by Manda Scott
“Boudica! Boudica! Boudica!”
The sound rebounded off the walls and would have raised the golden tiles on the temple’s roof, had they not already been melted.
Breaca stepped down from her plinth. They swept apart to let her in, and came together again behind her. Very slowly, she walked through the middle of her host to the back gate of the garden. As geese follow the leader, they followed her out, and through the city to the green space beyond where they could rest, and eat and retell the stories of Camulodunum’s burning, and plan all that was yet to come.
It was evening before Breaca was alone.
The full five thousand had not come each to speak to her personally, it only felt like it. Then there was the time of planning with those who had taken responsibility for strategy while she had not. Then Cunomar left, and the she-bear and the warriors of Mona. Cygfa, Dubornos and Ardacos finished their quiet thanks and the brief, understated eulogies of battle.
In the end, even Longinus, Theophilus and Airmid had stepped away, to find the evening cooking fires and the smoke that kept the dusk insects at bay. Only Valerius was left. Breaca sat with her brother on the turf by a smouldering heap of ash on the western edge of the encampment. One or other of them should have scraped the embers into the centre and laid on more wood from the small, neat pile left in the morning, when the world was a different place. Neither had yet found the energy.
Valerius began to shed his chain mail. He stood, bent double from the waist, while the slither of linked iron inverted itself and, chiming softly, oozed over his head.
He shook himself free and straightened up. His hair was vertical. His woollen undershirt was marked with sweat and rust and blood. The mail had left a reddened lattice of prints on his upper arms.
He attended to none of these, but sat down and said, “They would not have agreed to that so readily if it was me or Cunomar who had suggested it.”
Breaca reached at last for a piece of cut wood and laid it across the fire. Through the new smoke, she said, “I’m sorry there was no time to talk to you before. Are you happy to go south to take Canonium and the other towns? They’re farther and harder to reach than Verulamium.”
“Verulamium is the easier battle, and by far the more glorious. Cunomar will do well with it. Yes, I’m happy to go south.”
It was Breaca’s plan, conceived in the moment when she stood on the plinth in the garden and saw her war host so clearly divided. Even when they came together again, united in the roar of unison, it had seemed good to split them in two; fewer mouths to feed in each travelling host, fewer causes for conflict, twice the fighting power.
She had offered it, and it had been taken: Valerius had agreed to lead his followers south and then west to assault the Roman towns and ports along the banks of the Great River, ending at the place where the legions had crossed in their first invasion, which the Romans called Vespasian’s Bridge; Cunomar had leaped at the chance to take his faction due west to annihilate Rome’s second city, Verulamium. They already had scouts who knew each other; it had not been difficult to arrange the means by which a relay of riders could keep the leaders of the two smaller hosts in touch with each other.
Valerius leaned his back against his saddle packs and peered through the growing cloud of midges at his sister. He looked thoughtful, as Cunobelin had done, but weighed with the weariness of life.
“You didn’t say what you were going to do while we are clearing Rome from the southern towns and ports. Cunomar thinks you will be with him, but is afraid that you may join me, which is why he didn’t ask. The rest think his fears are right. I don’t need you and you know it. So where will you be?”
Breaca watched a crow gather its courage to approach one of the unmoved dead from the temple’s front courtyard. She said, “Airmid has asked that I not fight for nine days. I’m going north to find Venutios of the Brigantes, to see if he will bring his warriors to join the host. He has at least two thousand spears with battle experience who will answer his call, and they hate Rome as much as any. We’ll do better against the legions if we have them with us.”
“We still shouldn’t face the legions in a line fight,” Valerius said. “Nothing has changed that. Even Cunomar would agree, I think, after facing the veterans in the garden. If one century was hard, imagine a legion of a full five thousand.” The evening light lay on his face. He shuffled sideways a little and, taking out his belt knife, began to clean the grime of battle from beneath his fingernails.
