Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (63 page)

I wrote this in a short gap between sections of
Rome
:
The Coming of the King
, and completed the editing after the first draft was done. For me, it’s a breath of freedom, to return to Britain, to return to people I know better than most of those I come across in real life, and to return to a world where the gods and the dreaming hold true. It is, in fact, sheer, glorious self-indulgence. I offer it for your entertainment.

Manda Scott, Shropshire, mid-summer 2010

T
he girl was not a ghost; she only looked like one. Wreathed in mist, she stepped out of the storm, and crouched at his side. ‘Are you Hywell of the white scar?’

‘I am.’ Her eyes were grey and seemed too grave to be the eyes of a child. Unsettled, Hywell said, ‘How did you know my name?’

‘They said you were controlling the fighting. Who else could it be?’ She pointed down the slope into the bowl of flat land where the remaining men of the Second Legion fought to their late, swift deaths. They died for nothing, not even to defend their standard: they had not brought the Eagle with them on either of the last two sallies from the fort.

‘I am to tell you that the Boudica’s army is within reach. If you need more warriors, they will come.’ She had a light, grave voice, that put him in mind of winter breezes, and starlight at dusk.

‘Thank you.’ He looked at her more closely. She was small and slight and would have been blonde if the rain had not plastered her hair darkly to her head. Her face was oval, with high cheeks, her eyes the grey of a sky after rain. He imagined her adult, and knew then, who she was.

He wiped rain from his eyes. ‘Do you think we’ll need your mother’s warriors?’

‘Maybe.’ Her cloak was of oiled wool. The water ran off it in fat drops. She settled it around her shoulders and stared down onto the battlefield, assessing it much as he had done.

The Roman legionaries were clustered in a ring with their shields locked tight and their gladii stabbing out between. The pride of the Dumnonii, Hywell’s tribe, stood about them in a wider circle, unshielded for the most part, without helmets, without any of the stolen mail they had worn earlier in the day when there had still been a chance they might lose the battle. Now they were naked in the fray, men and women equally, that their children might tell of this in their dotage; how their mothers and fathers slew the last century of the last legion armed only with the blades of their ancestors, and claimed the land back for their own.

They fought under a storm-sky, on bloody earth, and behind them, in the west, the fortress of the Second Legion was a black void haloed with scarlet; the fires that had been lit in the early morning were feeding on whole oak limbs now, and the summer storm had not the power to extinguish them.

Such a simple thing to end a siege; if he had known all it would take was a good, hot fire, Hywell would have lit it far sooner. But then he was inclined to think that if he had lit it sooner, the men inside would have had the wit to reach buckets down into the southern sea below the cliffs that held their backs, and empty them onto the flames, leaving the wood to smoke in useless ruin.

It had taken this long; four months of warriors camped around the fort, just out of missile range, so that the defending legion had to rely on their well water, and their reducing rations to eat and drink. It had taken the steady flow of message birds flying into the high lofts on the fort’s roof, telling of the defeat of the Ninth legion, the fall of Camulodunum and then Lugdunum, of Suetonius Paulinus’ failure to take the stronghold of Mona, sacred to the gods, of his decision to turn back and confront the Boudica’s warriors; of his long, slow drawn-out defeat as those warriors had harried and hunted his legions so that they could not march from one night camp to the next without losing men.

Later, reading the smokes of camp fires and hearing the skull drums and the victory horns of night encampments in the forests beyond their fort, they had learned of his final defeat.

When they killed and ate their cavalry horses, when the flow of deserters grew from a trickle to a river, and each one ready to tell him of the humiliation, the desperation, the waning discipline, of the few who held out for Nero to send reinforcements, of the greater mass who knew they had been abandoned – then Hwyell had known they were ripe for the picking.

And when the Boudica’s brother had sent down the Eagles of the Ninth, the Fourteenth and the Twentieth legions for him to set about the fort as proof that they were alone on this foreign soil, the last legion in Britain, then he had known the time was perfect.

