Dreaming the Serpent-Spear Read online

  Valerius knew too much and was too free with his opinions. On principle, Cunomar did not want him to be right.

  He was thinking exactly that when the gates slammed open and the legionaries charged out. They were formed in a wedge, with their shields to the outside and wet leather draped about their heads as protection against fire and iron.

  Cunomar’s spear had already left his hand when the words he needed came to him. “Go for their legs! Aim below the shields. Go!”

  The night splintered apart. Two dozen greased, limed, howling bear-warriors threw down their wicker barriers and hurled their spears. Most aimed as they had been told and if they did not all hit flesh and bone, they caught amongst the ankles of men who stumbled into the night dazzled and deafened and drunk but still viciously able to fight.

  “Break the wedge! Don’t let them form a line!”

  The battle rage had not yet come. Cunomar was intoxicated by heat and smoke and the heady release of action, but still able to think. He saw his second spear glance off the knee of the leading legionary. The man wore the helmet plumes of a junior officer but no leg greaves; there had been no time to fit them. Shocked, he looked up, drunk and sober at once. His eyes were black pits in a fire-red face. He was too young to be leading men alone.

  His eyes barely changed as another spear struck him. He collapsed onto one knee, using his shield to push himself upright, and opened his mouth and shouted “Hold the wedge!” and it was then, spurred by the angular grate of the Latin, that the bear took hold of Cunomar, filling his heart and his gut and his head with a vast, unstoppable fury, so that he no longer knew what he did, only that he needed to kill and to keep on killing until every thing of Rome had been broken apart and driven into the sea for ever.

  He was of the she-bear; he ran to battle unshielded and unarmoured, fighting only with spear and knife. Bear grease was his armour, his rigid, white-limed hair his helmet. The king-band that encircled his arm marked him as the son of the Boudica, child of the royal line of the Eceni. His knife was a gift from his mother, made before the men of Rome had flogged her. He had made his first battle kills with it, in her company. As he had done then, he sought the song of the blade that he might bear a small part of the Boudica into battle.

  Screaming her name, he smashed the cheek of the Roman officer with the knife’s hilt, then stabbed at his eyes. The man’s one good knee buckled. He crumpled to the bloody earth, too suddenly dead to cry out.

  Exultant, Cunomar threw back his head and howled victory for the Boudica and the bear. If one of the enemy had struck him in that moment, he would have died. He knew it and did not care. He lived because the bear watched over him and was invincible. He shared a second kill with Ulla while there were still men alive to hunt and was sorry there were not more.

  Afterwards, it was quiet, but for the spit and tumble of the fire.

  Eight Roman legionaries and their officer had manned the watchtower, and all were dead. Of the two dozen she-bears who had attacked it, only Scerros, a red-haired youth of the northern Eceni, had taken any wound and that a shallow sword thrust to the thigh which would heal by the month’s turn.

  The enemy dead were stripped of their weapons and armour and their bodies fed to the fire. The flames reached up for the sky, bright as sun in the encroaching night. The heat was unbearable.

  Cunomar walked back to the wicker palisades and began to stack them. From that distance, the fire was pleasantly warm, easing the transition to calm.

  “It’ll be seen.” Ulla spoke from the shadows to his right. Her kill had been first and cleanest, and she had visited the bodies of the slain afterwards, running her blade along each throat that the men might be assuredly dead before they were given to the fire.

  Such an act was a mark of her care, or her hate; probably both. She, too, had been flogged by Rome, with Scerros and three others. These five made the tight, unyielding kernel of Cunomar’s honour guard, and if Rome had had the choosing of them, still, he was glad of the choices. Nearly a month had passed since and they were recovered enough to move and to fight, but the scars would never go, nor the patina of otherness that set them apart even within the she-bear, which was already set apart from the greater mass of the Boudica’s gathering war host.

  Ulla was dark-haired and bright-eyed and she killed as a hawk does, with a fluid, savage beauty. She joined Cunomar in stacking the wicker barriers in a heap.

