Dreaming the Bull Read online

  Kneeling at the bedside, he reached forward a tentative finger, knuckle bent, to stroke his daughter’s face. “She is you,” he said. “The most beautiful woman alive.”

  “I don’t think so.” Breaca grinned, an unexpected, welcome sensation. “She’s Graine if she’s anyone, with Macha’s heart and power, although she doesn’t look like either of them until she smiles. And she has your eyes. You can’t see them in her yet, but they’ll be clear when she’s grown. Grey eyes and dark red hair, the colour of ox-blood.”

  Caradoc lifted his gaze from his daughter. His smile was a well-spring of infinite courage. “She’s you inside,” he said. “In her soul. I can see that already.” Leaning forward, he kissed her. His lips were dry and salt from the sea wind and rasped against hers. His breath joined her breath. His world enfolded hers and she was afloat in the sea he held.

  Breaca lay in summer shade and knew her life perfect. Graine squirmed and shifted to the other breast, rocking her. Cresting the tide of it, Caradoc came to sit at her side, Cunomar on his knee. He was stained with the dust of travel and the old blood of killing and the unkind spray of the straits. His skin, which had once been fair and smooth as a girl’s, was weathered to oak boarding and scarred on both sides of his face. His hair, bright as polished gold after a summer’s sun, was uncombed and was marked at the brow by the line of a helmet, or cap. He had travelled, then, in some haste and with his hair covered as partial disguise. Since the invasion neither he nor the Boudica had worn a helmet in battle. Their hair was their best banner and gathering mark for the warriors. His eyes were a little bloodshot, as they became when he lacked sleep. His hand lifted hers and Breaca felt the calluses of the sword hilt match the smoother, less ridged lines of her own. In three months, she had softened. She imagined the work it would take to reach battle fitness again and winced. Her mind turned back to war.

  “Venutios,” she said. “He can bring his Brigantes and a thousand Selgovae—”

  “I know.” He hooked his fingers under hers and kissed the backs of her knuckles, lightly. “And we have a place to set the salmon-trap. It’s all in hand. This once, you can let the battle slide you by. If it goes well, the dreamers will have their greatest wish fulfilled by the moon’s wane or a little after.”

  The dreamers had only one wish that great. Sunlight died inside her. “Scapula’s here?” she asked.

  “Not yet, but soon. He’s marching west with fresh recruits to bring the western legions back up to strength. Word is that he will go first to the fortress of the Twentieth and then come north with all of that legion and three cohorts of the Second. When he gets here, we will be ready to fight.”

  “But he’ll drive west, to the heart of the Silures’ land. We need him further north if Venutios’ war band is to join us.”

  “I know. It’s been seen to. The legate of the Twentieth has good reason to believe we are massing against him in the north. Scapula will come to us where and when we want him.”

  … has good reason to believe. Horror brushed her spine. In the past, warriors of outstanding courage had “defected” to the legions. Not one of them had escaped with their lives and most, if the spies were correct, had died slowly under Roman blades and irons, skin peeled back, eyes gouged and flesh burned to tear the truth of their hearts from their mouths. The only word Scapula would believe now would be that of a wounded man or woman captured alive on the battlefield, who would live long enough to spread the lie, but not so long that the truth could follow. It was a sacrifice greater than any she wished to imagine and it came to her suddenly that she did not know who had made it. At any other time, she would have known as friends each of those who had prepared themselves to be taken, would have spent time with them before the battle and prayed for them afterwards, sitting by fire or water with Airmid, or Efnís or Luain mac Calma until they were sure the soul had crossed to Briga and was free.

  She could have asked for a name or names, but did not. The question came to the front of her teeth and stopped there, held by Graine who squirmed, wide-eyed and helpless, on her breast so that, once again, Breaca fell into the vast, incoherent space where her own unbounded love met unbounded terror for the life and welfare of her daughter and the knowledge that, for the rest of her life, she would want to protect this child and keep her free from all harm, and that, ultimately, she could not.

