Dreaming the Serpent-Spear Page 4

  The pain in her back was less now. She lifted her blade. “Will you match against me? So that I can find how I might live, or die, in battle?”

  It was a fanciful offer, only half serious. Valerius threw her a grin that was layered with too many meanings to be read. His blade came fast after it, before she was ready.

  She swung her own blade up to block and braced herself for the pain of impact, but he was already gone, the iron flashing blue in the moonlight, a twisting fish that tapped her own sluggard sword and danced away, and tapped and away and again and again, fast and fast and too fast to follow, until she forgot herself and her pain and raised her own blade in both fists and brought it cleaving down towards his head, screaming his name as if they were in battle.

  “Valerius!”

  He did block that one, hard, slamming his blade crosswise against hers so that the jar ran from her wrists to her arms to her shoulders and on to the ruined flesh of her back. She stopped abruptly and was still, grinding her teeth and swearing aloud. Sweat poured from her as much as it had done in the fever. The sound of her breathing rasped between the trees.

  “And so?”

  Breaca lifted her head. Her brother was breathing a little faster than he had been, but had not broken sweat. He studied her and said nothing, only cocked one brow, dryly.

  “If you can remember never to lift your blade like that without a shield-warrior on either side to protect your flanks, you will be perfectly able to lead. If you forget, then the first raw recruit with a spear will run you through and our war of liberation will be over before it starts. Can you remember, do you think?”

  “Maybe. If there’s nothing else happening that might distract me. Which doesn’t change the fact that I’m not yet fit enough to lead any army into battle. You’re more than fit. You know Rome as no-one else does and you have led more armies to victory than anyone else. You’re the obvious choice.”

  “Am I?” Valerius sat down suddenly, folding his legs beneath him. Turning towards the gods’ pool, he said, “Graine? We have nearly five thousand untested warriors who have gathered in the Boudica’s name. Do you think I should lead them if your mother is not fit? What would your brother Cunomar say if I did?”

  Breaca watched her daughter step over and sit beside him with an air of confidence and ease, as if she saw in him only the dreamer of Nemain, trained on Mona, and not the other, equal half, which was Roman.

  Graine said, “Cunomar remembers the prophecy the ancestor-dreamer made to Mother. Find the warrior with the eyes and heart of a dreamer to lead them and you may prevail. The vision showed a warrior leading the final charge against Rome. My brother wants to be that warrior. He always has. Then you came and were not only the man who abandoned his father in Gaul, but now a warrior and a dreamer and brother to the Boudica—and you saved his life. He owes you everything and you are all he has ever wanted to be. How can he not hate you? Hating you, how could he follow you as leader?”

  Valerius looked up. The irony and the humour were gone. “Breaca?”

  She took time to slide her blade back to its sheath and wrap the belt loops round it. “I had forgotten that, I’m sorry. It seems I have forgotten a great many things that matter.” Her hands and the sword’s hilt were greasy with sweat. She wiped the serpent-spear with the sleeve of her tunic, so that the metal returned to the dull matt her father had made.

  After a while, when no-one had spoken to fill the silence, Valerius rose and went to kneel by the altar stone, and the hole that was under it. He leaned in as Graine had done, so that the upper half of his body was hidden, but delved deeper, digging his fingers through the earth in the floor of the pit that Graine had found.

  He emerged some time later and sat still with his head bowed over the slim wrapping of birch and bull’s hide that he had brought out. His hound was visible by his side then, and remained so afterwards through all that followed; the dream-hound that had been Hail and was still Hail, but no longer living.

  “Could you come with me closer to the pool?” he said. “I would have Nemain also bear witness to this.”

  Breaca was still lost in the memories of Cunomar and his ambition. Even as she sat down and Valerius began to unwrap the thongs of the bull, sacred to Mithras, and the birch, sacred to Nemain, she still had no idea what it was that he held.

