by Manda Scott
She eyed him a long time and smiled a little at the end of it. “A good leader sees the way out of trouble and can make it happen. Perhaps my warriors would have listened to me and gone over the wall when I told them. That will come with time. It can’t be forced. Even so, it was a good idea.”
That was true, and he knew it, and it had been his idea, not Ulla’s. It was harder than he had ever imagined to accept the praise he had yearned for, freely given and deserved. He took the feather and did not try to hide the shake in his hands.
He had no hair at the sides of his temples in which to braid it; he had shaved off an arc above his missing ear, and then again on the other side, for balance. He wove his mother’s feather into the queue that remained at the back. Around him, warriors he had known since childhood stopped to watch. He felt the weight of their experience and remembered what they had known of him in his youth, and regretted it.
“I don’t understand,” he said to his mother. “Why is Braint here, and the warriors of Mona?”
Breaca waited until the feather had been fixed and fell flat against the back of his head. When she spoke, it was wryly, so that she sounded like Valerius and it was hard to tell if the irony were tinged with humour or frustration.
“Because Luain mac Calma sent them to us having decided that the war here had more need of trained warriors than his own war in the west. He has the full body of dreamers there, all soaked in the power of the gods’ island, and he has Graine, who has joined him. How could the legions possibly prevail against that?”
CHAPTER 21
SMOKE CHOKED THEM ALL.
It rose yellow and grey, thick as sheep’s wool and pungent from the smoke pots, and snaked out across the foreshore. Where it met the sea, it spread sideways into the troughs between the waves and was scooped into handfuls by the water. On land, it met the rock and the wind and rose between them, coming up to eye height and hanging there, forming a veil, easily torn, between this world and others, through which the unwary could readily fall.
Corvus’ cavalry had fallen through it, those who had survived the fold in Manannan’s sea. Of the thousand who had left the mainland, over half had drowned. The remainder sat shivering on their horses, staring blindly into smoke that swirled tight as bandages about their eyes. Corvus had not ordered their surrender, but neither had he led them into battle; it seemed unlikely that they could have gathered wit to obey him in either of these if he had.
Even so, the five hundred warriors of Mona had not set about them and there were, as yet, no Roman dead. There had been many dead in Graine’s fire-weaving. Bellos the Blind, who alone of those at the foreshore was not newly blinded, felt the first faint line of a schism grow between the fire-fancy that Graine had woven and the reality that was building in the half-lands between sea and shore, and it worried him. He wanted to find Luain mac Calma to learn why the change had happened, but greater things were needed of him and the first of those was to fulfil his part in the future that the Boudica’s daughter had built.
Three thousand dreamers stood shoulder to shoulder along the foreshore. Bellos walked in front of them, closer to the line of pots that he and Graine had filled and others had set out. Smoke rose from them in puffs and was denser in patches where the small fires smouldered. After a while, as he came to recognize the pattern of their placing, he held his breath when he was close to them and breathed more deeply of the clearer air in between.
Following his path of the morning, he walked down to the place where Graine had lain. He had noticed nothing special about it then and found nothing different now, but he had seen the place afresh in the fire and there had been an anchoring to it that had mattered and was not found elsewhere. Breathing in a chestful of thinning smoke, he lay down on his belly and tried to root himself against the first whispers of men’s imaginings that came at him from the far side of the straits.
It was not easy now, when it mattered most. Other thoughts crowded where there should have been clarity; Thorn was at the far southerly end of the line, a long way out of reach. She had wanted to hold him, to talk and perhaps more, in the morning and Bellos had chosen to follow Graine instead. There had been no time to speak to her after, only a hand’s touch in passing and a silence that he could not read.
Graine herself was not far behind the line, with her triad of warrior-dreamers to keep her safe, or to attempt it. Hawk, Dubornos and Gunovar; over the two days since their arrival, Bellos had come to know and respect each of them. He had felt their fears for the child and the degree to which they swamped any concern for their own safety. He had wanted to ease them, and had not known how.
He set them aside, his lover, the warriors, the child they protected, and sought instead the heart-swell of Mona and all that he loved of it. He sought, and found, the dreams of past elders, strong and durable as taproots, that grew down through the generations from the far ancestors who had first built the great-house to the latest, youngest, most vulnerable generation who might yet live to see its destruction, or die very soon before.
Among the leavings of the old and the very old, men and women, grandmothers and grandfathers, he found traces of Luain mac Calma’s passing, brighter and younger than the rest, looping across from one root to the next, building of them a network that formed the core of the gods’ island. Beneath, deeply, lay the undercurrent that was the care of the gods and sustained them all.
Finding that, Bellos brought himself back to the shore, to seaweed and the mewing of gulls, to rich, heady smoke belching from Graine’s fire pots, to the line of dreamers and the calm they held, to the distant, discordant maelstrom that was the oncoming legionaries. Breathing in all of it, Bellos opened his mind as he had once done by the fireside and sought out the fears of the men who came to kill him.
Fire. Flames. Heat. Death.
