Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  “Which he has done.”

  “Indeed. The Roman officers rode west towards the coast. Valerius thinks they’ll summon the legions down from Mona to join them and that, together, they’ll march south down the new road they have built, which is wide enough for eight men and stretches all the way to the Great River.

  “Your mother’s brother has ten thousand refugees from Canonium and Caesaromagus and Lugdunum. If the legions meet them, it will be carnage. He has sent me to ask, therefore, if you will harry the legions as you did in the forests of the east against the Ninth, until he is able to join you. The place named by the Boudica for her meeting with you both is just north of here. He wishes to wait there for her, unless she’s already joined you here?”

  There was a warning in the words, more than the casual question allowed. For a moment, the threat and promise of the legions was a small thing. “She’s not here,” Cunomar said. “It’s twelve days since she left and we’ve heard nothing since the third day after we parted. Has she not sent word to Valerius?”

  “None.” Braint’s eyes were less cold: Cygfa, who was soul-friend to Braint, had been chosen to ride with the Boudica. If Breaca was lost, then her daughter was lost with her.

  Cunomar said, “I had thought she was with you, or at least had sent word. We could send out scouts to search—”

  “When she rides with Ardacos and Cygfa?” Braint grinned, sharply. “We have no scouts who could find those two. If she wants to be found, she will be found. If she does not, or cannot, scouts will find nothing. They would be better put to seeking out the legions.”

  Cunomar’s mouth had dried so that he had to swallow to speak, and then again to loosen his jaw. “How many are they?” he asked. “And how close?”

  “Almost all of the Fourteenth with a third of the Twentieth, plus two wings of cavalry. Perhaps six thousand legionaries and a thousand horse. As to how close, Valerius thinks that they will have reached the lands of the Coritani, who worship the horned god. There are places there which lend themselves to ambush. We should be able easily to attack the tail as before.”

  Braint ran her tongue round her teeth. “Valerius could have sent the warriors of Mona alone,” she said, “but he has sent me to join you. If you were a hound, I would imagine he was throwing you a bone. Are you willing to take such a thing? Have you the warriors to ambush the legions?”

  Cunomar sought the bear again, and was empty. He heard his mother, a long time ago, before they came east. When the gods most fill you, you feel most empty. Then is the time to ride the wind and let it guide you.

  The wind came from the south and east. It blew north and west, towards Mona and the marching legions. Cunomar looked up. A scattering of crows came together from three directions, flung rags cawing in the fast air. They made the sky black with their circling, then turned and flew with one mind, north and west.

  He felt hot breath on his neck. He let his eyes turn, but not his body. The wall-eyed chestnut mare was behind him, lipping at his shoulder, ready to be caught. For no particular reason, she reminded him of red-haired Corra, one of the would-be she-bears, who had broken her arm and could not fight, but was good at organizing; she had a wealth of good sense and could be trusted to complete the evacuation and burning of Verulamium, and grateful to be asked.

  Others came to mind, in fast sequence. Quite soon, Cunomar said, “I have fifty of the she-bear who could run alongside your horses into the land of the Coritani and then fight effectively at the end of it. If they combine with your warriors, I think we could give the legions a reason to slow down, as Valerius asks of us. If that’s a bone to a hound, then I accept it.”

  Braint made the warrior’s salute, in the old way, that they still used on Mona. “You are the Boudica’s son, her Hound of the Sea. If it’s a bone, then you have earned it, and will prove yourself worth more after.”

  CHAPTER 33

  GRAINE RODE DOWN FROM THE WEST AND NORTH, A CAREFUL day behind the marching legions.

  The road hugged the coast; the sea was to their left and mountains to their right. As if a god had stepped on it, the land between was crushed where the marching men had been; heather and grass were laid flat where tents had been pitched and men had slept; circles of black ash showed where the cooking fires had fed the seven thousand; latrines hastily dug and more hastily filled again hummed with flies.