  Then he smoothed the linen flat and sat back and a new, quite different blade lay in the moonlight: her father’s. Not the fast, light cavalry blade that he had made for her, but Eburovic’s own sword, the great war blade of their ancestors, which had come to him down the lineage of warriors, passed from father to daughter and mother to son since the Eceni first came into being.

  It was longer than her own sword by a hand’s length, and broader at the hilt, and the balance was different: not an easy blade to use, but lethal in the right hands. The shape on the pommel was the feeding she-bear that had been Eburovic’s dream long before Ardacos of the Caledonii brought the cult of the bear from the cold north to the eastern lands of the Eceni.

  Breaca stared at it, empty. She wanted to feel something and could not, only thought that she had heard nothing to warn her, neither the song of the blade nor her father’s voice, and both should have been there.

  She said, “Valerius? How did you come by this? It was hidden beyond any man’s reach.”

  “Eburovic led me to it. That is, his ghost did, and I had not time to ask…when did he die, Breaca? In the invasion wars, with Macha?”

  “He was killed in the battle in which you were taken from us.”

  She had forgotten that he would not know, that so much of his own history was missing from his life. She watched him take this fact, and fit it into the pattern of his loss. More gently, she said, “Has he given the war blade of the ancestors to you? That would be fitting. He raised you as his son, and felt for you as if you were. With that blade, you could lead the war host and be honoured for it.”

  “Thank you, but no. The blade and the leadership that goes with it are, I think, for another.”

  He stared out a moment at the moon’s disc on the pond, and pressed the knuckle of his thumb to his breastbone. Quite close, an owlet screeched for its parents, and was answered.

  Valerius said, “The spirit of your father—of our father—gave the blade into my keeping only until such time as he should ask me to relinquish it. He has given no sign yet of whose it should be, but we’re moving towards war which will take us away from Eceni lands. If we leave it buried here, we may never come back. I think it’s time it had a new owner, who knows how to use it, and has the right. I don’t want to lead your war host. With this blade as his gift, Cunomar may yet grow into the leadership of—”

  “No.”

  They said it together, mother and daughter, with one voice.

  The owl chick screeched again, in underscore.

  In the quiet afterwards, Valerius asked, “Why not?”

  “If my grandchild ever wields my blade, know that the death of the Eceni will follow. I trust you to see it does not happen.”

  Breaca had not meant to say it with the voice of her father, but it came out so, echoing across the gods’ pool.

  In her own voice, she said, “Eburovic’s spirit spoke when we hid the blades. Cunomar was there; he heard it as clearly as any of us. One source of his grief is that he will never wield his grandfather’s blade. If you tried to give it to him, he would refuse it.”

  “And likely think I was trying to bring ruin on the entire Eceni nation, which would hardly improve his trust of me. I see.” Valerius pressed long, lean fingers to his eyes. Some time later, hollowly, he said, “I have no sense, then, of what your father would have wanted. I can hear no word from him or the gods, except that we need to wait until his wish is made more clear. In the meantime…”

  His hands had dropped from his face. His eyes were oddly amber. In quite a different voice he said, “In the meantime, there may be more pressing things to consider and we may no longer be alive to co
nsider them. There are fires lit in the east.”

  Breaca turned as he had turned and looked at the place where the moon had been and where should now be black night and was instead pale, flickering light reflected off a boiling sky.

  Dawn had come early, many dawns; she could count four smaller fires beyond the first and the greatest, four columns of smoke, which became white and black in steady rhythm.

  She said, “Cunomar,” because no-one else would, and then, “He’s attacked one of the watchtowers and set off a signal chain.”

  Valerius said, “He was forbidden to attack either the Ninth in the north or the city of Camulodunum to the south. We had not thought he would bring both on us at once.”

  Very briefly, her brother was quite easily read: raw anger was followed by frustration and both gave way to the wry, dry humour that was his response to most things, except that, this time, a hint of astonished admiration coloured it.

