Dreaming the Bull (12 page)

He looked up at the grandmother, his eyes squeezed against the smoke. Suspicion filled him where before had been only resistance. “What are you protecting?”

“Nothing of yours.”

“Of course not. None of this is mine, is it? None of it has been about me.” The truth, so obvious once revealed, destroyed the last shreds of his pride. “I should have known you would only call on your gods to protect your own, not to seduce an enemy.” Resentment needled him into action where fear had not. He used her skinning knife to push aside more of the fire. The earth beneath was not as newly turned as he might have thought, but lines clearly showed where a hole had been dug. If he had to guess, he would have said it had been done four years before, at the time of the invasion, when an emperor came to Cunobelin’s dun and was welcomed by the treachery of an elder—a man who might
have betrayed his gods and his people but who would never enter this one place from which he had always been forbidden. Valerius, who believed he had lost the last of his scruples, stabbed into the centre of the hearth and heard the knife hit iron.

“Leave it! What harm it has done you is past. Leave it and go!”

The old woman was clawing at his arm, her fingers bird-boned to go with her bright, sharp eyes. He grasped both of her wrists in one hand and held her at arm’s length. With his other hand, he began to unearth the linen-wrapped blade the fire had hidden. It was longer and broader than any that had yet been broken on the smith’s anvil. When he grasped the hilt, the power of it raked like lightning up his arm, close to the threshold of bearing. The pain was cleansing, as the brand had been.

Speaking through it, Valerius said, “You offered me a choice that was no choice. My path was set long ago and not one step of it has been of my choosing. I take now what life I can and make the best of it, the very best. If there is a curse, then it came in childhood at Caradoc’s hand. I cannot escape it.” It hurt even to speak the man’s name aloud. He gave it as an offering to the dark and did not know why he did so.

She said, “It was not Caradoc branded you or killed your soul-friend. Was the brother’s death not vengeance enough?”

One other living man in all the world knew how Caradoc’s brother had died and he was not of the tribes. Swallowing, Valerius said, “Amminios did not pretend friendship and then betray it.”

Scathing, she said, “And so you take vengeance against those whom you do not know, in order better to attack the one whom you can never reach?”

The blade lay across his knees, liquid in the firelight. The hilt was bronze, of the oldest design, and the pommel bore the mark of the sun hound, carved in the time of his great-grandfather. In a wash of recognition that assuaged all the hurt, he knew exactly whose blade it was and why they had valued it so highly, risking everything on its protection. Joy, or something close to it, enwreathed him. His blood ran thin in his veins, leaping at his temples. He said, “I take no vengeance. I carry out the orders of those who command me. That is enough.”

“Then let it be enough. You are cursed, Julius Valerius, creature of the bull-slayer, servant of Rome, cursed in the names of the gods you have forsaken to live barren and empty, to know neither true fear, nor love, neither joy nor human companionship, but only the dull reflection of these; to kill without care, to hold the dying without grief, to find no satisfaction in the pure moments of your hate, to live only to carry out the orders of those who command you and to dream at night of what you have lost. The gods know you deserve it. They alone will know if it can end.”

She was shrill in her anger, old-woman-voiced, no longer the mouthpiece of the gods, but Valerius held the blade of Cassivellaunos, ancestor to Cunobelin, forerunner in lineage and in heart to the man he most hated of all those still living. He could have asked for no greater gift. The joy had run out of him, leaving him clear as a blown reed.

He cocked his head as the grandmother had done. “Do you wish to die by this blade, or another?” he asked.

She spat at him. Gobbets of phlegm sat proud on his cheeks. At his feet, embers of the swept fire smoked in the straw. Flames devoured it.

Valerius had control of himself now, had no need of further vengeance. Reasonably, he said, “If you walk out, they will hang you for fear of who you are and what you might do. If I leave you in here, they will let this place burn and you will die by the fire. If either of those is your choice, I will honour it. I am offering you a cleaner death.”

“Fool.” She whispered now. He could barely see her through the smoke. “Do you as you wish. I am already dead.”

