on the pathway, when they reached the meadow Samana realized why. Instantly she was frozen to the spot under the gate, barely able to breathe.

  For never in her life had Samana seen anything to match the spectacle of a Roman army, 20,000 strong. She had seen the detachments of the legions numbering a few thousand, even a whole legion of 5,000, but not this.

  The sun spilled down with abandon, its eager rays glittering on thousands of lance-blades, helmets and segmented breastplates; leaping from sword-tip to shield-boss, the brass disks of the signum poles, the bronze eagle standards standing proud above their massed legions. The coats of the Iberian horses gleamed among the cavalry, the mail shirts of the barbarian auxiliaries rippled as if alive, and the banners of fur that crested their helmets and lances ruffled in the breeze.

  All had come, just as that snivelling brat Tacitus said they would. Samana still hated him, but she could not hate what he had wrought. She could do little but gaze, feasting her eyes on the streaming scarlet cloaks, the feather crests and bronze-tipped parade armour that the officers wore, high on their shining horses.

  The light of the reflected iron was the glitter of conquest, and conquest was Samana’s passage out of this cold, backward land. These weapons were the doorway to her new life. So she gulped down the sweet saliva that surged in her mouth, drawing deep lungfuls of the scents of churned mud, male sweat, oiled leather and horses. Her heartbeats shook her whole body, and there was a warmth between her legs, a loosening, as she thought, not of the fervour with which Agricola was sure to take her this night, but of cool Roman halls, perfumed baths and delicate foods fed to her by slaves. It was all waiting for her to pluck, like some ripe, exotic fruit. And pluck it she would, and devour it, then lick the juice from her chin.

  Now Samana glimpsed Agricola himself, stepping down the lines on his horse, the feathered crest on his gilt parade helmet rippling. He wore a blinding white tunic edged in purple, and over that a polished breastplate and fringed leather apron, with a scarlet cloak pinned on one shoulder.

  In this last year, Samana had seen Agricola furious, excited and lustful. Yet now, in the set of his shoulders, the quick movement of his hands on the reins, she saw more than he could ever reveal in his eyes. And why would he not look as though the sun itself had risen in his face? Who would not think himself a god, at the head of this army?

  As Agricola drew nearer, to her surprise and satisfaction he turned his head, catching her eye. And even though the curving plates of his helmet masked his true expression, Samana felt the stab of lust that pierced her where she stood. She drew back a little, her legs trembling. He was well within her control again. She knew it, with all the certainty of her sex magic. This man, holding this power in his hands, had been hard to win, but she had done it.

  And this magnificent army, arrayed before her as if she were its queen, would crush the Alban rebels who had dared to scorn her. All the land would be won for her, and all those who had opposed or ignored her would be given painful deaths, or sold into slavery. And then, when it was done, and the land cleansed of her kin by fire and sword – why, then she would leave it behind for ever, to take up her life of luxury in Rome.

  It was so close now, for Agricola had his men. And she had him.

  Samana suddenly felt the stickiness of blood still oozing from her stabbed finger. She put it in her mouth and sucked it, savouring the taste.

  Rhiann squatted awkwardly by the pit. Carefully, she scooped some of the barley grains out with a bone spoon and rubbed them between her fingers. By some mysterious process, stored grain in clay pits did not grow mouldy, and she was relieved to see the same success repeated in this pit. The grains were clean and smelled earthy, with a touch of malt.

  Rhiann rose, looking at the women gathered around her. ‘Thank the Mother; this is whole as well. We will be needing all of it, so if you run out of baskets, Aldera is supervising the collection of pots of various kinds in the storehouse by the pier. We need to empty these other two pits in three days.’

  As the women clustered around the hole in the ground, stooping to their task, Rhiann turned away, with Eithne trotting at her heel.

  It was a difficult season in which to evacuate large numbers of people. The crops were growing, but far from ripe, which meant they would need to abandon their fields, depending on how long the threat lasted. Luckily, there were many pits with grain tithed from the past five years of harvest.

  Rhiann tried not to think what the lack of crops and cattle might mean to surviving the next long dark. One thing at a time, she reminded herself. ‘Have you been to the dairy sheds today?’ she asked Eithne.

  Eithne nodded and shifted the basket of greens in her arms, a mix of nettle, elder buds, sorrel, bracken, borage and chickweed. These could not be preserved, and Rhiann had instructed the women to gather as much as possible to feed their children before they left the dun. ‘Milk is starting to flow in from the other duns, lady. Caitlin and Fola said the girls are coming along very well with the cheeses; Bran’s sons and the carpenter’s whole family are putting together the frames.’

  ‘Good.’

  They entered the storehouses now, the cool dimness redolent with the scents of salt and herbs and smoked flesh. Despite the humped barrels of pickled meat, and the salted sides of beef that swayed against the rafters in the breeze, this storehouse was nearly depleted after the long dark. Those taking refuge in the farther duns and homesteads could access meat from the herds on the hoof. Yet the warband would need provisioning as well.