  Valerius whistled slowly, and ran his tongue across his teeth. To Breaca, thoughtfully, he said, “We can’t afford to be caught between the hammer of the Ninth and the anvil of Camulodunum. But the centurion in charge in the city has just lost three cohorts of fighting men to the western wars; he won’t try to march his veterans out against us until he knows what it is he faces. What he will do, as soon as there’s daylight, is send messengers north with all speed to the Ninth legion asking that they march down to assault us from the rear. If we can intercept them, there’s a way we could yet make a victory of this.” His gaze took in all of her. “Could you do that?”

  “No.” The sweat was still wet on her face from their fight. “We’ve spoken of this already. I can’t ride a horse faster than a walk or wield a blade for the time it would take to fight a full battle. I’m not fit to lead the war host into conflict.”

  “I know. But I have an idea, and if it can be made to work, there won’t be a full battle. All you have to do is kill a messenger in front of the war host so that they can believe they’ve seen you fight. I’ll be there, I’ll call him in and, if necessary, I’ll hold him for you. Will you trust me to do that much and keep you safe?”

  He asked it lightly, this brother she had once tried to kill. He had not done so before, only offered her his service until the end of his days. There was doubt in his eyes that she had not seen before.

  Breaca took his hands between her own. Close by, the owls hunted and a shrew died, shrilly. With no irony intended at all, she said, “Valerius of the Eceni, I trust you with my life.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Valerius stopped the messenger. Breaca killed him.

  Sedge grass swayed over the dead man’s face, pushed by the dawn wind. A skein of geese mourned him thinly, forlorn echoes strung across the grey sky. Where he lay at the edge of the marsh, the air was fresh with spring and the hope of freedom. To the east where the watchtowers smouldered, greasy smoke stained the skyline, delivering the smell of charred bodies onto the wind.

  Valerius lowered the body down from the horse, taking care not to break the seal on the message pouch. The messenger had been young and his face held no fear; he had believed Valerius a friend, for the red cloak that he wore and the officer’s plume in his helmet and his easy, urbane, soldier’s Latin that had offered security and a better route past the wet fenland with the marsh to one side and forest to the other and only an open unprotected pathway for a man alone to ride through.

  He had been terrified because all five of his companions had died to Dubornos’ slingstones and Ardacos’ bear-spears and he was alone and in need of a friendly face. Calling his welcome and his relief, he had not known death was close until it claimed him. His soul had departed quickly, called to freedom by the cries of the geese.

  Behind, nearly five thousand warriors of the Eceni, with a smattering of others from as far north as the Caledonii and as far south as the Durotriges, stepped out of the forest. Their line extended from the marsh to the far horizon, a glitter of bright blades and spears and round, painted shields and the occasional shimmer of cavalry mail or legionary armour, stolen from other dead men of Rome.

  They were as diverse as any group of warriors: their hair was red-gold and bronze, with the occasional dark throwback to the ancestors, and braided high at the temple and left without ornament to show they had not yet killed in battle. Very few wore helmets; the Boudica did not, and never had done, and they had gathered in her name, answering her call, holding fast to the belief in her immortality, even when the rumours spread of her sickness and closeness to death.

  She was not dead. She had killed a man cleanly in sight of them all, reversing in a single stroke their waning hope of the past thirteen days. That stroke may have lacked the brilliance that had always set the Boudica apart from the greater mass of warriors, but there were few amongst those watching who had the experience to understand the distinction between the mundane and the truly great, and fewer still who could see such a thing in the flash of a knife across a man’s throat.

  Valerius was one of those few, but he had already seen all that he needed in the brief contest by the gods’ pool. The details of that were something private between them, shared only in outline with those of her closest circle who knew already the reality of what Breaca could do and what she could not, which was the greater part.

  The challenge for all of them was to find ways to keep her alive until she could find her way back to who she had been; or it became clear that she would never do so. They had not yet spoken openly of that.

