Dreaming the Serpent Spear (37 page)

Along the way, she saw a sword on the shoreline and ran back for it, so that, for the first time in her life, she walked in dusk towards the dreamers’ place with a blade in her hand.

Corvus had dropped his sword, and so was unable to fall on it, which was unfortunate, when he had just pledged his life as a sacrifice to the sea.

He waded out of the water and watched his mare sink to her knees and then her side on the hard rock of the mainland. He sank to his own knees beside her and kept a hand on her heart. The beat rose faint to his touch and unsteady, but it was there. That mattered above everything; above Ursus and Sabinius and Flavius and how they had fared on the long, desperate swim back, above the men of the XXth legion who had heeded him through the fog of their nightmares and had brought themselves home across the mile of hungry ocean to safety. Most assuredly above the towering presence of the governor, Suetonius Paullinus, by the emperor’s pleasure, and courtesy of the emperor’s waning patience, governor of all Britannia, charged with the task of subduing the west or dying in the attempt.

The governor had not died in the attempt. Three thousand men had done so, to very little effect. Something close to two thousand others had returned from the battle alive but beaten. The governor, evidently, did not consider this to be any kind of victory and it was well known that he did not tolerate defeat.

He stood on the strand at the margins of the heather and the rock with his hands clasped tightly before him and his face was set as if already carved in monumental marble. Without looking down to where Corvus knelt, he said, “Prefect, you will present yourself.”

Corvus pushed himself to standing. His teeth were chattering and would not stop. His flesh shook like a man with palsy. His hand dropped out of habit to the place where his sword hilt should have hung. With some effort, he remembered that he had unbuckled it and dropped it on the shores of Mona just before he set his mare back into the waves in a place where the currents were clearly lethal and already two barges had overturned.

In a world and at a time when he was certain of nothing from the solidity of the ground beneath his feet to the identities of the men at his side who had begun to take on the shapes of ravens, he had thought dropping the mass of iron bound to his waist a remarkable act of sanity. A part of him thought so still.

“Have you ever seen a decimation?”

The governor’s face was very close. The bloodshot eyes were watering in the wind. Rage, or that same wind, had turned his nose red as a cock’s comb and set it streaming with mucus. He looked like a mummer in a Greek farce.

As it happened, Corvus had indeed seen a decimation. The memory was carefully buried in the far reaches of his mind where it was not likely to emerge without warning and unman him. He was very careful not to think of it now. He said, “No.”

The sea still washed through his ears and throat and sinuses. It juddered in his eyes so that he had trouble focusing,
or perhaps that was the aftermath of the dreamers’ smoke; he had not been able to focus clearly on Mona, either.

It was the sea, not the island, that had crippled his senses; his nose and throat had been scoured by the brine leaving only deadness behind. Ursus was close by and Corvus could not smell the Dacian wolfskin. There was a time, less than a day before, when he would have thought that a miracle. Now, it seemed yet one more waystone on the path to disaster. He considered the strangeness of a world without scent and, for a moment, it mattered more than the governor’s threat.

“Corvus…”

Corvus sighed, and took no trouble to hide it. On the lee shore of Mona, he had stared into the eyes and hearts of things worse than death. Luain mac Calma had promised life, not sanity, and his protection had not extended to saving the integrity of Corvus’ mind.

Wearily, he said, “The second governor, Scapula, threatened decimation of the Twentieth at Camulodunum when the Eceni were in revolt. He decided then that he did not have sufficient authority. These men are in the grip of the water and the dreamers. They are too exhausted to walk; most of them can barely stand. Even if they could hear you, I doubt if they are physically capable of drawing lots, and if they did, I don’t think you could find any nine of them fit to lift a club to the tenth. In any case, none of those who have lived through the hell on the shores of Mona is willingly going to slaughter a friend who stood at his side. The Fourteenth could do it, but if you set the men of one legion to kill those of another, you will cause a rift that will last beyond our lifetimes, however long we may live.”

