Dreaming the Serpent Spear (47 page)

Only Gaius, the scout, looked uncertain. He could not have missed out on the story of Suetonius Paullinus and the doomed officers of Parthia, but he did not have the years of service to tell him that the only possible answer he could give was the one that military sense dictated. To survive, he had to make the decision as if he led a legion, or a full army; only then would he command Paullinus’ respect. What killed men, what caused them to forfeit their honour and their lives in the governor’s eyes was sycophancy, or an attempt to buy an ovation from the senate at the expense of winning the war.

They waited, because Gaius could not decide. The veins on his temples beat blue and matt with sweat. His skin was as yellow as his hair. He made a decision and unmade it and for that alone he faced death, and knew it. A watery sun shone on them, making the day hot. In the flowering elder behind, a thrush called. The scouts of the Eceni sat in the long grass and seeded nettles through which they had crawled forward and watched with interest.

In silence thick as curdled whey, Gaius thrust his right arm forward into the ring.

“Reveal yourselves.”

Corvus felt his arm turn of its own accord, and his fingers uncoil. Ursus was on his right. He saw the spark of copper on the grubby palm of the man’s hand before he saw his own. The wolfskin had been left behind. He wondered, idly, if that might make them both unlucky.

Flavius, on his left, opened his palm a fraction later. He, too, held copper.

Around, fourteen men held copper tears on their palms. The fifteenth, bearing silver, was Gaius.

The governor’s head turned slowly, as an owl’s does, without blinking. “You think Vespasian’s Bridge can be fortified?” he asked.

Gaius was not a coward. “I think the people can be rallied.” His voice was commendably strong.

“Get off your horse.”

He did so.

“Kneel.”

He did so.

“I promised you citizenship and now I grant it. You are Gaius Fortunatus, citizen of Rome and auxiliary officer of
the legions in the rank of decurion. Your pay is one sestertius per day. You have been paid in advance. You will earn it.”

The man blinked in the poor light. “How?”

“By rallying a defence amongst the people of Vespasian’s Bridge. How else? You will go there now and hold it or die in its defence. If I hear you have fled, I will have you named traitor throughout the empire and your family will pay for it. Am I clear?”

“You are.”

There are worse ways to die and citizenship passed through the male line unless it was revoked. Gaius turned to look down at the place in which he would die and it seemed to Corvus that the smile that flowered on his face was genuine. He saluted up to the sun and across the river’s water and spoke to them in a tongue that had not the least trace of the Tiber in its accent.

They watched him ride down. The Eceni stood at his passing, as if they had some idea of what had taken place.

The governor turned first, and sought out Flavius, who had care of the pigeons, and the centurion of the XXth who acted as his scribe and dictated a brief message to be sent to Agricola, and Galenius of the XIVth who commanded at Mona.

Flavius’ care of the birds was of a man with a new horse. He held them gently between careful palms and made sure the message carriers on their legs were firm and would not chafe. He spoke to them in words no-one else could hear so that they bobbed at him, bright-eyed and ready.

He threw them up high, and they were waiting for the lift he gave them and spread their wings and cracked the air
and rose and flew straight, one after the other, until four of the six were gone.

The governor saluted them, as he would have done a legate leading a legion to a distant battle. “If the dreamers set falcons on them, I will have them all crucified.”

They rode west, fast. No-one felt the need to point out that their guide had just been sent to his death; they were all good trackers in their way, and could retrace any path they had taken once. The Eceni scouts put up a war cry as they left, a long ululating howl that echoed from one to the other to the other and lasted long after they were out of sight.

Later, as the sun reached over their heads and sank towards the west and the sea that they were seeking, Paullinus pulled his horse back alongside Corvus’ black colt.

“You understand the native tongues better than most. What was it he said to the sun and the river before he rode down to Vespasian’s Bridge?”