He had ordered that the biggest of logs not be used for the fire, but dragged out onto the flat plain at the dark of the moon. The remnants of the Second legion had sallied out through the main gates at dawn, when the ground was still dry and they could hold their ranks in good order. Under the morning light, the great, hewn trunks lay in a haphazard pattern across the battlefield, giving cover to the waiting warriors.

Under Hywell’s watching gaze, the first three centuries had marched forward in good order, aiming for the oaks. The leading ranks only discovered the ditches that had been dug ahead of the logs by falling into them, losing men to the stakes and loose boulders set beneath the latticework of willow and turf.

The centurions were seasoned men, used to acting in adversity. They pulled their troops back and sent them forward again in narrow columns, testing the ground, in the course of which, they discovered that there was method in the chaotic patterns of the logs. Thus they advanced in a long, winding snake – not line abreast, which was their strength.

Hywell’s warriors had waited and waited, and only when he had set the bull horn to his lips and sounded the note had the first hundred risen from behind the felled trees.

The battle had not been fast or clean; the legionaries of the Second legion had fought with the ferocity of men with nothing to lose, slashing out like cornered stags, calling on Jupiter, Mars and Mithras to help them to die with honour, and to kill as many as they might while doing it, but they were against warriors who had nursed their hatred for twenty years, who cared not if their lives were the cost of victory.

The men and women of the Dumnonii fought for the future of their children and the land under their feet. They fought for their gods and their ancestors and their language. They fought for their roundhouses and the chance once again to bear weapons in the open. They fought with their hounds at their sides and their children at their backs and they were winning with such ease now because they had worked through the night to drag forward the trees on Hywell’s orders, for he had the best understanding of Rome and its legions.

Which was why he was lying here on the warm, wet earth with the stench of blood and entrails rolling over him in steaming waves. And why the Boudica’s daughter had come to find him.

She turned to him now. Her grey eyes rested on his face. ‘Your warriors need no help,’ she said, ‘The Romans will all be dead by dusk.’

A shadow crossed his soul, stirred from a darkness he had not explored in all his time with the Dumnonii.

Her eyes saw all of him. ‘You’re Gunovar’s father?’ she asked. ‘Aerthen is her mother?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘And yes.’ Aerthen, love of his life, was on the battlefield. The hardest part of his morning had been their parting. He carried her scent in his nostrils, flavoured with sweet apple smoke from the first fire. Gunovar was safe, away from the carnage. His daughter was three years younger in her body and a thousand years younger in her soul than this child who had come to find him.

He said, ‘You are Graine, the dreamer.’ He did not say,
You are Graine, the Boudica’s youngest daughter who was raped by an entire century of men and nearly died
.
You are Graine, who held her mother as she died on the battlefield, leading the charge that broke the shield wall when the last three centuries of the Twentieth finally turned at bay
. It did not help to speak such things aloud, but she read them anyway, in his face.

‘I am both of those,’ she said, nodding. ‘My brother and my uncle are here now, waiting at the forest’s far edge. They wish to speak with you.’

He made himself smile for this small, terrifying child. ‘They wish to ask how best to find the lost Eagle of the Second?’

She smiled back, teasing, and raised a brow. ‘Mostly.’

The storm ended as Hywell stepped out of the forest and into the Eceni camp. The clouds cleared on the back of a freshening wind. The stench of battle swept eastwards, leaving rain-cleaned air and the mellow autumn scents of forest, horse and hound.

It was not the whole of the Boudica’s army; most of them had gone now, to bring in a late harvest. But a few hundred had gathered, bringing with them wagons of corn and hunting hounds, and had dug their own fire pits and latrines as if they were a Roman unit on scouting duty. The Boudica’s brother, Valerius, had fought for twenty years for the legions before he came back to his people: his hand showed in everything.

Hywell counted the numbers of horses, of standards, planted in the earth, of men and women mending harness or hammering swords and it crossed his mind that if ever they wanted to assault Rome itself, this was the time to do it.

Two men waited among the tethered horses on the camp’s margins. The younger was blond and naked to the waist, with the marks of the bear-warriors on his back and arms. His right ear was missing and his hair had been shaved back on both sides to show it.

