Dreaming the Bull (37 page)

And so the waiting was over, so easily, with so little forewarning. Relief and the apex of terror made Dubornos dizzy. He laughed. They stared at him; a lunatic, or a witless fool. His skin prickled with the promise of pain. He rolled his shoulders, feeling afresh the coarse scratch of the tunic as it touched his back, his waist, his arms. The crush of the shackle-wounds on his wrists felt warm and comfortable, a known and measurable sensation. Blood pulsed from his head to his feet and he knew every part of himself. For the first time in thirty-two years, he felt at home in the body he was about to lose. As Airmid had said he should, he stood on the dividing line between the worlds, a foot on each bank of the gods’ river, evenly. His thoughts flowed freely, released from all constraints.

“If you believe they are seeking revenge for Caradoc’s capture,” he said, “you have one easy recourse. Release him, return him to his family and his homeland. Withdraw the legions from our land. The emperor will live to old age and you will be hailed as heroes for having achieved it.”

Narcissus stared at him, a man who sees his life’s work threatened and counts its preservation worth a hundred thousand other lives. “We cannot withdraw now from Britannia—we will not. The emperor’s standing with the people depends on it.”

Callistus’ priority was finance. He said, “We have invested too much to withdraw now. The loans to the eastern tribes alone are worth forty million sesterces; they cannot be recalled in time. There will be another way. You will give it us.”

Dubornos shook his head sorrowfully. “There may be another way,” he said, “but I doubt it, and even if there were, I couldn’t tell you. It’s true that I have lived for some time on Mona, but I am not a dreamer; I was not privy to their rites. I would have died for it had I ever tried to find out what they were and that death would have been worse than anything you could do here.”

Narcissus smiled, lips tight against his skull. “I very much doubt that.”

“I don’t. If I had defiled the dreamers’ ceremonies, I would have brought on myself everlasting shame. Here, the shame is all yours.”

Narcissus stared at him a moment. Across the gulf of cultures, there might have been some meeting had Callistus not already snapped his fingers. The guards came forward to take Dubornos’ arms. In the last moments, because he no longer had anything left to lose, he fought them.

The knife was very sharp. It pressed into the skin below Cunomar’s eye, drawing fine beads of blood. By looking down, he could see the blue-grey iron and the thousand faint cross-hatchings scored on the metal where it had been ground back and forth on the whetstone. They vibrated under his gaze, but the knife was steady. It was his own body that shook.

He looked past the knife to where his father knelt on the cold marble, held still by two of the horse-guards. The guards were alive only because of Cunomar, that much was clear to them all. If his son had not been there, were not being threatened before him, the man who had slain a thousand Romans would have slain a dozen more, up to and including the emperor and his family, or would have died trying.

Because of Cunomar, Caradoc did nothing, but instead knelt where they held him with his gold hair twisted tight in the grip of a guard’s hand, with blood sliding down from the newly opened cut on his left cheek, scarlet against bone-white skin. His lips were greyed, from anger or pain or the vast, superhuman effort he was making not to fight, and he spoke to Claudius as if His Imperial Majesty were a slow-witted apprentice goat-herd, which was as bad, really, as if he had truly fought.

There was nothing a child could do. Cunomar stood very still so that the knife did not cut him and watched an elegant bronze fountain splatter water on the emperor’s elegant garden. The water came from the pipes played by a naked, goat-footed boy-child. It spewed out musically, to spray a thousand rippling teardrops into the green marble basin below. It was not good to think of tears. He had long ago resolved that, whatever happened, he would not weep. It was the only thing he could do for his father and even this much was hard. Over his head, the adults conducted a conversation the implications of which were too appalling to contemplate.

“Dubornos knows nothing. Whatever you do to him, he can tell you nothing. There is nothing to tell. If Scapula is dead, it is not the dreamers’ work. If they could kill at a distance, if they could threaten a governor and the person of an emperor, do you not think they would have done it long ago? How many of them did Tiberius crucify? How many did Gaius? How many have you? Tens? Hundreds? If it were possible for any or all to exact revenge, do you not think one of them would have attempted it in the days and nights of her dying? To believe otherwise is superstition and it ill becomes a civilized nation.”

