Dreaming the Hound (53 page)

He had seen a movement of Longinus’ chest; only once and not recently, but enough to hang hope on. He found himself prayingto Briga, to whom he was not and had never been given, but who ruled the deaths of battle. Crows took his words and carried them and he felt himself heard.

Madb was still watching him. She said, ‘Valerius, did you hear me? The horse is mad, or inspired by the gods. You’re going to have to cut its throat if you want to get close to your friend.’

‘If you think you can get near enough to kill it, you’re welcome.’

The woman barked a laugh. Her voice was deep and rich and resonant and the sound was strange in all the death and wounding. She said, ‘Do I look as if I want to die? I was thinking you could ask Huw to use his sling. He’s strangely in awe of you; he’d probably do it.’

‘Would a stone kill him?’ Valerius stooped for a pebble and tossed it close to Longinus. The Crow-horse snaked its head at him, ears flat and mouth wide. It ignored the pebble. Stepping a half-stride closer, Valerius said, ‘It might work, but Huw’s too soft to do it. He’d spend the rest of his life reliving the day he killed the greatest war mount ever to set foot on the earth. I wouldn’t ask that of any man. They sing of this horse as they sing of Hail. I know. I’ve heard the songs.’

Madb said, ‘So have I. They say it’s evil.’

She was testing him, as she had tested him in the battle. Her jackdaw’s eyes watched him, brightly. Valerius shook his head. ‘No. They say the man who rode it is evil.’

‘Are they right?’

‘I don’t know. You spent the afternoon’s battle saving his life.’ Valerius dragged his gaze from the horse. ‘Did you know who I was?’

He had not looked at her properly since the end of battle. She was bruised down one side of her face where the edge of a shield had caught her. It would blacken overnight and leave her half dark

for a month. Her left wrist was swollen enough to be sprained and would need binding soon if it were not to stiffen. She sat her horse as if each of these was normal for her, and looked down at him pensively.

‘Of course I knew. How could I not? You don’t need a red hound painted on grey to show who you are, it’s stamped on every part of you. “Valerius of the Eceni.” The man who fights for both sides and loves neither. Except it seems he does love one part of one side after all. Did he know?’

‘Longinus? Possibly once. Not now.’

‘Then you’d best get to him to tell him before Braint decides four dozen live Thracians are not enough of a prize and she wants a head on a stake to show Rome what fate awaits it.’ Madb pursed her lips, appraising. ‘I saw you show off your skill at the warrior’s mount very prettily this afternoon. It’s easy on a willing horse, harder on one trying to kill you. Could you do it now, do you think, if I had the beast’s attention?’

‘We could find out.’

It was the only real chance and Valerius had been working towards exactly that since the battle ended. Spoken openly, it became harder to think of. His palms were wet. He rubbed them dry on his tunic.

The Crow-horse felt the sharpening of his attention and spun fully to face him. Its flanks heaved and its nostrils flared scarlet, dragging in air. Its tail slashed, violent as a wildcat’s. Its eyes were red-rimmed with dust and rage and the loathing of being surrounded. More than any other living beast, it understood the ebb and flow of battle. Never while Valerius rode it had it been on the losing side in more than a skirmish and never in all of its life had it been taken captive.

Valerius would not believe that it was evil, only that it hated him. He wanted to believe that it had hated Longinus as deeply and, by the same token, that it would have protected Valerius as savagely if he had ever fallen in battle. He began to speak to it in the language of the ancestors, that he had used in the beginning when he and the beast had newly met, when he had first made the warrior’s mount in front of a blood-hungry circus crowd, with it the freshly broken colt brought in for barter and he the slave-boy trying to escape. He had loved the beast then, and had thought it could come to love him. Half his life had passed waiting for that to happen.

He tossed another pebble and the horse ignored it entirely. He cast a handful towards Longinus’ fallen body and was sure he saw

a shudder. Valerius wrapped the thread of his hope around that certainty and, with every fraction of his attention on the beast that sought his life, he edged inwards, speaking lullabies in the tongue of the ancestors. Halfway through, in Hibernian, he said, ‘I needit to turn to my right and take a step forward.’

Madb was a moving thing on the edge of his vision. Her voice was a rolling wave on the sea. She said, ‘Does it know what a spear is?’

‘It did when I rode it.’