  A child could have tracked them. For most of the first day after they left Mona, Hawk was sulkily redundant, then he discovered what it was to ride with a blind man who could see into the worlds beyond and he grew buoyant again and rode alongside Bellos with his eyes shut, trying to learn what could be seen without sight.

  As had become habit amongst them, Dubornos rode a spear’s cast ahead, and Gunovar behind to guard their tail, which left Graine to ride with Efnís, of the northern Eceni, about whom she knew very little, except that he was the named successor to Luain mac Calma as Elder of Mona and had been a friend to her mother since childhood, and had cared for Valerius when he was still Bán. What he thought of him now was unknown, and she did not have the nerve to ask.

  “What do you feel for Hawk?”

  He asked it on the second day, peacefully, in the same tone as he had asked if she had seen the falcon stoop on the pigeon, or the three herons standing in the river. The sea was behind them, and the flat, boggy land that lay east of the mountains. They were riding through the broad, fertile flood plain of two rivers, crossing bridges made by Rome. The horses walked gingerly, hearing hollowness beneath them, and the rush of summer water.

  Graine looked round to the road behind. Hawk was no longer playing games with Bellos. This last day, he had become a tracker again, or a hunter, leaving his horse in Dubornos’ care and running ahead or to the sides on foot. She thought he was gone when she first looked, then found him off to the right, jogging through scrub hawthorn and blackthorn on the far side of the valley. He saw her looking and waved. She waved back.

  To Efnís, she said, “He cares for me.”

  Mac Calma would have pushed for more. Efnís nodded a little and looked into her and through her and past her to the distant ridge and the small hill that rose near it and said, “Your father fought there once, in the spring before you were born. Already they call it Caer Caradoc. There are three others with the same name within two days’ ride of here.”

  She was finding in Efnís a very different man from Luain mac Calma, who had sired Valerius in Hibernia and come to see him on the heels of a storm in the lands of the Eceni, and watched over him, it seemed likely, ever since.

  Efnís, to the best of her knowledge, had sired no-one and did not seem overly inclined to start. He had shared a bed with one of the younger warriors and when she travelled east with Braint to fight Rome on Eceni soil, he had grieved openly and fully for the day of her departing, and then had thrown himself back into the evacuation to Hibernia. When next Graine saw him, he was himself again, open and clear where mac Calma was opaque and unreachable.

  There were disadvantages to his transparency, she was finding; in many ways it had been easier to ignore mac Calma’s oblique probing.

  They rode on for a while, leaving the small hill and the ridges behind them, following the Roman road into broad, wooded land, that rose and fell gently and put no strain on the horses. Hawk took himself further off, so she could not see him. There was an urgency to his moving now, and an attentiveness she had never seen before. Because Efnís’ question so clearly was not fully answered, she said, “I feel safe in his company, as I do in yours.”

  He stopped watching a pair of magpies that squabbled over something discarded by the legions and turned his attention back to her. “I was not part of what happened to injure you. Hawk was a scout in Roman pay. He helped them to do what they did.”

  “My mother killed his father.”

  She wanted that to be enough. It was not. She said, “He went for help. He brought Valerius and then Corvus who was able to stop the procurator and send the vete
rans away. Without him, we would have died.”

  She had not seen that, but everyone except Hawk and Cunomar had told her of it, and of how Hawk came by the cut on his lip that had disfigured his face and still left a coloured bruise over three months on. She said, “He has apologized so often his throat is worn out. I can’t hate him for it.”

  “Do you care enough to grieve if he were to die in battle?”

  “Hawk won’t die.”

  She said it too fast, without thinking, and was surprised at the power of it; she would not have said the same about her mother, or Cunomar, or Cygfa or any of the others whose names and easy mortality tumbled through her mind. She would not have said the same about herself.

  Efnís pursed his lips and she saw a shading of grief in his eyes, that mac Calma would have hidden and he could not. He said, “I’m sorry. I should not have pushed you to that,” and was silent.

