Dreaming the Bull Read online

  In the hospital, in a quiet room, he needed badly to sit.

  From the bed, Corvus said, “Marcus…?” and the tribune raised a lazy brow and, smiling, said, “Of course. I’ll be outside when you need me.”

  The door closed and they were alone, a newly made decurion and the man who was no longer his prefect.

  A bench had been placed next to the bed. Valerius sat on it without asking leave, then stood, remembering his place, and sat again at Corvus’ nod.

  Silence held him. What does one say? I saw you die and if my world had not already ended, it would have done so then. But I am unable any longer to feel either rage or grief or love, but can only mourn their loss. It is the curse of the gods and the one god cannot lift it. Can you forgive me? Can we be as we were, knowing I cannot feel?

  No point. His answer stood in the felt presence of the tribune on the far side of the door and the single informal name spoken as a quiet request: “Marcus?” Very few beyond close family would have been granted the right to call the governor’s son by his first name.

  Reaching forward, Valerius lifted Corvus’ limp right hand and felt a tremor of intended movement. In his mind, he could see how it would heal, given time. That much was good.

  In a while, when he had more control of himself, he looked past the hand to the face beyond it. What had once been an open book was closed beyond any power of his to open.

  “Why?” he asked.

  He did not mean the promotion, but it was easier for Corvus to answer as if he did. He said, “Your actions on the battlefield were seen and reported to the governor. Both the attack on the dreamer and the fetching of the horses were acts of outstanding courage and an example to all the ranks. These things cannot be put in the despatch—nothing can be seen to outweigh the tribune’s actions—but they can be rewarded.” Corvus’ gaze became more keenly focused. “I didn’t know you could command an entire troop of horses by voice alone.”

  “I didn’t. They followed the Crow. All I had to do was point them at the barrier where the warriors were thickest and the auxiliaries least and trust they would jump over. The Eceni will not kill a riderless horse. They don’t have it in them.”

  “But riderless horses will kill the Eceni?”

  “Only if they feel themselves attacked. It’s in their training.”

  “And a horse, which has no conscience, will act by its training. For a man to do so takes more courage.” Corvus’ voice had roughened, losing the brittle bite. Reaching out with his good left hand, he asked, “What did it cost you?” Almost, his face was as it had been.

  I knew you were behind the barrier and that you would die. I would have made you proud of me, this one last time. The curse has not destroyed my pride, or yours. It was my gift to you, freely given, and your black-eyed tribune has stolen it.

  Valerius shook his head. “Nothing.” He let go of the hand he was holding and drew himself back. Where Corvus had just recently hidden, he too, took refuge. “Why must I join the Thracians when I have served these last nine years with the Gauls?”

  The brittleness returned, and the layers of rank between them. Corvus said, “The first troop has need of a decurion. It’s an obvious promotion for you, a clear demonstration that your actions were seen and valued. You are a good example. If we are to survive the winter, we will need men to show initiative when it counts, and clear courage.”

  “Regulus also died. I could remain with the Gauls.” I would still serve under you. Please let me?

  “No. This is best. The decision is the governor’s but I believe he will take advice from the tribune.”

  And, doubtless, from the prefect whose life his son has so valiantly saved.

  Valerius could have said that last aloud but his courage was not so great and he found that, after all, he did not wish to be flogged and demoted to the ranks for the sake of gaining the last word. He let go of the hand he had been holding and smoothed down the bedlinen. “I should go,” he said. “The tribune waits outside and should not be made to stand for longer than necessary. I wish you good health and a swift recovery.”

  He was by the door when Corvus spoke.

  “Valerius?”

  “Yes?” He turned too fast. He had not passed beyond hope.

  “Longinus Sdapeze will be made duplicarius of the first troop, serving directly under you. Theophilus swears he will be fit to ride by the end of winter. He’s a good man. If you take care of each other, we may all come out of this alive.”

  II

  SUMMER-EARLY AUTUMN AD 51

  CHAPTER 9

  The child was born on mona, in late summer, when the fighting was at its height.

  Mona was safe. The governor, Scapula, remained intent on subduing the Silures. His pride would not let him stop, nor his oath to the emperor, nearly four years old and not yet fulfilled. He had not yet turned his attention on the dreamers and their island; or, more likely, had not yet gained the military mastery that would allow him to strike that far north and west. Every spring for four consecutive years, the IInd legion had held the very southern tip of the land against attacks from the Durotriges while the XXth had marched out of their winter encampments and done their best to push their line of forts further west into Siluran territory. In places and at times they had succeeded. As often, they had failed.

  The mountains of the west had become a constant battleground. Corn was planted and harvested now only by the very young, the old and the infirm: all those who could not hold a weapon in war. Horses were bred in favour of cattle to replace the many lost in the fighting. Game became scarce. In those places where Rome gained ascendancy, the legions hunted to extinction all that lived within easy reach of their forts. Their indiscriminate felling of the forests to supply timber and firewood ensured that those beasts which had fled would not return. In the occupied lands of the east and south, grain, which had once been freely owned by those who worked to plant and harvest it, became the property instead of tax collectors or of the Roman veterans who owned the land but ordered others to farm it. Starvation stalked the months of winter in ways it had never done before the invasion.

