Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  CHAPTER 19

  “I CAN SEE MOVEMENT IN THE TREES OVER THERE.” Corvus, prefect of the Fifth Gaulish cavalry unit, halted his bay mare carefully upwind of his second decurion and the poorly cured Dacian wolfskin that he wore slung about his shoulders. If nothing else could be said of Ursus, at least these days one knew always where he was.

  Other things could be said of him, of course: he had burned the southernmost of the two jetties efficiently enough, or at least had given the orders to have it done and seen them promptly carried out; he had organized the supply chain that had kept the horses and men fed for the half-month while the barges were being built; he had had the forethought to mark out the place for the Batavian wing to make camp some distance from their own tents so that it had been ready when at last the huge Germanic horsemen had ridden in at dusk three nights late, still green from their vomiting and diarrhoea and wearing fetishes that reeked far more strongly than Ursus’ wolfskin had ever done, even when it was newly bought. For such small grace as this, amidst the mist and the thankless cold, Corvus gave thanks to whatever god chose to look over him.

  Now, following the line of Ursus’ gaze across the water, he said, “There has been movement over there since before dawn, but this is in a different place and there are more of them, and they’ve got smoke pots, which doesn’t bode well. There’s nothing we can do; they could hardly be expected not to notice that we’re about to launch a flotilla against them.”

  “We could delay, so it is less obvious that it’s today. They’re building fires over there. The smoke’s already too thick to see through.”

  “I know, but the Batavians are as ready as they have been or are ever likely to be. This is it. If we wait another half-day, a cloud of the wrong shape will slide over the sun or the moon will show a red halo, or a sparrowhawk will chase a cock redbreast across a rock of a certain hue and the entire Batavian cavalry wing will retreat to its tents and sacrifice another mare and make neckbands of her innards wound round with tail hair and the arm bones of a newborn infant girl. So if you could—”

  He stopped. Ursus was staring at him, with nostrils so tightly flared they were white at the rims. He said, “Tell me you made that up.”

  It occurred to Corvus that Ursus’ sense of humour was improving and that he could give thanks for that, too, when surrounded by Batavians with no humour at all. He grinned. “All right, if you insist, I made it up — some of it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And the principle stands. We get them ready, as sober as may be and in the water before noon, or the crossing will never happen. If the governor gets here and the cavalry haven’t forced and held a bridgehead so his precious boats can land in safety, we’re all dead men.”

  “I thought we were going to provide an escort for the barges as they sailed?”

  “No, that’s what I came to tell you. Paullinus has listened at last to the advice of his cavalry commanders. A messenger has just come with a change in the orders. They’ve seen the warriors and dreamers gathering on the island and they don’t want to land the barges against opposition. The governor wants us to take and hold a bridgehead to give them safe landing. He wants us to go now. If we go fast, we’ll make it across before the tide turns. It’s time to muster the men.”

  A pair of small black and white birds carved a path across the tops of the waves. They flew parallel with the headland for a wingbeat or two and then turned west, direct for Mona. Both men watched them go. Reflectively, Ursus said, “You’ve lived amongst these people. Is it true that the dreamers can send their souls as birds to spy on their enemies?”

  Corvus grimaced. “I hope not. And if they can, I would prefer to believe that they can’t understand Latin.”

  “Hold that bloody horse or I’ll kill you myself!”

  Ursus shouted himself hoarse and he may as well have whispered. On the headland, horsemen who had been riding before they could walk were having trouble holding horses who had been schooled and drilled to instant obedience and had bits in their mouths severe enough to puncture their hard palates if they should forget their years of training and force their riders to be hard with their hands.

  They had forgotten it, and the savagery of the bits made no difference.

  “It’s the dreamers! They’re bewitching the horses!” A Batavian screamed it, from a horse that stood vertically on its hind legs and appeared to be trying to climb to the sky. Once, it had been grey. Now it was black with running sweat and its eyes bulged whitely. Its mouth ran with blood in the frothing saliva and it screamed with the need to escape. Around it, mounted and unmounted horses spun uncontrollably, fed by its fear.