  Some time later, after they had crossed a second bridge and the river had wound west again, and they had climbed a ridge and meandered down the other side, he said, “We are coming into the lands of the Cornovii, who worship the horned god. They live a different life from ours, but still honour Mona, and I believe they honour the Boudica as strongly as anyone; certainly they will know you are her daughter and respect you for it, but they are sworn enemies of the Coritani and will know Hawk as one of them. If you would see him live, you should make clear to them your care for him.”

  She had not thought to ask why Hawk had left his horse and taken to scouting again. Now, it seemed a fatal oversight. She made herself sit straight and not look aside to where she thought he might be. Her head spun. “Why are we here? Why not go a different way?”

  “Luain mac Calma was clear; if we miss the battle that is coming, we are all as good as dead. The only way to be sure we can be in the right place at the right time is to keep close on the heels of Rome. Hawk knows that.”

  “But did he know the road came through the lands of the Cornovii?”

  “He has fought these people since his childhood, exactly as he fought the Eceni. I can’t imagine he would not.”

  Breaca met alone with Venutios of the Brigantes after dusk in a wild place, near the edge of a rocky escarpment, with, on the one hand, brown, gritty rock that fell dizzyingly to scrub below and on the other heather, not quite in full purple, and crows somersaulting on the updraughts and a pair of courting buzzard mewling in circles above.

  She had come fast, leaving Airmid with the bulk of her warriors. Only Cygfa was with her; speed lay in small numbers. Ardacos was already there with Venutios. Only he could have tracked a single man who took refuge from Rome and was wary of being seen, and only Ardacos was known by Venutios for himself first and as the Boudica’s shield in all things second, so that his words were her words and carried the same power. A man wanted by the legions for the crime of treason against Cartimandua, his queen, would have come for no-one less.

  The meeting place was high and flat, with a clear view all round so that no-one could come at them unexpectedly. The two war leaders sat on dry rock beside a fire rich with heather roots and old birch, circled by standing boulders that had been carved when the gods were young, so that the lichens were knotted into the carvings and even the edge marks that gave the numbers of dreamers and warriors were barely clear.

  “We need you,” Breaca said. Stone lay behind hunting hares in his sleep so that the tremors of it shivered through her.

  Venutios had been Warrior of Mona and had returned to his people to hold the balance against his queen. He had aged since their last meeting, more than the passing years would have warranted, and it showed most in the depth and detail of his caution. He offered no answer, but chewed on dried venison and let that fill the gap.

  Presently, he said, “I came to you here because Ardacos reminded me of the she-bear dancing as it was done by him on Mona, and all that led from it. For that, and all that you have been, I owe you the honour of a hearing, even if my heart did not demand it. For what Cartimandua did to Caradoc, and I failed to prevent, I owe you life itself. But I cannot give it now. The Brigantes are evenly split. Half follow me and will fight against Rome. Half follow Cartimandua and will fall on our backs and kill us if we show any signs of joining you. If we come, we bring more trouble than help. Do you really want that?”

  “If we drive the legions into the sea, or into the earth, if they are broken and will never return, if the emperor abandons Britannia and all that is in it, what of Cartimandua then?”

  He grinned with unexpected savagery; she had never known him a bitter man. “Then she is dead. We will kill her in the Roman fashion, nailed to wood and left to the skies. But even then, the blood of my Brigantes, and their flesh, would feed the crows for days after the battle that will lead to that. Just now, while Rome is still here and still commands power, it is impossible; we are too few and she is too great. We would lose, and you would have eight thousand hostile spears at your backs as you try to battle Rome. If you win — when you win — enough who currently favour her will side with us and she will be defeated. Until then, we must work quietly and win over a few warriors each day in secret by the power of our arguments, not thousands by the power of our spears.”

  It was summer and the night was warm. Venutios wore no cloak and only a light tunic without sleeves. His arms were bare of ornament or clan marks, as they had always been; the once-Warrior of Mona eschewed the glitter that others enjoyed. It gave him an austerity that others lacked, and set him apart from the greater mass of his people.