  It was not a time to sink into the horror of another’s pain. She took Caradoc’s hand and held it. Together, they each cupped their daughter’s back and felt her smallness shift and mumble beneath their touch. Briga was mother of life as well as death; one could believe with all one’s heart that a new child and the hope she brought was prayer enough for her protection.

  In a while, when Breaca could think more clearly and look ahead at where another part of her heart would ride alone into danger, she asked, “Where will you set the trap?”

  Caradoc was a war leader and he loved her. He could imagine a little of the frustrations of the one left at home. He gave her what she needed with the crisp exactitude of a council summary. “It’s already half set at the river of the Lame Hind. There is only one route the legion could take out of the fortress. It crosses the river at the lower fording place. Gwyddhien and Ardacos are there now, building a barrier in the cleft between the mountains. We will hold them at the river awhile and then fall back to the barrier, then let them flow over it and on into the valley beyond. The far end is already blocked by a rock-fall so that no legion can get beyond it. We will hit them from the sides. If Venutios can bring his two thousand Brigantes, even without the war bands of the Selgovae, he can take them from behind and we will crush them to pulp. If he fails, we will kill as many as we may and then leave them. There are forests on either side and behind that no Roman will dare to enter.”

  “Can you win?”

  “I don’t know.” He had always been honest with her. “It’s one battle of many and it depends on a lot of things over which we have no control. We may not win, but we won’t lose.”

  It was a good plan, marred only by one thing. She had thought of it in the midst of birthing, when the pains were at their height. “What will you do if Scapula recognizes the salmon-trap from the battle in the Eceni lands? He may not take it.”

  He smoothed a hand through her hair and ran his fingers over her scalp. She pushed against the flat of his palm like a hound seeking a caress. His shoulder leaned into hers as Hail’s did, a steady presence, for ever hers. The slow surety of his smile soaked into her bones.

  “I think he’ll take it. The gods are on our side. Half the legion will be raw recruits, with poor discipline. If they see us in retreat, they’ll follow and Scapula won’t want to stop them. In any case, he didn’t see the first salmon-trap. He will have heard of it but that was four years ago and a hundred battles have passed since then. There’s no reason to think he’ll remember the detail of that one above the rest. The only one who was there and will remember is the decurion who rides the pied horse. He broke the barrier; there is no chance he will forget. Our only hope is that he will not come this far west.”

  “Or that he dies early.” A sourness filled her mouth. More even than Scapula, the shadow of that man’s reputation dulled the morning. Word of the atrocities amongst the Trinovantes had spread west like slow poison and the trails of his dead wailed in her sleep on the nights when the battles did not take all of her dreams. She said, “Airmid could find the decurion for you now. She has felt enough of the death he has wrought. A knife in the dark could kill him. The gods know that one does not deserve a death in battle.”

  She had not meant it as an oath but there was more power in her one spoken breath than all of Cunomar’s careful recitation, swearing the protection of his sister. The gods listened and heard and somewhere, in other worlds, was an echo. Moths panicked in her chest. The somnolence of motherhood broke and became the urgency of combat. Breaca lay flat on the bed and stared at the thatch and, for a while, forgot that she had ever become a mother.<
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  Caradoc brought her back, slowly, with the stroke of his fingers on the nape of her neck. Still, the joy of the morning had gone and could not be recovered. Drily, she asked. “When will it happen, the trap against Scapula?”

  “Within the month. Scapula is marching west already.”

  “Then you must leave soon?”

  “Not that soon.” His smile was the making and breaking of her heart. “The legions are marching slowly and he will go south first. I think we have ten days to repair the weapons and heal the wounded. Most of the others have returned to their hearths to help with the harvest. I’ve never been very good at cutting barley. I had thought to have at least that much time in peace with my family.”