  From Ursus’ left, Corvus said quietly, “Archers, kill that man’s mount.”

  There was a hiss and a feathered whine and the dull slam of iron in flesh. The Batavian whose horse died under him had the presence of mind to throw himself clear as it fell. He rolled and came up against a rock where he sat for a moment, shocked, then bent his head to his knees and howled in anguish. More than the Gauls or the Thracians, the Batavians loved their horses.

  Corvus did not have to raise his voice greatly to send it above the still air and the sudden, bruising quiet.

  “Listen to me! I have lived among these people and I tell you now that they may enter the minds of men and send you nightmares; they may make mist to confound you on a battlefield; they will certainly take your bodies and mutilate them, even before you are dead — you know this and have seen it. But they would not, never have and never will, enter into the minds of beasts who have not made the choice to be here, nor have any power of their own to leave; their gods would not allow it.

  “If your horses are panicked, there is a good reason for it, one we can find and change. Look at them! See the way they are all looking in the same direction, towards the barges? They have the scent of something they hate. Ursus, set your men to search the boats. Grannus, get your Batavians to back their horses off to the far end of the beach. I have a young black colt newly trained for war. It’s in the second corral, with the Eye of Horus branded on its left shoulder, for luck. Give it to the man whose mount was shot.”

  They had been going to kill him; Ursus felt it even as the first arrows were airborne: the flicker of shock and the anger that had followed it through the entire Batavian wing. He had thought Gauls were difficult and overly emotional until he met the Batavians with their bluster and thin-skinned arrogance and the waves of weeping that came whenever the wine was passed too freely, and the sore-headed fury that came afterwards and was only barely held in check by a semblance of military discipline.

  In the officers’ quarters at Camulodunum, it was said you could flog a Batavian and he would stand at the post in silence and grin at you afterwards, but for the rest of your life you had to make sure he was never near your back in battle. Not many of them were flogged and not ever by anyone but their own officers.

  No-one, to the best of Ursus’ knowledge, had ever ordered a Batavian’s horse shot out from under its rider. He was surprised, therefore, to feel the anger recede at the gift of the black colt and, even as he was giving the orders to search the boats, prayed that there was something to find in them that would prove Corvus right. That was the one advantage to their astonishing superstition: if they thought a man lucky they would do whatever it took to keep him alive. Corvus badly needed to be seen to be lucky.

  Ursus’ men had heard the command and needed only to know how he wished them to split up. He sent them in tent parties along the shore to examine the lines of bobbing boats. It did not take long for Corvus to be proved very lucky indeed.

  “Pigskin? They were scared of a pigskin? I thought Batavian horses rode into battle with the rotting flesh of their enemies’ heads tied to the saddle posts?” Flavius snorted and spat. The bundle had been found in the closest of the boats, and tipped out onto the shore.

  Ursus said, “Horses hate pigs, and from the smell of things there is more here than only the rotting hide of a wild boar.”
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  He prodded the bundle with one foot and discovered that the stench outdid his wolfskin, which surprised him. Holding his breath, he bent and cut the thong that bound it. The bundle fell open, revealing the hair-side of a rotting boarhide, scoured almost smooth by the sea. As he tipped it over, a thick armful of herbs rolled out, held by their own thong. On the beach a good spear’s throw away, horses jerked in panic.

  “What’s in there? It’s the herbs the horses hate, not the boarskin.”

  “Fescue, wild oats, battlewort. Nothing that a horse should be afraid of.” Corvus was beside them. He knelt upwind and stirred the contents with a piece of driftwood. “Unless…” He poked the stick into the thicket of herbs. “Cut this open, will you? Don’t get close. You may have to ride later today if we can ever get this invasion started and I want you to be able to mount your horse without driving it mad.”

  Ursus used his knife gingerly, at arm’s length. The bundle of herbs spilled open. A small disc of fatty tissue rolled out.

