Dreaming the Hound (28 page)

Berikos passed them by, staring curiously. In Latin, Corvus said, ‘The governor is genuinely grateful for the gift-spears. In every way, you are a credit to your father and his craft.’

‘Thank you.’ Breaca began in the same language and changed back to Eceni partway through. ‘I will never be what my father was, but I may be good enough to teach his skills to my children. Do you still have the blade that he made for you?’

‘I do. I keep it safe in honour of better times.’ Corvus looked weary. Age had thinned his face and added more scars, but the core of him was the same as it had always been. Looking down, he laid a hand on Graine’s head. ‘Is this your daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s exquisite. You and her father must be proud.’

It was what the governor had said, more or less, but spoken with a knowledge and an integrity that the governor’s words had lacked: Corvus knew the identity of Graine’s father where the governor could not have done.

The Roman officer knelt, took the spearhead brooch from Breaca’s hand and repinned her daughter’s cloak. Happy that it was secure, he smiled as any adult smiles to any child.

Graine was not any child; he had been watching her through the ceremony and should have known better. The cool sea-green dreamer’s eyes had locked on his before he could look away. She frowned a little, and, for a moment, looked achingly like Airmid.

When her brow cleared, she said, distinctly, ‘Valerius Corvus, you have been good friend to my mother’s brother, the traitor whom she once loved. Because of it, I would make you a gift of my horse. She is the fastest we have ever bred. You and she will do well together.’ She used the formal language of Mona’s council, learned at Airmid’s knee. The word she used was the one that signified a gift between battle partners, or from sister to brother.

Corvus stayed very still. A muscle beside his eye twitched. In a

while, he looked up at Breaca. ‘Is this so?’

‘You would know better than me. You were a friend to Ban when you were with us; I am prepared to believe you were so afterwards when he fought for Rome. As to the horse,’ Breaca shrugged, ‘she’s the best mare I’ve bred yet. She was my gift to Graine at year’s turn, to be the beginnings of her own herd. If she chooses to give her to you, it’s her right. Do you have a good battle mount?’

Corvus grimaced. ‘Not any more. I had a good black colt, son of a horse called the Crow out of a Trinovantian mare. Riding him was like riding black lightning, but he was killed under me by a woman of the Silures who went on to break my skull. I have a remount to replace him; a good-hearted gelding but without the fire of the black colt. I would not ride him into any battle that I wished to ride out of alive.’

A handful of his fellow officers passed by. Corvus’ knees cracked as he rose. He patted Graine on the head. His face conveyed polite interest in the child of a client king’s wife. In Latin, he said, ‘The governor wishes us to assemble at the new theatre. Have you seen it?’

They were not going to die. Corvus, the man of integrity, did not find that his duty demanded it.

The understanding came slowly. Relief left Breaca hollow. She breathed in the cold and the stink and the noise that was Camulodunum. Graine’s shoulder pushed into her thigh as a hound’s might have done, for reassurance. Corvus, prefect of the legions, who had been Ban’s friend, gazed quietly into the middle distance, where a sow rooted in a sty, and waited while the governor’s guest brought the fractured parts of herself together. From the new stillness of her mind, Breaca found the right words to answer him. Formally, as he had done, she said, ‘Perhaps you could guide us to our first view of the theatre? We have not yet had the pleasure.’

XVI.

SEEN FROM THE HILLSIDE ABOVE, CAMULODUNUM HAD BEEN A brick-and-whitewash fungus leaking unchecked across land that had once been green. In the clutter of paved and muddied streets and pathways, painted merchants’ booths and shacks, pigsties, wooden stables and loudly colour-washed villas, only the triumphal gates in the west and the theatre in the east had stood out from the rest.

Following Corvus through the mire, the noise and the smell

crowded Breaca more. The city was not a quiet place. Even close to noon, the crowing cocks were barely outdone by the shrieks of children and the bawling of men; men in armour and men in chains, men ordering other men, men ordering women, men ordering mules and packhorses and bullocks. A girl screamed, but only once and not for long; Camulodunum was man’s domain.