Caradoc spoke in the short, clipped tone that made clear what he thought of the drivelling imbecile standing before him. The sound of it made Cunomar wince. The horse-guards not directly involved stood still as carved marble, staring rigidly ahead. In their very stance was their terror. If a man could lose his life for speaking thus to an emperor—and quite certainly he could—then so, too, could those who had witnessed it.

Claudius was renowned for his secret trials and summary executions. Callon, who had brought the news of the governor’s passing, had withdrawn to a distance, as if half the length of the garden were enough to render the guards deaf and thus safe. Closer, a yellow cage-bird trilled. Liquid notes poured into discord and were lost. Ignored, it fell soon to silence.

Cunomar could sense the emperor’s uncertainty. The man had not known that his governor was dead; the news brought by the freedman was as unexpected as it was unwelcome. Given the facts, his first thought had been for the spectacle of his planned victory celebrations, his first emotion anger at the thoughtlessness of his subordinate in so untimely a death. Pressing his hand to his temples as if his head pained him, he had said, “He can’t be dead. We need him for the procession. Who will take his place?”

Callon had long dealt with his master’s priorities. With practised tact, he had said, “We will find another governor to replace Scapula, your excellency, or we can excuse his absence and substitute a representative. I believe it might be best if his death were not widely known for some time, perhaps until spring. But before that, we must ensure your excellency’s safety. The brother knows nothing. He is unconscious; he fought and the guards were over-zealous.
They have been disciplined, but he will be some time returning to us. We may not have time. Answers must be found by other means.”

“What?”

Thus had the unnatural peace of the emperor’s ghastly, oppressive, flower-scented garden been breached. Claudius and his freedman had been speaking Greek, thinking themselves in some measure secret, and certainly the horse-guards had not understood, but Caradoc had been schooled on Mona where Greek had been written and spoken for five centuries and Latin was the upstart youth in a world of wise and ancient languages. Even Cunomar had understood enough to foretell his father’s abrupt intervention.

“What
exactly
have you done to Dubornos?”

Caradoc had not attacked anyone, only stepped forward a pace towards Claudius, his shackled arms rising, but the guards had not been of a mind to give a man room to make himself plain. They had treated it as an attack on the emperor’s person and responded as they thought fit. Horse-guards were not employed for their subtlety, nor for their respect for an enemy leader.

It was after that the freedman had withdrawn and now there was only his father, catastrophically angry, facing a madman who had the power to kill them all, or worse.

The children. Do whatever it takes to keep them alive.

My son.
Cunomar stood in the grip of the guard, his skin tinged blue at the mouth, his eyes round as river pebbles. Tears trembled on the brinks of his lids and the effort he made to keep them from falling was plain.
My warrior-to-be. You will die now, because of me. Cunomar, please forgive me.

The guards’ fingers goaded, twisting Caradoc’s hair. The shackles bit into his wrists. In the first moments, they had been unlocked and locked again behind him. They were drawn now high up his back so that his joints cracked under the strain. He had expected pain, had been steeling himself against it daily since his capture until the reality was almost welcome. He could breathe and he could think and he could see that his son stood unhurt and only threatened by a knife; that much was bearable. What hurt far more was the loss of his self-control and the descent into anger and pointless violence, the unexpectedness of it, the futility, the wasted opportunity. If the bridges to Agrippina had been fragile before, they were broken now, and those to Claudius shattered beyond repair. Agrippina had been humiliated in his presence and her pride would never let her forget or forgive. Claudius was afraid and angry but more than either, he was suspicious. The man had remained alive through fifty years of tyranny while those around him died like rats in a fire. His intellect, steeped in subterfuge, had allowed him to do so.

The emperor had regained control of himself after the first high-pitched squeal and the scurry for safety. The twitching arm was still, and the head with its jug ears. His gaze was oil-smooth with turbulent currents beneath. His soft voice, rasping, said, “You will apologize.”

“For what?”

“For attacking the person of your emperor.”

