Dreaming the Serpent Spear (38 page)

The Ninth is broken. The Eceni used Arminius’ tactic
… Not the Eceni: Valerius. No-one else could have betrayed Rome in the way Arminius did. Seeing him on his insane horse in the Eceni steading, with the procurator at his feet, Corvus had understood that Valerius was going to join his sister, if she lived, if the rest of the Eceni nation would have him and not stone him from their thresholds.

Viewed from a distance, with hindsight and the understanding of the tribes, it was possible to see that Valerius’ whole life had been shaped by the gods just for this, if one wished to believe in the gods and their shaping of men. At that moment, Corvus very badly wanted to believe in something that shaped a life and all that came after it.
All things are possible in death, as in the dream
… He wanted to believe that, too.

Through the blackness of a sudden, knifing loss, he heard his own voice say, “Of course. I always listen to you. If you had any sense, you’d turn me in yourself.”

He waited for an answer in kind and was met by silence. He took his palms from his face. The flame from the small soapstone lamp was too bright.

Ursus was staring at him, shaking his head. “You’re not listening. Flavius is unstable. He loves you and now he owes you his life and so he resents you as well. He’ll talk because his mouth will run away with him and think of the reasons afterwards. I thought you were going to deal with it, but you didn’t. You could have let him die there on the foreshore with no harm done. No-one else would have known.”

“Perhaps.” The smell of roast pork reached Corvus’ belly and his head at the same time. Hunger and nausea gnawed at him equally, making him salivate. Sometimes eating helped. He considered it and regretted the thought.

Through a rising gorge he said, “I’m a condemned man. The governor can have me hanged in the morning for leading the retreat on Mona, or for freeing Breaca of the Eceni from the procurator’s crucifixion. Either way, or both, I can only die once. You and Sabinius have life still ahead of you. I prefer to think Flavius is his own worst enemy and will kill himself before he kills anyone else, but if you two think he’s
a problem, you can decide what to do about him tomorrow, or whenever it is that he forgets I saved his life. In the meantime, if you don’t want me to be sick all over your wolfskin, do you think you could twist some favours out of the Batavians and get me some pork?”

A voice from beyond the door flap said, “I have it. And I may be my own worst enemy, but I won’t forget what you did.”

The air in the tent grew suddenly sour. The smell of the pork was overpoweringly rich and still did not come close to obscuring the stench of wet wolfskin. Corvus shut his eyes and opened them. He said, “I’m sorry,” and the word dropped into the open abyss at his feet. It was not — could never be — enough.

Flavius stood by the door flap to the tent, not quite inside. He shook his head, flatly. “You said what you believed, and he said what he believed before it. It may be he was right. If I had not seen you block the centurion’s sword today, I might be talking to the governor now. And I might tomorrow, whether I remember it or not. But then, I may be too late, and may die with you. I am not the only one who knows what you did; there were twenty of us rode with you into the Eceni steading to face down the procurator and I can’t be the only one who has worked out whom we saved. If you think I am alone in wanting to buy my own life with information, you are more of a fool than I took you for.”

Flavius’ gaze raked the length of Corvus’ body from the scars at his ankles taken on shipboard past the knotted spear-thrust beneath his ribs to the new throbbing bruise on the side of his face. Something flickered in his eyes that could have been grief or spite or contempt or the promise of retribution, saved for later.

He said, “The governor wishes to speak to you in his tent. He has called a tribunal. You should dress first.”

He had brought a board, with three slices of hot meat laid on it and a cluster of olives at the side. The meat was perfect, running a little to pink at the middle. The crackling was brown-edged and fine. The olives had been stoned and were arranged all in a ring, pointing outward. He laid his gift down at the tent’s threshold and stepped back into the unclouded night. He turned to leave and went three paces and turned back and the grief on his face was plain working from his throat to his mouth.

Thick-voiced, Flavius said, “I had thought better of you.”

