Dreaming the Hound (40 page)

He could not have been more wrong. The reality was more disturbing and he discovered it as his captors opened the door and pitched him face first onto the gravel inside. As an officer in the legions, he had seen this place too often to count. He knew, as he had known his own quarters, the smell of old blood and vomit and stale urine and the old-meat stench of terror and capitulation.

Then, his rank had protected him, and the closed walls of his mind. Now he was no longer an officer and Nemain had opened all that had been closed. Sliding face first across the floor, he felt as if it were his own, the horror of every other dreamer, every other man and woman of the tribes who had lived and died in this place.

Some had been stronger at the start, some weaker, some given to gods other than Nemain, some trained in better ways to hold closed the floodgates of their minds so that the impact of their breaking would be less on those who came after.

None of them, however well schooled, had failed to add to the weight of horror and Valerius was only the latest in their line. The weight of their deaths fell on him like a sledgehammer and he screamed out the agony of it as the guards kicked him again in the guts for luck.

The kicking saved him. He crumpled, choking, into his own private hell of not-breathing and, briefly, the fight for air was too urgent and too overwhelming for the rest to swamp him. Clawing at the floor, fighting to hold the threads of mac Calma’s teaching, he was able to find that part of the chaos that was only Valerius and hold it apart from the rest.

The guards let him alone while they undid his shackles. He lay prone, his cheek smeared with his own spit and tears and blood and dust, and fought to reason.

One fact rose late out of the rest: that they had brought him here, to this chamber, when they would have taken a serving officer, even a legionary, to the detention rooms in the south wing of the barracks. Thus they believed Valerius to be a tribesman and did not know his past identity. He clung to that, a spar in the ocean of his drowning.

The chamber was not a big place; the four guards barely fitted inside. They rolled him over and he could see them for the first time, at least with his left eye, which had not swollen shut. They were all young men, and strangers. None of them had seen service in the time of Scapula when the decurion of the First Thracian cavalry had led his troop across the river in a drive that had ultimately defeated Caradoc.

Even if they had been there, without his mount they would not have known Valerius. The Crow-horse had been his emblem, however often he had painted the bull on his pennants. He had loved it and it had hated him, which was safest and best and he had loved it more for doing so. For one long, distracted moment, the loss of the Crow-horse mattered more to Valerius than the pressure of the inquisitors’ room and the slow death that was to come. He called to the beast in Thracian and the four young men of the XXth thought he cried in Siluran and spat again, laughing.

The guards were young and lacked experience and left Valerius alone with his hands free while they turned to lock the door. Their blades hung at their hips, as open invitations. If he had been the warrior they believed him to be, he would have killed at least one of them, and then himself, in the time they took to fix the bolts.

Because he was not only a warrior, and did not intend to die, Valerius pushed himself upright and stood swaying in the centre of the room. His mouth was full of blood. He swallowed it rather than spit and, in the archaic Latin favoured by Claudius and still a sign of allegiance to the old emperor, said, ‘You’re supposed to strip me next. It’s in the Order of Action: all clothing to be removed from the prisoner at the time of arrest. I think it’s designed to deprive the warriors of warmth and dignity which rather presumes they have some dignity left to remove. Still, I think you should do it.’

Four men stared at him, aghast. One, black-haired, leaner and more intense than the rest, swore an oath in the name of Mithras.

Valerius had not made his choice in the cave, but he gave thanks in great profusion to the bull-god now, for the gift of this lean young man and the strength of his faith. Holding himself tall, he spoke the words of the Lion’s invocation before the sun altar and watched the young initiate pale to the colour of grey parchment.

A well-tutored Siluran spy might, at a stretch, have known Claudian Latin and seen a copy of the Orders of Action, but only a man who had progressed high in the ranks of Mithras’ priesthood could possibly know the Lion’s invocation well enough to recite it aloud and such a man could never be of the tribes. The hierarchy of the bull-god was notoriously selective in its choice of those who held high order: with each passing word, Valerius proved not only that he was a Roman citizen who had seen service in the legions, but that he had been of the elite few who distinguished themselves so fully in battle that others might follow them who were not of their corps.

