Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  Theophilus sat nearby, with Stone between them. From a satchel hung over one shoulder, he brought goat’s cheese wrapped in nettle leaves, and a skin of water and a handful of hazelnuts.

  From earliest childhood, her mother had saved for her goat’s cheese wrapped in nettle leaves. Breaca said, “Your city has burned to the ground. Where did you find these? Did Airmid give them to you?”

  “Credit me with my own ingenuity.” Theophilus contrived to look affronted and gratified together. “The hospital has a cellar which is made of stone and so has not burned. It was not an act of any particular genius to move the food to the earth closets there when the Boudica’s war host so clearly came with fire and destruction in mind. I have an apple, too, if you’d like it? And a salve for the burns on your feet.”

  In the midst of war, while others ate burned bannocks and chewed on strips of smoked meat, they feasted, and layered an ointment of crushed olives and comfrey on their feet.

  Breaca said, “I feel like a child who is sheltered from the realities of battle.”

  “But only for this one night,” said Theophilus. He ate a hazelnut, delicately, like a field mouse. “Tomorrow morning you’ll fight as you did before. Or differently, maybe. Can you tell me why you were weeping?”

  She thought a moment, and said, “The past is too real in here.”

  “Perhaps it needs to be.” He wiped his fingers on his robe. “I would ask again, what makes you weep?”

  It was a long tale, and there was not a great deal left of the night. The torch flared in a new draught and so, although it was not the beginning, she began with fire, and sunlight and the blistering gold of the Sun Hound’s funeral.

  Speaking aloud to a living ear, it was easier to conjure the magic that Luain mac Calma had wrought on the first day of the funeral with his nuggets of gold set in the mound’s green turf, to catch the first rays of the rising sun, and then the field of gold behind it that had roared to the dawn as the door hides were thrown back.

  It was easier, too, to remember the man, to build his features in life and in death; to trace the lines of the waxen face on its bier, raised high to the skies, and then the fire and smoke afterwards when they had burned him, which smelled quite different from the fire and smoke of Camulodunum.

  She spoke also of Caradoc, third son of Cunobelin, who was her second loss, after Valerius, and she reached Graine’s birth more quickly, and the loss of Caradoc and the years of lone hunting that came after.

  Theophilus knew already of her journey to the lands of the Eceni, but she told the parts she had told no-one, herself least: of the strained winters with ’Tagos who wanted to sire a child and could not, but tried all the same; of the loss of Cunomar and his return; of the death of ’Tagos, and the surprising grief of that; of the inexorable build to war, and the procurator, who had nearly destroyed it; of the grief of Graine, and Cygfa and Cunomar and the joy of Valerius, and back, as ever, to Graine again.

  Morning was on them when the resin torch guttered to nothing and she came to rest. Breaca pressed a hand to her eyes. After a while, remembering she was in company, she said, “I’ve kept you up all night. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Theophilus came to sit in front of her. The late moon had risen, giving light enough to see. He tilted her face towards it and looked through her eyes to what lay inside. “How do you feel?”

  She felt the same; worse. Her head ached, thickly. Her tongue lay heavy from over-talking. The future hung as grey and featureless as it had done since the end of the fevers.

  Striving for something, she said, “I feel less afraid of this place and have more care for the man who was left here. As much as Eburovic, Cunobelin was grandsire to my children. These things matter.”

  Theophilus caught her arm and turned her to the paler grey of dawn and searched her face with his eyes and her back with his probing fingers, and looked at her tongue and laid his fingers flat across her wrist and then her neck to hear the songs of her pulses. At the end, he let her arm drop. Grief and disappointment made him old.

  Breaca stood abandoned at the grave’s mouth. She said, “You did tell me it would take six months.”

  “But this place seemed different, as if it held so much of what was lost in you.” He stepped back. “I’m sorry. Sometimes old wounds must be opened again, to let them heal cleanly, but I had not thought to wreak such destruction in you.”

