Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  She passed Valerius the waterskin and he drank and the small scrape as he set the leather flask back on the stone wall ahead of them was the loudest sound along the length of the wall. They stood awhile, watching the dawn. A cloud lay over the sun and would not move, so that, in a clearly blue sky, there was no rising brightness.

  Watching it, Valerius asked, “Did you find what you needed with Theophilus last night?”

  “Perhaps the beginnings of it,” Breaca said. She was sick with lack of sleep and the smell of burning flesh turned her stomach. He looked at her as Theophilus had, as Airmid had after, when she returned. As they had each done, he said, “You don’t have to be here. We can take the temple without you.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that, it might be that Cunomar is ready to lead the war host.”

  That, too, had been said in the morning, although with less conviction. The line of battle was not the time nor the place to argue. At length, Breaca said only, “That’s not necessary yet.”

  They fell to silence and watched the sky. Presently, the sun moved up above the trees, still locked behind its following cloud. When it was so high that the shadows should have reached halfway across the empty courtyard, Valerius said, “If they don’t come out soon, we’ll have to—” and stopped, because the first part of the waiting, at least, was over.

  Something brazen rang to the dawn, as of a shield struck to greet the gods. A grating came, of metal on stone, and the bronze door to the temple edged open slowly, as if it weighed a great deal and those behind were afraid to open it quickly.

  For a breath’s pause the silence returned, then a child wept, reedily. There was more waiting, and then four girl-children in stained tunics with dirty blond hair emerged on unsteady feet, blinking in the dull cloud-light. They stood on the white stone steps, half naked and filthy, clutching rags and wooden toys in their arms for comfort, staring out at the ring of warriors round them. They were crying, silently, uninhibitedly, with running noses and red, wide eyes.

  Four girls, none of them older than Graine. Only four, no more.

  The bronze door closed, shuddering.

  Cygfa said, “There must be more.”

  “There aren’t,” said Valerius.

  Breaca said, “They need help.”

  Airmid had already stepped across the low wall towards the temple. She walked out alone, straight-backed under the late moon and the mist and the clouded sun. The limed stone of the temple made all the light white, so that it glanced off her hair and she was silver, marked for Nemain. She walked up the long courtyard, past the roughly hewn block of the altar stone, yet to be consecrated, to the foot of the steps. Seeing her, the girls shrieked and turned back to the doors and would have run, perhaps, to the unsafety of the interior, but she stopped and crouched and tipped her head to one side and said something too low to be heard where the warriors waited; only the murmur of it carried to them, and the sudden softening of the children, so that they walked to her, and were held.

  Lanis joined her, who was a dreamer of the Trinovantes and known to them. They lifted one each and led the others. Four girls, when an amnesty and safe passage without harm had been offered to all the women and children inside.

  Only four.

  The clouded sun moved up, and the contours of the temple walls began to acquire a semblance of shadow and texture. Along the stone parapet that surrounded the compound, the tension eased. Men and women rested their shields and drank water and ate smoked meat and handfuls of soaked barley and spoke to each other so that the rock and rhythms of speech filled the silence. The warriors were not waiting, now, for anything, except some sign to show how one moment differed from the one before it and the final assault could begin.

  Breaca backed away from her stance and went to see Airmid and the children in the safe place they had found in the broken arc of the theatre, close to the place where Eneit had died. It was hard to see it and not remember that; Breaca walked round the edge to avoid stepping on the sand in the middle, that had been the flight path of her spear.

  The girls were at the edge, on the first row of seats. Theophilus sat with them, whom they knew well. He had one on his knee and two crushed against his hips, and was wiping their hands and legs with sheep’s wool dipped in water and rosemary oil. They had been locked in airless, sunless stone for two days and nights, sharing food with five hundred, and water, and latrines that were the corners, with nothing to keep themselves clean.