  Rhiann tapped a nail on her teeth. ‘We n
eed meat cakes for the men, to take into the field. Which means smoking more sides of beef, and rendering more pig fat. Berries we can do little about. We will have to take every woman’s dry stores.’ She turned in a slow circle, as if the stores might just magically appear if she wished hard enough. ‘Perhaps honey would replace the berries.’

  ‘I’ll give the orders, lady,’ Eithne said. ‘Cattle and pigs for slaughter, then preserving. Honey and berry stores. Baking of meat cakes.’ She smiled. ‘I know how.’

  Rhiann gazed at her in surprise. Now approaching sixteen, Eithne had grown physically this past year, but that was not the change Rhiann saw now. It was more in the set of her head on its slender neck, the way she no longer hunched, or peeked out from behind her black hair. Then Rhiann remembered all Eithne had gone through, and recognized the new steadiness in her eyes, the firmer chin, for what it was.

  ‘I am small,’ Eithne admitted, blushing only slightly beneath Rhiann’s scrutiny. ‘But the women heed my orders, as do the men.’

  ‘Do they?’ Rhiann raised both eyebrows. ‘And why is that?’

  The flush along Eithne’s cheekbones deepened, and she fingered the new strand of blue-glass beads at her neck, a gift from Rori. ‘I’ve learned how to speak to them from listening to you.’

  Rhiann hid a smile, suddenly amused at the thought of her own commanding tone issuing from Eithne’s slight body. Then her smile faded, and she placed her hand softly on the girl’s shoulder. ‘I have the utmost faith in you, Eithne.’ She nudged her out into the sun. ‘And when is Rori going to capture this prize for himself ? Perhaps it is he I need to be hurrying!’

  ‘Oh, no, lady!’ Eithne’s arms tightened around the basket, her dark brows drawn together. ‘He wishes to discharge his duty to his prince, he said, before he takes a wife. We are still young, after all.’

  Yet Rhiann’s attention had been caught now by Lorn, racing bareback on one of his black chariot ponies across the causeway and up to the gates of Dunadd. He and Conaire had been busy training on the field; Conaire with the foot warriors; Lorn with the chariot teams.

  Then she saw Eremon, who had been briefing the guards in the gatetower and was now taking the stairs to the ground two at a time, on his way to meet Lorn. Without a word, Rhiann handed her own basket to Eithne, and crossed the yard as fast as she could with her new awkward gait, arriving at Eremon’s side just as Lorn thundered up, the pony snorting and rearing.

  ‘What is it?’ Eremon’s voice was admirably calm, but Rhiann could sense the tension in his stance and jaw.

  ‘A rider has just come down the northern road from Calgacus,’ Lorn informed Eremon, his grey eyes dancing with a fierce joy, his pony shaking its head so the enamelled bridle rang. ‘All of the tribes, bar the Lugi, sent messengers to him as soon as the weather broke.’

  Eremon seemed to freeze.

  ‘They have sworn to the alliance, at last.’ Lorn grinned and rose in his saddle, holding his spear aloft, clenched hard in his hand. The fox-tail on its sheath streamed out in the wind. ‘Sword brother, we have our army!’

  BOOK SIX

  Sunseason, AD 83

  CHAPTER 62

  The altar before the kneeling form of Agricola was crusted with the blood of many sacrifices. Before him, set into niches of the mud wall, stood the statues of Mars, god of war, and king of all the gods, Jupiter. Agricola’s hands, spread before his bowed head, were also sticky with the blood of the ram that he insisted on sacrificing every day to ensure good victories and to ward away the evils that had befallen him these past two years. The fragrant smoke of the burning incense wreathed his face, as the haruspex, who had been joined by another this spring, stood chanting in the shadows.

  Yet the peace Agricola was enjoying in the temple was already being disturbed by the shouts of men outside, the rumble of carts and whinnies of horses. With calmer weather, a constant stream of supplies and messengers had been coming and going from the civilian towns and legionary headquarters further south. The subdued, settled part of the province was slowly coming alive again, and though Agricola preferred to spend his days as a soldier, not a glorified tax collector, the rest of Britannia, unfortunately, still needed his attention.

  As he emerged from the temple precinct now, one man, who had been throwing dice in the shadow of the walls, detached himself from the other soldiers by leaping to his feet. This claimed Agricola’s attention, as did the nervous agitation of the man’s hands.

  ‘Sir,’ the soldier said, saluting him, his crested helmet under his arm, ‘I bear a message from your home in Eboracum.’

