Dreaming the Serpent Spear (29 page)

Ursus used his knife gingerly, at arm’s length. The bundle of herbs spilled open. A small disc of fatty tissue rolled out.

“Burn that!
Now!
” Corvus jumped back. It was the single fastest move Ursus had ever seen him make off a battlefield. “Make sure the fire’s downwind of the horses and then find out where the rest of these are. Where there’s one, there will be more.”

They built a fire beyond the burned-out jetty, well away from the barges and the leaving point for the crossing. The fat crackled and flared and the smoke was greasily black. A further search found five more of the bundles, spread out along the coast. The camp cur found the last two and was rewarded beyond anything it had previously known in its short, harsh life.

Later, when the chaos was stilled and the horses settled and the men were ready, almost, to mount, Ursus said, “I don’t understand. The thing that scared the horses most was the foaling plug from a mare; they pass one every time they foal. We used to collect them from my grandfather’s paddocks and dry them over the fire and wear them in strings round our necks to count the number of foals in each herd. The good mares used to walk up and touch their muzzles to the one that was theirs. No horse I’ve ever seen has been afraid of one.”

“They’re not usually.” Corvus signalled behind and one of the horseboys brought his mount and Ursus’. Leading them down to the sea’s edge, he said, “I’ve seen it done once before, in Alexandria, to set a chariot off course. The mare-plug is soaked in skald-root and the urine of a red-haired child and then charred over a fire made of wormwood. I don’t understand why, but horses are terrified of it and whoever has placed these here knows it. If the governor hadn’t changed his mind, we’d have been trying to swim the horses
alongside the barges. I leave you to imagine the chaos that would have caused.”

“Thank you, I’d rather not.” Ursus rolled his eyes. “And I’m not in a hurry to work out where it came from, either, if it means we have insurgents in the mountains behind who are bold enough to come down while we’re asleep in our tents.”

“I think it’s worse than that.” Corvus brushed his hands on his tunic. Ursus saw damp sweat marks where they had been. His commander smiled at him, weakly. “The hide of each bundle was sodden and the boats they were hidden in were quite dry. We have been here on the shore all morning and seen nothing. I think someone from the island has found a safe route to swim across that we don’t know about, which is not an encouraging thought. And we’re going to miss the tide.”

Ursus felt the blood drain from his face. The route they were planning to take had been given by a Siluran who had lived all his life crossing from mainland to island. Two things had been clear; that theirs was the only safe route, and that it must be made before the turn of the tide. The inquisitors had sworn the information was reliable; that the man had not changed his story from the first, when he had tried to sell it for a very large sum of gold, to the end, when he had bought himself a much-wanted death with the same information. The inquisitors were not often wrong, but the times when they had been were numbered amongst the wing’s worst catastrophes.

Faintly, Ursus said, “We’re going to die.”

“Possibly.” The men were lined up. The sobbing Batavian had dried his eyes and was leading a black colt better than anything he had ever ridden. Corvus raised his hand. Along the beachhead, from one jetty to the other, the Batavian and
Gaulish cavalrymen mounted their horses in one smooth, armour-clashing movement. The sun blessed them, and the green waves spread smooth at their horses’ feet.

Corvus turned to his second decurion and smiled. He no longer looked nervous, if he ever truly had. His grey eyes were clear and achingly alive. Meeting them, Ursus remembered, suddenly, that his commander had once been shipwrecked and nearly drowned. To live through that and still lead his troop across unknown water in full armour took more courage than any man should have to contemplate. Ursus flushed, hotly, for too many reasons to name.

Corvus eyed him askance. “I think,” he said, “that as we go into the water, you would find it wise not to ponder too closely on the question of what has been or may be and particularly not on what’s waiting ahead. It’s too late to do anything about it now anyway and fear in battle is better saved for what can be seen and known. Shall we ride?”

To his own astonishment, Ursus felt himself grin and nod and realized he had just been asked for, and had given, the order to begin the invasion of Mona. He opened his mouth to take it all back and thought better of it.

To his right, laughing, Corvus dropped his arm.

