Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  The hare ran straight and true through the Roman ranks, between Roman legs to the debris of their camp behind and not one of those who bent over with grasping hands managed to catch her.

  She was gone to freedom, beyond the Roman lines.

  A single horse stamped at flies in the silence. Its harness clashed softly. Breaca reached, fumbling, for her daughter’s hand. Graine dared to look and found that she had been right to think her mother wept.

  “You should go now,” said the Boudica. “Take Stone to guard you, and you to guard him. Airmid will take care of you both. We’ll meet again at the battle’s end.”

  She kissed her daughter lightly, in front of both armies. Graine turned to go. Hawk was there, bringing forward the black colt with the white legs that had been Cygfa’s battle gift to the Boudica.

  Graine walked with her crippled hound up the ridge and the war host parted to let her through. As with Airmid, as with Cygfa and Valerius, with Cunomar and Hawk and Ardacos, as long ago with Caradoc, her mother never said goodbye to her before a battle, for the ill-luck of it: never.

  The first wave of warriors ran, screaming, over the place she had been.

  CHAPTER 43

  ALREADY THEY WERE RIDING. THE RIDGE PASSED IN A JOLT of hammering hooves and a war howl that wrenched the last crows from the trees. The shocked ranks of legionaries were lifting their javelins; their training was solid, if their belief in victory was not.

  From Valerius’ left, and a little behind, Cygfa shouted, “We should drive through where the hare went!”

  “We will!”

  Wind whipped at his eyes, his blade was level, his shield solid, the Crow-horse was as fit and eager as it had ever been, the hound of his dreaming ran with its head by his knee and he had found balance at last with both gods. Longinus was to his left and Cygfa to his right behind and if they died in the first moments of the wedge, all three together, even so, the world was perfect.

  Corvus had not yet unleashed his cavalry against them. He had no doubt it would come, but even that was perfect; they had discovered peace and death offered a re-joining that life had made impossible.

  The hare had run more to the centre. Valerius let the Crow-horse veer very slightly to his left, away from the place he had first intended to point his attack.

  Civilis, Madb, Huw and the combined eight hundred of the cavalry wedge followed him. The legions raised their javelins to shoulder height, long, light needles of death, ready for the command to throw. Valerius could see the trembling of the ends and the slight tilt in the cross wind. He raised his shield and held it to cover his horse and himself. Behind, eight hundred warriors did the same.

  They were in reach. He knew a moment’s pain that he had come to find his soul’s peace so late, and had so little time to savour it, but such time as he did have was a gods’ gift and he treasured it. At the last, just before they came within javelin-strike, he raised his voice in a wild, open-hearted paean to both of his gods and all they had given him, and heard his honour guard echo it, joyfully.

  He saw the trench too late, as he passed its end.

  It was dug at an angle across the plain, coming obliquely in from the valley’s end to narrow its mouth; if he had led his wedge as he had first intended, swinging wider from the right, he would have run his horse straight at the centre and would have died, and all eight hundred who followed him.

  The hare had shown him a path to safety, but not those on his right, in the wider wing of the wedge, who hurled themselves across treacherous turf that gave way without warning to reveal a ditch as wide as six men, with rocks and stakes in its base that broke limbs and necks and pierced flesh and guts and chests and broke apart the perfect instrument of his wedge.

  Horses and warriors fell, screaming, in a havoc of rending flesh and breaking bone and unsheathed swords that impaled the warriors who held them, or those who tumbled onto them afterwards.

  Half of the eight hundred fell and the rest could not stop, pushed on by their own momentum. They were slowing, with Valerius at the lead, when he heard the light whickering wind that every legionary knew to his marrow, and feared; the javelins had started.

  Hail fell, of hard, penetrating iron. It stuck in shields and made them useless; it pierced leather armour and iron and skin and flesh and bone. Men and women died by the dozen.

  “Valerius!”

  By a miracle, Civilis was still alive. Half of his band were still with him, riding to Valerius’ right. The old warrior raised his blade to the sky and his voice to the heavens.