In the world of others’ fears, he met a wall of ravening, insatiable flames that ate men for the joy of it. Heat devoured him, roasting his skin to flaking black, boiling his blood, reaching down into his lungs to suck his soul from his body. If he could have run, he would have done, but his limbs would not answer his call. He lay face down in the damp shingle and sweat streamed from his brow as it had once done in the heat of Valerius’ forge. His face burned. He tried to breathe and every inhalation was painful. He choked, and felt blackness closing at the edges of his mind that was quite different from the dark of his un-sight.
Somewhere, mac Calma spoke, cool as a winter’s kiss. Remember that this world is an illusion. He had forgotten. He drank in the words and remembered. Steam rose within his chest where they settled. Calm followed slowly and a separating of the flames so that he could begin to see the men behind them and the weave of their thinking.
“Why fire?” Mac Calma was there in person, kneeling at his side with a dry hand on his brow.
Bellos strained to find an answer. Thoughts slipped like eels through his grasp, too fast to be caught. He drew back and watched the patterns they made.
“The legions saw the smoke before they set out,” he said eventually. “They believe that on Mona men are burned alive. They fear it above everything else.”
“But not enough to make them turn back?”
“No. It makes them angry. They want to kill everyone who might otherwise burn them.”
“Can you find more, beneath the fire, that will undermine the rage and weaken them? Or confuse them, so that one man fights his brothers; that would be best.”
“I can try.”
Bellos might have believed himself an apprentice again, learning his way, but that the wind was on his face and the smoke teased his mind from its moorings and Thorn faced men who would kill without compunction and all of Mona faced a ruin that was real.
Quietly, the Elder of Mona said, “You were born for this. You can do what we need, Bellos of Briga.”
It was not meant to terrify him, but it did. Never before had he been named for a god and he had not known how much he wanted it — or that he had wanted this god
above all of the others: the all-mother, bringer of life and keeper of death, guardian of the final river and all that lies in the lands beyond life.
He was offered a gift to surpass all gifts and was not certain he deserved it. The hopes and fears of a generation, of all the generations, balanced on his ability to see beyond his own blindness. For that moment, fear of his own failure swamped him so that he was a child again, lost without hope or future in the brothels of a Gaulish sea port. He thought of Valerius, and felt the confusion he always felt when he remembered the man who had bought him and why it was done and then, because of that, he remembered what it had been to see and that the god had taken sight from him, to bring other sight, and even that might not be enough. Four years of held anger cascaded over him.
Luain mac Calma said, “Bellos. Think.”
It was enough. Confusion and anger and fear and doubt were a part of him, and would always be so, but he knew now how to set them aside, and did so.
He breathed in the last wisps of Graine’s smoke and let it rise through the roof of his mouth and loosen his mind in its moorings. Clarity came, and the weavings of the elder-roots and the ancestors’ dreams and the bright spark that was Luain mac Calma uniting them all and then the god was there, whom he had always felt and never named, and Bellos was a part of that weaving, and then rose over it, lifted up to skim over the web, freely.
Flames parted and let him through. Fear came at him split in two; half from the sea where men were afraid of the forthcoming battle, half from the mainland where they were afraid they would miss it. Aloud, Bellos said, “Paullinus has not committed them all, only the Twentieth. The Fourteenth is held in reserve. This is not as it was in Graine’s fire-making.”
“It’s enough. The rest may come later. Today, we need only fight those who come against us now.”
It was more than enough. Five thousand men came at them in barges, paddling against the current. Bellos steadied himself, and cast the net of his mind wide to take them all in and then, one at a time, began to pick the leaping, writhing fear-fish from it, and bring them back for those who could best make use of them.
In the world of flesh and earth, he pushed his palms to the rock and stood up. Under his feet, stone became shingle, became sand. Around him, a line of three thousand dreamers faced twelve thousand legionaries and he could feel the sparks of each one, and name them and the colours that they brought to the world, and how the futures would change with their dying.
Time opened its own weave and he could see which were destined to die now and which later, and when. Thorn was there. He saw her cross the river into Briga’s care and knew the time and the place and the manner of it. His own detachment surprised him.
On Mona’s shore, he set off down the line, walking from one bright light to the next, delivering the images as he was shown them: “You are the souls of all the slain grandmothers, come to take revenge on their killers. You are children, the walking dead. You are eyeless women, dressed in black, mad with grief and terror, and you cannot be killed.”
None of this was new; he had spoken of the legionaries’ fears in the great-house as he moulded the dreaming through the spring, but now he matched the dreamers to the dreaming, spinning threads for each one, connecting them to the legionaries as fishers to their fish. For a few were lesser evils more readily created: “Make the sounds of crow and eagle; mix them together if you can so that you are many of each, attacking in flocks. Throw sand in the air; make it form a snake. Send the grass to writhe amongst them. You are serpents, attacking by the hundreds.”
He reached the end. Thorn was there, alive and ready to meet him, tracing his lips with her finger, holding his palm to her cheek. He said, “You are the gulls, feeding on men’s eyes.” She clasped her hand in his and he felt the steadiness, as of long-rooted oak, and the un-fear of death. She sighed a little in concentration and he felt the pull of the sea and the sharp, clear sky and flocks upon flocks of white sea birds rising like the centre of a storm, growing to a tumulus of thunder.