Hywell did not kneel, but only because such things were not done here.

He said, ‘Son of the Boudica, the Dumnonii are honoured by your presence.’ It was safest to say these things; the bear-warriors of the Eceni were known from one land’s end to the other and their leaders were chosen by prowess, not by age or standing or lineage. Legend said they could not be killed, and their presence on a battlefield assured victory. Their trackers were said to take the guise of a bear and to move through a forest so silently that the grazing deer would not move out of their way. The Boudica’s son was said to have crushed the Ninth legion single handed, and while that could not possibly be true every single report said that he went bear-mad in battle and was not entirely sane the rest of the time. It was wise, therefore, to honour him.

The youth smiled, and was clearly Graine’s brother. ‘We have come too late, it seems, to be of much assistance.’ Cunomar. His name was Cunomar; Hound of the sea.

‘You kept the Fourteenth and the Twentieth Legions from our backs while we held the siege,’ Hywell said. ‘That was all that we needed. We … owed a great deal to the Second. It’s good to have been able to pay.’

‘We need to look ahead, though.’ Cunomar wore a knife at each hip. He drew one now and, knelt, smoothed the back of it across the mud to make a smooth plate and drew a circle with the tip thereon. Beside it, separated by a hand’s breadth of mud, he drew another, smaller circle. ‘This is us,’ he said, ‘Britain. And this—’ His knife stabbed the larger circle, ‘is Gaul and the Germanies, with Rome behind them. We’ve defeated the legions now. But we have to keep them away. How can we do that when they have already crossed the water twice?’

Cunomar drew a few lines on the mud that became troopships under full sail. When he looked up, his eyes were amber, not at all like his sister’s, but frank and open.

Hywell said, ‘Is it true that the bear warriors of the Eceni must fight a she-bear in her den before they are allowed to bear the scars in battle?’

‘No.’ Cunomar shook his head. ‘But it is useful to have the Romans think so. Is it true that Hywell of the white scar can kill with the stealth of a hunting cat so that the enemy souls walk the earth, not knowing they have died? Is it true he knows more about Rome than the Romans, and that he can set traps that even the wiliest of centurions may not escape from?’

‘No,’ Hywell said, ‘but it is useful to have the warriors think so.’

‘So!’ Cunomar rose, grinning, and took a step back. ‘They said you were clever. It’s good to know that much at least was right. So, with your cleverness and your knowledge of Rome, what would you do to stop the Emperor from attacking us afresh next year, or the year after?’

‘I would change the Emperor for someone who understood the foolishness of such an act,’ Hywell suggested, and waited for them to laugh at him.

Nobody did.

‘How very strange,’ Cunomar said, softly. ‘That’s exactly what Valerius said.’

The Boudica’s son looked to his left, where stood the man whom Hywell had been avoiding since he stepped out of the forest. This man was taller, leaner, older, and altogether less open than his companion. A black and white colt stood behind him, resting one hind leg. He leaned on its haunch with his arms folded across his chest. His eyes were black, and if the girl-child’s grey gaze had troubled Hywell’s soul with its touch, under this man’s look, his soul burned bright as the fires around the fortress.

Valerius, the Boudica’s brother, had served half his life in the Roman Auxilliary. Once, he had been a Lion in the service of Mithras. In Camulodunum one summer when Britain had seemed at peace, this man had acted in rites for the god, bringing novices to an underground temple where they knelt in darkness for the brand, and through the pain, came to know the light.

It had been dark in the temple. There had been forty novices, and the Lion had been masked. It was one rite in dozens, maybe hundreds, he had conducted over ten years. It was possible, therefore, that he might not recognise one of his initiates if that man was wearing different dress and speaking a different language than the one he spoke now. Hywell, who had not always been Hywell, prayed that it was so.

‘How did the Boudica’s brother imagine he might achieve the change of an Emperor?’ he asked.

‘I had hoped to ask you.’ Valerius said, ‘Will you walk with us? I believe the fortress of the Second is safe now, for such as we three to enter.’