  “The fire will be seen,” she said again. “If a single sentry of the Twentieth is awake and even half sober in any of the other watchtowers, they’ll light the signal chain and the whole of Camulodunum will know by morning there has been death in the Eceni lands.”

  Cunomar hefted the topmost palisade, testing its weight. “I would think so,” he agreed. “Valerius said as much.”

  Ulla met him face-on, her lips set straight. “He said it as a warning, not an invitation,” she said. “He thinks we are not yet ready to take on the legions.”

  “I know. I think he’s wrong. Soon, we will learn which of us is right.” Cunomar hurled the wicker onto the flames. The fire coughed and stuttered and flared higher and brighter. He stepped back, smiling.

  “Perhaps if we throw enough of these on,” he said, “it may be that we can make the flames reach the clouds. However drunk they are, Rome’s watchmen will find it hard not to notice that.”

  Ulla was the closest of his honour guard, his sworn shield in battle; she had never yet argued against him. With the four others who had bound themselves closest to the Boudica’s son, she helped him to throw the wicker onto the fire.

  Before the last of the wood was alight, a pinpoint of flame blossomed to the south and west. For a moment it looked fragile, a dandelion puff fluttering in the wind. Cunomar turned to face it fully and spoke aloud the first eight names of the she-bear as he had been taught them in the caves of the Caledonii.

  The night vibrated, richly. At the sound, the distant flame strengthened and held, and was joined, presently, by seven others, strung out over half a night’s ride in a line that led directly south to the veterans’ colony of Camulodunum, Rome’s first city in its occupied province of Britannia.

  CHAPTER 2

  The fever broke at dusk on its twelfth day.

  Breaca woke to the smell of smoke and the quiet of an empty hut. The fire lay dead in its hearth and the sweat was cold on the horsehides beneath her.

  Her face was creased in a pattern of ridges. She moved and then did not move, but simply breathed, because nothing else was possible while the pain consumed her: great, mountainous, pounding waves that crushed everything else to nothing.

  The fever had been a gift, she had known that even at its height. She tried to fall back into its oblivion and could not; the day was too sharp and too present and her body would not let her go.

  Other things made themselves felt.

  Her feet were cold, that was the first thing, and the palms of her hands too hot. Woven wool covered her, and paste had been smeared over the worst parts of her back so that she felt the tickle of the blanket through crusted remnants of dock leaf and powdered clay. Her hair was not plastered to her face as it had been when she last paid it any attention; someone had combed it with care, and braided it back from her face, so that there was a tightness at her temples and across her head. Airmid had done that; the touch of her care was still there in the patterns of weaving.

  Breaca had no memory of the paste, or the blankets, or the combing of her hair. Her memories began and ended with Graine, and the sounds of her screaming, and the brutal finality of the moment when it had stopped.

  Your daughter’s wounding is not your fault or your failure.

  So the god had said. Breaca did not have to believe it.

  On the third remembering, or perhaps the fourth, when the shock of the sudden silence was less, she realized that she could no longer hear the anvil, and that she had moved twice now, and no-one had leaned over to offer her a beaker of water and ask if she needed help to drin
k.

  Confused, she stretched her mind beyond the confines of her body for the first time in days. Sage smoke drifted light on the air but the scent was old, with its sharpness long gone. The fire was dull and white ash lay cold on its surface. No-one sat with their back to the wall, ready to lay the small heaps of apple wood and pine chips onto the embers, to cleanse and clear the staleness of the room.

  No-one was waiting, either, to change the wads of uncombed wool that had been propped under her armpits to keep her still in the turbulence of the fever, or to lift her head with quiet hands to offer her water and help her void urine into the clay pot that lay empty by the bed, or to kiss her, and smooth paste on her back and speak to her of the growing spring and the new foals in the paddocks and the whelps fathered by Stone newly born in the great-house and how the war host was in training, ready for her return.

