Dreaming the Hound (26 page)

Only his eyes gave him away. His gaze danced from the stark shadows of the execution site to the western gate where eighty men, led by an officer on a grey horse, marched out through the vast, twice-arched triumphal gate that spanned the entrance to Camulodunum, and formed three lines across the road. They made a spectacle, and knew it; the chain links of their armour were a net of silver across the path of the sun and the heads of their spears were herons, awaiting the careless fish. Painted thunderbolts crossed on their shields, newly painted since winter, and their bronze helmets burned from night upon night of polishing.

Behind them, Rome’s capital city - its only city - in the province of Britannia spread out across the wide plain that had once been Cunobelin’s richest farmland and pooled in what had once been forest. It was unwalled and undefended and that alone screamed out the arrogance of Rome. In a land defeated, what need had they of the walls and dykes on which the Sun Hound had relied for his safety?

‘One day, you will regret the loss of that.’ Breaca spoke aloud, but not loudly. Even had she shouted, the men below would barely

have heard her, but one, finally, chose to look up and his oath carried faintly on the breeze. Eighty faces flashed pale in the sun. The red-plumed officer gave an order, too distant to be clearly heard. The line tightened, visibly.

Breaca grinned. ‘Graine, heart-of-life, before we left, Airmid said that the best way to hide was to be seen most clearly. If I were to hold your reins, do you think you could join us in being seen very clearly indeed? The legionaries have sighted us now; there’s no point in hiding. I would not ride into their care as one defeated.’

She watched her daughter’s eyes grow wide. They were green grey in the sun and beautiful. Graine had always listened carefully to the singers’ tales. She knew what Breaca planned before her brother, but she was not yet a confident rider, even on the new horse.

Swallowing her fear, she passed her reins to her mother. ‘You and father came here once before,’ she said. ‘Before any of us were born. You did not ride in meekly then.’

They had not. With forty of her people, Breaca had charged the ranked hundreds of Cunobelin’s spears in the days when both his tribe and theirs had been free.

‘We are Eceni,’ she said. ‘We ride nowhere meekly.’

She lifted her hand in signal and Cygfa and Cunomar, trained in the battle signs of Mona, moved to either side. For the first time since leaving the steading, Cunomar smiled. He still mourned the loss of Eneit’s company, but he would ride as a warrior with his mother given the chance to do so. Cygfa set up the war chant of the Ordovices and the tone of it infected them all. Breaca missed her blade more badly than she had done since leaving it in the ancestor’s mound.

What she planned was madness, but she had lived through a winter of sanity and the legionaries who waited in front of the gates had already been given their orders. If death were coming, she did not want to meet it weakly, nor bring her children to the enemy shorn of their pride. Cunomar and Cygfa felt it with her; the change in their eyes was a gift in itself.

Graine was afraid and trying not to show it, which was worth more. Breaca leaned over and kissed her, winding a lock of loose hair behind the small ear. ‘Child of my heart, hold the front of the saddle and trust your horse. She’s the best I’ve ever bred. She knows how to take care of you.’

Breaca spoke to her own mare and it grew still under her, waiting.

To her two older children, she said, ‘Spread your arms so that they see we come without weapons.’

They did, and waited. Behind, ‘Tagos saw, understood and was too late to act.

As she had so often in the west, the Boudica raised her arm high and brought it down hard.

‘Go!’

The noise of Camulodunum faltered and fell silent leaving the morning to echo as three warriors and a child of the Eceni hurled their horses at lethal speed towards the triumphal arches that marked the magnitude of Rome’s victory over their people. The wind raised their cloaks and carried away the dust of their passing. ‘Tagos and the cavalry escort, caught unawares, were left hopelessly behind. They slowed and stopped, deterred by the pitch of the hill.

The Eceni were born for a ride such as this; even Graine found the joy at the end. At the last moment, as the legionaries, who had not fought in the west and had been a long time away from war, struggled to hold their line, three warriors and a child reined in to stand on sweating, heaving mounts before a junior tribune of the XXth legion and his wide-eyed men. At the final stride, seeing them , stop, the officer resheathed his sword.