  “If there’s destruction, I made it.” Breaca reached to embrace him, and found him as stiff as she was with cold. “You did what you could. If there’s no healing, it’s not your fault.” She smiled then, because he needed it, and, with brittle cheer, said, “We should go and warm ourselves at the fires of Camulodunum. Today, we have a temple to assault.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE DEAD MAN LAY FACE DOWN IN THE WATER. HIS HAIR was spread out round his head like the fronds of a sea anemone, pulsing a little with the rock of the waves. It was a dirty yellow, the colour of old straw, which was no help at all in identifying him; he could as easily have been Siluran, a friend whose body should be retrieved and given cleanly to Briga, or one of the Batavian cavalrymen who should perhaps be taken care of with more respect for Corvus’ sake if nothing else, as one of the straw-headed Romans who littered the XXth legion, a product of their time in northern lands. If he were that, then there was no reason he could not be left slowly to sink and feed Manannan’s creatures in thanks for help in the battle.

  Graine sat on the end of Mona’s jetty with her feet dangling just above the lap of the water and watched him bump gently against the oak pillar. He wore no armour, but that said nothing; half the legionaries had abandoned their armour on the outward crossing when they saw the anger of the gods’ sea. For men who lived and died by the sword, death by drowning was something to be feared almost as much as death by fire; better to face warriors unarmoured than fall into the hungry water and sink while still living.

  An upturned barge nudged at the dead man, as a cow herds her calf, pushing him farther out to sea. The body spun a little, limbs outspread like a starfish. The right arm was missing from the elbow down. Blood leaked out in lazy threads to stain the barnacles and the green-grey weed. There was a tattoo that curled up towards his armpit. It tugged at old memories but not clearly. Nothing came clearly; the horror of battle had brought the workings of her mind to a halt and she had not found a way to start them again. She stared at the water and tried at least to pray. She failed at that, too.

  “He’s Batavian. I heard him fall.” Bellos came to sit beside her. He had a staff, which was a new thing; long and twisted and painted. She thought it might be hawthorn but could not be sure. It looked like Luain mac Calma’s work: a gift from before the battle, perhaps. She borrowed it and reached down into the water and used the ram’s horn handle at the end of it to hook the man’s shoulder and turn him over so that his face could be seen. His mouth fell open. His teeth were white and very even. He could still have been Siluran.

  Graine said, “How do you know who he was when you can’t see him?”

  There was a small gap, time enough for her to realize she had been rude, and that he did not mind, but was concerned about how he should answer. At length, he said, “His ghost is still near.”

  She should have known that. The battlefield was crowded with the ghosts of the dead and she knew them only by the deadness blanketing her mind. She said, “I think perhaps I know now what it is to be blind in the land of the sighted.”

  Bellos was gentle and easy and tolerant. His day had been better than he could have prayed for; she had watched him stride along the beachhead, directing the dreamers as if he was as sighted as any of them. Only once did she see him stumble and that was because a horse had gone down and its thrashing hooves came too close to his head.

  He said, “No, you don’t. But you are perhaps deaf when others can hear. It’s not the same, but it’s not easy. Did you want to know more of him?” He took back his stick and dried the handle on his cloak. Wi
thout waiting for an answer, he said, “He was a cavalryman. His horse was killed earlier in the day and Corvus gave him another. He stayed close to the decurion because of it and so lived when the sea came to eat them. One of the legionaries attacked him when Corvus brought his troop across to escort them back to the mainland. He was too far into the dream to know friend from foe.”

  “The legionary or the cavalryman?”

  “Both. But the cavalry were recovering by the time this one died; they could see enough through the smoke to know land from sea and they were not all caught in the havoc of the nightmares as the legionaries were. Corvus understood what was happening. It was good that your vision in the fire said to leave him alive.”

  That was what was wrong. Graine’s stomach twisted in on itself so that she felt sick. She said, “This wasn’t what I saw in the fire. In the fire, the cavalry and all of the legionaries killed each other, to the last one. Not one of them was left alive except Corvus.”