The silence that settled after he ended was brittle with fear. In the midst of it, the initiate of Mithras swore again, quietly, begging forgiveness of his god.

The youth was newly branded; every part of his bearing said so. Valerius leaned back against the wall and managed not to wince. He raised his arms so that his sleeves fell back to show the scars of the Lion’s rank at his wrist, and placed his left thumb on the front of his tunic where it covered the old brand of Mithras that had been burned long ago on his chest: even the guards who had never been permitted within the cellars and caves of the bull-god could recognize that brand when they saw it.

‘You really should strip me,’ Valerius said, pleasantly. ‘It will save us all time in the end although I’d be grateful if you could manage to do it without kicking me again. I’m not sure there’s anywhere left that isn’t going to take a month to heal.’

He thought he had pushed too far. All four of the legionaries gaped at him and the shape of their minds screamed of the need for help from a senior officer, preferably one branded for the god, ranked Lion or higher.

Very badly, Valerius did not want any of them to call for that help.

Looking past the young initiate, he caught instead the gaze of the armourer, who was the only officer among the four. He said, ‘Your choices are simple: if I’m a warrior of the Silures, you have to strip me before the inquisitors come; it’ll look bad otherwise. If I’m not, if I am, instead, what you see and hear …’ he was not going to lay claim to the god aloud, but he touched again the brand of Mithras at his chest, ‘then you’ll pay for disobeying the order of a senior officer. I have ordered you to strip me. If you don’t, I will report it. Think, man—’ He snapped his fingers and felt four young men flinch. ‘In battle, an officer who hesitates is dead, and his men with him. You know what—’

He would have had them. The young officer drew breath to give

the order to strip him - and let it out again at the sound Valerius had heard half a heartbeat before and that had rendered all other arguments useless. Outside, a troop of auxiliary cavalry had just been ordered to stand to attention in rank formation in front of the door.

The help of a senior officer had arrived, unasked. The young officer blazed a smile, relief written bold across his face. Valerius smiled with him, and cursed in Hibernian, to hide the panic.

Once again, he could have armed himself; the guards wore their weapons with little care and all of their attention was on the officer outside. It would not have been hard to take a sword and sheathe it in his own chest. If he were prepared to risk being overwhelmed by the guards outside - or any other of the five thousand armed men in the fortress - he could probably have killed at least one of the young legionaries first and gone to the god with one last ghost waiting to greet him in the lands beyond life. He considered both of these in the time it took the newly arrived officer to march to the door and rap on it and demand to be admitted.

For the rest of his life, Valerius, once-decurion of the First Thracian Cavalry, believed that he had already decided to live and not to kill - before he recognized the voice. Then the bolt was thrown back and the morning let in and Longinus Sdapeze, decurion of the first troop, the First Thracian Cavalry, took up all of the doorway.

Only because he was watching, and he knew Longinus exceptionally well, did Valerius see the in-breath of a suspicion confirmed and the consternation and the too-fast thinking that followed.

The rest saw the tall, much-garlanded officer of the Thracians sweep his helmet from his stag-red hair and toss it, grinning, to the prisoner, swearing a cheerful oath in Thracian and then again in Gaulish and Latin. He clapped the young armourer of the XXth on the shoulder and, as one officer to another in the presence of the rabble said, ‘Have you asked this idiot who he is or has he been too busy swearing by the bull-god to tell you?’

It was the luckiest of guesses, or Longinus had ways of hearing through wood. In that moment, Valerius believed each of these equally. He slid the cavalry helmet onto his head and if the rawly beaten parts of his skull throbbed hard against the metal, he was still glad of the protection.

