Dreaming the Bull (21 page)

Valerius had no idea what it meant.

Longinus, whose gods spoke in voices other than a bull’s, was at Valerius’ left. He said, “The hound will break free from the boy if Umbricius doesn’t get out of there. If it kills an officer of the auxiliary, they’ll kill the hound and hang the boy. Umbricius isn’t worth that.” They had never spoken of hounds and what they might mean in the past history of either man; there had never been the need. It was too late now, but perhaps still not necessary.

Valerius lifted a hand to shade his eyes from the late sun. A youth held the hound. In looking earlier, Valerius had failed to see that. He was not an exceptional youth in any way; his hair was dark, and he was of middling height and gangling. Nothing linked him to the god except that he was kneeling on his left knee with his arms about the hound.

Something metallic flashed in the air. The bull flinched and bellowed. The hound howled. The boy shouted something in the language of the Cornovii. Alone among the tribes, they worshipped the horned god before the Mother. The boy’s eyes met Valerius’ and begged for help. Uncounted others had done so in the steadings of the Trinovantes and he had ignored them, had slain their sisters, had hanged the ones who begged, silently or aloud. Then, the god’s breath had not whined in his ears nor the bull stared him down.

For the god, not for a dark-haired youth and his hound, Valerius pushed the Crow-horse close to the gate and shouted, “Umbricius, leave the bull alone.”

The Gaul was twice armed. A short throwing knife glinted in either hand. He was the son of a fisherman; where other men, given the right knife and the right pacing and
enough practice, could throw a knife and sometimes hit a target, Umbricius could throw any knife and place the point to within a finger’s width of his aiming place. Three other short, wide blades hung from a belt slung over his shoulder. He was known to carry nine, the number of luck. Of the remaining four, three lay on the turf around the bull. The last one thrown jutted, vibrating, from one massive shoulder. The gloss of the beast’s coat hid the blood.

“Umbricius, leave it. That’s an order.”

Umbricius was only an actuary, albeit on double pay. A decurion of any troop outranked him. The first decurion of another wing ranked so far above him that only a prefect could call back any order he gave. To ignore him was a flogging offence. Umbricius ignored him.

The gate was closed and there was no room for the pied horse to jump it. Gauls crowded close and none made any move to support the Thracians. Somewhere, far back, Valerius’ troop had gathered but they were too few and too far away, and anyway none of them could force a way through to the gate. Valerius and Longinus stood alone within a sea of Gauls. Men had died in similar circumstances and the threat of decimation had not brought forth the names of their killers. Valerius doubted whether either Scapula or Corvus would choose to slaughter ten men in a hundred of their foremost cavalry wing on the eve of a battle against warriors renowned for their use of the horse.

“Get Corvus.” Valerius said it without turning, in Thracian. The whine in his ears altered the sound of his voice.

Longinus said, “I’m not leaving you.”

“You are. I order it. If you ignore that, I’ll have you flogged with the Gaul. Do it.”

There was a breath’s silence, and room to feel shock and regret and to know that, in this company, it was not possible to take back the words. In Thracian, Valerius said, “Just go. Please.”

Longinus saluted, rigidly. His chestnut mare backed away from the gate. The Gauls were more willing to let her go than they had been to let her in.

Valerius turned the Crow-horse sideways to the gate. “Umbricius, if I have to come into that field and get you out, you’ll regret it more than anything else in your life.”

“The bull is mine. The boy insulted me.”

Valerius found suddenly that he liked the youth. He pitched his voice to carry. “Why? Did you try to take him and he refused you? Anyone with eyes in their head would refuse you. He should be given half a year’s advanced pay and offered a place in the wing for displaying uncommon good sense.”

The men about him were Gauls and he knew them well. In the press of bodies, men sniggered. Umbricius coloured, unflatteringly. “I did
not—
”

“Really? The bull then? I don’t think even gouging its eyes out will make it any more amenable. Face it, you’re going to spend tonight alone, and all the nights after this until one of Caratacus’ spears finds the dried goat turd that is your heart and breaks it open. Now get out of that field. If you go now, while Longinus is away, no-one need know that you were lax in following an order.”