Breaca faced him, smiling. For nearly twenty years, the best minds on Mona had been her tutors. In faultless Latin, she said ‘Breaca of the Eceni brings greetings to the governor and asks if he will do her the honour of accepting her gifts.’

‘Be welcome Breaca of the Eceni, wife to Prasutagos, king of that tribe.’

The best way to hide is to be seen most clearly. Believing it, Breaca had brought her family into the death trap that was Camulodunum at a gallop, and had not been arrested. If Graine was wrong and they were bound for crucifixion, the junior tribune detailed to meet them did not know of it. Holding fast to his dignity, he ordered his men to form ranks around Breaca, the children and the lately arrived ‘Tagos. With every evidence of respect, he led them through the mud-slimed, noisome streets of Camulodunum to the forum, where they stood in line to be announced.

‘Be welcome Cygfa and Graine, under Eceni law heirs to Prasutagos, and Cunomar, his son.’

A pasty-faced secretary stood to one side of a podium and read from a prepared script. Looking up, he chanced to catch Cygfa’s

eye and she smiled for him, bright with a hate so well concealed that only a dreamer would see it. He dithered and lost his lines. Finding them, he rattled to a close, losing the customary emphasis of the syllables.

‘Quintus Veranius, by the grace of his excellency the Emperor Nero governor of Britannia, formerly consul of Rome, formerly augur, formerly first governor of Lycia and Pamphylia, bids you welcome and thanks you for your exceptional gifts.’

The secretary bowed his way back into the row of Roman officers and local magistrates who formed a line before the marbled back wall of the forum. All of them studied the incomers. None of them was so ill-mannered as to stare although the king’s new armband, of woven gold with enamelled copper at the end pieces, drew their eyes and their attention, as it was meant to.

The governor of Britannia, the emperor’s representative in the province, with the power of life and death over every living soul within it, stepped forward to the podium and, for a while, it was impossible to look elsewhere. Quintus Veranius’ parade uniform, while sober in its colouring, was nevertheless quite easily the most costly item of clothing ever seen in the province of Britannia, the Emperor Claudius’ gold-woven gown-of-entrance notwithstanding.

The governor’s chased gold cuirass bore a complex interweaving of the fish-tailed goat with oak leaves and a standing vine. His shoulder cloak was so deep a brown as to be almost black and his plain-woven tunic beneath it seemed in contrast to be perfectly white, marked only by a sober border of blue and venous red. No-one would ever be allowed to forget that the middle-aged, grey-haired man who now ruled Britannia in the name of the boy emperor in Rome had once led his troops in person in the mountain provinces of Asia, defeating tribe after tribe on their home ground. His gaze had weighed each member of the tribal delegations as they entered the forum. Each had felt it as an uncomfortable probing, not unlike the scrutiny of a dreamer.

Only for the children had it softened and then only truly for Graine. He was said to have no children of his own; it was his only lack. He smiled at the girl now, and then at ‘Tagos, who purported to be her sire, before he looked down at the wooden crates and boxes arrayed on the table in front of him.

Breaca’s gift lay open before the assembly: a long case of polished yew wood lined with wool dyed in Eceni blue on which lay three finished spears, each with a single heron feather dangling from the neck. The hafts were made in the same pale russet wood as the box with a bulb of burr oak at the butt end for balance, each a subtly different colour. The blades were of silver and delicately

leaf-shaped, with copper inlaid in spiral shapes in the tapering necks and the sign of the running hare etched along their lengths on both sides. The blades’ edges showed the brilliance of fine honing and the tips glittered sharply. Each was exactly twice the length of those permitted to a hunter of the tribes.

The governor ran his thumb along the length of the box, testing the texture of the yew. It was said of him that his skill in war was superseded only by a winning charm in the council chamber. There was an easy warmth to his smile and humour in the creases around his eyes that might well have passed for genuine candour in the council chambers of Rome.

‘I am told you are a smith.’ The governor spoke in Latin, slowly, and left a pause. His voice was warmly bronze, like a bell, and it held no more threat than his written invitation had done. If he were acting, if he knew the identity of the woman to whom he spoke and was concealing it, he was exceptionally skilled.

