Dreaming the Bull (34 page)

He was not alone. A warrior can maintain an outward impression of composure, even of humour, in the face of danger but no-one yet living can control his bowels. In the Brigantes’ camp, there had been some pretence at privacy and, in theory at least, a man could keep the rancid fluctuations of each morning’s movements to himself. On the ship, such dignity had been lost. They had been separated from Caradoc; he had been transported on an earlier ship and, for all they knew, he could have been already dead. Without him, Dubornos and Cwmfen, Cygfa and Cunomar had lived for uncounted days in the lightless, rat-ridden bilges of a merchant ship, sleeping on fetid planking, feeding and drinking at the whim of the auxiliaries who were their guards and feeling their way to the slop buckets afterwards.

There had been no need to speak of it but the two adults, if not the children, had known from the beginning that the aching, mind-numbing terror was not theirs alone
and taken some strength from the knowledge. On the first night, as the ship fell quiet, Dubornos had slept with an ear to the wooden hull listening to Manannan of the oceans whisper and rush less than an arm’s length away and had prayed to the god in the silence of his heart that the gift of oblivion might claim them all.

They had nearly lost Cunomar, although not to the sea god. The boy had begun to vomit as they passed down the Gaulish coast but it was only when he had begun to pass bloody, fluid faeces that they realized he was afflicted by more than seasickness. The ship’s doctor was an army man, bluntly efficient but with a limited supply of medications. Nevertheless, he had done his best. His orders had been unambiguous: he was to deliver his prisoners alive to the emperor’s justice. The cost to his own person if he failed was unthinkable.

With this in mind, he had provided the powdered elm bark and poppy to stop the vomiting and diarrhoea and had brought them fresh water with his own hands. At Dubornos’ suggestion, he had ordered their slop buckets emptied twice daily and had them moved up to one of the mid-level decks to a holding room with a hatch that could be opened for air and light.

Light and air: gifts beyond imagining that had once been taken for granted. For the first time in days, they had smelled the salt sea in all its dizzying purity. The sharpness had made them sneeze and sneezing rewoke the shackle-sores on their necks. They wept in silence, hiding their tears from each other, as if such things still mattered. The light, then, was a mixed blessing. The darkness had hidden the suppurating ulcers beneath the irons, the skeletal thinness of the children—so much weight lost in so little time—the
depth of care etched on the faces of the adults. Presently, they took turns lying with their heads beneath the hatch, staring up at the changing sky because anything was better than looking at what they had become. In the evening, when it could be hidden no longer, Dubornos had learned what Cygfa and Cwmfen had been keeping from him, that the girl had begun her bleeding as they rounded the south-westerly point of the Iberian peninsula and was in transition to becoming a woman.

The news had been devastating. When he thought he could sink no lower, the gods proved him wrong. From the moment of their capture, Cygfa had followed the lead of her parents in displaying an unimpeachable dignity. Only twice had it faltered when, first in the Brigante camp and then again on the boat, a clerk of the legions had asked her outright if she was a virgin. In their presence, she had said nothing, staring over their heads with a frozen disdain that left them silent. Neither had pressed the question and the girl’s reaction afterwards, the pallor and shaking, had gone unseen by the enemy.

The fact of her coming to adulthood was similarly concealed, but its impact was as damaging to her soul as the flux was to her brother’s body. Dubornos had offered to do what he could. As a singer, it was in his power to begin the opening rites of the long-nights, the passage from childhood to adulthood, and he was prepared, in the absence of any other, to do his best to achieve the full ceremony. It would not be as it should be, but he had believed that, with Cwmfen’s help, he could have brought about a true dreaming and the girl could have gone to sleep as a child and awoken a woman with at least some ghosted whisper from the gods. Cygfa had
refused with the same cool restraint with which she had spoken to the legions’ clerks and Dubornos had not pressed his offer twice. Instead he had watched her retreat into herself, building a shell against the outer world. It had seemed effective and he had admired her fortitude. He did so still, although the unbending fragility of it frightened him more than if she had wept.

