Dreaming the Bull (42 page)

Mithras. Father of Light. I need you.

The precision of their arrival shocked Valerius into momentary clarity. Whoever had organized this knew exactly what they were doing. The shadows of the waiting crosses met in a tripartite linkage of straight lines and bold blacks and the centre point fell with mathematical exactitude between the horses as the prisoners’ cart slowed for the line. Caradoc, who had been gold in the sun, became muted in shadow.

Narcissus stood in the herald’s place to the right of the tribunal. He had the voice for it; when he chose, he could project to the back of the waiting silence as well as any actor.

“Halt before the person of your emperor! His excellency Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus Britannicus commands it!”

As the words fell away, they halted. Legionary horns sounded a deafening fanfare. Julius Valerius, floundering officer of Rome, found himself eye to eye with his emperor.

This close, Claudius’ tremors were apparent. He stood, his toga luminescent in the radiant light. The palms embroidered on the tunic beneath waved as if alive. He might have been their sole focus of attention but Agrippina leaned forward. Even seated, she was regal. No sane man could imagine her earning her living diving as a slave-girl. She studied the two prisoners on the cart as a cook might study fresh fish at market. In a long while, her gaze transferred, equally searching, to Valerius.

“One is fair of hair, one red, one black,” she said at length. “They do not look of one tribe.”

In Latin, Caradoc said, “My lady, we are not.”

The empress’s exquisite brow rose to the height of her hair line. Narcissus twitched. The crowd could not hear them now. Fifty senators, straining forward, were their only audience. They had better breeding than the masses: they did not sigh their surprise, but swayed as if they had.

Valerius was not so lost to reality that he could no longer sense danger from his superiors. In Eceni, he said, “You might wish to consider the future of your children before you speak again in Latin. In this place, at this time, you do not know it.”

Caradoc inclined his head. He was no longer the god, but neither was he a cowed and beaten prisoner. His face was a mask of restrained, intelligent dignity from which his eyes laughed. Agrippina smiled into them, beautifully.

In the breathless silence that followed, Narcissus, reading from a scroll, began to announce the long list of the emperor’s victories over the rebellious tribes of Britannia. Under cover of the noise, Claudius said, “We have received word from your dreamers. They do not agree to our proposal. They will not lift their curse in exchange for the lives of your wife and children.”

The ghosts already knew this: Macha, Eburovic, the slave-boy Iccius. Surprisingly, each greeted the news with gladness. Cwmfen and Cygfa, standing within earshot in their wagon, quite clearly neither knew nor were glad. It was possible they had not known of the bargain at all. Valerius saw a sudden movement and turned in time to see Cwmfen, who had been silent, clamp a restraining hand on her
daughter’s arm. A single harsh word in a foreign tongue slid out across the plain, unnoticed by most. It took Valerius some time to identify it as Ordovician, straight from the battlefield, a command to give ground immediately in the face of the enemy. It could as easily have been meant for Caradoc as Cygfa, or for both.

If Caradoc heard, he gave no sign. White-faced, he opened his mouth to speak and snapped it shut again while Valerius, remembering late his role, made the fiction of translating the emperor’s Latin into the language of his childhood. He struggled over one or two of the words, finding poor representations, but then he could have spoken the words of an infant’s sleeping song and it would not have mattered. All those within hearing understood what had been said.

The time it took gave Caradoc a chance to recover. He no longer smiled. In Eceni, in absolute earnest, he said, “I did the best I could. I have kept my side of our oath.”

Translated, Claudius said, “Indeed. Your friends in the rebel territories, however, do not hold your family’s life as dearly as your own. They would sacrifice them for you.”

“What?”

That needed no translation. Behind them, Narcissus reached a small climax in his descriptions of martial valour: the triumphant entry of the emperor into Camulodunum, borne on the backs of elephants. The emperor smiled and raised a hand to the grateful crowd.

When he could be heard again over the tumult, Claudius said, “If you die, I die. That is their exact declaration. Not only do I die, but my death will mirror yours exactly. I ask you now, and you should know that your
family’s well-being hangs on the truth of your answer, can they do this?”

