Dreaming the Hound (30 page)

Marcellus watched them come. Raising the blade, he saluted each one by name.

‘Valerius Corvus: I will never forget your charge against the hill fort of the Durotriges. The god saw it on the day and will hear of it again from me. Cornelius Pulcher: I have heard of your actions against the warriors of the west. You will prevail in time, I am sure.’ His sneer said otherwise. It fell away as he turned to face the last of the officers, an ageing, white-haired centurion of the IXth legion who looked easily old enough to have been pensioned as a veteran himself. To him, Marcellus bowed. ‘Rutilius Albinus, first father under the god. I will give him your greetings as I give you my honour, my oath and my life.’

Albinus, at least, saw what was coming. With a report like a thunder clap, he sheathed his own sword and raised his arm in salute at exactly the moment Marcellus reversed his grip on the hilt of his stolen blade and, without error or hesitation, thrust it home in his own chest, a hand’s breadth to the left of the bull god’s brand. With his last conscious movement, he tipped forward, so that he could have been said to have fallen on his sword and could go to his god with honour.

He was dead before the first of the officers on the stage reached him. They were slow, rendered sluggish by their own fear. Under some governors they would have replaced Marcellus on the cross for allowing a prisoner to escape his own execution. The legions did not look favourably on men who failed in their duty.

The first of them knelt, his fingers laid flat against the great vessels of the prisoner’s neck, seeking signs of life that he would never find. Thinking himself useful, he pulled the blade from the lifeless chest and thereby released the ocean of blood waiting

within. The oak stage soaked it up, hungrily. At the sight, the massed voice of the audience was released, creating its own sea of astonished sound.

The governor was not one who visited unnecessary death on his men. A brief move of his head caught the attention of the ageing centurion of the IXth. ‘Albinus? Your man, I believe. Please see to his removal. The veterans may wish to claim his body. They may do so.’

With practised alacrity, the old men on the stage formed an honour guard and removed the body of the man they had respected but not liked.

In death, Marcellus’ memory was transformed from a battle hungry officer and drunken abuser of men to a hero who spoke his mind when all around him were silent. For now, he was simply a body who was leaking blood and ranker fluids across the governor’s new stage. The veterans made a litter of two shields and carried him away, doing what they could to minimize the mess. A servant in tribal dress returned shortly afterwards with sifted sand and poured it over, soaking up the worst of the excess. On the ground below, two others drew across a long rake and smoothed away the splashed debris from the deeper, paler sand that filled the semicircle between the front row of seats and the stage.

Breaca watched Corvus return to his seat. His face was closed to her but his eyes held a warning: There is more. Don’t relax yet. She lifted Graine onto her knee and said quietly, ‘I think there’s a break now. Do you need to go out?’

The girl shook her head. Breaca bent to kiss her and said, more softly, ‘Is this what you dreamed of that made Cunomar angry?’

‘Not yet, but it was here, in this place.’ She faltered. ‘It may not have been today.’

‘Then we will watch and see. If anything bad begins to happen, will you let me know as soon as you see it?’

‘I’ll try.’

If Graine did not need to go out, a great many of the adults who had drunk wine in the morning did. There was a shuffling and a changing of seats and men and women passed each other on the long stairs that led down the back of the theatre from the upper ranks of benches. Breaca held Graine and talked lightly of nothing to Cygfa while ‘Tagos regaled the governor with his best tale of the boar hunt by which he and Dubornos had together celebrated their ascension to adulthood.

The governor, who had almost certainly heard the tale before, or others like it, evinced total absorption and only one watching him as closely as Breaca did could have seen the signal to the officers on the margins of the theatre that ordered the start of the next phase of the afternoon’s demonstration.

The ranks of benches were full again and settling. A horn called for quiet. The governor rose and stepped into the central area of freshly raked sand, as visible from the top tiers as any man on the stage. He had shed his cloak, leaving it on the seat when he rose so that his armour took the full glare of the afternoon sun and lit his face to a silvered gold. A dreamer, doing such a thing, would have known how to use the impact to bring the people closer to the gods. The governor of Britannia, being Roman, blinked firmly and set his face at a different angle to the glare.