“Gaius? He was speaking in the tongue of their ancestors. He commended his life and that of his three sons to Lugh of the Shining Spear, god of the sun. In the days when the gods were young, Lugh felt the thirst of eternal fire and came to earth to quench it. He drank the Great River dry and then laid his head down to sleep. Nemain and Manannan together sent rain and the river swelled to flooding, but would not touch the god. It curved round, to leave him sleeping and dry.”

“And so the river is sacred? And the place where it bends, where Vespasian built his bridge, especially so?”

“It is. They would never have built a bridge there. And they do not name it after a Roman general. In the native
tongue it is named after the god who first made it sacred. In the tongue of the ancestors, it is Lugdunum.”

The single standing elder by the jetty on Mona was in full flower. A cascade of creamy white frothed and bobbed on the breeze that rose from the sea.

Graine picked a half-head and teased out single flowers and ate them, dusting the pollen on her tunic so that green became green-gold in smudges. Shuffling forward, she dangled her legs over the edge of the oak and felt the biggest of the waves slide up to kiss the soles of her feet. The tide was at its highest, covering what was left of the debris of battle. A warrior walked with a hound whelp at heel along the tideline. Watching them, Graine found she missed Stone for the first time since she had left him to take care of her mother.

She watched a shadow lengthen and slide across the rocks at the base of the jetty and made a bet with herself as to which of three people it might belong to, which meant she could not turn round early to look.

“May I join you?”

She lost the bet. “Of course.” She edged sideways just enough to be polite and Luain mac Calma, Elder dreamer of Mona, hitched up his tunic and came to sit beside her, dangling his long, lean legs over the edge and into the water.

“Who did you think I was?”

“Hawk. Or maybe Bellos, except you were not quite as quiet as either of them. So then I thought maybe Efnís had come back from Hibernia. If I had been asked, I would have said him.”

“He is back. I could get him for you if you want.”

“Not especially. Have you come to watch the legions leave? They have been striking camp since the tide turned. Maybe Manannan sent the big tide to scare them off.”

“I think it has more to do with the governor’s messenger pigeon that evaded the cliff falcons and returned to its roost at mid-morning.” Mac Calma made a hammock of his fingers and hooked it over the back of his head, stretching his arms. His shoulder joints cracked, scaring some wading birds out on the strand. “Your mother’s war host has set alight to the east and south,” he said. “I think the destruction of Mona is no longer the governor’s first care.”

The day became suddenly cold. Graine pulled her knees to her chest and her tunic to her toes. Wrapping her arms round her shins, she said, “Is mother …?”

“Healed? Her healing has begun, yes.”

He left room for her to ask a question. Graine discovered a wedge of dirt between her toes and rubbed at it with her forefinger. “Did you make the falcons leave the pigeons?” she asked.

“No. We couldn’t do that. But we offered them two of the laying pullets to feed their young and they did not hunt on the day it came through. The gods may grant what we ask, but sometimes we must act as our wisdom dictates and hope that is enough.” Mac Calma’s voice had not changed that Graine could notice, but they were no longer talking of falcons and Roman pigeons. He said, “Bellos tells me you have been dreaming.”

Graine said, “Not proper dreams. There was no purpose to them. I didn’t know I was dreaming. I couldn’t ask anything except of the hares.” There had been two hares in her dream. They had each given an opposite answer. She had not told Bellos that, or the nature of her question.

“Thank you.” Mac Calma lay back and hooked his hands behind his head.

Graine said, “Will the people come back here to Mona now the legions have gone?”

“I think so. We might see what happens in the south first.”

“Will there be another battle?”

“I hope not. The legions will win if there is.” Mac Calma turned his head to look at her. Graine realized, with shock, that he was exhausted, as if he had fought the battle already, and alone. She had never seen him less than resilient, and always good-humoured.

He saw her look and smiled, wryly, in the way Valerius did when he was uncomfortable. He took a breath to say something and changed his mind and said instead, “Graine, will you go to your mother? I think it will make a difference to what happens when they come to fight the legions.”

“Because I am the wild piece on the board of the Warrior’s Dance?” She hated that. She had no idea what to do about it.