The ultimate test had come much later in a poorly lit sanatorium in the emperor’s palace when Polybius, the religious secretary, had asked Cygfa for a third time if she retained her maidenhood. This man was not a clerk of the legions, but one of the half-dozen most powerful men in Rome. His orders could be rescinded only by the emperor, who was in bed. When his question had been met by the same silence, Polybius had snapped his fingers and ordered the doctor to examine her.

Clearly unwilling, Xenophon, the Greek physician, had done so on a pallet in the presence of armed guards and her mother. Cygfa had not fought him and nor had she wept, even when the physician had pronounced her intact in front of the assembled guards, clerks and freedmen, but Dubornos, turning back from his fixed study of the depiction of Io on the opposite wall, believed he had seen a small part of the fire in her snuffed out, and feared he would never see it lit again. It was soon after that the wine had been offered and he had drunk it, craving forgetfulness.

A singer lives by sound first and all others senses second. Thus even while the memory of Cygfa’s blue-white face knotted his bowels, Dubornos was listening, sorting the murmurs of the coming morning from those around him.
Without opening his eyes, he established that he was in a small, cramped room that was neither the sanatorium in which Cunomar had been treated and Cygfa dishonoured by the doctor, nor the underground holding cell to which they had first been brought. The former had been near the main part of the palace and the floors had been smoothly marbled, so that sound reflected from them like light. The latter had been tight and airless and the single lamp had guttered noisily and had clearly done so for years, so that the walls were grey with soot and the air smelled of rancid sheep’s fat.

In this new place, the bricks of the wall were so close that the wash of his breath came back to lift his own hair. The muted crackle of burning charcoal to his left and right spoke of at least two braziers alight in the corners. The lamps above were filled with finer oil, and had recently been lit with flint and tinder; the sharp smell of it lingered.

The only door was behind him and to the right. Two guards stood there. The one on the left suffered from impacted sinuses and breathed with a whistle while the other maintained the drifting inhalations of near-sleep. They were horse-guards, the vast Germanic tribesmen who wore their hair tied in a warrior’s knot over the left ear. Their reputation had spread to Mona as the men who had carried Claudius to power and ensured that he kept it. The Romans considered them dull-witted but feared them as barely controllable savages. Having watched them through part of the previous evening, Dubornos believed both assessments to be reasonable and accurate.

He was about to turn over when he heard the slow, still breath of a man sitting awake and alert on the opposite side of the room. Two in-breaths later, he knew who it was.

“Caradoc?”

“I’m here.”

“Gods…” Relief washed him, as the fear had done earlier. “I thought they would hold us apart. Have you seen—” The guards shifted warily. Dubornos bit off the words. Without turning his head, he said, more slowly and still in Eceni, “The larger of the two guards fornicates with pigs. The smaller is his child by a lop-eared sow.”

In the hush that followed, the Batavians straightened themselves and became more attentive but did not offer violence.

Caradoc laughed softly. In the same tongue, he said, “Nicely done. They speak Latin and Batavian and, I think, a little Greek, but not Eceni unless they can act better than any paid performer and they don’t have the wit for that. In any case, even if they understood what you said, they have orders not to kill us. If we die, the fate that would have been ours will be theirs. I think it is safe to assume even the horse-guards fear that.”

Dubornos opened his eyes. The cell was smaller than he had thought; his pallet took up half the width and two-thirds of the length. The door was oak with iron binding the planks. The walls were poorly plastered, showing the underlying pattern of the bricks beneath; the sanatorium had been done better, the underground holding cell not at all. The ceiling was flat and, unnervingly, it seemed likely that it was not surmounted by a roof, but by yet another storey of the building. Only aboard the ship had Dubornos experienced life with others walking above his head. He had not found it comfortable then, either.

Three guttering lamps hung from brackets on the wall.
In the curling shadows beneath the central one, dressed in a tunic of un-dyed wool, Caradoc sat up on an identical pallet with his back to the plaster, his knees hugged to his chin and his arms wrapped loosely round them.