  On Mona alone, life continued as close to normal as was possible with the legions less than two days’ ride away beyond the straits and the mountains. Dreamers and singers still took apprentices from amongst those tribes who chose to send them. Those not under the Roman yoke sent more than they had ever done, feeling a greater need to be close to the gods. Those who lived under the shadow of the legions sent few and in great secrecy and each one came knowing that if their calling were discovered, their family, at best, would hang.

  In the same spirit and with the same fears, girls and boys nearing adulthood who showed the spirit and potential for war journeyed west to pass the rites of the long-nights in safety and afterwards, if their acts and their dreams showed them worthy, to train at the warriors’ school. The luxury of ten years’ tuition was denied them; many went into battle after their first year, but some few older ones remained on the island to hold the core of the school together.

  Breaca, who, as god-chosen Warrior of Mona, should have been teaching the future generations the skills of battle, spent the greater part of every summer fighting the enemy with those of her own generation who had survived this far. That much was different from how things used to be. Venutios, her predecessor, had left the island only once in the twelve years of his tenure as Warrior. In the changed new world of constant war, she was the Boudica and her place was in the front line of the attacks on the forts, or the ambushes of supply trains, or the encircling of auxiliary troops lost in the mountains. Her presence brought heart to the warriors and fear to the enemy. For the eight years since the invasion, she had received the blessing and instruction of the gods, relayed through the dreamers who sat in almost continuous council, monitoring reports from the occupied lands. War was her life and, in so far as anyone could be in a land under threat, she was content.

  It was her body that betrayed her, and the ti
ming of the gods in sending a child when it was least needed. There had been nearly seven childless years since the birth of her son Cunomar. She had thought herself barren and had not taken the infusions that would have kept her so in the lull after the fighting. When, in late winter, the fact of the pregnancy had become clear, she had panicked and sought out Airmid, dreamer, healer and heart’s-friend, to ask her help in its unmaking.

  Airmid had smiled, which was a gift in itself. Unlike the warriors, she had not enjoyed a winter’s respite from the strains of battle. Since Scapula’s slaughter of innocents in the Eceni lands, the dreamers had sought the destruction of the governor by any means the gods might provide and winter was their time to discover what that means might be.

  Breaca had walked alone to one of the stone circles that scattered the island: vast rocks quarried elsewhere and erected by the ancestors to form a focus for their dreaming in the days when the whole land had dreamed. It had been snowing and the ground was sparsely white. The circle stood alone in the valley between two low hills. Stunted, wind-driven oaks leaned to the east; snow powdered their limbs and fell as grey dust in the evening light. A huddle of heavily pregnant ewes found forage in the lee of the circle.

  Airmid stood near the westernmost stone, facing the rising moon. Nemain, god of night and water, showed her face more distinctly here in the west than she had ever done when they were children in the eastern lands of the Eceni. Even now, with night not yet on them, one could see clearly on her surface the hare which had brought the first dream to the people and had acted as messenger ever since. In the god’s light, Airmid became a dream creature in her own right. Already tall, the linear shadows cast by the stones on either side made her taller. White snow made her hair a falling of night, bound back by the birch bark thong at her brow. A necklace of silvered frog bones glimmered softly at her throat, the only outward sign of her dream. Her eyes were a gateway to the true dreaming, the messages of the gods, sent to guide the people.

  Breaca leaned against the north stone, waiting for the woman she knew to return and inhabit the living flesh. Her hands linked on the small mound of her belly, seeking the pulse of life within. In her head, she formed the words of apology to a half-made soul that it must leave early, with its life’s promise unfulfilled. Her daughter stirred under her touch. In the gods’ space of the circle, she took form. A young woman, coming near to her long-nights, stood in the gap between two stones that had just now been empty. She was not the daughter Breaca would have imagined; a child of two parents so tall would not be expected to be so slender and slight, nor her hair so richly dark, the colour of ox-blood, when her father was corn-gold and her mother the burnished red of a fox in winter. She stood in the drifting snow and her eyes alone were recognizably Caradoc’s, iron-grey and clear, with an honesty that did not allow for doubt and a depth of love that carved the soul.

  The girl turned, seeking guidance. Her eyes met those of her mother. The fire of recognition leapt between them, to be replaced, too fast, by surprise, then fear, then something intangible that went beyond either: understanding and surmise and love buried in grief. Only at the last did she smile and the sight of it cut through the weight of the present and became a channel to a past that had been too long buried.

  “Who does she remind you of?”

  Breaca found her eyes closed and opened them. The dream child was gone. Airmid stood where it had been, her face still alive with the presence of the god. “You thought of someone then,” she said. “Who was it?”

  Words were hard. It was best, suddenly, to speak without thinking. Breaca said, “Graine. That is, my mother. And her sister, Macha, the wren-dreamer. She was both.”

  “Then you have two names that would be good. You will know which one is best when she is born.”