  Three of them welcomed his touch and relief patterned their faces. The fourth sat apart, clutching the wooden hound she had been sent out with, and stared ahead and would not speak. Her hair was rust-red when the others were dirty straw, her eyes were more green than their blue-grey and her nose was more strongly aquiline than theirs. Of the four, she smelled most strongly of faeces and stale men’s urine.

  Airmid had been gone and returned. “I found this for them to eat. It’s not much, but better than they have had.”

  It was better than any of them had had, of the besieging army, or the besieged. She opened a willow basket and inside was malted barley and warmed oatcakes, a little crumbly for too little milk, and honey. In a burned city, inhabited by a war host that carried barely as much as it needed, Airmid had found honey. Even Theophilus had not had that.

  For all the fear and tension and loathing of what the day held, Breaca had to swallow and resist an overwhelming temptation to reach for the basket. The three girls who leaned on Theophilus’ knees had no such inhibitions; two days on corn uncooked alone had left them open to the bribery of honey and malted barley. They grabbed what they were offered and crammed more than they could swallow in their mouths.

  The fourth girl, the one with the darker, rusty hair who hugged her hound and stared at nothing, looked past the food as if she could see neither it nor the woman who offered it. Her eyes were the colour of the straits that kept Mona safe, but red and thick from weeping.

  To Breaca, in Eceni, Airmid said, “Where’s Stone?”

  He was with Valerius, to whom he had given some of his heart when Graine left. Breaca whistled and the old hound trotted to her and smelled the oatcake she held out to him from a distance away so that his stride lifted and his ears flagged high. She broke it in half and gave him half of one and sat on the dusty earth and teased him until he lay down and rolled over and she could scratch his belly, away from the pink flesh and skin of the healing wound at his ribs.

  The rust-haired girl watched sideways, without turning her head. Breaca studied her the same way, weighing the signs of care — her tunic, which had torn and then been mended awkwardly in poor light; her hair, which had been cut recently, so the ends were still level — against the signs of uncare that were more manifest. She was thinner than only two days’ reduced rations might have created, and her hair was matted at the back, with straw and dung in parts of it. Her feet were filthy up to the ankles, as if she had stood in a pigsty, which was not entirely impossible; closer, with the wind from behind her, she stank of pig as much as of men.

  Stone rolled onto his side and grunted as his wound stretched. Breaca ran her fingers round the edge of it, feeling for heat. To the girl, not looking directly, she said, “His name is Stone. His sire was Hail who died to protect Graine and her father Caradoc. The Roman procurator tried to kill him. It has taken all of Airmid’s skill to keep him alive. Are there hounds inside the temple? If they can be sent out, you could care for them. We would not have them harmed.”

  There was no answer. The girl turned to look the other way. Breaca stopped speaking and sat up. Stone flagged his tail on the earth, raising dust and old, settled ash. She rubbed him with her toe and he mouthed at her leg and she forgot the girl for a while, until a thin voice, surprisingly deep, said, “They killed the hounds to eat them and so they wouldn’t eat the food.”

  There was nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Breaca took her foot from Stone. He got up, puzzled, and went to nose the child, who pushed him aw
ay. Breaca called him and led him back to the warriors, leaving the children with Airmid and Theophilus, who did not make war and did not cause hounds to be killed for food in a temple to a man who had been made into a god.

  In a sky of clear blue, the one cloud still covered the sun. The warriors still waited outside the parapet. The day was dust and death and nothing could be done to change it.

  The cloud drifted sideways by slow degrees, freeing the sun. On the bronze door of the temple, a band of light grew at the hinge and widened. A knife blade of brilliance became a finger’s breadth, became a handspan, became an arm’s length of undiluted fire. The tiles above glowed softly gold, then dazzled, more brightly than the bronze beneath.

  For those watching, the temple was consumed by the gods’ fire, sent not by Claudius, but by the gods of the tribes, who had been petitioned since dawn, since the days of their first lost battle and all that had come since.