  Leaning over, he kissed her a third time and she found that it was not, after all, too late to recover the joy in the morning.

  CHAPTER 11

  “We ride to take Caratacus, to kill him or to capture him, to wipe out his mountain rebels and bring peace to the west.”

  Scapula said it in the great hall of the praetorium at Camulodunum, speaking to five thousand newly trained infantry and two wings of horsemen on the morning before they marched west. The new recruits repeated it, chanting in marching rhythm with the verbs made scurrilous and Scapula as much their target as the man they marched to kill. The cavalry spoke it to their horses, quietly, as a prayer and a protection; they had ridden against enemy horsemen and knew their mettle.

  Julius Valerius, decurion of the first troop, the First Thracian Cavalry, second in command of the entire wing and thereby acting leader of the half-wing currently on campaign, heard it repeated over and over in the rhythm of the Crow-horse’s feet and felt the promise of ultimate vengeance fill him as a gift from his god, made greater by the absence of the ghosts and the nightmares. Always, they fled in the face of action, even when that action was against women and children in a three-hut steading. In the face of real war, they were gone so far it was possible to imagine they might never have been. He slept well and ate well and drank for pleasure not for need. Longinus Sdapeze rode with him, recovered from his war-wounds and promoted to standard-bearer of the troop. The man was intelligent and thoughtful and he understood better than anyone living the mercurial swing of Valerius’ moods.

  We ride to kill Caratacus. Caradoc. To kill him. To kill…

  As far as it could be, his life was perfect.

  The rain began on the third day out of Camulodunum. Without a following wind, it fell thinly from a patchy sky, a warm, steady drizzle that saturated hide and hair and leather and wool, that made slick the tracks worn to ruts by the tread of the several thousand new recruits who had marched this route over the past eight years to die for Rome in the wild mountains of the west.

  Sadly, the clouds did not cover the waning moon, which hung palely on the western horizon. The Thracians considered it ill luck and cited the rain as proof that they were right. Valerius rode his pied horse at a walk through the mud and listened to the mutterings of his men as they grew in conviction and coherence. A horse drew up on his left-hand side.

  “Someone should tell the governor—”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know what I was about to say.” Longinus contrived to sound aggrieved which was a significant achievement given that it was less than a month since an accident in the practice arena had seen him take a shield rim across the throat and he had not been able to speak for several days, nor even, in the first night, to breathe.

  Valerius grinned, acidly. “I know exactly what you were about to say. You want me to inform the emperor’s representative in this province that his army should wait in the night-camp until the moon sets—which will be halfway to noon—or turn back to Camulodunum and delay his advance until the rising of the new moon, at which time the lady’s light will grant certain victory in war and love to all men, although why anyone should want Caradoc to have the same luck as us is beyond me. I tell you what—” He turned in his saddle. “You tell the governor. I bet you my horse against yours that you’ll be less than three words into the first sentence before he hears your voice and has you dismissed from the ranks and sent home. If he’s having a really bad day, he’ll send the rest of us back as your escort.”

  Valerius had gone to some lengths to keep the extent of the Thracian’s injuries from his superiors. In certain quarters, it was believed that a man who could not shout his orders across a battlefield was a liability to himself and his troop. Valerius did not believe it and he did not want anyone to have an excuse to exclude Longinus from the battle plans. In the uncertain politics of the fortress, there was a very real likelihood that the entire wing would have been left behind to keep him company.

  Longinus knew the reality as well as anyone. He shook his head. “I don’t want your horse. It’s simply that, as your standard-bearer, I don’t want to see you dead sooner than you have to be.’ The Thracian’s cavalry cloak fell in sodden folds to his horse’s rump and his rain-darkened hair straggled from beneath his helmet, but even in the rain he had the stare of a hawk. It was the sharpness of his eyes that set him apart from his compatriots, giving light as they did to the sharpness of his mind.