Worlds stopped while Caradoc considered his answer. They could have been alone, two men facing death in different ways. On the rostrum, Claudius the fool was replaced entirely by Claudius the survivor, the excellent, scholarly mind tuned, always, above the need to witness pain in others, or to dominate, to the absolute, unconditional need to preserve his own life.

Opposite him, Caradoc, too, had shed the armours of pretence. Stripped to the bone, he stared at Claudius, the inner workings of his mind laid bare. If he had laughed at the emperor, he did so no longer. If he had disdained his failures as a man and a leader of men, he did not disdain his mind, nor the manifest reach of his power. More clearly even than in the prison, the core of him blazed for all those close enough to see it.

On the wagon behind, Cwmfen and Cygfa stood still as marble, and as white. At the emperor’s side, Agrippina tilted her head and ran a single perfect nail down the side of her cheek. Among the Senate, several men sat more upright. The ghosts crowded close, supporting the warrior in ways he would never know. Valerius, striving wholly to be the instrument of his god, set his teeth and prayed that he not be sick and that the nightmare be taken from him.

“Can they do it?” asked Claudius again. “I asked you once before and you refused to answer. You will tell me now. You have lived among them; you must know it.”

Valerius translated, woodenly. The silence after stretched the limits of endurance. If Caradoc could have gone to his death without answering, he would have done so, that much
was clear. His family’s life depended on his answer but he had no indication as to which way Claudius would lean. Eventually, in Ordovician, the language of his own childhood, he said, “They will say that they can. I do not believe it.”

The words drifted out into the golden air and left their own echo. The emperor, the empress and fifty men of the Senate, to whom they meant nothing, turned to the decurion of the cavalry for his translation. The dreamers of the Eceni signed for Valerius, who had once been Bán, to interpret accurately, using wards of binding that would have stopped him dead as a child and forced him to compliance. They bound him no longer. On the contrary, they gave him the first indication of what he could do, what his god required of him; whatever the ghosts of his enemies so badly wanted, he would do its opposite.

In a glorious moment of freedom and perfect clarity, guided by his god and with the promise of vengeance hot in his heart, Valerius translated the two sentences as, “Governor Scapula took ten days dying, each one in pain. In that may be your answer.”

Caradoc’s gaze was grounded in stone. Dubornos grunted as if punched in the chest and clamped his teeth on his tongue. Cygfa, standing beside her mother on the wagon, hissed a stream of invective in withering Ordovician. The ghosts fled, chittering.

Claudius turned to his decurion. “You brought us the news of our governor’s death and yet did not tell us this. Is it true?”

Valerius bowed, light-headed as if with wine or the promise of combat. He balanced on the edge of a precipice and a step the wrong way would see him slowly dead. He
said, “Excellency, it is. Those of my command who travelled with me can confirm it. The legate of the Twentieth legion sent a written report and my orders were not to speak beyond that unless directly asked by yourself or another in high command. I have not been so asked. I believe the legate saw no point in disturbing your excellency with unnecessary detail.”

“I see. We will consider this at a later date.” Returning to Caradoc, the emperor said, “You knew before word reached me of Scapula’s death and now you know the detail before it is openly told. How can you do this?”

“The gods may speak to any man in a time of need.” It was Dubornos who said it, in Latin, out of turn, in the presence of the emperor and interrupting the man who was ostensibly his king. Caradoc stared at him fixedly but said nothing.

The emperor nodded. More was at stake now than protocol and he could not further condemn one already sentenced to die. Valerius heard a man he despised take risks to protect him and regretted it. The ghosts addressed Dubornos in whispers and he listened, nodding.

Speaking to Caradoc, Claudius said, “Our life is threatened. This cannot be allowed. Your family will pay the price for your failure. You alone will live as Vercingetorix did, held in confinement in perpetuity as hostage for my life. The rest will die over the coming days.”

Caradoc had recovered himself. In Latin, he cast his voice beyond the emperor to reach the listening Senate.

“And so Imperial Claudius is brought down by the might of barbarian soothsayers and bards? I had thought better of you than that. And that an oath between kings was binding.”

