Dreaming the Bull (25 page)

Of all she said, the last words burned deepest. Before the singer could reply, a horn sounded nearby. Bear claws rattled in rhythm against the hollowness of a skull. A falcon screamed from another fire, a sound to chill the hearts of the enemy. The morning came alive with moving warriors, riding and running in waves down the mountainside. Dubornos felt himself pushed apart from his fellows, a husk with his tongue glued stiff with the shame of the past.

Gwyddhien lifted her sheathed sword from a rock and looped the carry-thong over her head. A spear and shield hung together from her saddle bow. Each bore a frog, painted green, the mark of Airmid’s dream. Her hand once again gripped Dubornos’ shoulder. He felt the prints for half a day.

“You have chosen the path of greatest courage,” she said. “We all honour you for it.”

“I do what I must.”

“I know. That doesn’t make it easy.” In her mind, the warrior was already riding the slope down to the river, rehearsing the many varying plans of battle. With a clear effort, she brought herself back, turning to face him. “We will be on the right flank. If you need help to guard the child, get word to me. I will send whoever I can spare. Remember that.”

“Thank you. I will.”

Cunomar was the only one below fighting age on the mountain. His peers, without exception, had accepted the need to stay at home; in this battle, there were no children carrying
water or tending to the horses, no hostages to Rome who might need protection, except this one. He crouched alone on the far side of his father’s fire. Hail lay beside him, an unwilling guardian. The great hound’s soul remained on Mona with Breaca and the newborn infant. As it had not been with Cunomar, the bonding at Graine’s birth had been immediate and complete. The hound mourned her absence, visibly, as did the boy, if for different reasons.

Around the pair, warriors finished their last preparations for war, and Cunomar looked on stonily. It was Cygfa whose presence upset him most. His half-sister was nearing her long-nights. For months now her first bleeding had been expected and it was widely agreed that, once adult, she would be a warrior of a calibre to match their father. She had trained since infancy amongst her mother’s people, the Ordovices, and the warriors of the war hammer were known across the land as the most ferocious of the west. Later, Cygfa had joined her father on Mona and trained in the warriors’ school, learning sword and spear moves from men and women considered the best of any tribe. When the time of the battle had come and she had not yet gained her spear, the elders had agreed that she could attempt to win it in fair combat, as Breaca had done. Her mother, Cwmfen, fought in Caradoc’s honour guard and Cygfa had been granted permission to ride at her side.

For Cunomar, that alone would have been unbearable, but then Breaca had made a gift to the girl of the shaggy, wide-hoofed war horse that had carried her as the Boudica through the invasion battle. The beast, known as the bear-horse for the length of his pelt and the shape of his nose, was sire to half of the best youngstock on Mona but his passion was war and he had not seen enough of it. Breaca rode the
grey mare for preference, even when the animal was old enough to be turned away to pasture. Granted now to Cygfa, the bear-horse revelled in the smells and portents of war. He stood with his head high and his ears up and only years of training in the need for silence before battle kept him from screaming his challenge to the morning. His presence, together with the swan-hilted blade that had been Caradoc’s gift to her, made Cygfa one of the best mounted, best armed warriors on the field. Cunomar hated her and let it show.

Dubornos skirted the fire towards him. “Good morning.”

The child nodded but did not answer. His gaze was fixed on the two warriors on the far side of the fire. Cygfa stood with Braint of the Brigantes, braiding her hair at the sides. In the splendour of the dawn, the pair could have been sisters, or two of the three parts of Briga: the one dark-haired, dark-skinned and scarred from battle, the other fair of hair and skin and unblemished. All they lacked was the grandmother, grey-haired and lame. Cygfa had not yet killed and had no right to wear the black crow feather at her temple but Gwyddhien had given her a falcon’s grey-barred tail feather with the quill stained black and red to bring on Briga’s luck and Braint was showing her the proper way to fix it. They laughed together and the noise rolled down the mountain like the ring of iron on stone. Cunomar scowled and his mouth moved in a clear, if silent, curse.

Dubornos perched on a rock at his side. Childless, he had never learned the ways of reaching children and searching his own past for aid had proved little help. He chose, therefore, to address the young as if they were already adult. Often, he was successful. With Cunomar, he could never tell how it would be.

