Dreaming the Bull (38 page)

Caradoc dared to laugh. “You would expect a daughter of Caradoc willingly to submit to slavery and rape? Would that make of your victory celebration a thing of value? Would we remember your ancestor, the deified Julius, for his victory over Vercingetorix if that warrior had surrendered his blade at the first hint of attack? Does not the valour of the conquered give honour to the conqueror?”

Thoughtfully, “We honour every victory gained by our ancestors, those of the deified Julius most of all.”

“And yet your conquest of Britannia is held in such high esteem because Julius attempted it and failed. By his actions are your own measured. If it is time to strike when wrong demands the blow, then surely it must be time also to show mercy when right argues as strongly for it.”

The emperor stared. The grey, straggled eyebrows rocked to the limits of his brow. “You would quote Homer, to
me?”

“I would quote your own words to you. How often have you said exactly that to the Praetorian tribune before an execution? Even on Mona you are famed for it. When a man becomes so readily predictable that his enemies can put words in his mouth, it may be time for him to consider a change of rhetoric. You have a choice, by which history will judge you. You can match your ancestor, or you can exceed him. Gaius Julius Caesar was renowned as a warrior, but not loved for his magnanimity in victory. Scipio, who pardoned the defeated Syphax, was both loved and respected. The one may be valued more highly by posterity than the other, or both together.”

The guards became restless. Rhetoric had no place in their world. The emperor signed them to stillness. Slowly he said, “Let me understand you correctly. In return for your order to the dreamers revoking their curse on me, you wish me to spare the lives of your women and your son? You do not beg for your own life?”

“I do not ask the impossible, but only what may be freely given. In my place, would you not also argue for the life of your family?”

Uniquely, Claudius’ smile carried a flash of true humour. “My son Britannicus perhaps, but only him. In this we differ. Your family, it seems, fights only the enemy.” The smile faded. The emperor’s eyes fixed on a thing unseen, his gaze clouded. Distantly he said, “You argue well. I concede your point. Your wife and children, then, will become hostages for my life. If I die, they die. While I live, they will live. They cannot be free but they will not be enslaved. A place will be allocated them from among the imperial holdings. Well? Can you do this? Will the dreamers retract the curse at your command?”

Caradoc nodded. “I will do my best. They may still listen to me, but I will need an intermediary, someone to take the message who will be heard. Dubornos would be one such, if he lives.”

“He lives. They would not kill him without my consent. But he will die with you. I will not send a warrior back to his country to continue this rebellion. The prefect Corvus will take your written message to Britannia. He is due to travel with the evening tide. Between now and then, you and he will find a way to convey your letter whither it must go. I am told the dreamers can read and write in Greek. They will return, in writing, their confirmation that their curse is lifted. If it is received, your wife and children will live. If not, they will die as you die. Knowing this, you will exert every pressure on those who threaten us.”

The emperor clapped his hands once. The guards advanced. Claudius smiled. “Pen and ink will be brought to your cell. Prepare your words well. You are dismissed.”

The sun rose more slowly than it had ever done. Dubornos had lived through countless mornings before battle when time had slowed to tripping heartbeats but never before had it seemed entirely to stop. He sat with his back to the wall, tight-shouldered to Caradoc, sharing with him the space of one man that each might see what he could of the creeping light through the high, barred window of their new cell. They had asked to see the dawn and this was the closest that could be found commensurate with the emperor’s order that they be kept in close confinement.

The horse-guards had withdrawn as a courtesy. They were no longer necessary for security. Cwmfen and the children were hostages not only for Claudius’ life, but for Caradoc’s death. Such was the nature of the warrior’s agreement he had made with Claudius: for the price of a letter written in Greek to Maroc of Mona pleading for the emperor’s life, and for Caradoc’s oath that he would do nothing to impede his own prolonged and very public death, a woman and two children would be allowed to live.