It was said for the men closest to him because not all of them favoured Umbricius and Valerius had, after all, brought the horses over the barrier at the salmon-trap and kept them alive. Talking, he had given them time to remember that, and
to find that they did not want to hate him. They grinned and, when Valerius slid down from the Crow-horse, they crowded less close. He vaulted the gate, neatly, and was applauded. The hound bayed at him. The bull slashed the turf with its horns. Valerius prayed to the god that the beast knew he came to help, not to injure.

His presence changed the balance in the field. Before, Umbricius had had a clear run to the safety of the gate if the bull charged. With Valerius blocking his escape, the Gaul was trapped between two foes, both of whom wanted to kill him—three if he counted the hound.

However much one hated him, one could never say of Umbricius that he lacked courage. He grinned and drew two more knives from his chest belt and began to juggle them, flashily. He, too, was applauded. Gauls liked excellence and, if he was not beautiful, Umbricius could create a measure of beauty with his knives.

In the juggling, the Gaul took a single pace back and where he had stood between Valerius and the bull was now clear space. With his eyes on his knives, he said, “If the bull kills you, will they decimate the natives, do you think?”

“Maybe, after they have hanged you.” The bee-whine in Valerius’ ears made it difficult to think, more difficult still to remember the exactitudes of a language he had not spoken regularly for half a lifetime and had made some effort in the past two years to forget. He tried, feeling for the words, raising his voice so that it carried over the keening of the flint-pelted hound to the youth who held it. In the dialect of the dreamers that was common throughout the tribes, he said, “Take your hound and leave. I will keep the horned one safe.”

He felt the cut of the boy’s stare. The Cornovii worshipped the god as stag, not as bull, but they would know of Mithras and perhaps believe that one god or the other would keep the beast alive. Valerius spoke again, remembering more words. “Go now. The hound is in danger if you keep him here. If you care for him, you must take him to safety.”

A boy will care for the welfare of his hound when his own pride might require him to remain in danger. Peripherally, Valerius saw the youth clasp his hound closer and speak to it. The urgent keening ceased. The humming in Valerius’ ears did not, which was a pity but could not be altered. It had only come once before and then only briefly, when he had gathered the Crow-horse to ride him over the barrier at the salmon-trap. He had thought then that it signalled his imminent death and that only luck and the god had prevented it. He prayed again for the same luck, or for the god to keep safe his soul if he died. On the western edge of the field, the boy began to move towards the gate, dragging his hound with him.

A knife danced in an arc and sliced across the forehead of the bull. It bellowed and turned towards Valerius, who was closest. Horns as long as a man’s arm gouged the turf, flicking black soil to the treetops. Its eyes were dark as walnuts and too soft for true rage. The red-roan hide blackened around them, smudgily, as if one of the officers’ wives had applied paint in haste and the rain had smeared it. Valerius had long enough to see that and for part of him to want Longinus to see it and to share the joke before the eyes dipped and the horns became horizontal and the bull charged. It was not at all too soft for rage.

The world divided and became two; at once impossibly fast and infinitely slow. In each world, Valerius both met his death and avoided it. In the slower, he noted small things: the change in the timbre of the god’s voice in his ear, so that it became lower and calmer and was a pleasanter prelude to death; the sudden flurry of crows in the upper branches of the oaks when he had not realized any birds were watching; the tight jingle of armour as men in repose came suddenly to attention in the unexpected presence of an officer; the sound of Corvus’ voice, shouting.

“Bán! In the name of all the gods, get out of there!”

It was the wrong name spoken in the wrong language and with a depth of care he had not heard for four years. Shock spun the two worlds impossibly far apart. Longinus’ voice followed and could not heal the rift. “Julius! Move yourself, damn you.”

He was already moving. In the faster world, the one in which Valerius’ body moved without the care of his heart, a bull sent by Mithras came to kill him with the speed of a galloping horse. Because he had fought daily for years with a horse that moved with the whip of a snake, his body carried him sideways and down and rolled him like a tumbler to come up on his feet beside Umbricius. As in the best of battles, terror fired him, raising him up. He came to his feet with his sword in his hand and only the presence of Corvus stopped him from burying it in Umbricius. The Gaul saw it and lost the last vestige of colour. Valerius laughed. “Run for the trees. I wager your life against mine that the bull can outrun us both.” They were a spear’s throw from safety. It was not an impossible distance, only improbable. Umbricius ran. Valerius, still caught in two worlds, did not, but backed away slowly.