“You are not my emperor.” It should not have been said. In the jagged cave of Caradoc’s mind, no room was left for diplomacy.

The emperor stood as still as any normal man. He
pursed dry lips, thoughtfully, and smiled. To the guards he said, “He will apologize.”

It had always been rumoured of Claudius that he enjoyed the spectacle of inflicted pain. The guards were practised at accommodating him. The wrist-shackles twisted tighter and higher by slow degrees. Iron cut through healing ulcers on both wrists to grind the raw flesh beneath. Pain came in nauseating waves so that, for a while, it was no longer possible to speak or to think or even to breathe.

For his son, if for no-one else, he would say nothing. In the locked space of his skull, Caradoc of the Three Tribes reproduced for himself every syllable of unspeakable invective he had ever learned through three decades of seamanship and the leading of armies. He cursed in Eceni, in Greek, in Latin, in Gaulish, none of it aloud. If he were lucky, if he kept the image of Cunomar in the front of his mind, he believed there was a chance that unconsciousness might claim him before any sound passed his lips. He closed his eyes and built a picture of his son behind his closed lids but it was Breaca who came when the strings of his right shoulder tore apart and the darkness claimed him.

They pushed his head in the fountain to bring him back and then drew it out again before he could take the necessary breath that would kill him. He emerged, gasping. The rasping voice was closer, too close. Again it said, “Apologize.”

“For what? Stating the truth? Is that lost now in Caesar’s court? I thought Polybius valued truth and integrity above all other qualities in a leader.” The gods gave Caradoc the words. He had neither the strength nor the wit to find them.

Silence; and the falling water of the fountain. In Rome, even water must be controlled.

Claudius’ mouth was set hard. Only a small smear of saliva betrayed him. It was said that he held the old values dear above all else but there was no way to know if that were true. He nodded, weightily, a practised act, designed for the Senate where rhetoric was valued above even valour in war.

“Polybius was not dealing with barbarian soothsayers who strove to kill him from afar,” he said. “Truth and integrity are marks of civilization. Barbarians apologize to their emperor.”

The shackles were lifted and the twisting began again in the opposite direction, more slowly than before. They had no wish to lose him to unconsciousness again. To think clearly, to speak distinctly over the pain, was a warrior’s challenge set by the gods. On Mona, Maroc the Elder had talked of Rome and what drove the fledgling empire to war. Fragments of memory floated up through the rising agony. Each was given such breath as it needed to be heard while there was still time. He spoke to the scholar now, not the tyrant.

“The dreamers were civilized before Polybius was a squalling babe … before ever Romulus and Remus suckled the she-wolf. If they kill now … in defence of their land and their civilization, does that make them uncivilized? Rome kills and she is not under threat.”

“But her emperor is.”

“Her emperor … need not be.”

A finger was raised. The shackles were released. Relief, briefly, was as debilitating as the pain had been. The guards stepped back and they were alone, Caradoc and Claudius: two men who led their people, who could order death or its suspension. The emperor blinked. The tremor returned to his head. Indecision curdled the shiftless gaze. Fear and the
offer of safety fought with power and the need to use it. The tremor acquired a rhythm and became a nod. “You knew the governor had died. Did you order it before you left?”

“No. I have no power to order the dreamers.”

“But they have chosen you to lead their cause in war. If they have killed Scapula, it is because of your capture. I believe they will listen if you order them to recall their curse, or never to cast it.”

Airmid! Whatever you have done, I thank you.
He had been powerless and yet was given a measure of power. He fixed his gaze on the fountain, not certain he could keep the understanding from his eyes. Without looking up, he said, “You ask a great deal of one who has little left to lose. Why would I so order the dreamers?”

“Because you value the life of your son.”

A straight bargain, like bartering iron for horses. An emperor’s life is worth more than a single child. Caradoc said, “And my wife and daughter.”

“No. Both of these raised a sword against Rome. Your wife was seen to kill many legionaries in the battle. Your daughter killed one of the auxiliaries who took her captive and wounded another beyond repair. It cannot be allowed that women bear arms in war.”