Bandages of unbleached linen cuffed his wrists, the right one crusted a little with dried blood. The contusions on his face from when they took him prisoner were fading and his hair shone cleanly gold as it had not done since the battle at the Lame Hind, lacking only a single lock, shorn short to the scalp on the right side where Cartimandua had cut away the warrior’s braid to keep “as a remembrance”. Sometime since his capture, they had returned to him the brooch in the shape of the serpent-spear that was the only item of jewellery that he ever wore. It needed polishing, but it was clean of blood and the pin whole. Two threads of red-dyed wool hung from the bottom loop, their ends a little frayed. One of them had become stained during the journey and was stiffly black.

Like Dubornos, he was unshackled, and the lack of the irons, or perhaps three days’ rest, had set him right again, lifting the haggard weariness of the Brigante camp so that he looked once more the warrior who could lead a nation. Under Dubornos’ scrutiny, the cool, grey gaze remained level, with a dry spark of irony at its core. If they had not shared a slop bucket for ten days in the sea port before the first ship departed, Dubornos could have believed him unafraid.

“You didn’t drink the poppy,” Dubornos said. They had each taken the same oath against drinking wine; only Dubornos had broken it. Shame was a small thing, a distraction from terror; he welcomed its familiarity.

Caradoc shrugged. “I wasn’t offered any. Tonight, if they offer us both, you can keep watch and I’ll drink the wine and then sleep.”

“Will they do so?”
Will there be a tonight and will we be in a position to choose to drink or not drink, to sleep or not sleep?

“I don’t know. Narcissus, the freed slave, seems to be in charge. If word on Mona is right, the man is shrewd and intelligent and has no great lust for blood.”

“But he answers to an emperor who is neither of those things and who enjoys the spectacle of slow death more even than Caligula whom he replaced.”

Caradoc blinked slowly, exhaling through pursed lips. “Thank you, yes. In which case, we should be grateful that Claudius is said to be weak and ruled by his wives and freed-men. If he had Caligula’s instincts and the same lack of restraint, the dying would already have begun. That one once made a father sit and drink wine while his son’s skin was flayed from his body before him. I don’t recall what happened to the father.” The grey eyes flickered. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Dubornos’ skin prickled beneath his tunic, as if the nerves were already exposed. He said, “Sooner started is sooner ended,” and knew as the words left his mouth that he was not alone in thinking it and that it should not have been spoken aloud.

“They have the children,” said Caradoc flatly. “Xenophon the physician has been tending them. He came here this morning to make sure that you were still asleep. He believes that Cygfa and Cunomar may be allowed to live, if only in slavery. If there is anything—anything at all—that we can do to keep them alive, we must do it. It’s all there is left.”
He looked up sharply. “And don’t say what you were about to say. Xenophon knows it, but has told no-one else as yet.”

Cygfa is no longer a child.

Dubornos sucked in air and made himself unsay the words that had so nearly rolled off his tongue. They hung in the clotted air, a sentence of death unspoken.

Caradoc’s smile was a brief baring of teeth. “Thank you. If this is over in less than a month, it may be they will never find out. Meanwhile, you could tell me your entire stock of heroes’ tales, or we could find some other way to pass the time.” He eased himself down on the pallet until he lay on one elbow, Roman style. “I don’t suppose you still have your knucklebones with you?”

Dubornos’ knucklebones had been taken from him soon after his capture and he had not made any more, but they fashioned gaming pieces from fragments of plaster with crosses or lines scored on them with a fingernail and played with them a primitive version of Warrior’s Dance. Through the passing afternoon, with the autumn sun baking the southern wall of the cell so that the place became a roasting oven and sweat ran freely from guards and prisoners alike, they played a game that neither had taken the time to practise since before the invasion. From that, they relaxed slowly into talk and the sharing of such news as they had garnered since their capture.

Moving a piece idly forward, Caradoc said, “Do you remember Corvus? The Roman who was shipwrecked at the same time the
Greylag
went down?”

Dubornos looked up. “How could I not? He beat me in the river race, knocked me into the water and then helped pull me out before I fell into the gods’ pool. He was the hero and I the fool. I hated him for it.”

“And now he is prefect of a Gaulish cavalry wing and we could both hate him if we chose.”