The sea devoured them.

Cold, green water ate at their horses’ legs. Fronds of weed dragged them down. From the moment the horses began to swim, and the men slid from their backs to swim at their sides, the ocean felt them and knew them as the enemy.

Corvus was ahead of the rest. For the duration of the crossing, it was the safest place to be, clear of all the thrashing hooves but those of his own mount.

It did not feel safe. Waves which had seemed from the shore small things, barely a child’s hillock in the mountains of what a sea could be, grew huge as houses and hurled themselves down, dousing him in cold, searing salt that filled his armour and his ears and his throat, that made him sneeze and then inhale and brought him, choking, to the verge of drowning so that if his mare had not stayed true to its training and swum bravely forward, if his arm had not been hooked into the loops plaited into her mane, if he had not trained to do this in daytime and night time for most of his life, he would have died.

He had trained, and his mare, which he loved with all of his heart, did swim brave to her teaching and the men behind him, coughing and cursing, followed his lead and the sea spat them out again, bobbing, one man beside each horse, and they made their way with excruciating slowness along the route they had been given, knowing now that it was not the only safe way across, and may not even be safe at all.

They were just over halfway to the island when Corvus felt the tide turn. The mass of the ocean beneath and around hesitated in its grinding of him, a great holding of breath and deciding and then a shift so that the power came from ahead instead of behind, as if the pull of the moon had become a push, holding him back from the island.

Because water and wind were cousins, the breeze that had fluttered astern backed round at the same time and blew harder in his face. The ocean, committed now, came at him with new power. A rolling wave lifted him up and dashed him down, and another, so that he choked and breathed in cold and salt and choked again, smashing the water with an armour-clad arm to
keep afloat. His mare, blessed of all beasts, kept swimming through water suddenly twice as treacherous as before. He pulled on the mane-loops and lifted himself higher in the water and so he saw before the others the flat patch of water, smooth as poured iron, with small circles growing and receding in the centre that lay ahead of them.

“Go right!” Flailing, Corvus raised his arm. Sabinius, his standard-bearer, was behind and to his left with a shortened standard fixed to the pommel of his saddle. As the next wave bore him up and down again, he saw the tilt and flap of the wing’s banner. A little after, with the sea draining from his ears, he heard Sabinius’ voice, hoarse with inhaled brine, too faint to be heard by any but those closest. An echo came, in Ursus’ voice, and he was glad of that, then Flavius and, surprisingly, he was glad of that, too, and then there was only time to survive, not to listen for who else might keep clear of the too-flat water.

The waves were too small now. Perversely, he wished them bigger, more robust, able to bear him aloft and smash him down again, to push him away from the plate of wide, green water that lay flat as quicksand just ahead of him.

He was too close. Already the suck and pull of the current drew him in faster than he could pull away. He was on the wrong side of his mare. It was swimming straight ahead, taking them closer to death. He pushed his shoulder against it and said, “Right. Go right.” His voice was a high-pitched whine.

The mare had been a gift of the Boudica’s daughter. The Eceni trained their horses to hair-fine reactions in battle, but not in water. Corvus had no idea whether his years of teaching would count now that they were in the real ocean.

Kicking with all his strength, talking in Eceni and Latin, leaning in with one arm across her withers, all he felt at first was a loss of pressure under his shoulder, then a tilt and a turn and then — beloved of all beasts — she was pulling him right, away from the sucking treachery of the current.

He could have wept for relief but had not the breath for it. He pushed and kicked and swam and time stretched so that lifetimes came and went between the crests of each wavelet and then suddenly he was in surf again, with the gods’ horses about him, white-maned and beautiful, and his mare was scrabbling on some kind of footing and ahead water furled whitely between green weed on one side and brown weed on the other and Corvus knew that the Siluran who had tried to make himself rich and had gone on to buy his own death with all he had that was of value had not lied.

Then the sun glanced off something polished amidst the rocks and the flash of it dazzled him and he remembered that there were warriors on the land, waiting for him and his men, and knew without question that he had not the strength to fight now, or even to stand.