The governor’s gaze darted round the bay and came back to Corvus. He inhaled and clearly regretted it; doubtless Ursus’ wolfskin was close, and wet from the sea, which would not enhance its odour. He said, “I do not consider myself likely to see the luxury of a long old age, and less so after today. We must take this island and wipe out all those who live there, or we die. We may die in the taking, but it will be better than what will happen at Caesar’s hand if we return defeated. Have you no stronger reason why I should not visit the wrath of Rome on the men who have failed me?”

And so Corvus said the rest of what he had understood as he had dragged himself out of the water and realized that bringing half a legion of men back alive from the teeth of Hades was not going to be enough.

Quietly, distinctly, knowing what he did, he said, “You have not earned the right. You were not there to face the enemy with them.”

He saw the blow coming and did nothing to dodge it. The hilt of the governor’s knife took him on the left temple where his helmet might have protected him had he not thrown that, too, onto the shingle of Mona.

He felt the shock and sudden anger that always came when he was hit and then a long, long fall that lasted an aeon and was time enough to see the faces of those he would want to meet when eventually he was allowed to die. He did not think that would be soon, given the depth of the governor’s temper. He saw Ursus, looking concerned, and was not sure if that was in his mind or not. Then he saw Valerius, riding his mad horse and knew he had fainted and so felt free after Valerius had gone to embrace the dark-haired Alexandrian
who had given him the falcon of Horus as a parting gift and never come back. Last, he saw his mother, which surprised him, and then not: he had landed as an enemy on Briga’s land; it was right that a mother should come to see his ending.

The Batavians were celebrating, and somebody had killed a pig.

The sound of drunken singing came and went in a rocking rhythm, more sonorous than the sea. It matched the throbbing pain in his head, focused on the left temple. The smell of gutted swine waxed and waned to the same tempo, and failed entirely to cover the stench of wet wolfskin that lined his nose and his head and his lungs, thick and pungent as month-old fish. Corvus lay still, savouring the ugly mix of flavours, and was grateful that he was not going to have to die without the power of smell to remember the world by.

He lay under cover, which surprised him. An uncertain rain stammered on a tent hide above his head, slurring the Batavians’ choruses. Beneath the rankness of the wolfhide, the air smelled pleasantly damp. He lay on linen and was no longer in his armour. Someone had undressed and washed him; his face felt clear and clean and he no longer tasted brine when he licked his lips. He could not bring himself to open his eyes, but the crisp bite of the air spoke of night.

He was not in pain, that was the second surprise, except for his head, which had been broken open like an egg and was leaking his thoughts out onto the floor in a tumbling mess. That had happened before and Theophilus had treated the headaches that ground him down. He spent some time thinking of Theophilus and how he would take the news that his friend the prefect had been executed for failing in his duty.

Corvus wanted to reach him, to explain the nature of the sacrifice, willingly given, and the nature of obligation. He wanted it known, more widely than only by Theophilus, that the gods accepted such things in the spirit with which they were offered and that there was no dishonour, however it might seem in the eyes of Rome. The needs of his own pride surprised him; through all the years of battle, with death never farther than the thickness of his skin and the blade that might sever it, he had thought that what mattered was life and the manner of its living, not the nature and time of his death. Luain mac Calma, for whom he had an abiding respect, had said something similar:
Take the life that is offered and live it well, by your own heart’s truth.

It occurred to him that Luain mac Calma could see things that he, Corvus, could not and that the dreamer had not meant him to give his life to Manannan of the wild seas, for no better reason than to assuage the anger of another man.

In the never-ending dark, he heard the Elder’s voice, with the god’s sea behind it:
If you are careful from here forward, you will meet my son at least once more in this life.

He thought he had been careful. He fell asleep, reaching for Theophilus and for the dreamer, to ask them where the carelessness had been. In the place of no-time, he dreamed of a decimation, and what it was to watch an entire legion in which nine out of every ten men clubbed to death the tenth with whom they had until that moment shared life and bread and battle and, in some cases, a bed and passion and love. In his dream, he was able to stop it, which he had not been in life.