  “Go left! We are your shields!”

  Valerius felt wind graze his skin, but no iron. He would have argued, but there was no time, and the offer was there and it was right.

  On an instinct that was as deep-drilled as the legions’ raising of their weapons, he swung the Crow-horse hard to his left. For three suicidal strides, he veered broadside across the line of the legions, and waited for the moment’s shock of impact, and did not feel it, because Civilis was there, and his men after him, a solid wall of flesh and bone and iron that took the first impact of the javelins and held it fast, in front of the men with whom they had so recently served.

  Five hundred Batavians found death in blazing glory and their horses with them, that the rest of the wedge might have life and fight on.

  “Civilis!”

  Valerius shouted it as a battle cry and a thanks and an outpouring of grief for which there was no more time. The Crow-horse kept him safe, turning tight as a coursing hound, to race back over the place they had come, where the hare had gone before him; the only place on the battlefield they could be sure was solid earth.

  The ranks upon ranks of Breaca’s warriors who had followed the wedge came forward still. He spun sideways, to give them room, and made the Crow-horse slow and turned it back to face the legions and found that Cygfa was with him and Longinus, and Huw and Madb and Knife and two-thirds of the warriors of Mona, for which he should have been grateful, but was not; he had lost Civilis and his entire wing of Batavians, and the battle had not yet fully started.

  He could have wept, but there was not time for it. Panting, high-coloured, Cygfa said, “Did Corvus do this?”

  “I don’t know.” He had asked that of the gods in the first moments and not found the answer. “It must have been done before our scouts found the valley, which means the engineers and pathfinders did it when they first came here, and laid out the camp later. If he didn’t do it, he knew of it.”

  “And said nothing.” She would have killed him for that.

  “This is war. Why would he?” He said it aloud and his heart keened and did not believe it. To me, he should have said something.

  Cygfa thought the same; it was etched into her face. She said, “What do we do now?”

  “Fight where we stand. Try not to die. Keep the right flank safe as we planned. This is not the end.”

  Cunomar felt the shock of the breaking wedge from the far side of the field.

  The she-bear were on foot and so slower and he had time, just, to understand the catastrophe of the trenches, and to realize that they might face the same in mirrored image — and to see it, and shout a warning inward to Ulla and Ardacos who ran on the far side with his older bear-warriors, and to jump the trench, howling, and to hurtle on towards legionaries who were distracted by the carnage on the far side and had not yet cast their javelins.

  The bear was with them, clearly; under blazing mid-morning sun, they ran beneath the arc of the late throw so that the lethal, singing hail passed over their heads and landed harmlessly beyond, and then they were in, hurling themselves at shields and half-drawn blades and men were dying, and they were not of the bear.

  Cunomar dodged a shield that smashed for his face, and tasted blood where the edge caught his cheek, and stabbed for an exposed eye with his knife and felt the puncture and grate of the socket. If the man screamed, the noise was lost in the chaos around him. The Boudica’s son screamed his mother’s name and heard Ull
a echo him and then Ardacos’ deep bear-howl. His nightmare was as nothing, banished by the force of their intent. Without fear, he immersed himself in battle. A small part of him, cold and quiet in his core, listened for the trumpet calls of the enemy.

  It mattered that the Boudica be noticed, and known.

  She was dressed to catch the eye: for the first time in years, she rode into battle wearing a cloak in the late-sky blue of the Eceni, not Mona’s grey. The sun-serpent torc of her ancestors blazed at her neck. Her hair was a banner of spun copper made gold in the high, hot sun. She bore the broad-bladed spear, made for her in hope and love by Valerius and Airmid in the days before they left Eceni lands.

  Copper whorls along the blade caught the morning, brightly, as if she held aloft a rod of flame. Its balance was perfect, and its song caught the strings of her heart, calling in echoes of Briga and the full panoply of ancestors. She was the warrior with the eyes and heart of a dreamer. In final and complete fulfilment of the ancestor-dreamer’s prophecy, she led the central mass of her war host into battle.