  Valerius had a great respect for the sharpness of Longinus’ mind. “Why should I be dead? Is it the moon or is there something else?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see the way that you can. I know only that there is something coming that is worse than battle. When I know what it is, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, I think you should take your horse and ride it somewhere hard and fast. You’re as cramped in as he is and it’s upsetting the men. They’re afraid you’ll take it out on them when we get to the fortress.”

  “I’ll take it out on them before that if I can find something for them to do. Tell them. It’ll give them something else to worry about that isn’t the moon.”

  “I don’t have to. They all have ears. They heard.”

  “Good.”

  The mountains remained in the distance and the marching men passed through gentler land, just past harvest. The wars of east and west had not touched the centre of the province and, even in the rain, the fecundity of this place was clear. On either side of the track, men and women of the Catuvellauni cut beans in long, straight-sided fields. Elsewhere, ewes and lambs grazed, guarded by youths with throwing sticks. In larger paddocks, young weaned bulls fought each other haphazardly or watched from the shelter of aged beech and oak that the axe had not yet sought out. Buzzards circled high over fields where corn stood in shining sheaves and scruffy children with sapling hounds hunted the rats that made their nests within.

  The children were the only ones to respond to the column of armed men passing through their land. In the beginning, as the first centuries of the first cohort had passed them by, they had run to the field edges to stare. The boldest among them had skipped alongside offering the men water or pocketfuls of malted barley or twists of smoked meat in return for a coin or a carving. Later, as the morning grew old and the armoured ribbon did not cease, they grew bored and returned to the rats, who gave more sport more consistently. Only when the cavalry passed did they turn once again to stare at the horses and nudge each other and lay uncollectable wagers as to which was fastest, or would make the best brood mare.

  Valerius came last of the last, the snake’s second head, guarding the rear. He felt the children’s eyes on the pied horse as they came within sight and heard the change in tenor of the whispers and knew, with a familiar, unnameable mix of resentment and defiance, that he was recognized here as readily as he was in the east and if here, then it would be the same in the west. The pied horse felt the tension of his hands through the reins and set its jaw against the bit. If he chose, Valerius could lose himself in fighting it.

  “They will be waiting for you, the spear-carriers of the mountains, if we ever see the field of battle.”

  Longinus rode a mare that should have been almost as well known as Valerius’ mount but, being chestnut and blandly marked, was not. />
  “Is that the source of your bad feeling—that they will know me?”

  “It should be; they will have their dreamers mark you and set the spear-throwers on you from the start, but no, it’s something more than that. I’ll tell you when I know. In the meantime, there’s a river ahead that’s flowing fast enough to make the swimming hard. If you want something for the men to do, that might provide it.”

  Longinus had always thought like an officer. Valerius grinned. “If I make them ford it, they’ll think it was my idea.”

  “Would they be wrong?”

  “No. Would you care to bet that Axeto loses hold of his horse before he reaches the far side?”

  “Hardly, that’s a certainty. But I’ll lay you the first flagon of wine tonight that he’s mounted again before the last of the others is on land and that he doesn’t lose his sword to the river gods this time.”

  “Done.”

  Valerius commanded the eight troops who made up the left half of the wing. Of those, the first seven were strung out ahead along the sides of the marching column; only his own troop rode with him at the rear, his fangs in the snake’s second head. They were his honour guard and they moulded themselves on the pattern of the enemy that was as much the pattern of Thrace. They loved him and they hated him and they had all smelled the river and then seen it and the order to swim, when it came, was not a surprise.

  They were alone in their endeavour. Dry-footed, the infantry crossed the water on one of two bridges built by the engineers of the XXth when that legion first marched west. The other half-wing of cavalry, the Quinta Gallorum, assigned to the head of the column, had long since walked their horses across in warmth and comfort; in all likelihood, they were at the fortress already, settled and resting. The early troops of the Prima Thracum had similarly crossed without incident. Lacking an order from Valerius, their decurions had not made them swim.