  She looked out across the straits. Far away, near the shores of the mainland, the first of the Roman barges was backing water with the leeward oars, turning broadside to bring wounded and exhausted men as close to the shore as they could safely go so they would not have to disembark in deep water. Corvus had marshalled them and they had left under his command, in something approaching good order. It was nothing like the ending she had woven in the fire.

  She said, “The governor only sent half of his men to attack us and half of those have gone back again. In the fire, two legions died on Mona. We should have killed them all.”

  This time, Bellos took far longer to answer. Long enough for the nudging barge to herd the Batavian cavalryman out to the wide water of the straits where the currents caught him and began slowly to spin him, and then faster, drawing him down with each revolution until the spiral of straw that was his hair was gone too far beneath the water to see.

  She felt a sudden tug in her midriff and a hollowness as of a room made suddenly empty. Because she was angry, she said, “Thorn lived. I saw you say goodbye to her, as if you thought she might not.”

  “That was for later.” Bellos was being remarkably patient with her. “No-one lives for ever and there is no harm, ever, in catching the joy of a day while it lasts.”

  He leaned over and trailed the tip of his staff in the water, carving a furrow. More seriously, he said, “If we had not spared Corvus, then very likely the legionaries would have killed each other to the last man as they did in your vision. Certainly they were still held in the dream when he got them in the barges and made them leave. He’s a good man with an understanding of the gods, so I’m not sorry that he was left alive, but it may be that we have altered something that will change the futures beyond what you saw.”

  She had already thought about that. She said, “I didn’t see Corvus being killed when I looked in the fire. And I did see two legions attack Mona. Today, the governor only sent the Twentieth. He did not hold back the Fourteenth because of us.”

  “No. And you saw Valerius and Cygfa lead the charge on the foreshore, but not the Boudica. It seems to me that perhaps you saw two things at once, that part of it was for today and that the rest is to come at some other time. Even if not, we can do nothing to change what has happened, only live with what is given us.”

  Bellos stood. His staff came to the top of his head. The ram’s horn was carved in the shape of a crow’s head, with amber for the eyes. Small points of fire, they sparked in the sun. Snakes twisted below, rising and falling along its length.

  Graine said, “Mac Calma has marked you for Briga.”

  He smiled, gently. “I think the marking was done a long time ago. The Elder has simply made it clear for even me to see. Shall we go before it gets too dark? The legions won’t be back today. Possibly not even tomorrow, and by the day after perhaps we will know why things happened as they did. Or we won’t, and we’ll fight again, but it will be against men beaten once, which is to our advantage, not theirs.”

  He extended his hand; an apology for slights that were not his fault, an offering of help, a promise of support.

  Graine took it and let him raise her up to her feet and they walked back towards the great-house along paths that he could feel and she could see, where plantain was beginning to spread and the cow parsley to scatter white flowers like frost now that the hawthorn was past, and a curlew rose, piping, from the higher reach of the beach and soared back over the salted grass of the paddocks to the new-growth greens of the heather and birch beyond.

  Along the way, she saw a sword on the shoreline and ran back for it, so that, for the first time in her life, she walked in dusk towards the dreamers’ place with a blade in her hand.

  Corvus had dropped his sword, and so was unable to fall on it, which was unfortunate, when he had just pledged his life as a sacrifice to the sea.

  He waded out of the water and watched his mare sink to her knees and then her side on the hard rock of the mainland. He sank to his own knees beside her and kept a hand on her heart. The beat rose faint to his touch and unsteady, but it was there. That mattered above everything; above Ursus and Sabinius and Flavius and how they had fared on the long, desperate swim back, above the men of the XXth legion who had heeded him through the fog of their nightmares and had brought themselves home across the mile of hungry ocean to safety. Most assuredly above the towering presence of the governor, Suetonius Paullinus, by the emperor’s pleasure, and courtesy of the emperor’s waning patience, governor of all Britannia, charged with the task of subduing the west or dying in the attempt.