Dubornos had no illusions as to his place in the arrangements. He was an accessory, his death an adornment to the main event, which was almost upon them. He existed in a place beyond fear, hollow and light, like a shell emptied of its snail that becomes later an echo of the wind. On this last morning, it was not the poppy that had achieved this, but time. For the past fifteen days, judicious use of the drug had dulled the stabbing aches of the broken collar bone and the splintered fingers of his left hand achieved by Narcissus’ questioners, but it had not, at any time, dulled his fear or emptied his mind.

The awakening dawn had achieved what nothing else could. The closer they had come to the day appointed for the emperor’s procession and the death of his two most notorious captives, the greater Dubornos’ fear had been, until this last morning, when he had crested a wave of a terror so overwhelming he had thought that, like a shrew teased by a hound whelp, he might die of sheer fright—and had emerged beyond it, unafraid.

Time nudged onward. The window was set too high to see the horizon, or any part of the blazing dawn, but the small square of black that had been night faded slowly to grey and then to a hazed blue threaded across with whispers of flesh-coloured cloud. A dovecote woke nearby. Squabs and adults roused with the light, warbling.

This time tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, it will be over. The doves will call as they have called each morning and we will be gone.

Dubornos could think this now without the words running dry in his head. It was a fact to be weighed with all the others and it counted for little against the greater fact of his soul’s loss, for his failure, on this last dawn as on all those
before it, to connect with his gods. He leaned his head back against the wall and, closing his eyes, searched again in his heart for Briga who was mother of life and death and for her daughter Nemain, the moon, whose light had slid past the window in the night, casting the iron bars in muted silver. When these failed to respond, he cried in his echoing mind for Belin the sun and Manannan of the waves; being male they might find Rome more acceptable. None of them came to him.

He remembered the spirits of the slain Roman legionaries, wandering lost on the battlefield of the Lame Hind, searching for foreign gods in a country not their own and finding themselves abandoned. He had imagined them weak, deficient in prayer, lacking the true connection that comes from a life lived under the eyes of the gods. Thus was hubris added to his inner list of failings.

A grey-winged dove fluttered on the window ledge, pecked at the ridged mortar surrounding the bars and flitted away. Dubornos felt Caradoc stir and dared to interrupt his silence.

“Do you feel the gods?” he asked.

He thought for a while he had not been heard. Caradoc sat as he had all night with the elbow of his uninjured arm perched on his raised knees and his chin resting on the heel of his hand. The slow lift and fall of his breathing passed through his body to Dubornos’ but gave no indication of his state of mind.

The patch of light on the wall grew brighter. Outside, at the front gates to the palace, one guard replaced another. Armour chinked and the night’s watchword was exchanged:
Britannicus,
name of the emperor and of the emperor’s only true son, final proof of conquest.

More distantly, the earliest of Rome’s risers, or the latest of her retiring drunkards, called to each other across the streets. A handful of men shouted obscenities, their target silent and unknowable. Presently, a woman laughed and was answered by a single man. A dog barked and set off half a dozen more, all higher pitched than any hound of the tribes. The single lamp with which the cell was lit cast fewer shadows of its own.

Caradoc was not asleep after all. Releasing his fingers, he stretched carefully, taking care for his ruined shoulder, with a rattle of cracking joints at the end. He turned sideways on the pallet, the better to see and be seen. The new light was harsh on his face, highlighting the greyed pallor of hunger and exhaustion. Night had been kinder. His eyes alone burned clearly as they had always done. It was impossible to imagine them lifeless.

Dubornos caught his breath painfully. He said, “Breaca will continue the war. She has the weight of Mona’s dreamers behind her, and the gods behind them. It’s all that matters.” He could say her name now, at the end, without its damaging either of them.

Caradoc smiled at the sound of it. “I know. But we are not abandoned.” He turned his face to the window. The colourless light bleached his hair to the white of old age. In profile, he was austere, not worn. The rents in his tunic had been mended and the serpent-spear brooch glistened on his shoulder, a statement of defiance that would continue beyond death. He said, “Do you fear the coming day?”

