by Manda Scott
She felt that; the pressure of waiting, of watching, was gone and in its place was a quiet gratitude. The air weighed less heavily on her skin. The gateway she had seen between the dawn and the night lay open. Briga was there, and Nemain and the other, older gods. She saw the ancestor-dreamer and the Sun Hound woven together and a piece fell into place in her soul, that made sense of them both, and herself.
What had become of Dubornos said, I should go.
“Yes.”
Still facing her, he backed away, faster. A river came, where there had been none, and nine stepping stones across it. Ninefold hazels drooped to the running water. A crow sat on each branch. A stag waited, full-pride, at the water’s edge. It raised its head and bellowed. Dubornos turned and began to run.
She had seen so many men and women fall on the battlefield and wander lost after. Never had she seen one pass without help to the river and across it. She stood a long time watching after he had gone.
“Mother?”
She thought it might be Graine. It was Hawk, naming her mother for the first time. Graine was with him, and Cygfa on his other side. She had four children, where before there had been but three. Another one added to her lineage, another to help preserve the land. It was easier to think like that than to weigh one more in the balance of Venutios’ question.
“Would you like to eat?”
The smell of roasting deer sighed through the lightness of the moss and the bog myrtle and the blood from Dubornos’ head. She was crouching beside him still, locked in place. Her hands were on his body, which was cold. She had thought she was standing. She stood now. Her knees cracked and were slow to unbend.
Dubornos lay face down as she had laid him. The fox fur on his arm was black with the water. His hair was the same colour. Since his boyhood, it had always been thin. It seemed thicker now, floating out around his head to weave into the moss.
“Mother?” This time, Graine said it.
“No. Actually, yes, I would like to eat. Thank you.”
They brought her food and she ate and came slowly back to the morning. The sun was far higher than it had been, the moon a pale ghosted sickle, already dropping down to the west. She sat on a rock and let the sun warm her skin and tried to come away from the sense of him stepping over the last stone into nowhere.
A young man came to sit by her, with striking blond hair and eyes that did not focus on her face. She remembered him in the dance, but not what he had done. He said, “I’m Bellos, once of the Belgae. Your brother, Valerius, who was Bán, brought me from Gaul and made of me a dreamer on Mona. It was I who called your daughter to the island and I return her now. The Elder, Luain mac Calma, believes her to be the wild piece of the Warrior’s Dance. He sends her back, with his wish that you and she find healing together.” His gaze sharpened, disconcertingly. “Last night, I thought you healed.”
“And now?”
“Now … You have passed beyond that. Can you see where you must go?”
She remembered a number of the things Valerius had told her about this young man, and saw the things that he had not. She said, “Not clearly. Never that. Only that we must be where the legions are, and that they are moving south. They are our bane. Their destruction is our salvation, or not, if we fail. Whatever happens can happen in their company only.”
Sûr mac Donnachaidh was near, eating meat from a rib. He had aged in the night. His eyes searched her face. “Ardacos could take you, but he might lose a day in finding their trail. My scouts have been watching the legions’ progress, and those who hunt them.”
A number of youths gathered behind him who had not been present in the night. They wore knife belts, where their peers were naked, and clay paint was smeared on their faces and in their hair, making them things of the soil. He said, “If you will take our horses and your own, you could reach them by nightfall. Your son and the Warrior of Mona have brought a thousand spears and are tracking them close behind. They will attack soon, before you can get there. They are outnumbered, but they hope to use surprise, as it was used before. I think they will not succeed.”
The dark thread in the weft took shape and form and size. Under the sun, the day felt cold. She sent a prayer to Dubornos and felt him gather it close, as she might gather a child.
She said, “Then if your scouts can take us, we will ride whatever you have to offer.”
CHAPTER 37
SUN ON SUN ON SUN ON POLISHED METAL, MAKING MORE sun, blindingly.
Corvus rode south, at noon in the height of hot summer, with two legions of infantry marching in full armour ahead of him and a cloud of flies feeding about his face.
He wanted to bandage his eyes, to take away the glare. He wanted to stuff cotton in his ears to dull the hammer of nailed feet and the clash of harness and the interminable bloody marching chants of the cohorts, for ever out of key. He wanted to slay every fly in the province and then drink unceasingly of cold water from mountain streams that splashed down through dim valleys to pools where only moonlight reached. He wanted to be back on the straits by Mona, or in the fortress of the XXth or in Camulodunum, even if it had burned. He wanted to be anywhere, but not on an open road with legionaries marching six abreast in double time ahead of him and a baggage train moving almost, but not quite, as fast, and himself the teeth in the serpent’s tail at the back, to make sure the rear guard could bite when — not if — it was attacked. He regretted ever having devised that strategy, and loathed the man, whosoever he might be, who had told the governor of it and encouraged him to use it now.
The heatwave was in its third day. The memory of the storms was gone from the men and the land. The flies were unspeakable and he chose not to think of them. Almost as bad was the gritty dust that clogged the air and settled on the mane of his bay battle mare and her harness and filtered through into Corvus’ neck and his waist and his groin, abrading them steadily so that already he could feel the ooze of blood where his belt sat over his mail. He checked his saddlecloth for the hundredth time and made himself believe his favourite battle mount was not being similarly damaged.
