Dreaming the Serpent Spear (30 page)

A face flashed in the fog, with southern, Alexandrian features, and a hawk called and a gilded statue of Horus roused its plumage and settled again, one-eyed, to watch over him. He said, “To meet, not necessarily now to love.” He thought the saying of it might finish him.

Luain mac Calma, Elder of Mona, gripped his wrist and helped him to stay upright. “Don’t be hasty to mark out your actions when life no longer holds you. All things are possible; all loves will be made whole and held so for lifetimes if you wish it. But if you would see him again in this life, you should go now. The battle for Mona is only just beginning and death stalks too close here for you safely to stay.”

“Go?” Corvus asked it like a child, dumbly. “Where?”

“On your horse, swimming, back to the mainland. Or on a barge if you prefer to wait. There will be some empty soon, I believe, and the men in them who are left alive will need a commander with the authority to turn them back to safer shores.”

T
HE BATTLE FOR THE CITY OF CAMULODUNUM BEGAN IN
thunder, with god-spears of lightning dancing across the gilded roof tiles and rain falling in unbroken sheets from the ocean of the sky.

Cunomar’s she-bears opened the assault, for the honour of it and because they fought on foot and could pass safely over treacherous ground in the pre-dawn dark when mounted warriors could not.

Naked, bearing no lights, drenched under continuous rain, they ran in a wave of silent destruction down the long slope to the city, across pasture land still muddied from the winter herds, past ploughed furrows ready for the spring sowing, under the Victory arch and past the empty plinth of Victory’s statue with the fragments of its breaking still scattered on the pathway below, and on to the first of the trenches that had been dug across the trackways to cripple the incoming horses.

As they had for the past five nights, retired Roman veterans of the XXth legion stood guard over the trenches
to protect them against the gangs of youths and children who came in the night to undo their labours of the previous day. Men in late middle age who had thought their night-guard days long behind them had drawn lots from a legionary helmet in the old ways of their service, and grumbled when they lost.

They had stood through the night and were tired and hungry and nervous of wandering ghosts and the more tangible threats of insurgent youths and the warriors whose fires had lit the hillsides through the night and then, very suddenly, had all been put out.

The night guards had been watching that, and shouting questions one to the other, when the rain had come and the crushing thunder. They were no longer young men, to stand out in the rain overnight; they had backed away into shelter, staring out into the blinding emptiness of the deserted city that became, just as suddenly, not at all deserted, but full of death, smiling, with sharp knives.

Wet and befuddled, they died without fuss. Their bodies helped to fill the trenches they had guarded, and were soon covered over with mud and rubble so that horses could pass over the places where they had been.

A small, unmanned barricade stood within the trench line, built of stone rubble and timber and parts of villas recently abandoned. With the trenches made safe, the she-bear ran on and began to dismantle it.

Dawn came slowly, clouded by the rain. Cunomar worked with his bare hands, hauling broken bricks and whole sections of plastered wattle to the side of the path. At some point, he realized that the dark was no longer complete, and that he could see the shape of Ulla nearby.

Her dark hair was plastered to her head so that the ends met underneath her chin and white lime paint that had swirled on her arms and shoulders instead puddled grittily in the creases of her elbows. A smear of it streaked her face across the bridge of her nose, highlighting the shape of her face. It would have been easy for Cunomar to imagine her a ghost if his fears had leaned that way. She grinned at him and they lifted a roof beam together and got splinters in their palms and stood for a moment, teasing them out with their teeth.

She was close enough for him to smell her sweat, to see the smear of her spit around her mouth and on her palm before the rain washed it off. Lightning flashed and she was silver suddenly, laughing. In the gap before the thunder, she put a hand to Cunomar’s one ear and shouted over the drumming rain, “We’ll never light signal fires in this weather, the wood’s too wet. You’ll need to get the flag on a roof somewhere.”

“I know.”

The storm was moving away. There was a longer gap between the light and the sound. Cunomar had time to shout that much back into Ulla’s ear and then the gods crashed the clouds together and the noise drowned out all talking. He tapped her arm and felt her follow where he led.