‘Warriors of the Trinovantes, of the Eceni, the Atrebates, the Belgae…’

The entire crowd gasped. He was not speaking Latin, that was the first surprise. In less than a year, he had learned a passable version of the Trinovante dialect that was familiar throughout the south-east, and he had called them warriors; that was the greater shock.

His smile encompassed them all. ‘Today we have seen that Roman justice is impartial, that it is the righteous arm of the distant emperor brought close. It protects the weak and restrains the over-strong, allowing all to prosper equally without fear of death or injury.

‘And yet, for justice to work, the emperor’s laws must be scrupulously kept. We can be lenient in allowing any people to continue their ancient rites and ceremonies in peace. Our gods have no quarrel with your gods; in the heavens, all gods live together in mutual respect. Our laws have no quarrel with your laws save in the instance where the one overrides the other.’

He said it smoothly, so that only a churl could choose to take it as an insult: We own you; our laws have precedence over yours and the world is a better place because of it.

Holding her own mind still, that her eyes might not betray her, Breaca felt Graine slip off her knee.

The governor was not watching the movement of children. His gaze roamed over those whose lives had changed most and who still resented it: men amongst the Trinovantes who had been called to fund the temple to the Emperor Claudius and had been required, on occasion, to help with its building; warriors among the Cantiaci and the Coritani and the Catuvellauni who had fought against the legions and might take up arms again if they had a good enough

reason; the Eceni, who had rebelled once, and might yet do so again.

Speaking most to them, he said, ‘Thus it is that when one is found flagrantly to be flouting the most basic of our laws - laws passed for the protection of all - then we must act with expedition and no compromise, as we did with ex-centurion Marcellus.’

A signal was given. The drums marked the arrival of a new prisoner. A door opened on the stage. The governor said, ‘Such a one has been found. He was captured in possession of a weapon of length and size forbidden under the law and, when challenged, he attacked our men, killing two and injuring one other so that he will never fight again. For either of these alone, he must die. For both together, he must face the harshest of penalties.’

His timing was perfect and must have been practised. His last words reached the top tiers as those sitting in them caught their first sight of the tribesman who had disregarded Roman law and been caught doing so. The prisoner could not walk unaided. Two fresh officers of the guard, older and more experienced than those who had gone before, manhandled him through the faun’s door onto the stage and held him upright, naked and bloody, in full view of the benches opposite. In the first shock of seeing him, all that anyone could have said was that he had resisted arrest, or been gratuitously beaten, or both.

One of the officers grabbed a handful of hair and forced the prisoner’s head up and it could be seen that his nose was broken, one eye was swollen to a pulped mess of ruddy purple, a sword cut ran the length of one forearm and a broken finger stuck out at a painful angle. The way his left arm clamped to his side suggested a second wound there, or bleeding inside. His breathing was ragged and he showed no sign that he knew where he was.

Breaca counted all these things first; the blink-fast assessment of the warrior in the field that seeks to find if the injured can fight on. This one would never fight again without urgent treatment and Rome did not waste the time of its field physicians on condemned prisoners. The best that could be said, then, was that, even nailed to wood, his death would not last beyond sundown.

A small, voiceless part of her celebrated his two kills and sought a dreamer who could, equally silently, begin the song of soul parting for one about to die in battle. Graine was her only dreamer and she was no longer sitting on her lap or on the bench next to her.

Dragging her eyes away from the stage, Breaca searched for her daughter and found her sitting instead on Cunomar’s knee, her

small hands clamped fiercely on his wrists, her face next to his, speaking intently, quietly, in a constant stream of instruction. To a stranger, possibly even to their stepfather, it was a continuation of the whispered secrets of earlier. To Breaca, shockingly, Graine was the only thing keeping Cunomar from attempted murder and a fate identical to that awaiting the youth on the stage, because it was a youth, not an older man, but a lad with short, wiry hair, sticky with his own and others’ blood; with brown skin that darkened too fast under the sun; with a fine scar running the length of his left arm from elbow to wrist, where Cunomar had landed a lucky sword cut before his soul-friend had learned properly how to defend himself.