It was a naked incitement to murder, the act of a man
who preferred any death to life. Valerius, listening, heard his efforts unravel and saw for the first time that the ghosts, perhaps, had known him better than he had believed.

His mother was staring at him, her lips pursed in thought. In his mind he said,
I am not your instrument, now or ever. If Caradoc wishes to die, I will not be his saviour.
She raised her brows and smiled and the skin crawled on his spine.

On the podium of the tribunal, Caradoc’s words were absorbed with due regard by the emperor and the men of the Senate but it was Agrippina who responded first, waving amused dismissal. She no longer smiled for Caradoc, but for Claudius, whose death would put her sixteen-year-old son on the throne. No-one doubted who would rule in truth if that came to pass. Several on the Senate saw the possibility stepping closer.

“The barbarian is bold,” she said. “I have rarely heard a man plead so eloquently for his own death. Clearly he seeks to persuade you to its opposite. The strength of his plea is proof of his true desires. I say, instead, you should let him have what he purports to crave. Kill him as you have decreed. We will sacrifice to Mars Ultor and again to Jupiter and see if his soothsayers are a match for our gods.”

“And yet we may regret at leisure what we have committed in haste.” Seated, with his chin on his hands and the crown of laurels on his brow, Claudius was another Augustus, epitome of wisdom and arbiter of reasoned justice. “This man is a warrior and king of his people. It is long known that among the barbarians, the king will sacrifice himself for the greater good. It may be that he knows the dreamers’ power and believes his death will aid them. For such a reason, he would seek his own death.”

Narcissus, freedman and minister of state, completed his announcements to the crowd. Entering the conversation as if by right, he said, “If there is any such risk, it must not be taken. The man may be spared without harm to your self or standing.”

The freedman set himself in opposition, once again, to the empress. Those amongst the Senate, tuned to the internecine warfare of the court, saw a parting of ways and a need to take sides. Nods of agreement began slowly and were taken up, or not, by those with most or least to lose.

Agrippina frowned, decorously. One would have had to be watching very closely to know if she noted those who supported Narcissus amongst the Senate. “We have a victory procession,” she said. “Triumphal distinctions have been voted for Ostorius Scapula. We do him and ourselves no honour if we do not demonstrate the magnitude of our victory. The crosses must not remain empty.”

Claudius nodded, pleasantly. “The brother will die, and the men who fought against us. The people’s desire to see blood will be assuaged and yet, at the same time, they will be reminded that their emperor is not without mercy. It is a good combination. Thus did Scipio win the favour of the people by his release of Syphax. Narcissus can provide a speech for Caratacus in which he throws himself on our mercy and we—”

“No.”

It was not said forcefully but, still, the Senate jerked back as if struck. Two of the Urban Guard stepped forward, their hands on their weapons.

Claudius directed his attention at Caradoc. “Your life will be spared. You are not in a position to argue.”

“Am I not?” The grey eyes scoured him. Valerius knew that look. “You have killed countless hundreds of your enemies but have you ever yet tried to keep a man alive against his will? To make him eat and drink as much as a body requires to live into long life? I promise you, our death, yours and mine, will be as lengthy as flesh can make it.”

The emperor said, “Once, in my audience room, you implied doubt that your dreamers could reach me. Did you then lie?”

“Yes. I believed it would protect my family. I retract it. The governor’s death is proof of their powers. If they can reach him, guarded by the legions, what is there to keep them from you?”

“I see.” The emperor spent full days in the law courts, acting as judge. It showed in him now, as he weighed actions, motives and consequences towards judgement. “You would go lying to your own death but resort to truth only when your family is threatened. Am I then to believe that you value your brother’s life above your own?”

“And those of the warriors, yes. I will not live to see another man die in my stead.”

“How very noble.” The empress sneered. The expression, if not the sound, was repeated here and there amongst the ranks of the Senate. “Let them all die,” she said again. “Xenophon and the horse-guards together will see you come to no harm from it. You are the emperor. You have no need to be cowed by a barbarian.”