With the other she-bear around them, they ran north and a little east to a substantial, brick-built house that had clay tiles on the roof, not the gilded bronze of the villas around them. The outer wall was high enough to be useful, but not too high to climb. Cunomar had noted it from the hillside in the early part of three days’ watching and was uncommonly pleased to find it not yet demolished, as so
many of the outer buildings had been, to make a barrier to protect the inner city.

Ulla saw the possibility as he had done. She said, “It will make a good place to raise the banner to the Boudica; and a better one to watch the battle for where we are most needed.”

“Yes.”

He was coming to expect her to think as he thought, even to depend on it. She had been the same when they lifted the roof beam from the barricade, and before that, filling the trench, and before that in endless small ways through the days of planning. Something had changed since the annihilation of the IXth; more than the flogging, or the winter in training, the act of having killed together in battle had brought them together as true shield-mates. The old songs spoke of it. Cunomar had seen it in his mother and her relationship with Caradoc and, later, with Cygfa.

As a child, watching, he had thought he understood. Now, in the heart of the storm with the ghosts of the dead walking openly towards the gods, with living men set to kill them a spear’s throw away, with the war host on the slope awaiting his signal, it came to him that this was a door opening into a new world, that he was standing on the threshold looking in, and that it was somewhere he badly wanted to go. He thought of Eneit, who was dead, and knew that the same door had opened there, and that for all of his life a part of him would regret having closed it when he did.

“Ulla—”

“Later. We can talk on it later.” She was no longer grinning. Her eyes were obscured by the rain and poor light and too hard to see, but her face was still and open and it seemed
that his thinking had carried her with him — or that hers had carried him, and she had reached this place first.

He said, “Know that I care for you, and need you in battle.”

“I do.” A grin in the lightning. “And you have to go up now, and set the banner, or we’ll be too late.”

She braced her feet wide and set her shoulders to the wall and linked her hands to make a stirrup. Cunomar took a pace back then vaulted up, stepping lightly on her shoulder in passing. His toes smeared mud on her skin and the ball of his foot slipped sideways but he was already gone, grappling for the guttering and the tiles beyond, pressing his palms on wet clay, pushing up and up, thinking of the bear to find the power for the climb, swinging his legs up to catch a purchase, and then he really was up, standing on the sloping roof with the rain bouncing to knee height, hard as hail, and the wild wind lifting his hair in spite of the wet and the city spreading dark beneath the storm, with light only within the ring of the solid inner barricade that protected the heart of the city, where families kept night fires burning in the hearth for warmth and light and the illusion of safety.

The roof tiles were greased with moss. Water hissed past his feet, flowing over the guttering. Spreading his toes wide, he stood upright, feeling the tug of the wind and the power of the rain. The gods sent to Cunomar a distant roll of thunder and he shouted his own name, and then his mother’s and then the first eight names of the she-bear into the retreating dark.

The wind caught the words and tore them apart, but the rain had lessened enough to let him untie the flag from his waist and tie it again to the stick Ulla passed up to him, so that
when the last flicker of lightning came to scorch the sky and raise steam from the bronze tiles on a neighbouring roof, he knew without question that his mother and her warriors could see him and the serpent-spear in red on Eceni blue that he waved, and the bear’s pawprint in white in the lower left hand corner, for the heart of the she-bear in whose light he lived.

The war host came in a storm of hooves and baying hounds. There was no need for secrecy now, if there had ever been. They blew horns and clashed their blades on their shields and some had thought to bring tinder in clay pots and lit brands of pitch and resin and tallow all bound about with sheep’s wool so that they burned in spite of the rain and the tide of horses was sparked here and there with the fire they brought to Camulodunum.

They ringed the city and moved in slowly through the deserted streets. The horses churned wet mud to slurry and the trackways became trickling streams under the last of the rain. The height and breadth of the inner barricade halted them. Whole houses had been demolished to make it, and the bodies of hanged men lay in the foundations, to lend the strength of their bones to its holding.