  A murmur ran round, and rose to a shout and then stilled again, in awe and the shock of faith tested and found to have sure foundations. They had asked for a sign, the combined warriors of the Eceni, of Mona, of the Trinovantes, of the Coritani and the Votadini and the Brigantes; through the vehicle of Valerius, who spoke to both moon and sun, they had asked that something tangible be given and the evidence lay before them in the streaming, dazzling brilliance of the gods’ furnace that opened before them.

  Valerius stood very still, not wishing his eyes to tire of it. He had asked for help as the sun rose, going out beyond the eastern margins of the city to a place where he could see both the first arc of the new day and the old moon that pushed above the horizon ahead of it and so could open equally to the two gods he served. In grey-silver light with a thin spatter of frost crisp on the ground, with the air clear as river water and free from the taint of burning, he had felt the doorway open in the caved silence of his mind and had stepped forward to the threshold with a question framed on his lips.

  He had not expected anything more than the release of asking. Then the dawn had come and the sky had grown to an aching, transparent blue, clear from one horizon to the other except for the one cloud that had sat doggedly over the sun, so that half of the morning had passed in its shade and the warriors had become progressively more restless, even after the children had been sent out.

  Valerius had been about to talk to Breaca, to organize a withdrawal. They were together when the cover of the cloud was taken away by Mithras’ hand, or Nemain’s or Briga’s or all of these acting together to send the gods’ fire in the sky to meet the man-hardened fire of the earth and make the meeting of them radiant, so that the watchers basked in liquid sunlight and were blinded and god-touched and grateful.

  It was necessary to move, to begin, to set the day in motion and all that might follow. Valerius did not sink to his knees in a weakness of relief, although the moment was there to do it. He flexed his fingers and forced some movement from them and said, “Huw?” and heard Mona’s best slinger move up to his side and the chuck of a stone falling into leather and the whispered whine of the flick as it was sent on its course.

  The stone sent was a flint the size of a hen’s egg that they had found together in the dusk-dew of the previous evening. One side of it was broken open, to show the black at the heart within the white skin. Briga, wrapped within Nemain; it had seemed a good choice to begin the ending.

  The hammer of it against the bronze door was of a giant’s war shield, struck by a god. It rang to the slope ten spear-throws behind, and echoed back on itself like ripples on water.

  For two more heartbeats after, the quiet remained. Then, under the blaze of the gods’ light, with all the noise and effort they could muster, Valerius and his warriors hurled themselves at the bronze door.

  The noise was astonishing, greater even than the usual deafening clamour of war. It lacked the screams of wounded or dying, or the usual dullness of iron on flesh, but in their place was a constant rain of iron on bronze, and wood on bronze, and stone on bronze as swords and spear hafts and slingstones crashed endlessly into the solid metal of the doors. They made no dents, nor moved them on their hinges. They did not expect to.

  Some time later, when he thought he had gone deaf, Valerius heard a whistle, high above the clamour.

  He stepped back, slapping sweat from his face. His throat hurt, and his chest. His eyes were stinging as if he had been in real battle. His right arm ached.

  “Here!”

  He looked up. Cygfa was sixty feet above him on the temple’s roof. Caught in the full sun, her hair was a blazing nimbus, her features fine as carved marble. She looked like the young Alexander on a fresco in a Gaulish villa. Valerius felt his past intrude unwanted on his present and shook his head to clear it.

  Cygfa shouted, to be heard over the noise. “It’s done! Send up the fire baskets.” She mimed a throw and saw that he was ready and spun a weight down to him that, when caught, proved to be a gilded lead roof tile, cheap and easily folded.

  He felt someone at his side. Breaca was there, from nowhere; she had not taken part in the attack on the door. He gave her the tile and she folded it in half, and then quarters, as the old men in Rome folded their curse tablets. Her face was unreadable; he was not used to that.

  Behind her, the fire baskets were passing from warrior to warrior, smouldering, not yet fully alight, belching fine, dusty smoke and the smell of oak bark and pitch. Valerius looked out into the heart of the throng still assaulting the door.

  “Huw!” The lad was not so far away, and he had seen Cygfa. He grinned and his sling flashed one more time.