  He leaned back on the rock. Stars pointed the moonless sky; the Hunter raised his spear to the Hare as brightly as he had ever done on Mona, when Venutios was Warrior. He studied Breaca a long while by the light of the fire, and then said, “I’m sorry. I could have told that to Ardacos and saved you a journey.”

  “You could, but I’m not sorry. Why did you not?”

  “I thought you would have wanted to hear it from me. And I wanted to see what you had become. We hear things at third hand, or fourth, and rumours come in pairs, one part set against the other. I needed to know if it were true that the Boudica had lost her heart after the rape of her daughters, as some said, or if, as we preferred to believe, she had instead grown with it to be greater than she ever was on Mona and in the western wars.”

  They were alone; his honour guard had taken themselves off to lie in the lee of the boulders, rolled in their cloaks, on beds of springing heather. Cygfa was hunting somewhere by herself. Ardacos was nearby and still awake, but no longer sharing the fire. He sat against a rock with birches on either side, not quite out of earshot; she could see the shine of his eyes and then presently the darkness as he closed them. She did not think he was asleep.

  Venutios sat with his hands looped over one knee, watching her. The firelight danced across his face, exploring the new hollows that a year on the run had given him. He had taught her what it was to be Warrior of Mona, and had given the horn to her as she had given it to Gwyddhien. No-one else living knew what it took to do that. Because she could ask it of him and expect a clear answer, she said, “What do you find, between the rumours and the fact?”

  “That you are changed far more than I had expected. That parts of you are broken and parts are greater than they were, very much greater. I see you clearly now and there’s a light that shines from within, as if a cloak has fallen that was a necessary concealment, to protect you from the brightness as much as us. I am thinking that it cannot be easy to live with what you have become, but I think also that you have found something to fight for that you did not know before?”

  “I have, yes.”

  It was late; they should have slept, and neither could. They put more heather on the fire and sat closer and then lay down, head to head, and for the first time since it had happened Breaca told of the ancestor’s prophecy and the question it posed and the healing she had found in its answer.

  Later, when Ardacos’ eyes had been shut for a very long time and
Venutios was, in any case, lying with his head so close to hers that the words passed from breath to breath between them, she showed him the ring that had been Cunobelin’s gift and tried to put into words how it was to hold the lineage of the Sun Hound and its promise; how he was with her and yet not part of her as the ancestor-dreamer had become; how it had changed her understanding of death even though she had lived on the borderline between the worlds for all of her adult life.

  Venutios was wise, and had been Warrior and knew what it was to fight for something greater than life and blood. He listened until she had run out of words, and at the end he asked a single question, and did not press when she was unable to answer.

  Later, when he had taken himself to another fire to sleep, she settled down in the lee of a boulder with her head on her saddle pad and Stone hard at her side for warmth and lay staring at the stars, asking herself the same thing. She fell asleep without finding an answer.

  She woke at dawn, and was no wiser.

  The fire was a mound of red ash, only warm if she put her hands close enough to burn the skin. She fed it the thinnest of heather roots and dead leaves and nursed the flames until they leapt to bite her fingers and were safe to leave.

  At her back, the sun made its own fire. It was larger here than in the south, hanging just off the lip of the crag so that it seemed she could step off the rock into its heart. She stood on the cold stone and watched the gods stoke their own furnace and asked them Venutios’ question.

  Red fire became gold, became white gold, and there was no answer. Around, laced frost melted from the rock. A long, lean pine tree became suddenly bare of crows. The sky became raucously black. A shadow slid to her side, and past it, and Ardacos said softly, “So which would you choose to save: your land or your lineage?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It had been a vain hope that he might not have been listening. She sat on the crag’s edge and hugged her feet and looked over. Below, small shadows of men crossed the land as Venutios’ hunters worked a deer trail. Ardacos came to sit on a boulder. He was naked and smelled of bear fat and his hair was wild as it was when he had been hunting. She said, “What did you kill?”