“Your sister rides for the first time into battle,” he said. “It won’t help her if you wish her ill. Nor you if she dies and you have no chance to call back your curse.”

Amber eyes flicked sideways and away. “She won’t die. She’s as good as father, everyone says so. She’ll carve the Romans into meat for the hounds.”

It was a subtle insult, carefully honed. The legions were rumoured to feed the dead of their enemies to their hounds, one more atrocity in their manifold tally. No warrior of the tribes would ever countenance such a thing.

Dubornos said, “That does not become you. If you dishonour Cygfa, the slur extends also to your father and her mother. Would you wish that on them when they go to fight Scapula and the decurion of the Thracian cavalry who rides the pied horse?”

The mention of the two greatest enemies in one breath had the effect he desired. With his shield hand, Cunomar made the complex gesture that unmade all curses. “They will win,” said the child sullenly. “And you and I will have sat here through the day, watching, while others earn their kill-feathers and make the tales that will be told at the fire.”

If it was hard for a grown man who was oath-sworn of his own free will to keep back from the front line, how much harder for a child who did so only because he was ordered by his father? Dubornos reached in his pouch for the knuckle bones he carried as perpetual distraction. He cast them on the scorched turf by the fire and studied the way they lay. “We can only pray so,” he said, drily. “Meanwhile, it will be some time before battle is joined. Would you care to play?”

“Did you know there would be so many of them?” Longinus Sdapeze sat his chestnut mare, resting his forearms on the front of the saddle. The entire wing of the First Thracian Cavalry stretched out behind him in rows of eight. Julius Valerius, outwardly recovered from his encounter with his god, sat at his side, studying the enemy and the geography of a battle site that was not of his choosing, nor would ever have been. It was the salmon-trap of the Eceni all over again, but then they had known from the start that it would be; the inquisitors had found that out for them. Their advantage, such as it was, lay in this forewarning and the other news gathered from spies and fallen warriors. Valerius could only wait and judge its accuracy as the battle progressed.

Meanwhile, they had the river to cross. It ran in front of them, in full autumn spate so that the force of the water ate away at the banks, and pools at which in earlier months the deer had drunk were sluicing wells of strong currents. Storm-split branches and other debris from the high mountains spun down heavily enough to sweep horse and rider
from their feet and drag them under. At the only sane fording point, the water foamed and spun and crashed through piles of smoothed boulders and jagged rocks, placed days ahead by Caradoc’s warriors to make the crossing more treacherous.

On the far bank, warriors in their thousands stood in clusters, or sat their painted horses, waiting. A man who knew what to look for could pick out the bands and sub-bands of the tribes by style of hair and cloak colour and the dyed flanks of the horses. A man searching for one specific enemy could find with ease the yellow hair and multicoloured cloak of Caradoc and the knot of white-cloaked Ordovices about him. That same man could note that the rumours were true and that a second Caradoc rode at his side, white-cloaked and bare-headed and mounted on a horse that had been in every major battle since the invasion, but now bore a new rider whose hair was not the red of a fox in autumn.

Caradoc and his daughter did not take part in the posturing that was the usual prelude to battle. From among the rest of their ranks, a warrior would periodically accept a challenge and step forward to hurl insults and spears at the enemy. The tribes had learned since the invasion; the spears they threw were stolen legionary javelins, tipped with soft iron that bent on impact so that they could not be picked up and thrown back at their original senders. On a day like today, with the river so broad, it made little difference; very few had the power to send a spear clean across to the far bank. Their impact was more on the minds and hearts of the waiting legions who must stand and watch what faced them. Twice already, sorely provoked, a century
of legionaries had stepped to the river’s edge and hurled their own javelins, wasting them likewise in the water.

The morning passed too slowly, with nothing to show for it. Somewhere out of sight, a war band started up a high-pitched, ululating chant that wove through the thunder of the river and soared over it, stretching further the overstretched nerves of the new recruits. In the foremost lines of the legions, men new to battle gripped their short swords and refixed their shields, wasting energy and condensing their fear. On the far right, set back from the river, Scapula’s standard cracked in the wind. Twice so far the governor had ridden down to the water and twice backed away again. Valerius watched him and felt the indecision spread south down the line. He felt, also, Longinus waiting for an answer to his question and realized he had answered it only in his mind.

