Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  Peltrasius had been ordered to drink a flagon of well water at each watch — water being the only thing in plentiful supply — and this had naturally increased both the frequency and the volume of his urination. His howls of pain as each corn-sized piece of grit passed down the length of his urethra could be heard as far abroad as the theatre and the forum.

  In happier times, men would have made jokes of Peltrasius’ pain, and built a mummery around it, so that the theatre would profit from the man’s misfortune. Now, with the smoke of a thousand fires obscuring the horizon and the numbers of the Eceni war host rumoured to be in the tens of thousands, the more gullible among the population, veterans as well as natives, claimed to have heard the ghost of Cunobelin arise from his grave mound and seen it stalk the emptying streets of the city. They would not have it that mortal pain could sound like the vengeful souls of the dead.

  Peltrasius was not close to dying, only wished that he were. Theophilus of Athens and Cos, once physician to emperors and reduced now to tending retired soldiers who suffered from an excess of their own indulgence, came as close as he had ever done to wishing that he could administer a dose of something permanently quieting to the man under his care. He would have had his apprentices tend Peltrasius and let them keep the payment, but he had ordered them to leave and, finally, on the third time of telling, they had done so.

  More than he had ever imagined, he missed the fast wit of his clerk, the boy he had named Gaius, and the slower, more lugubrious care of Felix, the apprentice physician. Their absence left a gap in the life of his hospital that the healing of others did not fill.

  He had not expected how much it would hurt when he had first asked them to go, standing with them at the open window of his second floor bedroom on the night the watchtower burned. Clothed in his nightrobe, his bare feet cool on the wooden floor, Theophilus had felt from them the awe and reverence of youths who think they know fire and war and are still young enough to worship both.

  Theophilus was not inclined to worship anything, and would never stoop to advocating war; he had too many friends on both sides not to see the tragedy of it too clearly. He watched the ball of orange flame blossom into the night, and then the string of others as the watch-chain was needlessly lit, as if more fires were useful, or necessary to augment the message of the first.

  Before the chain was complete, he had turned from the window, saying, “The Eceni are rising. It can be no-one else. They won’t attack here while the Ninth might come at their backs. We have some days to make ready. You should find your families and leave. Go north to the Eceni if you want to take part in their war. Go south to Caesaromagus or west to Verulamium if you would find sanctuary amongst the supporters of Rome.”

  “And if we want to do neither? If we want to continue our studies with you? What should we do then?” Felix had asked it, the round, cheerful lad who had hands that could soothe a woman in childbirth as easily as they could support a man dying of flux or mend a youth crushed under falling masonry in the temple. His voice was softly resonant, and warm, like the flames that lit the horizon.

  “He’ll tell us to leave anyway. There will be a siege and then a battle and he thinks it’s his duty to protect us from both, not the other way round.”

  Gaius had answered before Theophilus had time. The clerk had grown in the last year and was tall as any of the other tribesmen, lean and stringy and long-faced with bright, sharp eyes that saw dust in corners and cleaned it even while he was revising in his head the rates charged for a night’s keep and bandaging and the additional percentage levied on a bill for setting a broken wrist because the one who came to pay had made the mistake of opening his purse and showing the quantity and colour of his gold.

  That same sharp intellect showed as he offered one of his rare smiles, saying, “But we know it’s our duty to protect him. He can’t make us leave. If we choose to stay and face the Eceni at his side, there is nothing he can do to stop it.”

  Which was true, and had remained true, and, for six days, they had resisted Theophilus’ pleas and his orders and his attempts at reason and had continued to tend the dwindling numbers of sick and injured and increasing numbers of food-poisoned who presented themselves at the hospital’s door and asked for help.

  When Peltrasius began to scream and the rumours flew, they had washed their hands and donned their plain woollen robes without being asked and gone out in the evenings when the howls were at their height and done their best to persuade those who would listen that the man they could hear was very much alive and had no intention of becoming a ghost.