It had been the risk from the start. From the moment Corvus had ridden into the Eceni steading with the twenty men of his personal retinue at his back and seen a woman he knew on the ground beneath a whipping post; from before that, when he had seen a hawk-scout of the Coritani with a knife wound to his lip and recognized something of the wildness in his eye; from before that, when he had seen a youth of the Eceni in a horse fair in Gaul and recognized more than simply the wildness of him …

Tracing back the lines of intent was pointless. Boundaries had been crossed and trust breached and at each step Corvus had created justifications for himself: that he was not betraying his emperor or his standard or his oath to his general; that he understood the complexities of tribal life and was well placed — possibly best placed — to judge how things might be rescued from the calamities of others’ actions; that he could act out of honour, and that it enhanced the honour of his race and his office.

Walking the short distance across heather and the beginnings of mud to the governor’s tent, he considered saying as much to the tribunal waiting inside but the words warped in his mouth and he abandoned them, unspoken. He was not going to lie, to taint the life that was left. He had learned that much.

He thought of what he could say:
I did it because a woman once offered me her blade, when I needed it, and I did not understand, then, the depth of what she gave me.
Or,
A child gave me her horse, as from a sister to a brother, and in my ignorance I thought then that I did understand what she gave, and did not until I rode it today in the straits and found the greatness of it.
Or simply,
It seemed only honourable.

The last sounded hollow. It was also the only one any of those inside might hope to understand. On the whole, he considered it might be easier to remain silent; he did not imagine it would make any difference to the outcome.

He reached the tent. The glow of braziers made reddened patches on the hide. He could feel the warmth and damp and sweat and fug of burning charcoal from beyond the door, and then smell them. He himself still smelled of wet wolfhide, which was unfortunate and could not be changed.

He breathed in the air and savoured the heather and the sea and the sharpness of a spring night’s cold and then scratched on the door flap and heard the clerk inside step up to open it, and announce him to those who would judge all that he had been.

It was not a tribunal, but something greater. The legate and tribunes of the IInd legion were there, and the same of the XIVth. Two of the three senior officers of the XXth had died in the day, leaving only a junior tribune to lead his legion.

Eight officers, therefore, sat at the desk made for four, shoulder to shoulder, crowded, with lamps lit in front of them, so that the lines of dark and flame made bands up their faces. A ninth man, bulkier than the others and with white-blond hair, sat at the table’s end, with room to breathe and move and stretch to wrap his thick fingers about his goblet of wine. Thrice three, the number of Jupiter; a full military court.

The rushes on the floor had been cut wet, and had begun to rot. Corvus felt them slip away from his feet as he walked. Time yawned for him, so that the distance from the door to the standing place, where the lamps all shed light, was as long as the swim out to Mona had been. He knew all of the officers who faced him, some better than others. Galenius, legate of the XIVth, had been a friend in his teens; Agricola, tribune of the XXth, shared the governor’s tent. Clemens, senior tribune of the IInd, had quartered in Camulodunum for a winter, and shared baths, wine and dinner too often to count.

None of these men met his eye, or showed any sign that they knew him. It was left to the white-blond Briton to turn and study him, from head to feet and back again, and then to say, “So this is the man you would see dead? He does not have the look of one who would face the gods and live long, in the sea or out of it.”

He spoke Latin, with the accent of the north. No-one chose to respond; in a military court, by consent and order of the emperor, those present deferred to the officer of highest rank, who was the governor. A man of the tribes, even a messenger sent by a loyal queen, was a barbarian, and so excused his ignorance of protocol.

Corvus finally reached, and halted before, the governor. The man at whose favour he might or might not be allowed
to live looked up eventually from the two slate-blue running hounds who had held all of his attention. Paullinus was composed again; the rage of earlier had gone, replaced by the familiar dry, acerbic curiosity.

Corvus had seen him condemn men while in exactly that frame of mind. He met the open, brown gaze as evenly as his throbbing head allowed, and waited. It was possible to believe that the men who would judge him could not hear the beat of his heart in his chest. It was less possible that they could not see the shudder it sent through his frame with each spasm. He pressed the tips of his fingers lightly at his sides, to steady his hands.

Eventually, “You have rested and eaten?” the governor asked.