“There are fewer of them than were at the Thames on the first day of the battle,” he said. “We should be glad he has gathered only the western tribes. If Cartimandua’s Brigantes were not sworn to us, we would be facing twice or three times this number.”

He raised himself high in the saddle and looked north. The governor’s ewe-necked gelding was still balking at the water. Valerius cleared his throat and spat, a uniquely Thracian habit with uniquely Thracian implications. “We could sit here all day if we’re waiting for Scapula to get his bloody horse into the river.”

Longinus said, “We may as well. He’s only going to make us dismount on the other side. Myself, I’d rather stay on my horse.”

“We can if we hold the ford.”

“We’d have to take it first.”

“I know.”

A rider bearing a white armband on his mail waited to one side, designated for the day as a runner, to fight only in extreme need. To him, Valerius said, “Take word to Governor Scapula that the acting prefect of the Ala Prima Thracum believes that his men can make a crossing of the river and hold it so that the legionaries will be able to cross downstream of our horses. If he gives the word, we will attempt it. If he can spare men with javelins to give us cover, that would make the attempt more likely to succeed.”

The command was too long in coming. The enemy dreamers had long since marked the men they knew. Valerius had felt them at the beginning, that tickle of meeting minds, of mutual loathing, and the challenge that was of the spirit and the gods and not of battle. Still, it was in battle that the wills of the gods were made manifest and the delay in Scapula’s order gave the dreamers and singers of Mona time to gather on a heathered slope directly opposite the Thracian cavalry and to direct their ire and that of their slingers at one man and the horse he rode. Valerius felt them long before the first sling-stones began to puncture the river in rippling lines ahead of him.

Longinus said, “If you ride in there, you’re dead.”

“Is that your ill-feeling again?”

“No, it’s common sense. You should stay on the bank and give them a target and let the rest of us make the crossing.”

“Maybe, but if the god wants me dead, I’ll be dead wherever I go. If you think I’m bad luck, I’ll stay apart. Otherwise, I’ll lead and draw their attention, and the rest of you who follow will be safer.”

“Is that meant to be encouraging?”

“No, it’s common sense.”

“Good. Then have the sense also to remember what Corvus said. The governor wants Caradoc and his family alive to parade before the emperor in Rome. If you’re seen to kill him, they’ll nail you to a plank and leave you. Others apart from me would think that an awful waste of a life.”

“I won’t forget.”

He had not forgotten, could not forget. Corvus had addressed the officers in a group but his eyes and his words, and the threat they carried, had been for Valerius. Valerius had smiled at no-one in particular and gone away to design his own pennant for the battle. Since the cave, he had begun to understand more deeply the words of his god; there are many more ways to destroy a man than to kill him in battle. He considered those ways and savoured them and prayed that he might bring at least one of them about.

He believed absolutely that the god heard and was with him. All through the morning, the words of the deity whispered in his head.
His death is matched by your death, or the death of one you love.
Caradoc was still very clearly alive. While the corn-gold head remained a beacon amidst the enemy, Valerius believed himself safe. When, belatedly, the order came from the governor to attempt the crossing, he pushed the Crow-horse a pace at a time into the murderous torrent. Thirty-two men of the first troop, First Thracian Cavalry, followed in a line behind.

As they entered the water, Valerius said, “They’ve seen the red bull pennant. If you were ever planning to pray to Mithras, now would be a good time.”

Longinus Sdapeze, who had no intention whatever of
praying to the bull-slayer, but had been praying all day to his own gods, could have sworn he heard his decurion laugh.

A handful of knuckle bones lay forgotten on the ash-strewn turf. A man, a boy and a grizzled, three-legged war hound lay on their bellies on the dreamers’ outcrop and looked down on the backs of circling crows. Beneath the birds, a river thundered blackly; on its northern bank, small as field mice, men and women scurried back and forth, fighting for land and life, for honour and fame, for the futures of their born and unborn children. Against them, like so many beetles, fought the legions.