Dreaming the Bull (44 page)

“Philonikos, my apprentice,” said Xenophon, when the lad had gone. “I always swore I would never take one, but have allowed myself to be persuaded to make an exception.”

“And you regret having done so?” Valerius sat on the clothes chest, balancing the tray of food on his knees.

“No. He may do so, in time, but I will not. I have discovered that it is good, in one’s old age, to believe that a lifetime’s knowledge will not die with its progenitor.”

“Indeed.” The wine, newly poured, was heavy with age and good vintage. Valerius breathed in the smell of it as a man breathes fresh air after too long indoors. The first taste fortified the walls of his mind as the solid certainty of the harbour at Ostia had steadied his legs and his gut; the second washed him clear of the need to talk nonsense. Settling his shoulders against an expanse of green-blue plaster, he said, “So now, perhaps, you might tell me why I’m here?”

“Why do you think?”

“Not to play guessing games with you.”

“No. That would be unfair to us both.”

“And to Theophilus?” It was the soldier’s way, learned long ago, always to expose the enemy’s weapons to clear view.

“Perhaps.” The old man was tired and his guest had just taken the only seat in the room. Surprisingly, given his
evident care for his dignity, Xenophon sat on the floor. “How is life in Britannia really?” he asked. “I heard the new governor has stopped the hangings amongst the eastern tribes. That must ease the tension somewhat?”

He had not been summoned to discuss politics, either, but there was some refuge in doing so and Valerius took it. “Markedly. The Trinovantes and their allies are delighted. In the west, he has sent cohort after cohort of the Second and the Twentieth to their destruction, which nicely bolsters the morale of the Silures and their allies among the Ordovices and the warriors of Mona, while in the north he lets Venutios raise the spears of the northern Brigantes and threaten Cartimandua’s hold on those who remain. If our governor believes the emperor requires him to keep the tribes happy, to give them succour and support their belief that they will drive us ultimately from the province, then, yes, he is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams.”

“You would prefer it if he returned to the constant hatred that existed under Scapula? You know what the tribes think of you and how many dreamers have sworn to see you dead?”

“Of course.” In that one short sentence, they moved to a new, more personal, level. It was not unexpected, simply poorly timed; before the wine arrived, it might have been more damaging. Valerius drank deeply, and, smiling, met the physician’s eye. “Who cares if they hate, as long as they fear?”

Xenophon blanched. “Caligula used to say that.”

“I know.” The cheeses were made of goat’s milk, whitely crumbling. They matched well with the wine. Valerius broke one in half and ate it delicately. “In this, as in many things, he was right.”

There was no possible answer to that. Xenophon knew as well as any man exactly the disdain in which Valerius had once held Caligula. They sat for a while in silence, each reviewing his weapons.

Xenophon pursed his lips and pressed the tips of his fingers to the bridge of his nose, thinking. Valerius watched him make a decision and reject it twice before he lowered his hands and drew a strained breath to speak.

“Theophilus tells me you were a changed man when you returned from Rome two years ago; that you drank to excess, of wine and not ale; that in the gap between Scapula’s death and the appointment of the new governor, you slaughtered the natives unchecked, hanging men, women and children for “crimes against the emperor”—real or imagined—until, even more than before, your name became a curse in tribes from the east coast to the west; that you ran riot through your own ranks, killing an actuary of another wing so that the men threatened mutiny and only the intervention of their prefect kept you safe. Is it true?”

Valerius sat very still. Even after his return from Rome, he had believed Theophilus an ally. The physician had nursed him through the bull-dreaming and knew the measure of his encounter with the god. He had seen the ghosts after the decurion’s return, too, having raised them once with an excessive dose of poppy given to dull the pain while he stitched a spear-wound in Valerius’ thigh. The consequent ravings had not been dignified but they were at least contained within the private room of the hospital at Camulodunum. It was not something of which they spoke but Valerius had refused the drug ever after and Theophilus had not pressed it on him, even when cauterizing an infected
sword-cut. There had been nights later when he had offered the same private room and the company of his presence to a man who had urgent need of both. At the time, Valerius had been grateful to have someone with whom he could share the long nights when neither wine nor hard work had kept the walls between the worlds intact. Now, listening to Xenophon speaking in ways designed explicitly to raise the dead, he wondered if the overdose of poppy had not been so accidental, if all of this had been planned.