“Yes.” It was a lie; one small untruth of little moment compared to the great well of deceit that Flavius, or one of the others, might choose to open. Of the twenty who had ridden with him into the Eceni steading, eight had died to the sea or the dreamers. He had trusted the others with his life, and they him. He tried not to think who else might betray him; these things showed too clearly on a man’s face.

“Good.”

The governor shoved his chair back from the desk, stood, and rested his hands on the oak table. The clerk, whom Corvus despised, sat in dimness behind, poised to take note of the verdicts.

The governor lifted one of the lamps from the desk in front of him and moved it to a stand at the side, so that the shadows lengthened and the clerk became invisible. Paullinus returned to stand behind his seat and the only sound was the slip of his feet on the slimed rushes of the floor.

Rigid now under a brighter light, it came to Corvus that he did not know this man well enough; that of all the governors he had served, Suetonius Paullinus was the only one he had not taken the time or made the effort to understand.

The governor’s loves were well known: beyond the easy pleasures of the hounds and their boy, Agricola had shared his tent since they first came west. So too were his hates — disorder and inefficiency ruled their lives — and his old campaigns in the Atlas mountains, roof of all the world. The details of these things were common currency in the legions who served under him, but they did not reveal the things that had shaped his childhood and his youth, the men he had admired, those he had scorned, those who still fired his mind, whose approval meant something, whose disapproval would wound.

Too late, the lack of this knowledge became obvious, and that the sharing of it might have saved Corvus’ life. The pressure in his head became quite astonishing. He wondered if he might faint, and if it would change anything if he did.

The governor looked down at his own clasped hands. His fingers were fine as an artist’s, the nails neatly cut and very clean. It took a great deal of effort to achieve that on campaign. Alone of all the officers present, Corvus’ fingernails were similarly clean, but only because he had spent the better part of the day in the sea. It was not a useful thing to remember.

The governor said, “I have described the failure of your assault on Mona to our guest, Velocatos. He is of the opinion that you should not be alive.”

There was relief in having the waiting over. Corvus said, “You have it in your power to make that true.”

“Of course. And I may yet do so. Certainly there are those amongst your peers who would support it.” Paullinus ran his gaze along the line of heads beneath him. Clemens of the IInd coloured. The rest remained commendably silent and still. “My guest, however, would consider that rash. He believes you possessed of extraordinary courage and fortitude, and swears that you must lie under the protection of this island’s gods. The first, of course, is expected of any officer in Rome’s legions. The second is … fortunate in the current circumstances.”

If you are careful, you will meet my son once more in this life…

Corvus felt the air crack and shift. Because he was being exceptionally careful, he did not ask what they knew, or smile, or take in the breath that he needed, but raised a brow and turned to study the blond tribesman, who sat in the only place of any comfort at the end of the table.

He was a broader man than any of those present, built like the Batavians, with a bull neck so that his head seemed set directly onto his shoulders. He had oddly effeminate hair that might have been a true silver-white in daylight, but the lamps had turned the burnished yellow of coltsfoot. It lay loose to his shoulders, falling heavily over a tunic in sharp green with a yellow knotwork at the hem and short sleeves. The gold band coiled above his elbow was richer than any of the southern tribes could afford. The long shape of a mare was laid into it in white gold, with a triangle above.

Velocatos. His name began to mean something; he was
not simply a messenger. His placing at the head of the table made more sense than it had. Corvus said, “It is a long time since we were honoured by a messenger of the Brigantes, still less the consort of Cartimandua, their queen.”

The man’s eyes were pale in the lamplight. “It is a long time since the Eceni rebelled. You were a prefect even then, I think, when the governor’s son won his oak leaf at the battle of the Broken Tribes?”

The governor knew the truth of that battle, and he had never encouraged servility in his officers. With faultless courtesy Corvus said, “Is that how it is known in the north? The Eceni call it the battle of the Salmon Trap and celebrate it as a victory. I would not argue with them, except that the reprisals afterwards on their people were savage and they could be said to have lost because of it.”