  In the matter of being noticed, she had succeeded; already the javelins of the centre ranks converged on her. Beyond that, it mattered also that the governor should have personal reason to unleash his legions against her.

  She knew her enemy now, and had an idea of what would hurt. After the destruction of Valerius’ wedge, she had no qualms about doing it.

  As she rode, she dipped from her horse and thrust her spear into the body of the injured hound, putting an end to its pain. Someone in front of her shouted at that; it might have been the Atrebatan hound-boy but she believed not; she did not rise up in time to look.

  Hawk, riding close behind, bent further and cut an ear and threw it to her as they rode. She impaled it on the bloodied end of her spear and held it high like a legionary standard. A great many men shouted at that. The first javelins flew, loosed by rage, not reason. They fell five horse-lengths short.

  Two strides on, almost within javelin range, she brought the spear to her shoulder and waited until its song rang in resonance with the rhythm of her horse, and of her heart.

  Suetonius Paullinus, governor of all Britannia, sat ahead of her cloaked in his arrogance and dignity with his white plumes making a perfect aiming point above his head.

  The spear sang. The white-legged colt ran its heart out. Breaca lifted herself high from the saddle and hurled the spear as high and as fast and as true as she had ever thrown anything.

  It passed into and through the unarmoured chest of the Atrebatan hound-boy, who fell dead.

  The rage of the legions shook the earth. Javelins made white the air and treacherous the ground on which they landed.

  Already the war host was slowing. The second volley fell a long-step closer and more of the javelins were targeted on the Boudica; it had not been only the governor who had favoured the hound-boy and the grey-blue snakeheads he kept. As the third volley began to hit shields and drive past their heads, Breaca threw up her arm and shouted, “Back! Get back! They’ll finish us!”

  Throughout the evening of Valerius’ orders and all the morning’s preparation, the men and women who had been chosen to follow the Boudica and so hold the central brunt of the Roman attack had been schooled in two things. The first of these was that the Boudica’s spear throw was the preparation for retreat and that the rearmost ranks must be ready to turn about and run, or Breaca and those who rode closest to her would be driven onto the Roman sword points and certain death.

  They were not a standing army; the warriors were not used to drill and discipline, so took a long time to slow down and longer to stop. The legionaries ahead took another long-step forward and raised their arms for their fourth volley. Breaca swung up her shield and felt the crows gather in the other worlds and Briga breathe close.

  Hawk shouted, “Come! We’re clear!”

  The pressure behind her was less, and then nothing at all. The colt had been schooled by Civilis and Valerius had showed her all it could do. She spun it rearing and sent it forward and the leap was of a hare before a hound, or a stag from a clifftop.

  He brought her clear. They scaled the ridge and down the other side and there was room to stop and turn and a moment to pause, to drink from the hundred skins passed amongst them, to slide a hand down the sweat-soaked neck of the horse and to thank him, to be still and hear the songs of the weapons and of the horses and the deep, thrumming call of Briga’s crows, not yet drowned out by the shouts of five thousand men pushed past the limits of their own exertion.

  Then the flood gates opened, and the legions came.

  Men and men and men in full battle armour, shining as silver in the sun, crested the ridge and flowed down it, like the foaming edge of a wave. In their midst was a red horse with a white helmet plume rising above.

  The leading ranks saw the war host in front of them, and tried to stop and failed. As Valerius had predicted, the weight of armour, and of men behind, pushed them on in growing disarray. He had drawn what must happen next half a dozen times in the ash of the fire, so that its creation now seemed inevitable.

  “Go!”

  The shout came from her left and right together. Breaca threw up her arm and held the centre still while the remains of Valerius’ wedge hurtled forward on the right flank and Cunomar’s she-bears sprinted forward on the left. Within moments, the entire front line of the war host curled in like the sickle points of a horned moon, drawing the running legionaries on into a void of iron where they could be crushed together and slaughtered without room to swing their blades. All that mattered to make it happen was that the Boudica send the centre forward at the right time.