Valerius drained his beaker of wine and poured another. He would have liked the succour of divine instruction but Mithras came to him only patchily these days and hardly ever when he was in company. He had taken part in initiations of over a hundred acolytes since his first branding; at different times, he had cut the wrist-cords, had lit the lamps, had led the chanting. He had seen countless men come to the god and seen the change in them, not just in the cellar but on the battlefield and the training grounds. They shone with the touch of the deity and each of them believed that Valerius shared that. Theophilus knew the truth and so he must assume Xenophon knew it too; that the visit of the god was a rare thing, sustained through the barren years by hope and faith and a mess of incoherent dreams.

The knowledge of this had never yet stopped him from striving to reach the Sun and all that it stood for. Doing so now, he was surprised before he was grateful when his view of Xenophon wavered and the other worlds pressed in. The red-roan bull came first, as it had done ever since he had seen it in the flesh. Valerius met it as an old friend—his only true friend—and, with its strength, he built the square-blocked altar to the god, adding the incense and the memory of
brand smoke to make it real. On the sea-green plaster behind Xenophon’s head, he painted an image of the capped youth who committed slaughter at the behest of older, angrier gods. The roan bull died, forced to kneeling, and the god wept. Tears mixed with the blood and leaked onto the sandstone floor. The gathered ghosts claimed them for their own.

Valerius stared at his god and his god stared back. The ancient and recent dead filled the space between them. Xenophon waited in silence. At some time when the distraction was greatest, he moved across the floor to sit at Valerius’ side. The decurion felt a lean, withered hand test his forehead for heat and another lift his wrist for a pulse. A voice from outside time asked, “What do you see?”

“Nothing.” He would not speak of it again to anyone.

“Are you blind then?”

“No.” Valerius cupped his palms over his eyes. Sometimes the blackness worked, sometimes it made things worse. This time, it gave him space to gather the words he had half-prepared, expecting such an attack as this. When he could speak with a steady voice, he said, “Theophilus is a physician. He views the world through different eyes from those of us who are required to maintain discipline amongst fighting men. Umbricius attacked me openly; I killed him in self-defence. It was witnessed by my troop and his. No-one disputes it.”

“And the rest? The slaughter of the natives? The hangings? The villages razed and their children burned?”

It was too much and too deliberate. Blessedly, the anger came; not the surging, vicious fury that had killed Umbricius, but enough. It worked as nothing else ever did to lessen the haunting. In the consuming cold of his rage,
the screaming dead screamed less. Macha, mother to Bán, faded from sight as if she had never been.

A single cold, clear voice remained, of a man still alive who had once echoed the voice and features of the god.
What would you have done if…?
Only with extremes of wine could that voice be made to stop, but Valerius had learned, over time, to think past it. He dropped his hands from his eyes and was gratified to see Xenophon flinch from what could be read in his face. He remembered the knife in his pack and saw the possibility of death strike the physician. He smiled and knew what it did to the other man’s fear.

With deliberate clarity, Valerius said, “Killing is what war is about. If you don’t like it, you have the ear of the only man who can change it. Tell Claudius to pull his legions out of Britannia and the killing will end. Until then, we have to win or we die. I do not intend to die, but if I was brought here to face the executioner, you should know that my death will not end the war.”

“I have never believed it would.”

Xenophon was not truly afraid of him, which was a mistake. In the renewed emptiness of the room, the possibility of murder hung between them. Valerius set his goblet down and rested back against the wall, his fingers laced behind his head. He was pleased with the steadiness of his hands; it was not always so. “You still haven’t told me why I’m here,” he said. “I don’t believe it was to quibble over the death of a Gaulish actuary.”