  Sadly, as is the way of panic, the sight of them had fuelled more rumour so that soon there were reputed to be three ghosts of Cunobelin, or possibly the man and two of his sons, one who screamed and two others who moaned and murmured and touched passers-by with fingers of death. They gave up finally when a child they were treating for a broken finger swore in the names of two gods that his father had tried to attack one of the apparitions and his sword had passed straight through the ghost’s body and out the other side; the risks of someone’s trying to repeat that miracle in a population heading fast towards hysteria were too real.

  Gaius and Felix had left, in the end, when the only ones who remained in Camulodunum were veterans and their families, or those who had given themselves so completely to Rome that they dared not leave. The two had come to Theophilus together on the seventh day after the burning began. Drawn and white, Gaius had said what was needed. “There is no-one left but us who does not support Rome. If we stay, we are supporting something that is insupportable. The Boudica is calling warriors to the place of the Heron’s Foot. If there’s war, she will need physicians. Would you come with us?”

  Theophilus had known what they would say. Half the night, he had listened to them talk in the dormitory room two storeys below his. He had watched the moon rise and set and watched the glow of night fires on the horizon that showed how close the war host gathered. Listening to their feet climbing the stairs to find him, he had brought to mind the speech he had spent the night preparing.

  He did not know how lined he looked, or how old, when he said, “I can’t leave a hospital while there is still someone in it. If the women recover, if Peltrasius passes his last stone, or his last breath, if no-one else has come to take their places, I will give thought to what I should do.”

  They had expected as much. They would have killed Peltrasius for him, and perhaps tried to cover it up, but not the women. Felix had smiled through tears and said, “We brought you a gift, to remember us by.”

  The thing was outside the door and they made him turn away while they brought it in between them. He thought it might be wine, or the smoked boar he had enjoyed before the fires began, or olives saved in a cold store from the last shipment in the autumn. For a moment, hearing a rasping breath, he thought it might be a hound whelp, and panicked, because he had never yet owned one and was not at all certain that he wanted to give his heart so completely and have it broken, as he had seen other men do.

  It was not a hound, but a sword, and that was every bit as surprising. The blade was of middle length, a little shorter than was the fashion of the tribes, who fought alone from horseback, for the honour of it more than the killing, but longer than the legionary gladii that were fashioned to stab between the shields and so keep the integrity of the lines intact. The iron of the long-blade they gave him was burnished to mirror brightness and the hilt was of red copper and gold, in the shape of the Sun Hound, which had been the emblem of Cunobelin before his fall.

  Theophilus felt his jaw hang slack. “I don’t…”

  “You don’t know how to use it. We know.” Felix patted his arm. “But Peltrasius fought with the cavalry and he has spent his last ten years making a study of the ways the tribes fight. It’s a hobby of his. Get him to show you whenever he’s not howling. If you’re here when the Eceni arrive, you’ll need it, whichever side you decide to fight for.”

  He had no inte
ntion of fighting for anyone. He had thought that obvious, not needing to be spoken aloud. He said, “You should know by now that I—”

  Gaius put a cautious finger to his lips. “Don’t say it. Not here. Not now when the gods are listening. We don’t need to know.”

  He had thought they had both abjured their gods, preferring the cool waters of rationality to the hot turbulence of faith. They were aching to go and it was not time to begin teaching all that he wanted to tell them.

  Lost in the pain of the moment, Theophilus held out his hands and they gave him the blade, laying it across his palms as if he were a warrior among the natives. Felix was weeping openly, which was usual. Gaius was wet-eyed, which was not. In Alexandrian, a little rustily, he said, “Father, whatever you have taught us, we will use well and for healing, not for harm.”

  Theophilus bowed. “Then if Peltrasius dies, I can rest knowing it will not have been your doing.” It sounded too formal. He did not trust himself to smile.