  She waited awhile, and then turned her head and so found that she was, indeed, alone, without either the god or Airmid watching over her for the first time since the fever began.

  The shock of that left her numb for a moment, like a plunge into cold water in summer. After, coming to herself again, she began to weep, slowly and silently at first, then later in great, heaving sobs, and the release of it, and the knowing that her grief was no burden to anyone, was as overwhelming as the pain had been, and made it less.

  After that, she needed water, and so sat up, and drank on her own account from the beaker that was left by the bed. The water was cool and tasted of nothing more than the river, which was as telling in its own way as the silence.

  It was a long time since she had drunk anything that was not laced with something bitter from Airmid’s stocks, leavened with a little honey to disguise the taste. Those who cared for her, therefore, had known the fever was ending and had left her alone to find for herself the limits of what she could do. For that care, she wept again, briefly.

  She lay back, and stared up into the reeds of the roof thatch and began systematically to take the measure of her life.

  Am I not yet dead?

  She was not. The gods wished her to live; she must, therefore, strive to do so, and to fight, if that were required of her, and to care for those whom she had loved, and did still, and all of this must be done amidst the despair of Graine’s wounding, with no promise from the god that it would end.

  But she will heal? Airmid had asked, and Valerius, in his wisdom, had answered, If she wants to badly enough.

  To want to heal, one must first have a passion for life, and her passion was Graine, who was broken.

  Lacking it, she faced the bleak prospect of a life without the fire that had always sustained her. Weakness said it was better to be dead than that, or at least lost again in the fever, but she was the Boudica and a war host gathered in her name. Five thousand warriors waited daily for news that she had risen and had taken up the serpent-spear her brother had made for her, and was ready to lead them to victory after victory against Rome.

  She wept again, quietly, for the burden of that, and then drank and set herself to finding how she might manage this new life with all its limitations.

  She was not without courage and with courage came a pragmatism that said she was surrounded by those who were fit and able and had not lost their passion for life and so it was not necessary fully to heal, only to be well enough to rise, and fight and lead the warriors, at least in name. That was as much as could be expected of her, and was enough.

  Before all of that, there was a blade she must find which had been hidden, and before that, before anything else, she needed to find Graine, wounded child of her soul, and speak to her and hold her and find out if there was anything about her that could be mended.

  Breaca put her fingers to her face and sought out her eyes. With care, as if they were someone else’s, she rubbed the crusted matter from the corners. An early moon cast long angled spears of light through the part-open door of the hut. Silver splashed on her, and on the chestnut horsehide that pillowed her cheek, with its dribbles of old saliva and the crusting of white hairs.

  She took a breath, and hissed it out, slowly. The pain was not unmanageable; nor, if she were careful, was the fractured gap in her soul.

  On the second breath, for the first time in very much too long, Breaca of the Eceni, once of Mona, known to her world as the Boudica, bringer of victory, levered herself out of bed, put on her tunic, and went in search of the child whom Rome had broken.

  “You can walk.”

  The hut to which Graine had been moved was so new that the reed thatching the roof had not yet seen rain and shone dully green, like the hide of a frog. A low fire outside hazed the last of the evening light and cast dusty shadows on the clayed wicker of the walls.

  Inside, Graine lay on a pile of sheepskins near the side wall, one hand flung loose over the blanket, sweatily hot. Dark, ox-blood hair lying in straggled knots about her head told its own tale of restless sleep. The bruises on her face and neck were not as marked as they had been when last Breaca had seen her. That had been in daylight, and the bruises had been muddy green puddles against the strained white of her face. They were less now in the kind, grey light of evening.

  Carefully, Breaca eased herself down to sit on the edge of the hides. Stone, the crippled war hound who had been waiting outside the door to her sickhut, lay down with the same breath-held care near the bed, in a place where both mother and daughter might reach him.

  Breaca said, “I can walk, yes. It doesn’t mean I can fight, but it’s a start.” Here, in Graine’s company, it was possible to acknowledge openly the mountain yet to be climbed. “Can you?”