‘Eneit!’

The name broke from her, uncalled. The youth’s head turned stiffly and with difficulty; his hair was still held by the guard. He stared at Breaca with his one good eye and slowly, fuzzily, an understanding of where he was dawned on him. He opened his mouth and closed it again on the impossibility of speech. His eyes travelled along the benches seeking Cunomar and finding him. His smile was a private thing and carried all possible messages from apology to the joy of the warrior who has made his first kill in battle. Over them all was love and an abiding sorrow.

Without question, he was Eneit.

XVII.

BREACA ROSE IN HER CHAIR. CYGFA WRAPPED COOL FINGERS round her wrist and held her back. From behind, Corvus said, in quiet, forceful Eceni. ‘No. Think. There is nothing you can do.’ From her right, the governor turned her way and said, ‘Do you know him?’

‘Your honour, this is Eneit nic Lanis. He is Eceni, the son of a friend.’

They had the beginnings of friendship, she had felt it. His eyes reflected the same, and a moment’s indecision, then he said, ‘I’m sorry. Justice does not know the bounds of friendship. Marcellus, too, had those who cared for him. The youth must die; that is not in question.’

He had been a diplomat before and after he had been a general. In that last sentence was an opening. He had not said, ‘He must be crucified,’ when it had clearly been planned.

From Cunomar’s lap, in the language of Mona, Graine said, ‘This is my dream. His death can be yours or theirs. You must

decide.’ She said it, lightly, in exactly the tone she had told her brother of the gift she had made of a horse to a nice man. The threading imperatives of a dreamer carried in other ways, beyond the words.

From Breaca’s other side, Cygfa said, ‘The governor has just pretended a respect for our laws. Offer him the spear-challenge of the she-bears. You have the spears ready and waiting. The grandmother did not ask you to make them without a good reason. This may be it.’

Trust, Airmid had said as she was told of the elder grandmother’s instruction, trust the gods and yourself. You will know what is right when it is right. I cannot guide you beyond that.

Cold washed Breaca, and a sharpening of the senses that came with the breath of the gods. Airmid’s voice echoed from the distant past of their shared youth, long since forgotten: We dreamed her son. He was killed by one of the tribes and one of the legions, and those who could have stopped it looked on and did nothing. She got up and moved out into the open space between the chairs and the stage.

‘Tagos had never been to Mona and had only the barest understanding of its dialects. The governor leaned over to ask him a question and he was not able to answer it. From the raked sand in front of the benches, in full view of the entire theatre, Breaca spoke for him.

‘My daughters have suggested that, since we have seen Rome’s justice once today, perhaps for balance this man should submit to the justice of the tribes. This event is unprecedented but there are parallels within our laws. The spear-challenge of the she-bears is similar to the trial set to our youths who would be warriors, but with important differences. In the warrior-test, the youth must throw at a target of straw. In the challenge of the she-bears, the target is a living warrior. It is a test of courage equally for those who throw and the one chosen to die. I believe it would be suitable here.’

Like the governor, Breaca was used to addressing thousands in far less clement circumstances. Her words carried to the upper benches as the governor’s had earlier done but that here was the sense that she was addressing the man alone and the others were eavesdropping on a private conversation in a way that breached the bounds of decency. Throughout the theatre, adults shuffled and coughed. Younger children asked a whispered question, loudly.

After a pause in which a number of possibilities were considered and discarded, the governor asked the same question. ‘Tell me the nature of the spear-challenge?’

‘It is a test of courage undertaken on the eve of battle. Three spears are dedicated to Briga, who rules the outcome of war. Two are cast together by warriors on opposing sides of the conflict. The one which strikes most closely to the heart of the one-to-die is deemed to have made the kill, and the warrior who threw it is permitted to throw the final spear.’

A greyed eyebrow rose a fraction. ‘At a dead warrior? I had not thought the tribes would stoop to empty symbolism when your lives are bent most surely to practicality and function.’