  Agricola stood still, arrested by the man’s choice of words: your home. His tongue worked on a stray drop of ram’s blood that spattered his lips during the sacrifice. He felt strangely unwilling to meet the soldier’s eyes. ‘Accompany me to my quarters,’ he ordered at last, ignoring the curious gazes of the other soldiers lounging by the temple gates.

  Within the safety of his room, Agricola turned to face the messenger. ‘Well?’ he barked. ‘Give me the scroll then! Or is it a tablet you have? Quickly now!’ He held out his hand.

  The messenger gulped, sliding an unobtrusive finger up to wipe sweat from his upper lip. ‘It is no scroll,’ he offered, his voice quavering slightly. Then he cleared his throat and stood straighter, his heels together.

  Agricola received the news of the death of his son without even a flicker of an eyelash.

  The soldier passed on the brief words with which he had been charged, and waited to be dismissed, but the dismissal was not forthcoming. His commander did not move. Carefully, in the now eerie silence of the room, the soldier saluted, stammered his condolences and slipped away.

  Slowly, Agricola turned and looked down at the vellum map spread before him – a crude arrangement of lines that sketched out Alba’s eastern coastline, its south-west and south-east reaches, and a vague indication of its central mountains. His hands gripped the edge of the table. That land had taken his strength, his peace of mind, the very heat of his blood. That land – its cold, damp breath – had taken his only son.

  As the table crashed to the floor, maps and pens and inkwells flying, Agricola heard a movement at the door to his bed chamber. He spun on his heel, the blood shrieking in his ears, and his eyes focused slowly on Samana, who was lounging against the doorframe. Her face was heavy with sleep, the lids swollen, her eyes blinking languorously. Agricola’s gaze ranged lower, seeing, as if for the first time, the perverse lushness of Samana’s body, the curves and hollows and swellings that laid before his outraged eyes, an obscene parody of Alba itself.

  In the gleam of saliva on her parted lips, he saw the countless streams that wound over this land, entwining and trapping his soldiers. In the soft rising of her chest, he sensed Alba’s foul mists and fogs, smelled the rotting stench of its marshes. Samana’s breasts and hips and the cleft of her sex beckoned him, drawing him to lose himself just as his men had lost their way in Alba’s treacherous valleys and twisting glens.

  Agricola’s fists gradually clenched at his sides. Despite his will, he had allowed this abomination to seduce him. He had fallen into her exotic folds, lolled in greedy debauchery while his son sickened and died. With some part of himself, Agricola had known he would have to pay for that winter where he lost himself in lust, and now he knew the price. The gods had exacted their revenge.

  Alba had made him weak, drawn from him false fears and false bravado. It had tantalized him into the sins of doubt and, on occasion, pride. Worst of all, it had led him to forget that he was Agricola. It, Alba – she, this harlot – had made him forget, in a cascade of sight and scent and touch, that he was Roman.

  ‘My lord?’ Samana’s voice was low; it slid into a man’s loins like a serpent’s tongue. ‘What ails you? What has happened?’

  When Agricola didn’t answer, struck with an overwhelming horror at the foulness he had let into his body, his bed, his very self, she came forward and tried to take his arm, to press against him as she had s
o many times before. ‘No!’ Agricola spat the word with disgust, with loathing, and the blow of his fist that came with it sent Samana reeling to the floor.

  There she lay and looked up at him, white with shock, a hand to her bloody mouth. But in the fall her skirt had been dragged up, and her honeyed legs were gleaming against the earthen floor, the black patch of hair between them still taunting him with its moistness.

  Enraged, Agricola stood astride her and yanked her clothing down, covering what disgusted him so, and when she tried to speak, to rise, he only struck her again across the ear, and again, until she lay still with terrified eyes, and said nothing.

  By nightfall, the entire camp knew of what had befallen Agricola’s heir. The commander himself took refuge in the temple once more, and did not emerge for two days.

  No one could discern any sound from within, and the only movements from outside were the ten rams and two oxen that were led through the gates as sacrifices for the boy’s soul.

  Samana stood with the growing crowd of soldiers who, on breaks from their duties, began to cluster about the temple gates. They kept themselves busy by debating what would happen, what was happening, yet by the end of the first day the only visible sign was the thick pall of blue smoke that rose above the temple, tainting the air with the sweet scent of roasting flesh, and the acrid stench of entrails.

  Swathed in a veil to hide her bruises, Samana kept to a safe place in the cold shadows of the wall, trying to let the soldiers’ rough talk flow over her like water over a rock. Trying not to think what Agricola’s outburst meant for her.

  At last, at sunset on the second day, the two sacrificers emerged, their white robes untouched by blood, their faces stern. When Agricola himself appeared behind them, Samana understood, with a plunging horror, just why those priests were so clean. In the dying light of the sunset, Agricola’s face, throat, bare arms and feet were drenched with blood, his robe stiff and dried with gore. Within that encrustation, the whites of his eyes shone out.