  Five spear-lengths. Four. Three…

  “Go!”

  She launched the white-legged colt forward, and her warriors followed in a great solid wave.

  The two sides came together in a splintering of bone and flesh and armour. Death rode attendance, and reaped a fast harvest. Breaca sat a colt of black lightning and it rose and killed as her blade rose and killed and she heard the songs of both and saw Hawk still alive at her one side and Gunovar at the other and there was room, then, for a fierce, abiding hope in all the chaos.

  “We’re winning. More of theirs are dead than ours by five to one.”

  Bellos said it, and neither Airmid nor Theophilus argued, which meant it might be true.

  Graine stood above all three, on a bale of part-cured sheepskins on the headboard of a wagon with Stone shivering his tension at her side. In theory, she had a crow’s view over the battlefield. In reality, she looked beyond, to where the hare had gone, showing the way to freedom.

  She dared to look now at the battle. On the field, the brazen heads of the legionaries flowed into the crescent of the war host as blood flows into water, thinning as they went. The wings of the moon folded inwards, Valerius’ horse-warriors on one side and Cunomar’s bears the other. The bronze mass of men was crushed between, and began to crumple at the edges. She said, “Valerius’ horned moon has worked.”

  “So far,” said Airmid, distantly. “There’s danger far out to the right. I can feel it.”

  That was the cloud on the day. Under full sun, Graine was cold. She said, “Then Valerius will feel it too.”

  “We can hope so.”

  CHAPTER 44

  TRUMPETS RANG FRANTICALLY, TUNEFUL AS BIRDSONG. Three notes ripped and ripped again. Before they could sound for the third time, Valerius spun the Crow-horse on its hocks. Longinus was with him; he had drilled as often, as hard and as long; the trumpets sang to his heart’s blood. Cygfa was slower.

  “Come on!” Valerius screamed it over the crush and pulp and then, quieter, when she was close enough, “It’s Corvus.”

  It was Corvus, stationed out of sight on the right, who had waited until they had committed to the field, and then come at their backs. Because it was what Valerius would have done, he was ready for it. His honour guard followed him, as fast as they might. He had less than two hundred now, agains
t a full cavalry wing of five hundred.

  Led by Huw, who used his sling with startling efficiency, Valerius’ horse-warriors broadened out in a line as they fought their way free of the melee. It took longer than it should have done; the footing was cluttered with the pulp of dead men and no room to fight easily free from them.

  “Come on!”

  A line of cavalry came at a gallop, curving back in a bow’s arc that let the front ranks meet first, and the rest hold back to circle the outskirts if needed. The cavalry manuals offered two standard ripostes to that and Valerius had neither the time nor the trained men for either, only warriors who would give him their hearts and horses that he believed — that he had to believe — were faster and stronger and had far greater stamina than the enemy.

  “Left!”

  He swung his own blade and his own horse and they followed, as geese follow the lead bird, as fish the eye of the shoal, only slower, because some were still fighting.

  He led them over the ridge and back down and the slope gave them speed and momentum as it had done to the legionaries. He did not run headlong into a waiting horde, but turned hard at the bottom so that all who followed him swung out wide and back in again and came in at the right hand side of Corvus’ arched bow of riders, the sword side, where the shields were no use, against men whose focus had been in front, and whose vision had been blocked by the ridge.

  The clash was short and sharp and light and only six of the enemy died. Valerius pulled the Crow-horse far out to the side and back in again, stinging now at the rear of Corvus’ men as a hornet stings a horse.

  To live, the cavalry had to turn and fight, leaving Breaca and the central mass behind them. Valerius darted in again, and killed, and danced back, saving his horse’s strength for when it was needed.

  Even so few, they made Corvus’ wing spread out, and forced men to fight one on one when they were better in solid ranks. It was not perfect, but it was better than he had hoped for and, after the disaster of the ditch, far more than he deserved.