In that single sentence, a thousand deaths were reduced to a minor point of law and Roman order was restored. With evident regret, Xenophon moved back to sit at his place against the opposite wall. When he spoke, it was of other things.

“You’re right, of course. The emperor would not pay what he did to bring you here to discuss the death of a Gaul, although your reasons for killing him may have a bearing on the outcome of your task. Military discipline matters more to some than others, particularly here and now…”

The physician drifted to silence, staring into the reflective surface of his own wine, choosing his phrases for best effect. “If we leave aside the bull-slayer and remain in the temporal world, to whom do you, as an officer of the cavalry, owe your ultimate loyalty?” he asked. “Whose order will you obey without question, to its fulfilment or your own death, whichever comes first?”

Valerius said, “The emperor’s. That is, Claudius.” It mattered now, to state a name.

“And if that emperor is slain, then are you loyal to his successor, or to the one to whom you gave your oath?”

Thus did they quietly enter the realms of treason. Men had died over days for far less. Valerius dropped his eyes. He, too, studied his own floating reflection for the answer. It was not something to which he had given serious thought, although perhaps he should have done.
I serve my emperor, in life and to death.

“The emperor commands the armies, whomsoever he may be,” he said presently. “The loyalty is to the position, not the man. In absolute terms, my allegiance is to my prefect, through him to my governor and so to the emperor. But Britannia is not close to Rome and the winter is almost upon us. If an order failed to reach the governor before spring, he would act on Claudius’ last command and amend it as his powers and the situation required. I would take my orders from him.”

“What if, hypothetically speaking, the emperor—Claudius—were to give you a direct order in person and you were not to return to Britannia before spring? There would be no chain of command to cushion your choices.”

“No. I could see that.” Valerius set the tray of food carefully on the floor. Always before, action and the promise of action had brought him back to himself. It did so now. Thinking aloud, he said, “May I take it that the order I might be given would be contradicted by the next emperor, were he to find out what it was?”

“You may. If you are careful, he will never find out and you can return to your unit a far richer man. If you are careless—”

“—then I will die. That is always the case. The god knows I have been careful so far.” Danger sparked lightly along Valerius’ spine, welcome as a lover’s touch. “Is it fair to assume that you are empowered to give me this order?”

“Yes. I have it here, written by Claudius in his own hand and sealed before witnesses.” The scroll the physician drew from his sleeve was a small one, sealed with the imprint of an elephant, the emperor’s personal and private seal, used only in relation to Britannia. The order recalling Valerius to Rome had borne exactly that image.

Xenophon held it loosely, as he might a captured finch, soon to be released. With unusual gravity, he said, “I can give you the scroll, but may not do so unless you swear beforehand on your god and your soldier’s oath that you will accept in its fullness the order contained herein, that you will carry it out to the last breath of your life or die in the attempt. This is for your own protection. Without that stipulation, if you refused, you would have to die.”

“Obviously. In a matter of this secrecy, you could not risk that I might speak of it beyond here. Do you know the nature of the command that I am given?”

“I do.”

Valerius was standing now, his hands damp. His heart careened in his chest, rebounding off the bars of his ribs. The room had emptied, utterly. In place of the multitudes, he felt the distant presence of the god, drifting like old incense, promising victory. “In my place, would you accept this?” he asked. “Would you give your oath to carry it out?”

“Willingly and without question.”

“Thank you.” Valerius drank the last of the wine. The decision was no decision, as Xenophon must have known it would be. The lure of danger was too great and, greater than that, the god was with him in a way he had not been these last two years.

Savouring the sweetness of it, he said, “In that case, in Mithras’ name, on his honour and my own, by my pledge on his altar and by my oath to the emperor, I accept in its fullness Claudius’ order, whatever it may be. His will is mine, to death and beyond.”

Cwmfen of the ordovices, prisoner-under-amnesty to the Emperor Claudius, gave birth at dusk five days after the autumn equinox in the third year of her captivity, that being also the fourteenth year of the reign of the man by whose whim and under whose protection she lived. The child was a boy, son to Caradoc, full brother to Cygfa and half-brother to Cunomar who was no longer his father’s only son.