The enemy gathered in growing numbers within the safety of its ring. Cunomar could see them from his vantage point on the rooftop: men in old armour scurrying from house to house, shouting in Latin and Trinovante, calling up the Atrebatan mercenaries, paid for with a merchant’s gold, and the last remaining tribal residents of the city who had kept loyal to Rome.

Cunomar held his flag aloft until the first horses were within reach of the barrier. His mother rode past him with
Cygfa riding as shield-mate on her left, as she had done so often on Mona after Caradoc was gone.

With newly opened eyes, Cunomar saw the shadow dragging at his mother’s flame, but he saw, too, the tilt of Breaca’s head, the beaten bronze of her hair, made dark by the rain, saw the shift in her weight as she lifted her sword and the stiffness that came from the unhealed wounds in her back — and he saw with a generous heart the matching movements from Cygfa as she kept cover on the Boudica.

For the first time in his life, Cunomar understood how his sister shifted her weight on her horse a fraction, to come in on the left so that her body made an extra shield for Breaca, and how this was done without thought on either part, but was simply the way that they rode into battle.

Something small and sweet pierced him, like the song of a lark on a moorland, and he knew that he had found by accident something unique, shared with only a few, and that if he had coveted it any sooner, the yearning alone would have killed him.

It was good to be adult and see these things. He looked around for others he knew in the seething tide of riders, and saw the pair-links or lack of them and the way that they fought. Valerius and his Thracian cavalryman, blessedly, were out of sight: further back or coming in from the south, leaving the east to Ardacos who had led his own hand-picked warriors in from the eastern gate, closest to the Temple of Claudius, which was easily the most defensible building in the city and therefore the best guarded. There, the inner barricades were made of poured mortar and the streets had been scattered with iron spikes against the warriors’ horses.

In the west, where Cunomar stood on his rooftop, the fighting began in earnest as the Boudica’s warriors dismounted, leaving their horses to stand in the mud while they began to search out the weaknesses in the barrier. There were few places open to assault, but gateways had been left for the Roman veterans who had kept night guard on the trenches and they were hard to close effectively from the inside.

Cunomar watched a gaggle of young warriors group into a wedge opposite one of these openings. From his vantage point, he could see the Atrebatan mercenaries and Roman veterans gather on the inside. The Atrebatans carried hunting spears, broad-bladed and long with a cross piece at the neck that kept a boar from charging up the haft but could equally be used to hook a shield from the arm of an unwary, untested warrior.

A great many of the warriors with the Boudica were untested; those who had taken part in the annihilation of the IXth and so considered themselves battle-hardened were with Ardacos or Valerius coming in from other angles. The youths whom Cunomar watched forming their wedge had done so once in practice and never against a real opponent. The men waiting within the barrier sensed it and their line became visibly more solid.

Ulla was beneath the villa still, waiting. She looked up as Cunomar hissed her name and grinned at what he said. Five other she-bear were within reach: Scerros and his girl cousin and the three others knit most closely to the Boudica’s son. They did not consider themselves battle-hardened — they had seen the Boudica fight before her wounding and seen Valerius afterwards and they knew exactly how much experience they lacked — but they had
spent the winter training with Ardacos and Gunovar in the use of the knife and not one of them was unscarred or unsure of where lay the line between living and dying.

They were fit, too, and able to vault easily up on the stirrup of Ulla’s linked hands to the rooftop. She came last, pulled by Cunomar himself who lay on his belly with two of the others holding his ankles so that he could grasp her wrists and haul her bodily up.

They were armed only with knives, and the storm no longer hid them. Cunomar jammed the haft of his flagpole in a crack between two tiles and then, stooping low, led them at a run across the rooftops, jumping from green-mossed clay to the brilliant verdigris of bronze and then, more delicately and with prayers to the bear, onto a single-pitched thatch roof with a roof beam that was barely more than a stick and swayed as they ran across it.