“No. Not any more.”

“Then we have all we could possibly ask for. The opportunity to face death knowingly, to see ourselves tested
in the way that we face it. The rest is ours alone. Afterwards, when it’s over, the gods will come.”

“Are you sure? The Roman dead wander lost in our land. Is there a reason why we should not do the same in theirs?”

From the doorway, a dry voice said, “They did not have anyone waiting who could restore their souls to the care of their gods. Your dreamers will know how to do it and when. It is a skill that has largely been lost in Rome; the gods here are worshipped for their ability to generate money and power for the living, not their care for the dead.”

“Xenophon!” Caradoc, delighted, rose in greeting, as he might have done had Maroc entered, or Airmid. “I had not expected to see you again. Your work here is done, is it not? We are alive. We have not died of foul blood or broken bones. We will remain in fair health until the emperor chooses otherwise, at which point your intervention would not be politically wise, or, I fear, effective, however famed the teachers of Cos.”

It was said lightly, but not taken so. The emperor’s physician was not a man to deal in trivia. He drew bony fingers down his long, bony nose. “Many things are taught on Cos,” he said. “Not all of them are to do with preserving life.”

He stepped over the threshold into the room, making the cramped space tighter still. They had come to know the man well, this last half-month. Since the audience with the emperor, they had been his main charge, after Claudius, Britannicus and the Empress Agrippina. He had dosed them with poppy and infusions of leaf and bark until, if the broken bones and torn joints had not mended completely, at least the bruising around them had lessened and the skin
healed. They had come to welcome the sight of his lean, stooped frame in the doorway, as much for his company and the sharpness of his conversation as for the medications he brought and the orders he gave that they be permitted use of the baths and provided with clean clothing. When a junior officer of the horse- guards had argued this last, he had turned on him the weight of twenty years’ study and said starkly, “You can’t crucify a man if he’s died of blood poisoning beforehand. Did you want to take his place in the procession?” There had been no further objections.

The frequency of his visits had long ago numbed the horse-guards to his presence. If they had searched him at all this morning, they had done so with their eyes closed. He bore two small flasks, one in either hand, and a full pouch hung from his belt. Leaning the flasks against the edge of the pallet, he sat down.

“Healing is not always about saving life. Every physician knows that there are times when it is better that the soul be allowed to depart cleanly. To learn the rites of that passage, we of Cos travel to Mona if we can, or listen to those who have learned there. I have sat at the feet of dreamers older than any now alive and learned only enough to be certain that it would take me another lifetime to learn those things they know and I do not.” He pressed the bridge of his nose. “My memory is not what it was and much of the teaching is lost, but I remember enough to send you freely to the river when the time is come. Before that, we have those things I have learned from Rome. What will happen today is not an uncommon event. There are as many ways to die as there are men to hammer nails into flesh. Some are faster than others.”

He looked up at the window, frowning. Footsteps trod
the paving outside; a heavy, masculine step, lame in one leg. When they had passed beyond earshot, he said, “I have spoken to the centurion of the Praetorians who has charge of … the necessary details. He fought against you in the invasion battle and served at Camulodunum after that. He is a soldier and respects his enemies. He cannot go against Claudius’ orders, but he has some discretion as to their implementation. You will not be stripped but left in full barbarian battle dress, at least as Rome perceives it. I would advise you not to refuse. It may not in any way resemble what you would actually wear in battle but I doubt they’ll agree to hang you wearing a shirt of stolen cavalry mail. Whatever, it is the weight that counts. The heavier you are, the faster the death.”

He was a doctor, and could say such things without rancour or affected delicacy; in his presence, two days of drawn-out dying were reduced to a problem of engineering.

In this spirit, Dubornos said, “If we’re that heavy, the nails will tear out.”

“If they do, it will be the first time. The Praetorians have had more practice in this than any of us would care to imagine. They use squares of pinewood as washers to spread the weight and drive the nails between the bones of the forearm. You can trust that they will be secure.”