“It won’t come to that. We don’t have to let it. The scouts can carry messages between all three of us. Midsummer is five days from now. If your warriors and Cunomar’s can be done by four or five days after that, you can meet at a place west of Verulamium. I will bring Venutios’ warriors south and we can join the host again and you can tell us how to find victory against three legions.”
“If Venutios agrees to send his warriors,” Valerius said. “He may not.”
“He may not,” Breaca agreed equably. The crow flapped from the wall and dropped raggedly to the body below. Bird of Briga, it called to its fellows to join it. Two others flew in, so that three fed together.
A last threshold waited, beyond which was a land she had never entered and from which she could not return. As three crows fed, Breaca said to her brother, “I heard you had made me a spear, like the heron-spears of the Caledonii but with iron instead of silver for the blade, and that Airmid had carved the haft with serpents, so that it was a true serpent-spear, with no feathers to tip the balance, that might be used in battle. Is it true?”
Valerius stopped cleaning his fingernails. He laid his knife neatly on the front of his saddle. “We told no-one. How did you know?”
“Nemain told me. At the end of the fever. She said you believed it would hold me more strongly to life.”
The moon had not risen yet. He looked west, to the setting sun. His face was Macha’s made harder by battle. “I was arrogant in my despair,” he said at last. “You don’t have to take it.”
“I want to, but not yet. When I come back from the north, and am whole, I would like it then.”
She rose and took his arm and he was Bán again and she Breaca and they were going to the roundhouse for an evening meal and life was as it had always been before the nightmare of the legions, or could be allowed to seem so for a night at least before they parted.
CHAPTER 31
CORVUS, PREFECT OF THE QUINTA GALLORUM, TEMPORARILY assigned to the governor’s personal guard, celebrated mid-summer’s dawn becalmed on the deck of a wide-waisted cargo sloop with a single bellied sail that waddled through the waves as a duck through a farm pond and left all but the most sea-hardened men vomiting in their bunks.
Corvus had not thought of himself as particularly sea-hardened, but clearly was more so than those who travelled with him. He stood wide-legged on the aft deck with the steersman and the ship’s master and lifted a goblet of well-watered wine to the bleeding edge of the sun.
He had never been a priest or functionary in any of Rome’s cults, but he spoke a few words to Jupiter, who seemed the most reasonable of the gods, and then spilled some of the wine into the green-grey sea for Neptune, that they might perhaps see some wind shortly, and come safely back to shore at a place where neither tides, nor currents, nor hidden rocks, might kill them. Last, in Alexandrian, which neither the master nor the steersman understood, he spoke aloud the care of his heart to the listening spirits of those who were closest to him, as he had done at every winter and summer solstice since he first came into the legions.
The ritual calmed him, as it had always done, and made the insanity of what they were doing seem less. Taken in the right light, the venture could seem to be heroic and doubtless would be made to seem so afterwards in the senate and baths of Rome, by men who enjoyed listening to the deaths of others and considered the search for glory and displays of courage to be entirely admirable in anyone other than themselves.
Corvus gave a last sluice of wine
to the water and offered the goblet, two-handed, to the steersman who drank and passed it to the master, who drank and handed it back in like manner to Corvus, so that they each shared the mid-year bounty with the gods. The wine was mellow and smelled of autumn and ripe fruit. Corvus let it rest a while on his tongue and swallowed it with the next heave of the deck.
“Land today?” He spoke the words with exaggerated clarity.
“Nightfall.” The ship’s master was from the northlands, a giant of a man with yellow hair and a ring of blue dots tattooed in the weather-red skin round his neck. His Latin was as rudimentary as his Gaulish and both were greater than his grasp of Britannic tongues. His understanding of light craft and the seas between Hibernia, Gaul and Britannia was exceptional. He was paid a retainer that amounted to more than the annual salary for an entire tent party of legionaries and their centurion, and was worth twice as much for his ability to bring craft to land safely.