The dazzling came again and through the spearing brightness he saw shadows that moved with purpose down to the water. He heard Ursus’ voice in his head, heavy with dread, say,
We’re going to die
, and knew it very likely true, and not necessarily unwelcome, or unreasonable in the circumstances, except that he had a professional pride and did not wish to be seen to fail in his appointed task.

His mare’s feet touched sand and churning shingle and there was a moment when the beast was land-borne and Corvus was still buoyed by the water, and then he pulled on the mane-loops and twisted himself over and up and into
the saddle and shook himself free of the water and drew his sword, because twenty years of training had made it an automatic action, whatever the state of his body, and then he was riding forward to live or to die, to kill or to be killed, probably both. It was only as the mist closed in over him and he found he could see nothing that he thought to turn round and look for Ursus or Sabinius or any of those who should have come safely from the sea, at least, and by then it was too late, because the mist was not mist but a stinging, insidious smoke and it wrapped itself tight about his eyes so that his nose was running and his eyes were streaming and he really could see nothing at all.

“Corvus?” The voice was Valerius’ which was impossible this side of death. “Corvus, dismount. You are not safe on the rocks. The mare will break her leg and fall and you will die.”

“Am I not already dead?” He said it, and heard his voice thicken with the smoke so that the last of the words drew out longer and longer and spiralled round his head.

He dismounted, not to offend the gods. The rock swayed and lurched under his feet as if it were the deck of a ship. He remembered Segoventos, ship’s master of the
Greylag
, and the solid stability of the man as he held the steering oar of a ship that was heading for destruction. He felt the lurch and slam of the sea and, for the first time in a lifetime of sea voyages, he felt sick. He was, in fact, going to be sick, quite soon. Now, in fact.

He knelt on the swaying rock and pressed his sweating forehead to the weed and vomited until his stomach threatened to invert itself in his throat.

“Corvus? That’s enough. Drink this; it will help.”

He knelt on the hard rock and Valerius’ arm was round his shoulder and his other hand was on his brow and the rock was still slewing as if in a mid-ocean storm and the boy was not puking, which meant that both of them were certainly dead and that here, in the lands beyond life, Corvus had found again the love that had driven almost all of his waking, breathing moments for over twenty years.

The pain in his heart, which he had ignored for years, became all-consuming. He made himself lift his head and look at the fine brow and high, aristocratic cheekbones, at the long, straight nose and long, straight, black hair, threaded through, now, with silver that had never been there before. He saw the things that were present and the other things that were absent and loved them afresh.

“You’re older than I had thought you would be when life left us,” he said. “And you have lost the scar across your throat.” And then, because one thing struck him later than all the others, “Why are you wearing the dreamers’ brow-band? Did the Eceni take you back as one of their own?”

Deep black eyes met his and his worlds met in the heart of them. He saw the wry, dry irony that he had loved from the beginning, even in the youth who had not yet begun to use it as a defence, or even to understand the strength it gave him. He saw the compassion that had been so long missing and the care and the shadows of pain, and was sorry that death had not eased those.

The voice he knew better than any in the world, that he could have picked from a thousand others, said, “Corvus, I’m sorry. I am not Bán, whom you knew as Valerius. I am his sire. But it may please you to know that you are alive still. If you trust me, you will return to the mainland alive, and if
you are careful from here forward, you will meet my son at least once more in this life, perhaps enough to know your heart’s ease before death claims you both.”

He would have seen it if he had not been sick, and heard the difference in a voice that had not known the pain of the legions. From the debris of his thoughts, he picked the shard that mattered most. “It is not this life that matters now. Can you promise me we will meet after, in death? Will we have time together?” He had never asked such a thing of anyone, never so rawly, never so desperately wanted.

“In the place of no-time?” The black eyes were not as full of pity as he might have expected, only a sudden depth and a faint colouring of humour. “All things are possible in death, as in the dream. If you can find him and are with him in your dreams, you will find him likewise in death. But I think there may be others seeking you, and whom you may wish also to meet. One other at least, is there not?”