When he woke next, someone who knew how clear air helped his headaches had lifted the tent flap behind his head
and left it open to the sky. The breeze stroking his face was a kind one, not the cutting wind of Mona, which had carried the wailing of long-dead men and old women and the insidious smoke. The smell of swine and fresh blood had changed to one of roasting pork, which meant, now he came to think of it, that in his absence someone else had ordered the slaughter of the Quinta Gallorum’s only hog.

A rough, tired voice said, “That took you long enough. He didn’t hit you that hard. I was beginning to think the dreamers had stolen your soul and I’d have to send Flavius swimming back to Mona to find it. He’d go, you know, for you. After today’s work, I think he would follow you to Hades and back and not speak against it.”

“Ursus.” Corvus said it flatly, which was unkind, and smiled to take the sting from it. He had blocked a sword blow that otherwise would have decapitated Flavius. It had not been an act of any particular merit and he had not thought anyone else had seen it. Possibly, none had, and Flavius had spoken of it, which was telling of something, if he could only work out what.

He considered sitting up and thought better of it and stared up instead at the tent hide and then sideways to the small flickering soapstone lamp that cast odd-shaped shadows across his chest. He watched them awhile and saw that the rancid wolfskin lay on him as a covering. Never, in the five years he had known Ursus, had he seen the man allow another so much as a finger’s touch of his talisman.

He said, “I am more grateful than I can say, but you shouldn’t be here. After today, I’m not safe to be with.”

Ursus sat by his head. He grinned, and was upside down so that when he winked he became for a moment the monsters
of Mona’s beach and Corvus had to close his eyes to be free of them. Against the black of his lids, he heard Ursus say, “Safe enough until Paullinus is finished talking to the messengers, which could be morning, by all accounts. He doesn’t often get sent word for his own ear by royalty.”

“Royalty?” Corvus sat up too quickly and the world became a deep, unpleasant red. He bent his brow to his knees and breathed through his mouth. Muffled, he said, “Which royalty? Have the Eceni sent a messenger to the governor?”

“Hardly. If Sabinius is correct — and he’s been spending an untoward amount of time fixing the haft back on his standard very close to the back of the governor’s tent — then the message comes from Cartimandua, by the emperor’s very great pleasure queen of the Brigantes. But then there’s also the legate, two tribunes and the first two cohorts of the Second come up from the far southwest on their own initiative. They’re bringing the same message, which means it is probably true.”

Corvus cupped his palms over his eyes and wished he could think more clearly. The pattern of his dreams pressed in on the sides of the tent, so that he could hear men screaming, and then the sudden quiet when it all stopped.

He said, “What was the message? What is it that brings the fighting arm of the Second this far north and a messenger from Cartimandua south before the trade routes are fully open?”

There was no subtlety to Ursus. The news was bubbling out of him before he spoke, washing him with its greatness, and the implications, both personal and political. As a man offering a gift of great value, he said, “The east is in revolt. The Eceni have risen again and are storming Camulodunum. It will be in ashes by now, and after it Canonium, Londinium,
Verulamium. Without any legions to stop them, they have a clear run through all the towns south of the river down into the Berikos’ lands that border the sea.”

It was impossible. It was inevitable. These two raced together into his mind and clashed agonizingly in his left temple. “What happened to the Ninth? They hold the east. They could stop any revolt before it began.”

“Not any more. The Ninth is broken. The Eceni used Arminius’ tactic from the Rhine and cut them to ribbons. What’s left, which is not much, is under siege in the fortress on the eastern coast. Petillius Cerialis is alive, but I don’t imagine he will be for long. If he has any sense at all, he’ll fall on his sword.”

Ursus dismissed it, as if the loss of a legion were a small thing, to ruin only one man, not an event to bring down emperors and the men who served them. Striking back to the track of his heart, he said, “Flavius thinks the woman we freed was the Boudica. It’s lucky you saved his life today, he’d be reporting by now to the governor else, with you and me and Sabinius dead men on the back of it. Paullinus might forgive you for calling him a coward when there was nobody about to hear it. He won’t forgive you for freeing a rebel who has lit the tinder in the pitch pot of the eastern tribes and— Are you listening?”