  “Burn that! Now!” Corvus jumped back. It was the single fastest move Ursus had ever seen him make off a battlefield. “Make sure the fire’s downwind of the horses and then find out where the rest of these are. Where there’s one, there will be more.”

  They built a fire beyond the burned-out jetty, well away from the barges and the leaving point for the crossing. The fat crackled and flared and the smoke was greasily black. A further search found five more of the bundles, spread out along the coast. The camp cur found the last two and was rewarded beyond anything it had previously known in its short, harsh life.

  Later, when the chaos was stilled and the horses settled and the men were ready, almost, to mount, Ursus said, “I don’t understand. The thing that scared the horses most was the foaling plug from a mare; they pass one every time they foal. We used to collect them from my grandfather’s paddocks and dry them over the fire and wear them in strings round our necks to count the number of foals in each herd. The good mares used to walk up and touch their muzzles to the one that was theirs. No horse I’ve ever seen has been afraid of one.”

  “They’re not usually.” Corvus signalled behind and one of the horseboys brought his mount and Ursus’. Leading them down to the sea’s edge, he said, “I’ve seen it done once before, in Alexandria, to set a chariot off course. The mare-plug is soaked in skald-root and the urine of a red-haired child and then charred over a fire made of wormwood. I don’t understand why, but horses are terrified of it and whoever has placed these here knows it. If the governor hadn’t changed his mind, we’d have been trying to swim the horses alongside the barges. I leave you to imagine the chaos that would have caused.”

  “Thank you, I’d rather not.” Ursus rolled his eyes. “And I’m not in a hurry to work out where it came from, either, if it means we have insurgents in the mountains behind who are bold enough to come down while we’re asleep in our tents.”

  “I think it’s worse than that.” Corvus brushed his hands on his tunic. Ursus saw damp sweat marks where they had been. His commander smiled at him, weakly. “The hide of each bundle was sodden and the boats they were hidden in were quite dry. We have been here on the shore all morning and seen nothing. I think someone from the island has found a safe route to swim across that we don’t know about, which is not an encouraging thought. And we’re going to miss the tide.”

  Ursus felt the blood drain from his face. The route they were planning to take had been given by a Siluran who had lived all his life crossing from mainland to island. Two things had been clear; that theirs was the only safe route, and that it must be made before the turn of the tide. The inquisitors had sworn the information was reliable; that the man had not changed his story from the first, when he had tried to sell it for a very large sum of gold, to the end, when he had bought himself a much-wanted death with the same information. The inquisitors were not often wrong, but the times when they had been were numbered amongst the wing’s worst catastrophes.

  Faintly, Ursus said, “We’re going to die.”

  “Possibly.” The men were lined up. The sobbing Batavian had dried his eyes and was leading a black colt better than anything he had ever ridden. Corvus raised his hand. Along the beachhead, from one jetty to the other, the Batavian and Gaulish cavalrymen mounted their horses in one smooth, armour-clashing movement. The sun blessed them, and the green waves spread smooth at their horses’ feet.

  Corvus turned to his second decurion and smiled. He no longer looked nervous, if he ever truly had. His grey eyes were clear and achingly alive. Meeting them, Ursus remembered, suddenly, that his commander had once been shipwrecked and nearly drowned. To live through that and still lead his troop across unknown water in full armour took more courage than any man should have to contemplate. Ursus flushed, hotly, for too many reasons to name.

  Corvus eyed him askance. “I think,” he said, “that as we go into the water, you would find it wise not to ponder too closely on the question of what has been or may be and particularly not on what’s waiting ahead. It’s too late to do anything about it now anyway and fear in battle is better saved for what can be seen and known. Shall we ride?”

  To his own astonishment, Ursus felt himself grin and nod and realized he had just been asked for, and had given, the order to begin the invasion of Mona. He opened his mouth to take it all back and thought better of it.

  To his right, laughing, Corvus dropped his arm.

  The sea devoured them.