The bull reached the gate. If the men crowding outside had been calm with it, or had given the youth time to reach it, the beast might have stopped, but the gathered Gauls were afraid and excited and they stabbed at the great head and heaving roan hide with sword-tips and knives and the god that was not a god turned back into the field and charged again.

The youth was running, dragging his blue-pelted hound with him. He tripped on a tree root and let go of the collar. Caught in a field with two men and a rage-filled bull, the hound saw only that the one man it had come so recently to hate was running and could be hunted.

In the pantheon of the god’s beasts, only the hound is faster than the bull. Valerius saw it coming and knew that in this hunt, he was not the prey. In the slow world, in which his mind saw clearly, he saw the death of a Gaul and the death after it, inevitably more slowly, of a hound and a dark-haired youth who had knelt as did the god. In the fast world he stepped sideways and spun hard to his right and his sword sliced, back-handed, across the throat of the running hound.

The bull was only fractionally slower and it did not discriminate between one foe and the other. In the moment of the hound’s death, while his slow heart was seeking the words of a death-rite he had not heard spoken in over twenty years, Valerius saw the sky turn from lilac-grey to red-roan and then to black. In that same slow world, the god for whom that death-rite had no meaning took over his body, filling it. Without any will on his part, Valerius pressed himself flat to the turf and rolled sideways along his length as a child might roll down a snowy slope in winter, for the joy of it.

The god did not fill him with joy, but with splintering light and a unique, inexpressible pain that burned across his back on the side opposite the brand. Spurred by the power of hurt, Valerius thrust his hands down and launched up and forwards and where there had been turf and trees and the calling of crows was a stone wall, over which a god-filled man could vault as easily as he might vault onto a horse in the heart of battle. The bull collided with the wall behind him and knocked the top third of it down. The god kept the stones from striking Valerius’ head. He lay on his back in longer grass and felt the god leave him, taking his breath with it. Lying very still, unable to breathe, fighting to hold his vision clear when the world came at him in tunnels and was dark, what concerned him most was that he could still not remember the words of the death-rite for the hound.

Longinus reached him first. A hawk’s eyes filled the tunnels of light. Ungentle hands grasped his shoulders. A raw voice said, “Breathe, god damn you. Julius, breathe.”

A different voice said, no more gently, “He can’t. The bull smacked him across the back. If he’s lucky, he’s winded. If he’s not lucky, he’s got a back full of broken ribs and he’ll never breathe again. Let me look at him.”

It was into Corvus’ care that he fainted.

They kept him in the cool and the dark for five days. For the first three of those days, in delirium, he grieved over the death of a blue-pelted hound with rounded ears who had not drunk the blood of the bull. In his sleep, he strove endlessly to remember the rite of the battle-dead heard once in childhood and long forgotten. He searched the pathways of the dreams for the one to whom the rite was dedicated and did not find her. He railed against rejection and forgot that that god was not the one to whom he had given his life and dedicated his death. Later, remembering, he hunted the caverns of his soul and the uncertain vessel of his body for the lost light of the god that had so blinded him in the presence of the bull. He did not find that, either.

We ride to kill Caratacus.
On the third day, towards evening, he remembered that. The thought levered him up and he would have risen had not a long arm reached out and pushed him back.

“Not yet, I think. Not unless you want Longinus to lose your salary as well as his own.”

“Longinus? What has he—Theophilus? What in the god’s name are you doing here?”

Theophilus had been left behind in Camulodunum. The world was not, then, as Valerius remembered it. He collapsed onto the bed and spent the next several moments striving to breathe again through the hammering pain in his back thus created. His heart smashed into his ribs and the pulse soared in his ears like a high mountain waterfall. Over the noise of it, he could see Theophilus smiling. That was a good sign. Theophilus rarely smiled when death was near.