The choice of ship had not been his; unaccountably, among tribes who were notionally entirely well disposed towards Rome, there had been no ships free when the governor had needed them. If the Nordic master had not used some of his own gold to keep the crew that he wanted, they would have had no mariners either. The cargo sloop had been bought, at breathtaking expense, from the son of a man whose life Corvus had once saved. Even then, they had been begged to take it after dark so that he could say it had been stolen. Besides its crew, it carried exactly sixteen additional men, with one horse each. Corvus chose not to imagine how they were going to ride safely across country to Londinium if no-one in the pacified territories was prepared even to sell them a ship.
The blond northman nodded forward, to where the ship’s one small-boat rested in a sling. “Tonight,” he said. “Row. Dark. Horses swim behind. Not seen.” He rolled his eyes graphically. “Birds keep dry.”
The pigeons were Flavius’ special care; there were six, all homed to the flight in the fortress of the XXth whence a man on a fast horse might ride in less than half a morning to the coast. He cared for them as if they were his children and had told the northman, who seemed to consider them valid rations, that if he ate them, he would eat his testicles immediately after. At the time, it had seemed a strangely credible threat.
Corvus said, “Tonight?” and tried to think what it might take to get the governor and his men upright by nightfall and able to walk and possibly — please all the gods that every one of the horses had come through the voyage safely — to ride.
“Tonight.” The giant grinned. “Wind come soon. Boat go fast. Waves small. Governor less sick.”
They rowed at night, in the dark before the moon rose, with the oars and the breasting horses making phosphorescent fire in the sea, so that they left a fading trail that marked where they had been.
The governor was pale and smelled overly of peppermint oil, which did not entirely cover the smell of vomit. Even so, he was first to step ashore, and stood creditably straight with his blade ready while the others turned the boat round and sent it back with the ship’s steersman rowing, to wait offshore for their signal, and Corvus and the two men he had brought with him led the horses ashore, and worked by feel in the almost-dark to find grass with which to dry them off and gave them handfuls of corn to bring the life back to their eyes and make up for the cold and the dark and the sea. They checked their legs and their flanks and found no cuts or swellings or heat and Corvus thanked Neptune openly for his gift of horses from the sea.
The quarter-moon rose in a veiled sky. By its light, fifteen men gathered in the dark on the sloping sand around their governor and general, wet to the thighs from the final wade ashore, wrapped tight in winter cloaks against a summer night’s cold.
Eleven of them were of the XIVth and XXth legions. They were volunteers, but only in so far as the order had been couched as a request; none of them would have considered refusing. Not all were officers. Like Alexander of Macedon, Suetonius Paullinus had made the effort to know the names and achievements of the men who served under him, and so each was of middle age, a little younger than the governor himself, and each had proved himself outstanding in valour or wit or resource either in Britannia or in Paullinus’ Mauretanian campaigns.
Only the two cavalry men were not of the governor’s direct choosing: Ursus and Flavius came at Corvus’ invitation, the one to offer support, the other because it was no longer safe to leave him behind where he could not be watched, and for his precious pigeons, which had kept dry on the row over and might yet save their lives.
Last and least of the fifteen was a local guide named Gaius who had lived so long at the fortress of the XXth legion that he had acquired an accent traceable directly to the gutters of three streets that passed between the Mons Avertina and the Tiber in Rome. It had been rumoured on board ship that the governor had promised him citizenship if the war against the tribes was won. More plausible rumour said that the man had three sons of whom he was exceeding proud and that he wanted citizenship for them more than he wanted life itself.
Suetonius Paullinus, governor of all Britannia, stood on the weed and sand of a native shore that should have been friendly, or at least not hostile. He wore leather armour, because he had no intention of dying if the small-boat sank, and his sword was built for use, not for the parade ground. The hilt was covered in boarhide, and the cross-piece, so that no part of it would catch sun or moon and reveal him. His helmet was matt with age and could have been any legionary’s. They were all the same: grim, hard men who understood exactly what it was they were required to do, and how great were the risks.