‘Good. Here then, horse of all hate, shall we see now, are you all that they say?’

The blur of her movement wove into the screaming spin of the Crow-horse as it flung itself towards the new danger - and drew Valerius with it, as a wind draws leaves. Sucked by its power, pulled by the lock of his attention, he leaped forward and up for the saddle horn, throwing himself up on the rise of its rise, swinging up and over and down to land square in the saddle, his hands already reaching for the reins.

The Crow-horse felt him and knew itself cheated. Forgetting Madb, it threw itself into a screaming, rearing, bucking frenzy. On the first day he rode it, Valerius had watched a man nearly lose his life to its rage. It was older now and fitter and more practised in dislodging its riders. He felt the bunched muscle beneath him explode into action, felt his body wrenched and his teeth clash and blood gush from his tongue and knew that if it really tried, the beast could crush him to pulp.

The horse felt the same, and knew how. It came back to earth and there was a moment’s stillness as it gathered itself inwards. Valerius thought it might buck and grabbed a handful of mane to hold himself by. Then he felt the hindquarters gather and thought it might bolt and then the ground fell away and the sky tilted and it was rearing high enough to touch the clouds, high enough to throw itself backwards and crush the man on its back even if it broke its own spine in the attempt.

It screamed as it had screamed at Braint so that the sound shattered the sky and Valerius, knowing himself about to die, screamed with it, giving vent to all a lifetime’s pain and frustration and exhilaration and devastation that no amount of killing in battle, no depth of dreaming to the gods, would ever drain dry.

The sky did not fall. The horse did not topple and kill them both. The birds of Briga, circling, cawed thrice and flew west and did not take the souls of either man or horse.

The Crow-horse came back down to stand still on the earth, shaking its head, and Valerius, deafened, sat on it drawing breath after breath of sharp mountain air with tears scalding his face and pooling in the crook of his collarbone and no idea why he shed them.

He became aware, slowly, that others were close. Madb was in front of him, her spear held in a clear salute. Braint was with her, fierce-eyed and silent, and Nydd and Huw and the smith and others whose names he had once known and might know again, but for now could not begin to remember.

To Madb, he said, ‘Is Longinus still alive?’

‘Of course. Would you not know if he were dead?’

‘I thought perhaps I wept for him.’

‘Did you so? Then you are more of a fool than I took you for.

He is alive and awake and his eyes are open. Get off your god-riven horse and talk to him. And when you are finished, you can talk to those who fought for you, not against you. You were right; this was a diversion. Mona is under attack and Tethis holds the straits with three thousand against four times that number. Only the water and the good will of the gods keep Rome from the island. Neither will last for ever.’

Some time later, Longinus Sdapeze, former decurion of the Ala Prima Thracum, woke with a crashing headache.

Presently, when it became clear he was not about to die, he felt about him and then opened his eyes. The covered top of a wagon swayed pleasingly above his head, lit by a dawn sky. A brindled war hound lay at his side, peaceably watchful. A lean, dark-haired man sat on the sprung seat of the wagon, blocking most of the light.

Longinus lay a while, studying the familiar, stubborn set of the back so that he knew the moment when his scrutiny had been felt. He considered sitting up to ask at least one of the several pressing questions rocking against the walls of his head, but the hound stared at him until he thought better of it.

He slept a while and ate and was sick and drank water and slept again. When he woke, it was dusk and the hound had gone. The sway of the wagon was the sway of the cradle and it was hard to stay awake. Forcing himself to sit, Longinus reached up to touch the shoulder of the man who had saved his life. ‘Where are we going?’

‘East.’

‘Why?’

‘Because your brains are turned to milk in your head and you won’t be fit to sit on a horse until they curdle again to the broth you were born with.’

His brains had turned to milk and they made him sleep again, unquestioning, so that it was halfway through the night before he realized he had not been given an answer. The hound lay with him then, keeping him warm.

At dawn, when they had not stopped, he asked, ‘Valerius, where’s your horse?’

‘What do you think is taking you forward?’

Longinus laughed and it hurt so he stopped. ‘You’re making the Crow-horse pull a wagon? Valerius! Are you entirely mad?’

‘He’s good at it. And I have the roan and your mare as well. Two pull at any one time and one walks behind. In any case, I couldn’t leave him. Braint would have tried to ride him and he’d have killed her, which would not have been good. She’s needed to lead the warriors in the defence of Mona.’