  Valerius signalled him and shouted to back it up. “Pull back!”

  The warriors did not have Roman discipline and the noise carried its own power, so that it was hard to stop and risk again the threatened silence of before. Still, they slowed in time, as more were needed to relay the fire baskets and others walked backwards, to stand on the parapets to watch Cygfa and the dozen of her honour guard gather basket after basket on the roof of the temple, sending smoke to stain the clear blue of the sky.

  Those inside the temple discovered what had befallen later than those in the assaulting horde. The noise at the doors had been unpleasant outside; in the echoing stone chamber of the temple it had been truly deafening, so that the sound of the roof tiles being levered up and away was lost in the clamour of it. Wet hides had covered the growing gap that was made, letting in no light to betray early what was being done.

  Eight warriors stood on the sloping roof, each holding a basket from the pile at their side. Four others held the edges of the wet hides. Cygfa held aloft a pitch pine torch, that out-blazed the sun.

  Valerius gave the order, because the mix in the baskets had been his idea, and it was good that he be seen to be a part of the final battle.

  He shouted up and raised his hand and Cygfa grinned and tipped her fire torch in a warrior’s salute and then said something that could not be heard from the ground. The four warriors holding the goatskins pulled them aside. Cygfa spun in a slow circle and eight fire baskets took light, belching flames and dark, tarry smoke. The sound of a man’s panicked shout, and then a cacophony of others, came up through the gap in the roof tiles as the first of the torches was hurled in.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE DEFENDERS BROKE OUT BEFORE THE LAST OF THE baskets had been thrown down from the roof. No-one expected otherwise; given an open choice, few warriors, or even merchants, tanners, harness makers and magistrates who might become warriors if given a blade to wield, would choose death by burning over death in battle, or the chance of life, if they could fight better than they had ever imagined.

  The gods had spoken. There was no chance of life for those who broke out, but they had been locked in the dark and did not know that the sun’s fire had already melted the bronze doors and that they ran onto the waiting blades of warriors who walked with their gods beside them and could not lose, even in death.

  Breaca stood apart from the rest, with Stone at
her side. She had not intended to be alone; in the beginning Cygfa had been at her shield arm and Valerius at her sword hand and both would have died to protect her. When they were sent away, Cygfa to break in through the roof, Valerius to assault the doors, there were others: Braint of Mona; Madb of Hibernia who was honour-bound to Valerius; and Cunomar, who alone of all those fighting was not yet sick of the slaughter and led his she-bears with a fervour that bordered on battle madness.

  One by one, she had sent them where they were needed: Braint to help Cygfa, Madb to support Valerius when smoke began to thread through an opening crack between the doors; Cunomar to rally the few dozen Trinovantes who kept watch on the hidden exit from the temple, because if anyone was going to break from it, they would do it soon.

  Thus, when the doors were flung back, suddenly, by men still able to think and fight, she was alone at the edge of the temple’s courtyard with her crippled war hound and a blade hilt slick with sweat.

  Breaca hefted her shield, testing her strength. The night’s talking weighed on her, not only for lack of sleep. The shield felt heavier than it had done in the days before and then it had seemed heavier than ever in her youth; it did not seem likely that she would be able to hold it at battle readiness for the duration of a long skirmish.

  She sought the song of her blade and could not hear it, or feel the stabbing ripple in her palm that was the foretaste of the wildfire that had always before sustained her in battle. There had been something of it in the forests of the northern wash, fighting the IXth legion, and she had thought it paltry and insufficient. Now, even that much would have been welcome.

  She had seen others fight purely on their wits and skill, and never had to do it herself. Stone pushed against her leg, shuddering; it was impossible to tell if he was aching to fight or to run. She pressed back against him with her knee, having no hand free to ruffle his mane, and they leaned one against the other, watching the rush of the veterans from the doors down the steps and the ringing clash as they met the waiting warriors. Ordered lines disintegrated soon into the chaos of the battle and neither Breaca nor her hound had any great urge to join it.