The smell was eye-watering: the ripe rottenness of too many people crammed in too small a space, with their old food and their new food and their goats and pigs and cattle and ordure and urine and death. Of all the stories told to Breaca of Rome’s new city, none had mentioned that underneath the cacophony of life, Camulodunum stank of death.

The wind backed round, hurling the full ripeness of it full in her face. Breaca inhaled, regretted it, and spat.

Beside her, Cunomar grinned, sourly. ‘Rome smells worse,’ he said. ‘And it’s bigger.’ He was enjoying himself and it showed. The almost-confrontation with Corvus - his mother’s need for him, and her trust - had left him sharper than before. As after the spear-trial, the beginnings of the man shone through the child and he walked taller because of it. Twice, Corvus drew a breath to engage him in conversation, and twice, seeing the hate in his eyes, he stopped. Instead, he fell in beside Breaca, who did not hate him.

‘The theatre is ahead and to the left. The path is a little unkempt. I’m afraid the construction of the temple to Claudius has somewhat taken over this part of the city.’

‘So I see.’

Breaca lifted Graine to her hip, to keep clean the hem of her tunic. The path Corvus had indicated was a trail of much-trodden straw laid across a sea of mud that was one with the building site to their right. Within it, in isolated splendour, the part-finished temple to Claudius grew from the slurry like some long-dead animal drawn out by the gods, all bones and teeth and no flesh. Its ribs lay open to the sky, faced on the inside with marble. Around lay other piles of white marble slabs and squared-off roof beams, heaps of freshly quarried flints, not yet washed clean, and numbered stacks of gilded roof tiles which were under permanent guard.

Those guards excepted, there was no sign of life near the temple, no engineers, no architects, no slaves working under the whip. Abandoned for the day, it sat amongst the bones of its scaffolding, and it was as easy to imagine it shattered and the land beneath green again as it was to imagine the heights it would reach and the fire that would blaze from the gold-tiled roof when it was complete.

Corvus led them past slowly; one does not rush past the temple to a god, even when that god was not so long ago a drooling idiot whose own wife ordered his death.

Breaca held Graine close, feeling the patter of the small child heart against her shoulder. She recognized by now the change in her daughter when Graine began to see with the eyes of the dream. Feeling it, Breaca smoothed a tangle of rich red hair from her face.

‘What do you see?’ she asked.

The green-grey eyes were widely vacant. ‘Too many dead,’ Graine said. ‘They don’t know how to sing home the ghosts of their dead.’

‘The Romans don’t?’

‘Yes. And also the Trinovantes. The Romans break them as slaves and when they die, the people do not have the dreaming to sing them home.’ It was said without passion. Where others would have cursed Rome, or themselves for allowing it to happen, Graine shook her head in disapproval and unforced sorrow. ‘There are others too, burning. It’s not a good death.’

Breaca kissed her daughter’s brow. ‘No. Fire is never a good death.’

The horror of the thought brushed both of them, trailing goose feathers across too-fine skin. They held each other close, submerged in the moment, and so were the last of the small group to round the north-western corner of the temple and see what had been placed there as a warning.

‘Stop.’

Corvus said it, a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed. Breaca had already stopped, because Cygfa had come to a halt and was urgently making the signs to ward against evil. Beside her, Cunomar was shaking as Breaca had never seen him, swearing the oaths of the she-bears in a single unbroken stream that cursed Corvus, the governor and all of Rome to an endless dying on knives that cut but did not kill.

Beside them, the Roman officer Corvus stood stone-white and still. Breaca walked into him as she rounded the corner, so that the hissed curses of her two older children mixed with the Latin of his apology.

‘Breaca—’ He put a hand on her arm. ‘You must believe me. I

didn’t know they were here.’

She believed him, if only because he looked so sick. It was the smell that did it, as much as the sight. Breathing through her teeth, Breaca looked past him to the paired crosses she had seen from the hilltop, and knew, with a hollow hurt in her abdomen, that Graine had been wrong, at least in part, when she said that the crosses had not yet tasted blood.

It was not human blood, and the sheep hanging from the right hand arm of the right-hand cross had not died there, but somewhere else, where its throat had been cut and its skin flayed off so that its pink flesh showed in a way that could at first seem human. It had been gutted, to stop the gas of decay from blowing it open, but neither cleanly nor recently and streaks of greened intestines hung rotten from the open gap of its belly.