  They backed out, palms on their foreheads. Later in the same watch, he saw them leave, riding along the near-empty streets on horses bought for a year’s salary in gold from the quartermaster.

  The hospital was too quiet with them gone, except when Peltrasius howled, when it was too loud. For the first time in his life, Theophilus the physician wished at least one of his patients dead and the other two mended without him.

  At dusk, he made himself perform the tasks of both assistants, washed the women and fed them, saw to their water and the pots beneath their beds and gave them the infusions that had been standing half the day in his dispensary. He opened his stores, which had not yet been raided by desperate townsmen, and cooked a sparse meal for Peltrasius of field beans and barley with wild garlic to help the passing of the stones and carried the man a full ewer of tepid water in which to wash. He held him while he screamed and gave him poppy after, for the ease of them both.

  He lit a small oil lamp and made the journey down to the cellars to draw more water from the well. The cold and the dark were as far removed from war and others’ pain as he could imagine. He cursed them mildly and set the lamp on the platform above the well. The light sent his own shadow dancing along the rough-plastered wall to where the first spider to escape Gaius’ care was building a web. He watched it and the flittering shadows that joined it, and listened to the small scuff on the stone floor that was not a rat or a mouse.

  Without turning, he said, “Greetings, Bán mac Eburovic, beloved of Mithras. I had expected you here by a more direct route, and sooner.”

  The hair prickled on his scalp. He imagined a blade, drawn and advancing. When there was no more movement, nor any slicing cut to his back, he turned, slowly, keeping his hands in sight.

  “My brother is outside,” said Breaca of the Eceni, from the far side of the well. “He is beloved of Nemain, too, now, not only Mithras. In both of their names, he will make sure we are not disturbed.”

  It had not been easy for a brother and sister, soberly clad, to enter Camulodunum at dusk on the ninth night of the city’s siege, but equally, it had not been unduly hard.

  The ditches and dykes that had protected Cunobelin’s steading in the days of his power were easily passed and not close to the city. The trenches and walls that had served the fortress of the XXth in the early years of its existence had been pulled down and filled in when it became instead a veterans’ colony. They were no barrier any longer, only a line of rubble with grass growing thinly through to show where it had been; an infant learning to walk could have stepped over to get into the city, or to leave it.

  The streets had been less quiet than Breaca had imagined; looking down from the slope above the city, there had seemed few fires, and so few people out after dark, but she and Valerius had been stopped and challenged four times in the first hundred paces by groups of men who gathered by the dozen under the shaded light of tallow tapers and reed-bunched torches.

  They were Roman for the most part: dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed veterans, closer to sixty than fifty, with flab at the belly where once-fitness had lapsed. Some talked animatedly, and only fell to silence when the newcomers were seen, but most had been building barricades or digging trenches against incoming horses and were more suspicious than their fellows. They stopped the strangers at blade point and demanded to know their business. Valerius answered shabbily, in Catuvellauni, and then stilted Latin, saying that he had come from the northern quarter of the town and was bringing his woman to see the physician. They let him go. Nobody asked him why.

  There were women, too, under the tallow tapers, but fewer of those; young and underfed, with the smoky grey eyes and red-blond hair of the Trinovantes, they were pregnant or nursing or with silent children at foot, gawping and shadowed by a fear they did not fully understand.

  None of these chose to stop the pair of natives, dressed in the brown stuff of merchants with clan markings worked at the hem. Only a child, looking at them, had removed its fingers from its mouth and said, “Who’s that? Have they come to help us?”

  She had spoken Latin with a tribal accent. Her mother had hushed her, saying, “They’re Catuvellauni, friends to Rome.” It had been hard to tell if she considered that friendship a good thing, or despicable.

  They had abandoned the main thoroughfare shortly after that and taken to smaller streets with deeper shadows. A lone veteran with a drawn sword had challenged them in the first of those, his voice rusty with fear. Breaca answered this time, saying that she was suffering from bloody flux and stinging water and was being taken to the hospital for urgent treatment. The veteran backed away, making the sign against evil with his left hand.