  Cold, green water ate at their horses’ legs. Fronds of weed dragged them down. From the moment the horses began to swim, and the men slid from their backs to swim at their sides, the ocean felt them and knew them as the enemy.

  Corvus was ahead of the rest. For the duration of the crossing, it was the safest place to be, clear of all the thrashing hooves but those of his own mount.

  It did not feel safe. Waves which had seemed from the shore small things, barely a child’s hillock in the mountains of what a sea could be, grew huge as houses and hurled themselves down, dousing him in cold, searing salt that filled his armour and his ears and his throat, that made him sneeze and then inhale and brought him, choking, to the verge of drowning so that if his mare had not stayed true to its training and swum bravely forward, if his arm had not been hooked into the loops plaited into her mane, if he had not trained to do this in daytime and night time for most of his life, he would have died.

  He had trained, and his mare, which he loved with all of his heart, did swim brave to her teaching and the men behind him, coughing and cursing, followed his lead and the sea spat them out again, bobbing, one man beside each horse, and they made their way with excruciating slowness along the route they had been given, knowing now that it was not the only safe way across, and may not even be safe at all.

  They were just over halfway to the island when Corvus felt the tide turn. The mass of the ocean beneath and around hesitated in its grinding of him, a great holding of breath and deciding and then a shift so that the power came from ahead instead of behind, as if the pull of the moon had become a push, holding him back from the island.

  Because water and wind were cousins, the breeze that had fluttered astern backed round at the same time and blew harder in his face. The ocean, committed now, came at him with new power. A rolling wave lifted him up and dashed him down, and another, so that he choked and breathed in cold and salt and choked again, smashing the water with an armour-clad arm to keep afloat. His mare, blessed of all beasts, kept swimming through water suddenly twice as treacherous as before. He pulled on the mane-loops and lifted himself higher in the water and so he saw before the others the flat patch of water, smooth as poured iron, with small circles growing and receding in the centre that lay ahead of them.

  “Go right!” Flailing, Corvus raised his arm. Sabinius, his standard-bearer, was behind and to his left with a shortened standard fixed to the pommel of his saddle. As the next wave bore him up and down again, he saw the tilt and flap of the wing’s banner. A little afte
r, with the sea draining from his ears, he heard Sabinius’ voice, hoarse with inhaled brine, too faint to be heard by any but those closest. An echo came, in Ursus’ voice, and he was glad of that, then Flavius and, surprisingly, he was glad of that, too, and then there was only time to survive, not to listen for who else might keep clear of the too-flat water.

  The waves were too small now. Perversely, he wished them bigger, more robust, able to bear him aloft and smash him down again, to push him away from the plate of wide, green water that lay flat as quicksand just ahead of him.

  He was too close. Already the suck and pull of the current drew him in faster than he could pull away. He was on the wrong side of his mare. It was swimming straight ahead, taking them closer to death. He pushed his shoulder against it and said, “Right. Go right.” His voice was a high-pitched whine.

  The mare had been a gift of the Boudica’s daughter. The Eceni trained their horses to hair-fine reactions in battle, but not in water. Corvus had no idea whether his years of teaching would count now that they were in the real ocean.

  Kicking with all his strength, talking in Eceni and Latin, leaning in with one arm across her withers, all he felt at first was a loss of pressure under his shoulder, then a tilt and a turn and then — beloved of all beasts — she was pulling him right, away from the sucking treachery of the current.

  He could have wept for relief but had not the breath for it. He pushed and kicked and swam and time stretched so that lifetimes came and went between the crests of each wavelet and then suddenly he was in surf again, with the gods’ horses about him, white-maned and beautiful, and his mare was scrabbling on some kind of footing and ahead water furled whitely between green weed on one side and brown weed on the other and Corvus knew that the Siluran who had tried to make himself rich and had gone on to buy his own death with all he had that was of value had not lied.

  Then the sun glanced off something polished amidst the rocks and the flash of it dazzled him and he remembered that there were warriors on the land, waiting for him and his men, and knew without question that he had not the strength to fight now, or even to stand.