Dreaming the Bull (11 page)

Valerius was already behind Gaudinius when the warrior rocked back on his heels and it was to Valerius that the youth’s eyes rose. They held a defiance, a guarded question and perhaps, in their depths, a plea. Word had passed, then, that Valerius spoke their language. What had not passed with it, because it was not known, was the depth of his loathing for their people and the identity of the man who had spawned it.

The moment of decision was not without turmoil; Valerius still believed in the laws of honour and maintained an abiding respect for personal dignity. Had the warrior’s hair been other than gold, had his nose been less distinctive,
had his eyes not been that particular iron-grey so that one could less readily imagine Caradoc’s smile beneath them and Caradoc’s soul within, what followed might have been different. They were not. The Crow-horse pushed between the man and the crowd.

“Stop.”

Gaudinius had stooped to pick up the sword. He froze and then stood, empty-handed.

Valerius said, “He’s giving you a false weapon. This is not the blade of his ancestors.”

He said it in Latin, as was required, and then repeated it in Trinovantian. The scuffle had been noted. Already, Longinus was at the pied horse’s shoulder. Others ran to assist, forming a defensive knot. Valerius registered their presence as he would register the arrival of reinforcements in battle—distantly and without taking his attention from the enemy who would kill him. His gaze was locked entirely with that of the young, corn-haired warrior who had just tried to save the blade of his ancestors.

The youth was a good actor; he could control his face, but not his eyes. Anger followed shock and was followed in turn by a brief, swamping despair. Valerius knew that feeling intimately, the desolation of the soul when what one has most feared becomes reality. He knew also where it led. He was ready long in advance for the moment when the warrior took refuge in action.

The blade lying flat on the beaten earth was not the one with which the corn-haired man had grown to adulthood, not the one with which he had killed so often in battle, but it was good and he had used it enough to have the feel for its weight and swing. Certainly it was enough to kill a young
officer who had lost his battle-sharpness. Gaudinius died where he stood, spraying blood from his opened throat. A Thracian auxiliary would have been next if Longinus had not slammed into the man’s shoulder, hurling him sideways so that the killing blow cut only the flesh of his upper arm.

The warrior backed against the wall of the roundhouse and was joined by two others and, yes, finally, as had been clear all along, the red-headed smith was one of them. Valerius felt a moment’s exhilaration, tainted with an unexpected sorrow that one with such dignity should choose to die in such a manner, and then the Crow-horse, following a barely articulate thought, rose above the gathering mêlée and drove a smashing forefoot down in a blow not even a giant could resist. The beast relied on his rider to block the weapon that would slice open its guts and Valerius did so, wielding a cavalry sword that was the best Rome could offer and did not come close to the quality of the blades that it met.

Yet it was enough and the sparks flew high over the thatched roof of the roundhouse and Regulus was yelling, “Don’t kill them all. I want one to hang,” and then, too soon, it was over, with the corn-haired warrior alive and the smith and a woman dead, but not one with dark hair and an unruly daughter, for which, surprisingly, Valerius found he was grateful.

The governor had wanted an example and he was given it. They flogged the corn-haired warrior before they hanged him and it seemed likely he would have died of the one if they had waited too long for the other. A half-troop of auxiliaries took a pole from the wood store and balanced it on two uprights between the harness hut and the granary and raised the man
until only the tips of his toes touched the ground. In the time that he took dying, which was not short, Regulus divided the auxiliaries into three groups and sent them out: one to guard the natives, one to collect and burn their shields—now forfeit on the governor’s orders—and the third to search each of the roundhouses and huts for other weapons.

Sabinius said, “One of the roundhouses belongs to the priest. He’s a citizen.”

Regulus spat. “And one of his warriors murdered my armourer. If he resists, hang him alongside his man.”

All pretence of civilization, of dignity and courtesy, was gone. The search was brutal and effective. For each weapon already surrendered, they found spear-heads, battle knives or full blades hidden in the thatch, under the beds, in the small, secret places in the corners.