It was not true, although he made it so, using the blade of Cassivellaunos, who had once surrendered to Caesar, laying another man’s blade at his feet. The grandmother died without resistance or sound. He laid her on her left side on a bed of straw with her head towards the west. “Go to your gods. Tell them I serve another now and am content.” He believed it. He had rarely felt so calm. The flames were eating her feet when he left.

Outside, it had begun to snow again, the gift of one god or the other to cover the destruction. The body of the gold-haired warrior had been cut down and laid on the pile of the burning shields; fragments of greasy smoke fluttered up past falling flakes. A warrior among the women saw the man leave the hut and what he carried and raised a cry that was keener and carried more pain than the ululation for the dead. In a cacophony of women’s voices, Valerius walked forward and offered the blade to Regulus.

“This belonged to Cassivellaunos, ancestor to Caradoc, who leads the uprising in the west. They have kept this blade
in the hope that the last living son of Cunobelin will return and lead them to freedom. Longinus Sdapeze is both armourer and master of horse for his troop. His father was a smith. He will be able to break it. I thought you might like to see it happen.”

The snow continued, fitfully. beneath its shroud, the disarming of the tribes progressed. Troops rode out fresh each morning and returned each evening smoke-stained and bloody. Word of the events of that first day spread amongst the natives and the men alike and all pretence at courtesy vanished. Roundhouses were stripped and searched. Within three days, the second of the women’s places had burned to the ground and the hidden weapons had been raked from the ashes as puddles of waxen iron.

Soon, the killings began. In one steading, where armed warriors had been waiting for the auxiliaries and killed three before the troops retreated and called in aid, every adult male was hanged. The women were spared; to have hanged them would have been to acknowledge their status as warriors and if Scapula was not ready to do that, then neither were his subordinates. News of the savagery of the reprisals spread but did not stop others from rebelling. In places where fear constrained the adults, the children staged their own revolts, hurling rocks and sticks at the auxiliaries.
Always it was the youths near to their warrior’s tests who broke first, those who had grown in a free land, who had dreamed from infanthood of becoming heroes and wielding the blades of their ancestors and could not bear to watch both hopes and blades destroyed. Orders had been given that children were not to be harmed, but the line was fine and both sides knew that it was only a matter of time.

In the middle of the month, after a fifth trooper had died to a grief-stricken warrior, Scapula ordered that the executed natives should be denied their burial rites and their bodies hung instead outside the steadings as a warning. Neither he nor any of the officers specified the height at which they should be suspended and the auxiliaries, acting in haste, did not hoist them high, so that, by the old moon, wolves from the forest had migrated into the pastures, seeking easy meat. Soon, places which had been safe became unsafe and four men of every troop spent each night protecting the horse paddocks where the remounts grazed. The troops grew impatient and edgy. Roundhouses began to burn as well as the women’s places. Smoke rose to the sullen sky and gathered there. Breathing became a chore.

Valerius’ rank exempted him from night watch on the paddocks but it did not free him from responsibility, nor smooth his sleep. On his return from the raid on Heffydd’s farmstead, with the grandmother’s curse loud in his ears, he had gone alone to the consecrated cellar beneath the centurion’s house in Camulodunum and had spent the hours of darkness alone in prayer. It had not been a quiet night and at no time had he felt the true breath of the god, but he had believed afterwards that he had been heard. At the very least, Mithras kept the many and multiplying dead from invading
Valerius’ dreams. Mithras’ powers did not extend, apparently, to keeping at bay the recurring faces of the living: of a dark-haired girl with a rock in her hand; of her mother, pulling her back; of the endless storming sea of women staring their accusations and their hatred.

Nor could it remove the constant flicker in his arm, as of lightning, that had come from Cassivellaunos’ sword. The grandmother had been right in that much: the blade had sung to him and what was left of his soul sang back its regret that the song had been broken and would never return. Each night, lying awake, he remembered the grandmother’s curse and did not know if he should welcome the death-within-life that it promised or fight against it. Either way, by the end of the month, when the killing was at its height, he was too short on sleep to care.