It was swaying slowly in the wind, turning on the rope so that Breaca saw late what Cygfa and Cunomar had already seen: that on either side of its chest, burned with an iron, the serpent spear mark of the Boudica soared over the eagle of Rome.

Graine was sick.

Of all her three children, the Boudica’s younger daughter had been most sheltered from the raw brutality of war. Faced with the evidence as never before, there was a small gap as she struggled to understand, and then she vomited violently and colourfully into the mud at Corvus’ feet.

‘I’m sorry.’

Corvus said it again, in Eceni as well as Latin. ‘I don’t know who did this or why and when I find out there will be a reckoning. I swear, if I had known, I would not have brought you this way. Or I would have found a way to warn you. I am truly sorry.’

He knelt, offering water from a belt-flask to Graine, who was sobbing now, and drawing the attention from those in front and behind. Her shock was real, but overdone to turn eyes away from Cunomar and Cygfa who stood together, finding their feet in a world that had suddenly become unstable.

Breaca would have gone to them, but to do so would have attracted more attention. She let Corvus tend to Graine and accepted his apologies and found it within herself to smile at the governor’s secretary who brought the humble apologies of his master and his wish that her family be seated soon within the theatre where they might be sheltered from an ugliness which had no bearing on them.

Three centuries of legionaries stood in ranks around the tiered arc of the theatre and made avenues leading in towards the many entrances and staircases. Breaca and her family arrived late, the last of a few stragglers to make the journey from the forum. Ahead of her, in a sea of gossiping humanity, eight delegations, with their families, friends and retainers, made a show of being at ease in Roman company.

They could not have missed seeing the hanged sheep, symbol of cowardice and a failure to fight, but they chose not to speak of it; instead the talk was loudly and pragmatically commercial. After the heavy dignity of the early ceremonies, the gathering at the theatre had all the subtlety of a cattle market. The contracts made and broken here were every bit as binding as those witnessed in Roman law throughout the morning session.

‘Tagos was already there; this was a world in which he flourished. His lack of an arm was no impediment, easily compensated by a quick mind and the ability to strike sharp bargains. As it had been designed to, the workmanship of his king-band had won much attention and set him apart from the other client kings so that his monopoly of Roman wines and olives from Greece had not been broken.

Breaca and the now-silent Graine were conducted to his side and, as Cunomar and Cygfa joined them, he was pleased to present his family to the Iberian master mason who had designed and was building Claudius’ temple, to the balding Gaulish wine merchant who was the third most senior magistrate of the city and who had funded one hundredth of the temple’s building costs to date, and last and most effusively to the tall, white-haired Greek physician whom he spotted waiting by the stairs to the central tier of seating.

The physician was one of the few men held in equal regard by Rome and the tribes alike. ‘Tagos was rapturous in his greeting. ‘Theophilus, what a delight! I had not thought you would grace us with your presence on such an informal occasion.’

‘Had you not? How could I not come to watch when one of my former patients is to die?’ Theophilus did not return the smile. His clear hawk’s gaze was directed exclusively at Breaca. ‘This must be your new wife. I am honoured to meet her. If I may?’

He bowed, not waiting for the completion of formal introductions, and, taking Breaca’s hand, laid his fingers on her wrist. She felt a probing across the surface of her thoughts, not unlike Airmid’s or, more recently, Graine’s, and a pull in her midriff that was exactly like the first feather-touch of birth pains and then the

dry grip was gone and the physician was bowing again.

‘My lady, I had intended to offer my services should you ever come near childbirth but I see that will not be necessary. My best wishes to you and your three beautiful children. They do honour to you and their father.’ He nodded in turn to Graine, Cunomar and Cygfa and the colour returned, a little, to each of them without words exchanged.

If his intent was to crush the king of the Eceni, he succeeded. In one short speech, ‘Tagos’ hopes of a dynasty were prised open and shown empty to the world. He opened his mouth and, fishlike, shut it again. His eyes roamed the crowd around, seeking to find who, if any, amongst his rivals had been close enough to hear. Finding none, he turned away, calling Cunomar and Cygfa to follow him.