Valerius, who knew better than most where to look, took Sabinius and Umbricius and searched the granary and the harness hut where he found a cache of spears bound up in leather hidden beneath a stack of stiff, unworked hides. Out in the open, the auxiliaries broke the hafts and threw them on the fire made of the shields. The spear-heads were added to the bundles of broken blades to be taken away by the auxiliaries when they left.

One place remained untouched, a small hut on the western edge of the enclosure. Half a dozen hounds bayed from behind the black mare’s hide that blocked the doorway but that was not the reason the men were reluctant to enter. On the lintel, the marks of Nemain and Briga were clear; a crescent moon hung above the sinuous waves of a river, a wren circled above a foaling mare. Newly carved and dyed in red, a she-wolf stalked a skinny goat, a ram and a bull.

It may not have been widely known that the Quinta Gallorum took the Capricorn as its emblem, nor the Prima Thracum Aries, but anyone who had watched the governor’s arrival closely and seen the display of standards could have deduced it. Very few outside the legions should have known the significance of the bull, but the troops standing outside the hut knew exactly what it meant, both for themselves and for the ones who had cut and painted the image. Half a dozen gathered a spear’s length from the doorway, making the sign to ward off evil. None would go inside.

Valerius stood closer, listening to the hounds within. His brand ached. Sabinius joined him. He was braver than most. “We should take some of the women and make them go in ahead of us,” he said.

“No. It is safer if we go in alone.”

Sabinius stared at him. “We?”

Valerius smiled, a thing he had not done in days. “No, just me. Bring me a lit torch and then wait at the fires. If I don’t come out soon, burn the place without coming in. Whatever’s inside will be destroyed in the flames.”

“Including you.”

“Yes. You can come in and look for me if you want but I wouldn’t advise it. No-one will blame you if you don’t.”

Sometime in the day he had remembered the words of Trinovantian that were used to calm hounds. He spoke them now. By the time Sabinius returned with the torch, the beasts within were almost silent. In the steading was an equal hush. Feeling the eyes of every woman in the tribe burn into his back, Valerius pushed back the mare’s hide and entered.

It was not a big hut. The hounds were tethered on either side of the door. They strained against their collars, whining
hoarsely, choking themselves in their need to reach him. Speaking softly, he loosed them one by one, ruffling his hands through the coarse hair of their necks, and they gathered about him, testing the smells of blood, hate and fear. They were bigger than any hound of the legions and had been kept fit. If the day had gone differently, he might have been able to trade for one. Now, the natives would cut the throat of any hound he asked for rather than let him take it.

“Go now.” He said it in their own tongue, opening the door-flap, and the beasts spilled out in a joyful rush, not knowing that the world to which they returned had changed beyond all recognition.

With the hounds gone, the place seemed bigger. The torch burned feebly, as if lacking air. Within moments, it went out. Valerius could have left the flap open for more light but did not. A fire was lit on the western wall. Thin smoke rose to the roof and passed out through a baffled hole. The flame gave light enough. Searching along the junction of wall and floor near the door, he found a knife honed to razor sharpness and put it to one side. Instinct, and three nights’ dreams, told him there was more than that to be found.

“You should ask my leave, dreamer, before you take my blade.”

He nearly killed her. His sword sliced through smoke and a brief, curling flame and stopped only because his mind caught up with his body and a single word of what he had just heard made no sense. Keeping his guard, he relit the torch to give himself more light and saw, hunched on the far side of the fire in the darkest corner, a woman older
than any he had seen outside in the steading. Her face was the creased bark of the oldest oak, her hair had thinned almost to baldness, leaving white strands trailing from a pink scalp. Her eyes were oddly clear where he would have expected cloudedness. She was a true grandmother and there had been none like her amongst the gathered crowd. He should have noticed that and had not. He cursed his inattention.

The old woman watched him with the sharp regard of a hunting bird, a thrush seeking beetles in dung. Unbelievably, she smiled. “Welcome, dreamer. I have waited since dawn. You are not in the hurry I had thought.”

That word again, and a tone that came straight from his childhood.
Your mark could have been the horse. Or the hare
…The skin crept on Valerius’ neck. “I am not a dreamer,” he said.

“Are you not, so? Your mother would be sad to hear it.”