His gaze read them, and was content. He said, “From here until we reach and take Vespasian’s Bridge, we will act as if the natives are the enemy. We will ride fast, we will ride hard. We will avoid confrontation or even meeting with the tribes, but whom we meet, we kill.”
They travelled hard, but not fast.
It was said that the emperor Tiberius, in the days when he was a general in the Germanies and not yet an emperor, had once ridden two hundred and twenty miles in a single day. If it were true, he could have ridden the full breadth of Britannia in that same day, except that the roads did not exist and it would have required him to change horses at the post stations every twenty miles.
Suetonius Paullinus and his fifteen men did not have his resources. They rode on trackways and goat paths and were dependent for their directions on the lead of Gaius, who was of the northern Silures and did not know the routes well, and each man had to nurse his horse, knowing that if it foundered, he would have to find another one immediately or be left at the wayside.
They met very few natives, and all of them warriors in paint, with kill-feathers woven into their hair. None of them came close enough to engage and the risk of ambush, or of destroying the horses, was too great to follow them. A boy was killed, who did not run fast enough and did not know that Flavius, like another before him, was skilled in the use of a throwing knife.
Beyond that one inglorious kill, there was nothing but hard days in the saddle, frequent turns back on themselves when a track proved impassable, and only the growing breadth of the river to tell them they were making any progress at all.
They came to the first of the deserted trading posts around noon on the fourth day of their travel. It was not an imposing place, a wharf no bigger than the jetty on Mona, lagged about with river weed and the debris of a skirmish; a length of rope swayed in the brown water, caught on the wharf’s upstream footing, a tattered piece of woven wool showing green beneath it, the remnant of a child’s cloak shed in haste or by accident in flight.
Eight merchant’s huts were lined along the river up- and downstream of the wharf. The nearest was largest, paid for by the river tolls of those wishing to cross to the smaller jetty on the far bank, and the greater trading taxes of those who had bypassed the lower ports and sailed from the open seas through the mouth of the river and up this far.
Only one man could be spared at a time for reconnaissance. Corvus dre
w the white pebble from the helmet and rode down alone to look. He walked his black colt along the water’s edge. The horse was not strictly his remount, but he had come through the swim to Mona better than the mare had done and the Batavian who had ridden him was dead: Corvus did not want to come back and find the man’s soul-brother had taken his horse as were-geld.
The beast shied at a flapping door-hide and again more violently at a sow that had been left in a sty without food or water and screamed when it saw Corvus coming. He opened the gateway and let her out and she charged, ears flapping, for the river bank. A scatter of ducks rose in panic, honking so that for a moment there was screaming pandemonium and Ursus brought half of Paullinus’ troop at the gallop with swords drawn thinking that Corvus was under attack.
“There’s no-one here,” Corvus said. He had already checked each hut. The hearts of the fires were cold and damp, but, on a day when it was warm enough to ride in shirtsleeves, there was no mould yet on the fire stones. He said, “They’ve been gone more than two days, less than five.”
Ursus said, “Have they gone across the river, or east? They can’t have gone west; we’d have met them.”
Gaius, the Siluran guide, arrived after the first flurry of action. He had some facility as a tracker. He walked the length of the eight huts and came back to lean on the pigsty. He was taller than any of them, as the northman had been. He stooped a little, not to seem so. “The boats have gone,” he said. “Some of them likely went across, but at least three wagons travelled east along the trackway.”
“How far are we from Vespasian’s Bridge?”
“Half a day’s ride. They will be there long ahead of us.”
“And any others who have gone there.” Corvus swung himself into the saddle. “I hope the magistrates of the port are prepared for a thousand extra mouths to feed.”
The magistrates of the settlement that straggled along the northern bank of the Thamesis on either side of Vespasian’s Bridge were not well prepared. The pandemonium in the circle of huts and trading booths and the central corn exchange matched the chaos of the sow and ducks for noise and was spread over a far wider area.