Stooping, he kissed her brow. “Thank you. I love you. Don’t ever forget it.”
She pressed a smile into his neck, and he left her and a hole tore open in his heart.
The gaps in his web were all closed. There was nothing left to be said. Bellos turned slowly, spreading his feet wide on the shingle. A turning wind battered at his face, carrying the stinging spray from the wavetops. He could hear the lip and kiss of paddles in the water and the harsh breathing of many men.
Close. So very close.
Bellos reached for Graine with his mind, and found her, and basked in the brief joy-grief that flooded them both when she was touched so. Underneath that was a current of doubt, as strong in her as it was in him; they alone had seen the weavings in the fire. They alone knew the extent to which the preparation on the shore was not as she had seen it. Even if it had been, they had no idea at all if it would work.
Opening his mind to the god, Bellos turned the beacon of his attention on the dreamers around him, and the net they had woven that hung, waiting, above the incoming men.
A man’s voice shouted in Latin, like and not-like Valerius. A flat-bottomed boat grounded on pebbles.
Bellos felt a pulse of undiluted terror. From the centre of it, praying, he said, “Now!”
CHAPTER 22
CAMULODUNUM WAS BURNING.
The storm that had drenched the first moments of attack had passed westward. A freshening breeze had dried the timber of the merchants’ houses and the wattle of the craftworkers’ huts enough to feed the infant flames that lapped at the edges of the city, spewing smoke to the sky.
Valerius was in the south, leading the warriors who had chosen to train with him and fight with him. At their head, he faced a line of Roman veterans who had formed inside the brick and mortar barrier, all iron armour and leather with new-painted shields and quiet, waiting faces. He smelled the smoke growing in the west long before he could see it. The scent was welcome, but oddly out of place, as if the morning fires of a roundhouse had become bound up in all the iron-blood and sweat and opening bowels.
There were a great many opening bowels and most of them among the youths Valerius was shepherding into the attack lines. He had not yet found a way adequately to warn them how much the reality of war against the legions differed from the songs; that without the rites of the long-nights and tests of the spear-trials they had no basis for self-belief; that self-belief was what made the difference in the momentary crush and crisis of combat and the sum of those brutal moments was what won the day or lost it; that, even in the days before Rome’s invasion, no-one had ever ridden or run into battle without gut-wrenching fear and that it never left, only lessened a little so that one could think clearly enough to fight.
Flames flickered on the edge of his vision. Turning away, he hailed a skinny, hook-nosed youth who had shown some initiative in training and sent him forward at the head of a half-troop — he still thought in Roman cavalry terms; he should cure himself of that — to swing round and come in at the far end of the veterans’ line.
The youth was half his age and one of the many Caradocs. The ceremony to find new names for them and the several dozen Breacas had taken a night and half of the following day, but had been successful in the end.
Thus, Knife with the hooked nose ran forward at the head of his dozen warriors and formed them into an arc with surprising efficiency. A girl newly named Conna held the centre, with Longinus to help her, and Valerius himself was shadowed closely by a youth called Snail on a skewbald mare who held Valerius’ standard and was, in fact, far more able than his choice of name might have suggested.
“Snail! Signal both wings to drive inward!”
Valerius shouted it over the din. The standard waved in a clockwise loop and, blessedly, Knife and Conna were both looking and both remembered what to do. Their two half-troops came together, tightly, with shields overlapping at the edges and swords held between. At Longinus’ command, spears w
ere thrown from behind in a ragged volley.
None struck living flesh. Amongst the enemy, someone bellowed an order from near Valerius’ end of the line and the veterans swung their shields back down, beginning the moves that would transform their line into a square as if they had been doing it all their lives, which they had, except for the past ten years.
They were smooth enough but not as fast as they could have been. Shields angled aside and back into place, rustily. Valerius saw the barest of openings between one man and the next and hurled the Crow-horse into it. Screaming, he slashed downwards with his blade, and felt the impact of iron on iron that moved the blood through his veins in a way nothing else could do.
Alive with the beginnings of battle fever, he shouted the names of both his gods and saw the youths who had followed him through the breach catch the feeling and grow with it, cutting harder and faster.
Even so, they were still young and untested. For every veteran who fell, a handful of warriors died, screaming. The smell of void faeces and spilled guts entirely swamped the smells of sweat and blood and smoke. To Valerius’ left, the flames took better hold of the city and reached higher. He remembered lying on the hillside watching the veterans cut a fire break within the inner barrier, but could not map in his mind exactly where it was.
The fighting was too fierce to think that far beyond it and expect to live. Numbers told over experience and the veterans’ square fell in on itself, broken by the Crow-horse and the mounted warriors who came after. Another command was barked down the line and former legionaries broke ranks and ran to their right, setting their backs to a masonry wall.
Wheeling left, Valerius sought out the man who was shouting the orders. The youth, Snail, was still in his shadow, still holding aloft the banner of the bull on Mona’s grey that had been Valerius’ through his time with the Roman cavalry. The boy held it with an awkward pride, as if he had not yet resolved the contradictions within it or within himself.