“My mother?” The sword quivered in his hand, a thing alive seeking blood. With effort he restrained it. “My mother is dead.”

“As is her son in soul, it seems, if not in body.” The old woman grinned at his discomfort. “Why are you here?”

“To gather weapons. Rome would have peace. This is a means to achieve it.”

“If by peace you mean subjugation, yes.” She cocked her head. “So, if you will not answer clearly, I will ask it another way. Why do you gather weapons for Rome who was born to fight against it?”

He swayed on his feet. In the darkness was the echo of the god’s silence of the wine-cellar crypt. In a voice below the threshold of hearing, his mother spoke the litany of his nightmares.
You are forsaken. The gods condemn you to life.

Hoarsely, he said, “I have no choice.”

“Ha! There speaks a man of the bull.” She was laying fine, dry twigs on the fire. Small flames danced in the rolling shadows. Smoke rose to Valerius’ nostrils. An old, forgotten part of him coded its separate strands: hawthorn, rowan, yew. He sneezed on something harsher than any of those and was confused until it came again and he recognized the bitterness of singed hair. No grandmother burned animal hair without evoking the strength it offered.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“See for yourself.”

She passed him a handful of twigs from the pile at her side. He used its light to seek out those bound with hair. Unwinding one, he found what he already knew would be there: curled hairs in red and white taken from the poll of a red and white patched bull. He dropped them all on the fire. Thick smoke fanned up to fill his head. In the density of it, he heard many women’s voices, laughing, and the bellow of a bullock at castration. The bones of his skeleton crept from his flesh. He tasted death and a fear that battle had never brought him. Again, more desperately, he said, “I have no choice. I had none in the time of battles and I have none now.”

“You are wrong. There is always choice and no oath is binding but we make it so.” Her voice was clear and louder than the rushing in his ears. She waved her hands through the dense air. “See, I offer another choice clearly now. Turn round. There is a cloak behind you. Take it and put it on.”

He had not seen the cloak. The folds hung softly, of finest wool. Lifting it towards the firelight, he found it was blue, the colour of the sky after rain, with a border worked in
russet. His sister had worn a cloak of exactly that colour the last time he had fought at her side. She wore the grey of Mona now, and despised him. The gorge rose in his throat. In his hollow heart, his mother said a second time,
You are forsaken.

With shaking hands, he returned the cloak to its peg. Like a child, he said, “I can’t wear this. If I walked out with it on, they would hang me.”

The grandmother mocked him. “There are other choices, dreamer. You can wear it openly or in your heart. Either way you would find the welcome you crave.”

“I crave nothing.”

“Liar.” She was standing now, a small thing, barely up to the god’s brand on his chest. Her voice carried the power of centuries. No man could withstand it. “All your life you have craved but one thing—a true belonging to your people and your gods. I offer it now, a gift freely given. Leave here now, knowing it possible, or know yourself by your own hand for ever cursed.”

“No.”

The one thing the god had taught him was how not to hear the voice of deity. In the darkness of the crypt, that voice had not been directed solely at him. Here, in the bitter blackness of a place his mere presence defiled, he was the single point on which it focused, resounding in his soul. The brand on his chest burned as if new, holding him captive in his body. His mother’s voice was silent, withdrawing even that support. He put his hands over his ears and blocked out the gods, the crackle of the fire, the voice of an old woman, weaving him to a death beyond which was only desolation.

“No.” It came the second time through tight teeth, robbed of conviction. The bull-smoke wreathed his head,
holding him as ivy holds oak. Tendrils invaded his mind, eating at his sense of self. The old woman loomed over him, crooning in the tones of an elder grandmother, of
the
elder grandmother. “Take it, child. It is your birthright. The man who made it was a dreamer before he was a warrior. It will sing for you.” She was not speaking only of the cloak. Something greater than bull-hair burned on the fire.

“No!”

In her desperation, in her flagrant use of power, was the strength he needed. Thrusting her away, he kicked the fire apart, scattering hair and hide and burning embers across the floor until the smoke billowed thick and clean. It caught straw and flared up. By the new light he saw that, where the heart of the fire had been, the earth was not packed flat, but friable, as if newly dug.