Before the interpreter could fill the space, Breaca said in the same tongue, ‘Your honour, yes. My father was a smith. He taught me his trade before he died. It has been a pleasure to recreate his work for those who can appreciate it.’

‘Indeed?’ Crooking one eyebrow, Veranius lifted the first spear and moved his hand along until he found the balance point. The haft sprung in his grip. The blade quivered in the dusty light so that, for those closest, the hare etched along its length seemed to run. A sigh seeped from the assembled ranks of the tribal delegations behind. Those who had ever sat a spear-trial knew what they saw. The rest understood only that they were in the presence of a beauty that transcended the world of the forum.

The governor stopped smiling. If Rome did not have its spear trials, still, those who fought did so under the sway of their gods. Slowly and with more care than before, he rested the spear’s haft across his flattened palms and spent some time examining the blade, taking care not to tarnish the sheen of the surface with finger grease.

At length, raising his head, he looked Breaca directly in the eye. Abandoning the formal language of court, he said, ‘I didn’t know the Eceni hunted with silver weapons?’

He was not acting, and the question held more than the words alone.

Breaca returned his gaze. ‘Your honour, we don’t, but the ancestors are said to have hunted bear with these blades when called upon to do so by the gods. Silver is finer than iron and holds

its edge for less time. According to our most ancient lore, the blade must be made and used within the turning of one moon or it is useless and must be melted down again. A spear would be made on the instruction of a dreamer and used within the month or not at all.’

She did not say that the tradition was far older than the Eceni, that those who had hunted in this fashion were the direct ancestors of Ardacos’ she-bears. Nor did she say that the month would end in five days’ time.

The governor was not a stupid man. Over the course of his career, he had taken the time to study the ancestral histories of several cultures. Nodding thoughtfully, he said, ‘Silver is far softer than iron. Does it not bend on hitting its target?’

‘It may do. Such a spear as this must be thrown with absolute accuracy. If it hits any bone, it will bend and will not kill, leaving the hunter in mortal danger. If, on the other hand, the spear flies between the ribs and strikes the heart, or through the neck to the great vessels of the throat, the kill will be perfect and the hunter will survive. In former times, it was a test of courage. Even to own such a spear was a mark of honour. This is the first time in our history that one has been given as a gift to a warrior who is not of the tribes.’

‘Thank you. I am deeply honoured. I am constantly astonished by the beauty and craftsmanship of Eceni metalwork.’

The governor returned the spear to its bed of blue wool. Tracing his fingers along the fine polish of the haft, he said, ‘And of course, they would be perfect weapons for use in battle for one with the skill to throw them. If hurled at the enemy, the blades of those which did not lodge in the soft parts of a man’s body would bend and could not be returned. We do the same with our javelins.’

He was a man with the charm of a diplomat and the intellect to prosper in Claudius’ Rome. He threw his rock lightly into the flow of their conversation and waited for Breaca to run aground on it. Shorn of its languid humour, his gaze was an open challenge. Twenty years’ training on Mona prevented Breaca from returning it in kind.

Without rancour, she said, ‘Your honour, we had heard as much, but these spears are for sacred ceremony, not for battle. I would not suggest that the governor use these against the Silures when next he goes to war, but he may wish to try them some time against bear in our northern forests. If not, I would feel honoured if he would consider them worthy to take back to Rome as evidence of his governorship when it ends.’

Her own rocks were smaller but no less obvious. She felt ‘Tagos twitch at her side and force himself to stillness. Quintus Veranius, by Nero’s grace governor of Britannia, stared at her for a moment in naked astonishment, then threw his head back and laughed. After a pause, several members of his entourage laughed with him, though uncertainly.

The smile the governor directed at Prasutagos was genuine, possibly his first that day that was so. Reaching over the table, he clapped the king on the shoulder.

‘My friend, your late wife was a delight to us all and I am sorry for her passing, but this one is a gem beyond measure and you should treasure her. A woman with a sharp mind who is not afraid to use it is an uncommon gift. My lady’ - he bowed deeply to Breaca - ‘I will convene a council later tomorrow at which several officers recently in the west…’