  There was no question, then, of unmaking the child. Breaca said, “She was a dreamer. I saw the thong at her brow.” A dreamer bred from two warriors was not unheard of, simply unusual. She did not mention the other things she had seen, the battle-stained tunic and the weapons of war that were not the tools of a dreamer and were, in any case, forbidden a girl approaching her long-nights.

  Airmid, if she knew of them, chose not to comment. Nodding, she smiled a dreamer’s smile of unspoken mysteries. “She will be,” she said. “Not ‘she was’. Remember that always: your daughter is the future, not the past.”

  Winter leaked into spring. Snow melted to muddy water and filled the rivers cascading down the mountainsides. Hawthorn blossom hung white and was shed to be trampled underfoot in the rush toward spring and the onset of fighting. Leaves unfurled on the trees and the first shoots of barley broke through winter earth. Lambs were born and were followed by foals, stilt-legged in the fields. The seas opened to traffic and the ferry began to make its daily way across the narrow straits from Mona to the mainland, taking dreamers out into the wider land and, occasionally, bringing war-leaders back for council, or warriors to be healed of their wounds.

  The child who was the future, not the past, grew steadily in her mother’s womb so that, by the third month of fighting, Breaca was no longer fit to ride into battle. In disgust, she took the ferry to Mona that she might not become a burden to Caradoc, who commanded the western tribes alone in her absence, nor to Ardacos and Gwyddhien who, between them, led the trained warriors of Mona. She would have stayed simply to be close to the fighting and take part in the strategies and the talk after battle but in the previous year the legions had made a practice of sending a troop or two of their auxiliaries round the perimeter of any fighting to capture alive the families of those warriors engaged in the battle. They had hanged some outside the gates of their forts and sold others into slavery, but Scapula had long made it known that the capture alive of the Boudica or Caradoc or any of their kin was a matter of highest priority and that their fate, in Rome, would not be the swift death of a battlefield hanging. It would have taken more warriors than could be spared to guarantee Breaca’s safety and that, in itself, would have alerted Scapula to her presence. Thus the Boudica left her warriors to find victory alone and the fighting continued unchecked without her.

  She was in council when the birth pains began, in the great-house of the elders of Mona. Built by the ancestors and maintained by each passing generation, it was large enough to enable every dreamer, singer and warrior on Mona to fit into it standing and not feel crowded. The walls were of stone, cut and dressed by the lost generations in a time so far back that the oldest tales did not record it. The vast roof beams were of oak taller than any that grew on the island; the ancestors had floated them in from the far northern coast. The dream-mark of each successive Elder and Warrior was carved in the wood, spiralling up into the smoke-dense heights. Stag and snake, horse and salmon, beaver, fox, eagle, toad; each one came to life when the fires were lit and the people gathered. Breaca’s own mark of the serpent-spear writhed alongside the bear that was the dream of Maroc, the elder dreamer, and beneath the leaping salmon of Venutios, the man who had been her predecessor as Warrior and now led half of the Brigantes, the vast northern tribe whose aid could be the straw that tipped the balance in the battle against Rome.

  Venutios was there; the council had been called on his arrival, meeting swiftly so that he stood now before the fire in the great-house of the elders in his travelling cloak, explaining as frankly as possible the nature of the conflict in Brigante lands between his own followers and those loyal to Cartimandua with whom he jointly ruled. Cartimandua had borne him a daughter, but that did not mean she shared his hatred of Rome, or his lifelong care for Mona and the dreamers. Above all, she loathed Caradoc and had stated publicly that she would support no venture of which he was a part. More than anything else, that hatred strengthened her ties to Scapula and Rome.

  Venutios was not a man of great height, and the conflicting responsibilities of stewardship weighed him down, but he carried himself with the pride of one who had been Warrior and his voice was respected and heard. Firelight danced on his fac
e as he spoke, flattering the care of years.

  “A civil war amongst the Brigantes will be of no help to anyone,” he said. “Cartimandua has spies everywhere. I can raise warriors in secret but the numbers must be small—a few from each settlement, meeting as if for hunting. If we muster in thousands, she will hear of it and betray us to the enemy. If Rome were distant, this would not be an undue hardship, but the Fourteenth legion is already camped on our borders. To be certain of defeating them, I would have to raise ten thousand and I cannot do that. With less, we are always at risk of attack before ever we reach the battleground.”

  Speaking for the council, Breaca asked, “How many warriors can you safely bring without its being known?”

  “A thousand. Maybe two.”

  “More than that.” A young, straw-haired warrior of the Brigantes spoke up from his place on the other side of the fire. Standing to be better heard, he said, “It may be that the war bands of the Selgovae would join us from the north. They are not numerous, but Cartimandua has no spies amongst them. That would give us another thousand.”

  It went against protocol for any to speak out of turn but the youth, Vellocatus, was cousin’s cousin to Venutios and had supported him from the moment the elders of the Brigantes had called the Warrior back from Mona. His point was heard and accepted.

  In her head, Breaca mapped out the numbers and position of the legions and the tribes as the last reports had placed them, adding in Venutios’ promised warriors.

  “That may be enough,” she said. “We are five months into the fighting and the legions are faring badly. Scapula has sworn to come west but even so, his men are losing morale. With three thousand, we could—”