Sobered, Longinus said, ‘They can’t win, your warriors. Suetonius Paulinus may be an appalling governor, but he’s an excellent general. He wouldn’t have attacked if there were the slightest chance he would lose.’

‘He will gain Mona eventually,’ agreed Valerius. ‘It won’t be this month, or possibly even next; the Silures and Ordovices have rallied and are attacking him from the rear, so that he can’t throw his weight at the straits, but still, I think you are right. He will have the island by midsummer at the latest. He will not, however, walk to it on the blood and flesh of those who have lived there. It’s the people that matter; the elders to hold the wisdom and the children to hear it. Where they are, so is Mona, and they can be saved. All we need is time. Braint and her warriors are buying that time with their flesh and blood.’

Longinus was watching the planes of his face. He knew Valerius as well as any man, possibly better than Valerius himself. At length, with compassion, he said, ‘And do you not want to be with the warriors of Mona as they mount their defence?’

Valerius stared at his hound a while, and then at the horses pulling the wagon and the path ahead. The soft rhythm of footfalls might have lulled Longinus into sleep, but that the answer mattered too much to both of them for that. Eventually, ‘I want to be with them more than I can possibly express,’ Valerius said.

Longinus pushed himself forward, against nausea and the resistance of his friend, to sit on the bench where the hound had been. The Crow-horse was, indeed, pulling the wagon, which was, if nothing else, a sign of its rider’s desperate need to be moving. ‘So let me ask again. Why are we going east?’

Valerius sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose in the way Corvus used to do when pressed beyond endurance. Without looking to the side, he said, ‘I am going because Luain mac Calma, the man who claims to be my father and is Elder of Mona, has ordered that I take word to my sister that it would be to the great benefit of the gods and their people if the eastern tribes were to rise in revolt while the assault on Mona is under way. I am sworn to follow his wishes, or die in the attempt. You are going because I am going and I was not prepared to leave you behind.’

They were close enough to feel each other’s warmth and each became aware of it. The wagon faltered and moved on again; the Crow-horse had been ridden by both, and knew what moved them. After a long while, Longinus said, ‘And will we die in the attempt?’

At last, Valerius turned to face him. Surprisingly, his eyes were at peace, and had room for the old, dry humour.

‘I may do. You won’t unless everything I have done or can do fails. You kept the Crow-horse safe for me. Getting you killed would be a poor repayment.’

XXXII.

THE TOMBSTONE WAS DELIVERED EARLY, BEFORE FIRST LIGHT. THE factor of the prefect’s household was woken by a night slave and, blearily irritable, ordered it left in the spartan enclave of his master’s office.

Quintus Valerius Corvus, prefect of the Ala Quinta Gallorum and acting commander of Camulodunum, found it shortly after dawn as he came to his paperwork, seeking an hour’s peace before the debilitating trivia of colonial governance began to take its toll.

He had heard the watch called twice before he thought to inspect the stone he had so recently commissioned. He was studying it still, an hour later, when his first visitor called.

‘What do you think of it?’

Clean and sharp and scurrilous, the stone leaned against the farther wall. The sackcloth hung over one edge; the prefect’s usually scrupulous tidiness had, this once, abandoned him.

Corvus spoke Alexandrian, for privacy and out of courtesy for his guest and friend, the physician Theophilus, late of Rome, the Germanies, Athens and Cos, and now of Britannia. Theophilus had seen too many tombstones of late to find them absorbing and his eyesight was not as good as it had once been. Still, for his friend’s sake, he leaned forward to study it.

After a while, he leaned back again. ‘It’s very … striking. What would you like me to think of it?’

‘That Longinus would appreciate the humour, that it suits the man as we knew him and that it will serve him well in death as he served well in life.’

Theophilus nodded, sagely. ‘Then, indeed, for your sake as much as his, that is what I will think.’ He crouched more closely and read the lines incised on the stone.’ “Longinus Sdapeze, son of Matycus, duplicarius of the first squadron, the Ala Prima Thracum, et cetera,
et cetera
… His heirs had this erected in accordance with his will.” Did they indeed?’ He looked up. ‘I hadn’t realized you were one of his heirs. Who was the other?’