He drank from his waterskin and poured a little onto his palm and wiped his face, then leaned forward and rubbed his damp hand between the mare’s ears, batting away the flies and murmuring to her all the while. “It’s past noon. The worst is over. Walk steady and all will be well.”
He had taken to talking to the mare for the past two days, since shortly after the governor’s small party, riding north, had met the legions marching south with the remainder of his wing, the Quinta Gallorum, as escort.
The meeting had been welcome on both sides and the reunion joyful, but within a day Corvus had run out of things to say to Sabinius, who carried the standards and had led the wing in his commander’s absence. The mare, on the whole, was more rewarding to talk to. She did not contradict him and rarely answered back while Sabinius was very likely to do both. He had been escorting infantry in hostile territory for nearly twenty years; he knew exactly how long the day was, and that the worst almost certainly was not over.
The standard-bearer grunted now and narrowed his eyes to peer through the shimmering heat haze ahead. He said, “You have never told me how far south we are going to march. If Vespasian’s Bridge and Verulamium are both destroyed, then there is nothing left to reach.”
“That’s because I don’t know. I don’t think Paullinus knows. We can perhaps march to the west of the bridge and find another way across the river but I can’t imagine we’ll reach it. We face a rebel army that best estimates put at fifteen to twenty thousand warriors and we are less than seven thousand strong. Where we meet them is largely academic, I think, only that we must, and that if we march like this, so their scouts can see us from half a day away, without ever needing to come within range, then we will call them to us and won’t have to go looking for them. Paullinus will have his final, glorious battle.”
“And we will all die, gloriously.” Sabinius swiped absently at a horsefly and looked up at
the unsullied sky. “As long as someone lives to take word to Rome.”
“Paullinus has pigeons that will fly to Gaul with his report of all those who should be rewarded for their courage. Our names will stand for ever in the annals of the Senate.”
“If the dreamers’ falcons don’t pull the birds out of the sky and eat them before they get anywhere close to Gaul.”
“Thank you. Yes. If that.”
This was why Corvus talked to his horse. It was measurably less depressing.
They fell to silence, then. Ahead, the four cohorts of the shrunken XXth legion set up a new marching chant. They were fewer than two thousand and all of them veterans of old campaigns; by sickness and nightmares and the savage waters of the straits, had the dreamers of Mona culled out the youths and the less seasoned men. Those left alive, therefore, were the fittest and the best. Sadly they were also those who had spent two decades of winters devising new words to go with the old, settled rhythms of the march.
They began rustily, until the ones who knew the words had passed them on. Surprisingly soon, all two thousand men caught on and built the volume, the better to drown out the competition coming from the XIVth in front.
Against his better judgement, Corvus listened to the increasingly coherent snatches that rose up through the billowing dust; a complex triple rhyme involving heat and dust and insurgency and all saved from ruin by the wide brown eyes of a boy from Alexandria.
Even for one jaundiced by nearly thirty years in the legions, it was clever and he grinned the first time he caught it all, and still smiled for the second and third repeats. By the tenth, or perhaps the twentieth, he wanted cotton again for his ears and, lacking it, let his mind drift to Alexandria, which was hotter, certainly, than the land through which he was riding, and dustier and quite definitely more prone to lethal intrigue and insurgency against anyone who attempted to govern the ungovernable.
It had not, in his experience, been saved by the wide brown eyes of any boy, although there had been a man, and his eyes had, indeed, been brown and a great deal of Corvus’ life’s path, if he thought about it, stemmed from that man and all he had offered, and the result could be considered salvation, if one chose to look at it in that light.
The day was hot and images flowed easily, borne on the beat of marching feet and a scurrilous song that managed to link every officer in both legions and both wings of cavalry by anatomically improbable methods to the brown-eyed Alexandrian youth.
A small bronze statue of Horus took wings from Corvus’ pack and lifted over the mirage of the marching men. Its one jet eye winked at him and became the brown eye of an Alexandrian man, full of wisdom and care and dead so very much too early. The bird soared high. From its height a man’s voice said, What does it profit a man to serve the gods of two worlds?
He had always spoken thus, setting riddles in his arcane Alexandrian tongue in a voice smooth as quicksilver and sweet as ambrosia. The answers were never to be found where first one sought them.
Determined not to try, Corvus let his mind drift and drift again and, as it always did when drifting, it came eventually to a black-eyed, solemn, thoughtful boy of the Eceni and the painful trail he had walked to become an officer in the Roman cavalry, feared for his ferocity by those who fought on both sides of the conflict in Britannia and named traitor in Rome because he had made the mistake of pledging oath and honour to an emperor in the days before his dying.
He thought of the man that boy had become and the sight of him on a pied horse standing over the procurator of all Britannia with murder in his eyes and something quite different shining from his heart.
To his bay battle mare, Corvus murmured, “But Valerius is given to Mithras, the bull-slayer. He serves only him; a god of the world he has left behind. The gods of the Eceni would not accept him.”
Why not?