“I’m afraid so, yes. But only in part. The rest is because the Boudica needs you to be whole. And because you need her to be whole and each of you needs the other to find that wholeness. Mona has done all it can for you: you can dream a little and you can reach into the fire; it’s as much as anyone might have asked for when you came.”

It was not what Graine wanted to hear. Her eyes burned. Because anger was better than yet more grief, particularly in this company, she said caustically, “And I can fight. Hawk has taught me. Don’t forget that.”

He had taught her every morning for nine mornings while they watched the legions gather and plan their final
assault, and plan, and plan, and never yet launch it. She was better than she had been, but she would never be more than a liability on a battlefield.

She watched Luain mac Calma make very certain that there was no condescension on his face or in his voice when he said, “Yes, and you can fight.”

He reached into his belt pouch and brought out a small silver brooch, shaped like a hare. The design was not new; the lines were carved on beams in the great-house and stretched back for thirteen generations: she had counted them once. She thought the brooch itself might be new, or at least had not yet been worn by anyone.

He said, “If I gave you this, and promised that it would join you to Mona as long as there is a Mona to which you may be joined, would you leave here and take it with you and go to your mother, wherever she is? Your honour guard will go with you, and Bellos, too, I think, and perhaps Efnís, if he feels he is not needed here— Why are you smiling?”

Graine stood, shaking her head. The thought of Hawk and Dubornos and Gunovar as her honour guard was either hilarious, or very sad. She did not wish to think too closely which.

She would have gone anyway, without the silver or the two wounded dreamers, but she took the hare as he offered it, and pinned it to her tunic high on her left shoulder. It ran there, as the hares had done in her dream, and still did not give her an answer.

T
HUNDER FOLLOWED THE LIGHTNING, BUT NOT AS CLOSELY
as it had done. Valerius stood under an awning of bull’s hide with his fingers laid on his wrist and counted the beats between the flash of the gods’ fire and the blow of hammer on anvil that had created it.

When he could be heard over the noise and its echo, he said, “Ten. It’s moving away.”

“Could we petition one of your gods to make it move faster?” Theophilus stood with him under the awning, sharing in the fiction that by this they might be kept more dry than if they had, say, taken a step forward to stand outside in the everlasting rain, or gone to stand fully clothed in the storm-swell of a river that had brimmed over its banks and swept through the burned remains of the port at Vespasian’s Bridge.

“It’ll be gone by noon. Once they start to move, they don’t stay long.”

Valerius did step out from under the awning then, and stood naked in the rain. He had stripped to the waist three days before when the storm began. On the second day, along
with everyone but Theophilus, he had discarded the remains of his clothing as worse than useless and gone naked among the mud and fire-ash.

The rain ran over his body, pooling in the scoop of his collar bones, falling over in sheets that snagged on the knotted scars. A man with the right knowledge could read his life’s history there, if not the reasoning behind it.

Theophilus who could, and did, read new things daily in the mapped bodies of those around him, hesitated in the pretend-dry of the shelter. For reasons that were no longer clear even to himself but had to do with modesty and dignity and the habits of his youth, he had shed all footwear but continued to wear his tunic and cloak. Both had been saturated for three days. Cold, wet wool chafed him in the armpits and crotch and left him with a noticeably foreshortened temper.

Valerius stepped round him with amused caution, which did nothing to improve his mood. Eyeing him sideways now, the Boudica’s brother said, “We need to destroy the bridge before we leave. I know how you feel about it. If you would rather not be witness, you could begin the journey north now and we will catch you up.”

“Could I? Do you think the north road is safe for a man who has lived on both sides of this war? Myself, I doubt it.” Theophilus wiped the beak of his nose with thumb and forefinger and flicked a skinful of rain from them both. He regarded Valerius morosely. “Sometimes I think you are almost as Roman as the men you are fighting. Then you look at a wonder of engineering such as that bridge and think to wreck it and I am certain you are worse than that; for all his bluster, Paullinus has a heart beating somewhere underneath
his armour. You, by contrast, are more like Vespasian, or Caesar, who came here to plunder your corn and silver the better to feed his own armies.”