  The governor had not died in the attempt. Three thousand men had done so, to very little effect. Something close to two thousand others had returned from the battle alive but beaten. The governor, evidently, did not consider this to be any kind of victory and it was well known that he did not tolerate defeat.

  He stood on the strand at the margins of the heather and the rock with his hands clasped tightly before him and his face was set as if already carved in monumental marble. Without looking down to where Corvus knelt, he said, “Prefect, you will present yourself.”

  Corvus pushed himself to standing. His teeth were chattering and would not stop. His flesh shook like a man with palsy. His hand dropped out of habit to the place where his sword hilt should have hung. With some effort, he remembered that he had unbuckled it and dropped it on the shores of Mona just before he set his mare back into the waves in a place where the currents were clearly lethal and already two barges had overturned.

  In a world and at a time when he was certain of nothing from the solidity of the ground beneath his feet to the identities of the men at his side who had begun to take on the shapes of ravens, he had thought dropping the mass of iron bound to his waist a remarkable act of sanity. A part of him thought so still.

  “Have you ever seen a decimation?”

  The governor’s face was very close. The bloodshot eyes were watering in the wind. Rage, or that same wind, had turned his nose red as a cock’s comb and set it streaming with mucus. He looked like a mummer in a Greek farce.

  As it happened, Corvus had indeed seen a decimation. The memory was carefully buried in the far reaches of his mind where it was not likely to emerge without warning and unman him. He was very careful not to think of it now. He said, “No.”

  The sea still washed through his ears and throat and sinuses. It juddered in his eyes so that he had trouble focusing, or perhaps that was the aftermath of the dreamers’ smoke; he had not been able to focus clearly on Mona, either.

  It was the sea, not the island, that had crippled his senses; his nose and throat had been scoured by the brine leaving only deadness behind. Ursus was close by and Corvus could not smell the Dacian wolfskin. There was a time, less than a day before, when he would have thought that a miracle. Now, it seemed yet one more waystone on the path to disaster. He considered the strangeness of a world without scent and, for a moment, it mattered more than the governor’s threat.

  “Co
rvus…”

  Corvus sighed, and took no trouble to hide it. On the lee shore of Mona, he had stared into the eyes and hearts of things worse than death. Luain mac Calma had promised life, not sanity, and his protection had not extended to saving the integrity of Corvus’ mind.

  Wearily, he said, “The second governor, Scapula, threatened decimation of the Twentieth at Camulodunum when the Eceni were in revolt. He decided then that he did not have sufficient authority. These men are in the grip of the water and the dreamers. They are too exhausted to walk; most of them can barely stand. Even if they could hear you, I doubt if they are physically capable of drawing lots, and if they did, I don’t think you could find any nine of them fit to lift a club to the tenth. In any case, none of those who have lived through the hell on the shores of Mona is willingly going to slaughter a friend who stood at his side. The Fourteenth could do it, but if you set the men of one legion to kill those of another, you will cause a rift that will last beyond our lifetimes, however long we may live.”

  The governor’s gaze darted round the bay and came back to Corvus. He inhaled and clearly regretted it; doubtless Ursus’ wolfskin was close, and wet from the sea, which would not enhance its odour. He said, “I do not consider myself likely to see the luxury of a long old age, and less so after today. We must take this island and wipe out all those who live there, or we die. We may die in the taking, but it will be better than what will happen at Caesar’s hand if we return defeated. Have you no stronger reason why I should not visit the wrath of Rome on the men who have failed me?”

  And so Corvus said the rest of what he had understood as he had dragged himself out of the water and realized that bringing half a legion of men back alive from the teeth of Hades was not going to be enough.

  Quietly, distinctly, knowing what he did, he said, “You have not earned the right. You were not there to face the enemy with them.”