  “I don’t know.” Graine looked down at Stone. She combed her fingers through his ruff, teasing the hair straight and scrunching it up again. She said, “Hawk won’t let me go farther than the stream. He listens to Airmid and she says I shouldn’t. She thinks that if I sleep, I might dream, and that if I get up and walk about, it will stop me from sleeping. I think she’s wrong.”

  “Do you? She isn’t often.” Breaca reached over and swept her daughter’s hair out of her eyes. “Is Hawk the Coritani scout who is sitting outside your door with his blade naked on his knees? The one who cut off Cunomar’s ear?”

  She had seen him and not thought much of it except that he still had both of his ears, which was surprising. She had thought the she-bear had cut them off in vengeance for Cunomar. Sometime in the fever, she was sure she had heard that was about to happen.

  The youth had watched her walk into the hut and said nothing, only nodded to acknowledge her presence, and all that it meant. The shadow of a blood blister showed on his lower lip where Valerius had marked him with a knife, but he still had the easy, almost arrogant beauty that had been so evident when he served the Roman procurator. That had not changed, nor the blue lizard marks that crawled up the sculpted muscles of both arms as evidence of his clan ties and vows of vengeance to the ghost of his father.

  Breaca had killed his father. Hawk had cut off Cunomar’s ear and, later, had a part in delivering Graine to the hands of the procurator. She had no idea if those things balanced each other in his eyes or not.

  Graine said, “Yes. He and Dubornos both think they are to blame for…what happened.” The words came doggedly, one after another. “They take turns to keep watch on me.”

  Two men keeping watch over a child who had been raped by half a century of men. Whoever they were, however guilt-ridden or oath-sworn, Airmid should have stopped that. Breaca took her daughter’s hand and turned it over, studying the bitten nails and the bony fingers and the marble-white skin with the veins running thinly beneath.

  There was nothing to be read there. She folded the fingers closed and studied the lines of Graine’s face instead. Grey eyes, the colour of clouds after rain, stared back at her, unblinking.

  “Do you trust Hawk?” she asked.

  “Yes. He has sworn to protect me, my life for his, as if I were his sister. He did it kneeling with his blade across his han
ds, before Valerius and Airmid and Gunovar of the Durotriges who was tortured by Rome. They’re all still dreamers and they all believed him. Why should I not?”

  They’re all still dreamers.

  Such a barren phrase, so calmly spoken, so final. The small hands lay calm on the hound, held by an effort of will. Lifting one, Breaca kissed the blue-veined wrist, feeling the pulse run taut under her lips.

  She was lost, searching for a way to mend the unmendable, when Graine said, “Do you still wish the gods would take you from life?” It came as a whisper, so faint it could barely be heard.

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did. I heard you say it to Airmid. That was before they knew you had a fever and moved me out of your hut.” The grey eyes were very wide. The self-control by which Graine had kept her hands still was abandoned now. Small fingers gripped Breaca’s wrists, careless of the places where Roman cords had cut flesh. Their pressure grew with each word. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  So Nemain had said. It came no easier from the living than from a god.

  They waited, mother and daughter, in a place neither of them had thought to reach so soon or with so little warning.

  Words would not come. Breaca eased her hands free and opened her arms, and Graine came to her with a small, wordless cry. They clung together as mariners drowning in a storm neither has foreseen.

  Breaca pressed her lips to the crown of her daughter’s head and blew gently down, sending her breath to ease away the hurt as she had always done when the child was sick, or had lost something precious. It was not enough, but it gave comfort to them both.

  When she could speak, Breaca said, “Will you let me believe that I could have protected you better? Or sent you away sooner? Or simply that, as a mother, I should have the power to change the world and my heart breaks for knowing that I don’t?”

  “You can still change the world. The war host is waiting for you to do exactly that.” The words came muffled and were sent straight into her chest.