He recognized all eight of the men waiting outside. The horse master, standing at the head of the troop, flicked his thumb in the sign that was life for a gladiator across the empire. For the men of

the first troop of the Ala Prima Thracum, it had also signified their last decurion, who had ridden the mad, unrideable Crow-horse and had always led them into battle with the recklessness - and the luck - of the circus. Further back, a stout man with three of his four front teeth missing grinned unappealingly and winked.

The auxiliary did not foster an honour guard as the tribes did for their leaders, but such things came together of their own accord and these eight men, almost exactly, had been Valerius’ honour guard for the last four years of his time with the legions. He knew them all; their names, their lovers’ names, the names of their legitimate and illegitimate children. He knew their horses and how they rode and their courage, or lack of it, in battle and who could be relied upon to hold the left side of a line and who could best swim with a rope across a river at night and hold it fast, that the rest of the troop might follow.

They had been Valerius’ men and were now Longinus’, the wild Thracian horseman who had always loved and fought with a cheerful disdain for the risks. That these men had come to free Valerius was not in question, only whether, in all conscience, he could allow them to make the attempt.

The four ardent young officers of the XXth believed they had captured a Siluran warrior. Left alone, they would have questioned him as that and perhaps found, in the end, that he was given to Nemain and had lived some time on Mona. What they did not know, and might never find out, was that they had captured instead a former cavalry officer named traitor by the Emperor Nero, whose death in Rome would be worse, by far, than anything the inquisitors could inflict - and would be shared in kind with any others who had aided him at any point along the way.

Someone spoke over-loud nearby. Longinus leaned against the doorpost, holding open the door, all the while talking of Valerius, to Valerius, telling him what he needed to know.

‘… the hell of it is, he’s been so long among the natives that he’s forgotten how to give his name in Latin. But he’s the best pair of ears we’ve ever had inside the tribes. He got us news of Caradoc’s trap at the Valley of the Lame Hind and he ran his mad bloody horse over the rampart at the revolt in Eceni lands when Scapula’s son would have had us all killed. You should ask Priscus how he lost his teeth. You may think the Silurans are a bunch of wild bastards…’

Longinus turned and walked out of the door, sweeping the others with him. Most of what he said was true, and all of it was legend within the legions. The four youths of the XXth grinned, hearing in a new voice stories they already knew well.

‘… hardest problem will be how to get him back out to the Silures without them realizing we’ve let him go deliberately. At least you’ve kicked him enough for it to look real. I’d say if we’re quick, there’s still time for him to “escape”, if you see what I—’

Longinus was a cavalry man of exceptional valour but he had never been to Rome; he had not seen the circus, or helped to burn the bodies of the men branded traitor by an emperor. He had not seen the details of their dying, nor the exquisite care taken by men whose skill was in ensuring that those under their care did not die too early. Mercifully unaware, Longinus had no idea of the risk he took, for himself or those who served under him.

Valerius, who had done both, knew it exactly. In the time it took Longinus to sweep the ardent young officer of the XXth through the door, he saw, layered over the many deaths of the dreamers that haunted the inquisitor’s chamber, nine more, slower and more bloody; of eight cavalrymen he cared for, and one he had loved.

Many times in his life, Valerius had sought his own destruction. Each time had been a denial of life, an escape from gods and men who had abandoned him. This time, in full awareness of what he did and for whom, he reached for Nemain, and was held by her, and for Mithras, and felt the savage understanding of the god. With that, he knew what he must do.

The lean, dark-haired initiate of Mithras had reached the doorway. As much as his comrades, he was entranced by Longinus’ tales of past heroics, made drunk by his own close brush with danger, now passed, so that he laughed over-loud at the talk of war and battles and a life he feared and craved in equal measure.

Valerius put out an arm to block the young man’s exit. ‘When they find what I did to the god’s cave on the mountain, they will skin you alive for letting me go. And that’s nothing to what Mithras will do to you when you come to meet him at last with him clothed in flesh and you slim as a ghost.’

The youth stared at him, not daring to comprehend. Vicarious excitement evaporated as understanding came in spite of himself. Yellow with terror, he fought for words.

‘What have you done?’