  The mention of flux had been more than a lucky guess; the stench of rancid faeces had been with them for a while now, mingling with the thin, scouring stench of fear that robbed Camulodunum of its heart. Once, the streets had stunk of life and vibrant feeding; now they smelled chiefly of rats’ urine and rotting vegetables. The smell stuck to the back of the throat and made slime on the tongue. Breaca put her hand to her nose and walked on. No-one else stopped them. Nearby, echoing, a man began shrilly to scream.

  Valerius tapped her shoulder, making her jump. “Left. Here.” His voice was light with half-suppressed laughter. She had heard him like that in Longinus’ company once or twice; whatever the danger, he was enjoying himself — perhaps because of the danger. She followed him into a street even smaller than the one they were on, barely wide enough to walk down without shuffling sideways, and then into a solid brick-built house camped improbably in a row of wattle and daub huts. Stepping inside, she nearly tripped over Valerius, who crouched in the middle of the floor.

  Looking up, he said, “Help me lift this?” and she knelt, and did so.

  There were two rings set into the floor, covered by an excess of dust and old straw. They took one each and pulled and a section of the floor came up smoothly on tallowed hinges so that it smelled meaty even while it hissed to vertical.

  He said, “There are steps down. You could have light but it’s as easy to feel the way, and you’re less likely to risk being seen. There will be light in the well room if anyone is there. I’ll wait here and make sure you’re not followed. Shout if you need me. Theophilus will be surprised, but not, I think, discomfited.”

  He had been right, of course, which was why she had asked him to come. One of the reasons why she had asked him. She had felt her way blindly along a short tunnel of rammed earth and into a cellar of neatly fitted stones, as flat and smooth as any in the forum or other buildings of state. Further along, they were layered with plaster and white lime that flaked off under her fingers. Then a flame had flickered in the dense black ahead, and an old friend had trodden on the pavings, muttering and breaking wind, who had no reason to consider himself overheard.

  She had scuffed her foot to let him know she was there, believing it necessary for his pride, and he had thought she was Valerius, which was probably reasonable. Unreasonably, she was angry that he h
ad not known her better.

  She answered him too sharply, and was sorry, and he saw both of these. She had forgotten his prescience; he could read her almost as clearly as Airmid, and perhaps in some places better because he was not so close, nor blinded by love.

  “Breaca?” He reached out and drew her forward into the lamplight. His hand was on her shoulder, and then he had turned her and was running long, lean fingers across the span of her back, which was not a good thing at all. Her flesh cringed from his touch as it had not done from Airmid’s who knew her.

  She made herself stand still, not to insult him. He was delicate and adroit in his investigating. He stopped quite soon and took his hands back to himself. If she kept her eyes closed, or her back turned, his voice was ageless and belied the weariness she had seen on his face under the probing light of his oil lamp.

  Quite steadily, he said, “Have you come to me in my role as physician? Airmid has done well by you, but a true healing of the soul takes longer than the healing of the body and even that is barely begun.”

  She turned to face him, trying not to be angry again. “Is it so obvious? Or did the veterans tell of all that they did over cups of wine when they came back?”

  “Both.” He shrugged an apology. His face was long and lined and grey under the haphazard orange of the lamp’s flame. “The veterans sang of it over their wine for the few days before the siege began when they thought themselves safe and needed something to banish the disgrace they had suffered at Corvus’ hands. They sang of a legionary flogging inflicted on a woman of the Eceni, and then, when the wine hit, they sang also of the irreparable damage done to your daughters, for which I cannot express enough sorrow. But of you, I would have known the most of it as soon as I saw you, from the keening and black wind in your soul which is there to be heard by someone who knows how to hear it. Your brother was much the same; that’s why I mistook you. You must grant me that much in my craft: I can hear the mourning of what has been lost. Would you have me lie and pretend ignorance to my friends?”