  The warriors of the war host, who saw exactly as much as they were shown, stood in silence at first, in honour of the dead, and the gods’ gift of the morning and the shedding of blood that signalled the start of the war for which they had gathered and trained. Then a woman among them raised her blade in one hand and her shield in the other and set up the war chant of the Boudica, that the oldest had heard first on the banks of the great river at the time of the legions’ invasion and the youngest had only heard sung quietly, in secret, through all the years since.

  The sound grew and grew and spread out across the marsh, silencing the wind and the geese, and became a roar that might have reached north to the IXth legion and south to the veterans of Camulodunum and west to the Roman governor of Britannia in his assault on Mona and all that was sacred.

  Under the wane of it, Breaca said to Valerius, “I should talk to them. Could you find a way to help me mount the horse? It’ll be easier from there.”

  The messenger’s horse was a pale strawberry roan, trained to stand where its rider had fallen. It remained steady while Valerius knelt at its side and spread his officer’s cloak wide, and removed his helmet with deliberate ceremony and offered his knee for Breaca to mount so that it looked to the watching warriors as if they had arranged it ahead to show how Rome must kneel before the Boudica’s greater strength.

  They cheered for that as well, and gave her time again to catch her breath.

  She looked better mounted; she had always fought best on horseback. The morning sun caught the copper of her hair and set light to it so that even sick-grey and slick with the sweat of old fevers, with the mist leaching the colour from the air and a pale-washed horse beneath her, she shone as the watchers expected.

  What followed had not been prepared at all, except that each of those who had cared for Breaca had imagined something like this, and had prayed for it, and had come ready to act if the moment allowed.

  Thus, Airmid lifted up the torc of the Eceni, which had been saved from the procurator’s looting, and set it about Breaca’s neck so that it, too, caught the sun and blazed gold, marking her as royal and, more than that, lending her the strength of her lineage. Ardacos gave her a new shield painted with the mark of the serpent-spear in red on Eceni blue and Valerius passed her the blade with the serpent-spear hilt that they had retrieved from beneath Briga’s altar.

  “Warriors of the war host, you who have gathered in the name of victory…”

  She could not be heard by the full five
thousand, no-one expected that, but she sent her words to reach the oath-holders and spear-leaders and clan chiefs who stood as of right in the front lines of the massed host and could be relied on to repeat her message, word for word, to their followers.

  “As you know, the legionaries of the Twentieth have been ordered out of Camulodunum and are marching west to aid the governor’s war against Mona. The time is ripe now to attack the city that Rome claims as her capital in our land. We have only to rid ourselves first of the Ninth legion, the legionaries who wait in their fortress to the north and will move swiftly to attack us at the first word of insurrection…”

  It was better than Valerius had dared hope. He stepped back from the horse and listened to a woman who was barely fit to fight a full day’s battle nevertheless speak of leading five thousand untrained warriors to war and victory as if these two were certain; who, better than that, was able to reduce to a few, crisp, god-filled sentences the arguments of half the previous night and make them sound as if they were planned policy, as if Cunomar’s act of madness, and the risks that followed from it, were part of a strategy set in motion months, if not years, in advance.

  “…my son Cunomar, who had the honour to strike the first blows of this war…”

  She stretched out her arm and Cunomar came to stand beside his mother, a tall, lean youth, made taller by the hand’s length of lime-stiffened hair set straight up from his head. He wore only a waist skin held in place by his knife belt and the marks of the she-bear were freshly painted about his body. Even for those who knew the ways of the bear cult, he stood apart as something new and different, or possibly very old, which was worth more.

  The loss of his ear was part of that difference. He was no longer beautiful in the way he had been when Valerius knew him in Rome and Gaul. Then, he had been a bitter, clumsy child, living in the shadow of his father’s genius, for ever striving to match the legend, not the reality. His beauty had been of the fragile kind that graced the Roman salons, so that only those who wished the best for him could have said there was a promise of strength at the core.