For five paces more, Corvus remained in quiet reverie, then his world broke into shards, as a glass that is thrown at a white marble wall. “Sabinius! Signal alert forward and back!”
He barely recognized his own voice; out of nowhere he had found the spit and crispness of early morning and the certainty of battle command.
Sabinius’ standard flittered in the breeze, twice forward, twice back. A trumpeter in the infantry took up the signal and sent it forward up the line. Another sent it back at a different pitch; every man of the seven thousand up to and including the governor knew whence came the order and so whom to blame if it were wrong.
Corvus looked about. The mirage was gone. Men marched where it had been. Already their chant sank dead in the air. They shifted their packs and loosened their gladii and the lift of their feet in the march was higher and more elastic. Silence hung about them like a shield.
His neck prickled. His palms were wet on the reins. He looked about with different eyes. The road was raised, as they always were. The land about was flat for a spear’s throw on either side and should have been cleared back to the naked turf for three spear-casts beyond that. Once, it might have been; the trees had certainly been felled at least to the start of the rising land, but in the last year, the men of the legions had been occupied with other things than making safe the roads and the land was a havoc of scrubby new growth that could have hidden half the marching men and easily as many warriors.
Both sides were not the same. To the left, the land rose gently to make a small ridge which was covered in scrub. To the right, it fell away more steeply and the trees had been left to grow closer to the road; the engineers did not believe warriors would attack uphill.
Corvus thought they were right. The danger all came from the left. He looked over and through the nettles and flowering thistles and green-berried thorns and the scrub elder and saw nothing, only felt loathing and excitement and the almost-readiness to attack. He drew his own sword and shifted his shield from shoulder to forearm.
Sabinius copied him. “Valerius?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. I think I would know if he were…” Corvus shook his head. “Yes, I would know. He isn’t here. But there is someone … many. Waiting, watching…”
Their eyes scoured him. His guts clenched and he thought he might be sick, but he always thought that, riding into ambush. It had never yet been true.
Sabinius spat, sending precious water to the road. “They’re going to try to pick us off from back to front as they did with the Ninth.”
“I know. But we’re not led by an idiot. And this serpent has a sting in its tail such as they’ve never encountered.”
There was release in action. The bay battle mare came round in a faultless spin and danced on the spot, perfect and beautiful and ready to fight. Loudly enough for those around to hear, Corvus said to Sabinius, “You have command of the first two troops. At all costs, protect the mules and the baggage; I don’t want to sleep in the open tonight even if you do. I’m going back to be with Ursus and Flavius at the rear.”
Ursus and Flavius were ready. The former had already deployed the nearest two dozen men as flank riders, setting them in pairs, mostly to the left, staggered out and back so that each outer man protected the side and back of his partner, and each outer pair covered the side and back of those on the inside.
Flavius had command of the archers. Since last autumn, the Quinta Gallorum had retained one dozen Scythian horse-archers, employed at insane expense, who dressed in silks and then complained daily of the cold and the mud and had to be waited on and served hot spiced beef and olives and good wine and given their own private cook and must be set to train in secret, with scouts all around to guard against spies so that now, when they were most needed, they could be brought into action against an unprepared enemy, with all the insanity of money and cosseting proved worthwhile and not a man begrudging them a single olive.
Flavius had been given charge of them, and had come to care for them as the Atrebatan hound-boy cared for the governor’s blue-skinned hounds, and for much the same reason: they set him apart from the rest. He had taken
the time to learn their language, which was more than anyone else had done, and he shouted to them clearly, pure as a bell, as Corvus approached.
Like the hounds, the Scythians craved release into action. At the first of Flavius’ calls, they began to string their small, wickedly curved bows and chose arrows from the packs on their horses’ shoulders and nocked them, quietly and unobtrusively, the better to keep secret from the watching warriors.
The rest of the troop rode forward at an even pace, not turning to look at them, or to point or do anything that might attract the enemy’s attention; their orders were unambiguous in this regard. The flank riders covered them, and had orders to die in their defence.
Following his own instructions, Corvus rode past them to the rear without looking. Flavius gave him a queer, half-friendly salute as he passed. Ursus nodded, curtly. He had the same question as Sabinius, only asked with less tact. “Is it Valerius? If it is, he’ll know what we do and how we do it.”
“It’s not Valerius; he isn’t here. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t spent the last half month drilling those who are.”
“What do we do?”
“Out-fight them,” said Corvus, grimly. “And pray that word of the archers has never reached Valerius. Keep them facing the left; that’s where the danger has to be.”
“That’s Corvus, whom Valerius saw above Lugdunum. He leads the cavalry. He’s a friend to the Boudica.”
“And was soul-friend once to Valerius. He is known on Mona.”
Cunomar lay with Braint in a patch of head-high nettles within half a spear’s cast of the road. Even attacking the Ninth, he had not been so close. He could see the beads of sweat on the faces of the men as they marched, and black runnels of it on the necks of the horses. He could see grit and flies and the dulled eyes of men who had marched fast for days and had more days ahead of them. He heard pounding feet and the inane marching ditties and closed his ears to them so that the sudden blast of the trumpets had shocked him and he had jumped, and cursed and made himself lie still again.