He took to walking the perimeter of the horse paddocks alone, armed only with his belt knife. It became his offering and his open challenge to the god.
I am here, poorly armed and vulnerable. Protect me if you can.

He walked as if blindfold. Distant fires flared scarlet on the horizon. If he looked at them they left a cast in his eyes so that the night around seemed darker after. The sentries’ torches offered unreliable light, prone to moving just when one needed them most, or simply to burning out. In the absolute dark, Valerius came intimately to know the shadows of the hedgerow and the shapes of standing horses and he could name each one by its outline seen against the grass, without moonlight or starlight, simply black on black. Thus, even on the night of the old moon, a month after the first disarming, when the clouds pressed down on the earth, bleeding grey mist over the red blur of the shield-fires, he
knew that the shadow in the third paddock was not that of the Thracian decurion’s second mount alone, but that a man stood beside it.

Drawing his knife, he crouched in the lee of the hedge. The horse was a narrow-boned chestnut gelding; not a mount he would have chosen, but reliable in its way, and it knew him. He pursed his lips and made a hushing noise, like the soft sliding of snow. The beast turned its head and shuffled forwards, too idle to raise a trot. The man-shadow walked at its side, one hand gripping the mane, pacing its footfalls to that of the beast.

Just beyond killing range, it spoke. “If you kill me, the first
turma
of the Prima Thracum loses its master of horse. Do you want that?”

“Longinus Sdapeze.” Valerius stood up slowly. The knife stayed in his hand. “Why are you here?”

“Tonight, I prefer the company of horses to that of men.” The man took a step sideways and the outline of the gelding divided and became two. Like Valerius, the Thracian chose to walk unarmed and unarmoured. In the dark, still beyond reach of the knife, he saluted, a thing he rarely did these days.

Too formally, he said, “I did not come to disturb your travels. There are paddocks enough for both of us. We need only walk in opposite directions.”

“Thank you. In a moment.” Valerius sheathed his knife. It was a plain one, drawn from the armoury. The hilt was of elm and the pommel of unadorned iron printed with the Capricorn. He had not yet grown used to the feel of it. He kept the heel of his hand on the hilt and rubbed his thumb over the wood. “I heard your decurion hanged a pregnant girl today. Is it true?”

“Yes. I’m amazed only that you heard of it. Amongst all the carnage, I would not have thought the death of one more would reach the ears of Valerius. Unless, like the native dreamers, he knows everything?”

Longinus sounded sour and weary, and angry with himself as much as others. Valerius stepped beyond the shade of the hedge and walked down, as the other must, towards the gap in the hedge where a man could squeeze through but not a horse. As they met, he said, “I know only what men tell me—that your troop entered northern Eceni territory and they met – or created – resistance; that of the thirty-two men who rode out, only eight came back alive and that you were one of them.” Valerius had not asked that, but the man who gave him the information had found it necessary to tell him so repeatedly, as if he might care. “I know that the decurion who gave the order for the execution was one of the first killed, and that you were injured, but not fatally. I wonder, in all of this … carnage, that you mourn a dead girl.”

“Do you? Then you know nothing of Thracian honour. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, not long into womanhood. She had the warrior’s braids, but no kill-feathers. They had killed her lover whose child she carried and she stood over his body as a hound protects the one it loves. It took three men to overwhelm her and one of those died. The decurion ordered her hanged with the warriors. She was pregnant, Valerius, and it made no difference.”

The first woman, the first child. A barrier broken. If Valerius were not so hellish tired, either or both of these might matter more. “Was it that sparked the violence?”

“Yes. The people would not stand and see her die. Were she mine, I would have killed for her, also.” Longinus spat.
“Romans! They think women and children are fit sacrifices in war and anything less than crucifixion smacks of leniency. And they call us barbarians.”

You would as well crucify their children.

It may come to that.

The night was thick with fog and frost and unspent dreams. Valerius stared into nothing and waited for anger, or regret, or an understanding of the pain, for the reality of Eceni deaths to overwhelm him. Nothing came but weariness and visions of worse to come. In a while, thinking not of himself, he asked, “Have you daughters?”