Dreaming the Serpent Spear (10 page)

More than any of these, Valerius was aware of the tight, knotting pain that had taken hold of his diaphragm and all the hope and pain that it heralded. He took a hesitant step forward, extending one hand to the broad cheek and the wary, white-rimmed eye above. “Tell me, son of a god, did your sire—”

The not-black horse pinned its ears again and struck at the stall’s side. Teeth cracked on wood with a noise to shake the rafters. Throughout the barn, the quiet rhythms of eating ceased for a moment and then started again a little faster.

Valerius stood very still, watching the place where the teeth had gouged deeply into age-hardened oak. His face felt cold and slick and a single line of sweat ran down the centre of his spine. He was shaking, which was neither expected nor welcome. He realized it as Longinus reached him and saw the other man notice the fact and its reasons and choose not to speak and was grateful. He had forgotten how deeply they knew each other, he and Longinus. The remembering came in sharp counterpoint to the shock.

Longinus had stepped back to study the horse from a safe distance. He whistled, a low appreciative warble. “You
leave one mad horse behind with the Eceni and Civilis finds you another. Did he use the Crow-horse at stud all those years ago on the banks of the Rhine?”

Longinus had not been present on the Rhine, or even in its immediate aftermath, but he had listened to half-told histories and understood those parts that mattered most; and he had ridden the Crow-horse in battle, which no-one else had done but Valerius. For that, alone, he was unique.

Valerius said, “One of Civilis’ black mares threw a white-legged son by the Crow just before the invasion. I thought they had killed it as a four-year-old for being unrideable. I must have been wrong.”

“That horse would be nearly twenty. This is barely a six-year-old. It can’t have been broken long.”

“I know. If I were to guess, I’d say it was born while I was in Hibernia. It could be a grandson, or great-grandson. Enough of the Crow has passed down the line for it to be that.” Valerius put a hand behind him and found a wall to lean on. Unsteadily, he said, “Will you look at its face and tell me what you see?”

“Two eyes and two ears and a nose and a mouth?” Longinus regarded him curiously. “What would you like me to see?”

“The markings. What are the markings on its brow?”

The horse had turned away to face the darkest corner of the stall. Longinus walked round to its head and back. When he returned, he was no longer grinning. He said, “It has a disc on its brow in the shape of a waxing three-quarter moon and a flash like a falling spear above it. Julius, is that the horse of your dream?”

Julius
: the intimate, personal name. Longinus only used that when they were alone, and then most often at night, in the extremes of love.

Valerius looked down at his hand. The tremor in it was less than it had been but still not gone. He said, “No. I killed the horse of that dream on Hibernia, the day it was foaled. And the markings are not quite right. In the dream, the disc was a shield and the line of the spear passed diagonally across it, not above like this one.”

“And if I remember all that you said, in the dream you rode a gelding.” Longinus ducked down to peer under the horse’s belly, confirming a thought. “This is a colt.”

“Yes.”

“But a good one,” said a voice neither man fully recognized. “You could do worse.”

They spun, together, reaching for blades that were extensions of living flesh.

“Longinus, no!”

Valerius threw an arm out, stopping a strike before it had begun. Hissing a breath through clenched teeth, he said to Civilis, “Old man, you forget yourself. We’re at war. We have killed warriors who crept at our backs in the dark as you have just done. If you wish to die before your time, don’t leave your blood on my blade. I don’t imagine the legate treats kindly those who slay his favourite horsemen.”

“I don’t imagine he does, although he would have to move fast to claim your lives before my Batavians, and any death devised by Rome would be better than what they might offer, I promise you.”

Civilis stood three stalls away. Off his horse, he seemed less frail. His eyes focused without effort, and
with some amusement, on the two men who threatened his life.

The freckle-faced boy stood at his side, grinning. The old man ruffled his hair with unfeigned affection. “Gentlemen, I apologize. My courtesies have abandoned me. If you will blame it all on the curse of old age and a weak bladder, I would be grateful. In recompense, allow me to introduce my daughter’s daughter’s son, the first boy child of my line. There are nine women living who carry my blood and my name, and only this one boy, who will one day be a man and wield his great-grandfather’s blade in battle. For now, he is the best healer of horses we have got. If anyone can make your gelding sound again, he will.” He patted one lean shoulder. “Thank you, Arminius. You may go now.”

The boy wanted to stay. He shaped a plea, looking up at his great-grandfather. Whatever he saw in the old man’s face led him to abandon it. He paled, until the freckles stood out like mud spatters across his face. Bobbing a bow to Valerius and Longinus, he ran for the door.

Civilis lowered himself to sit on the edge of a drinking trough. There was little about him now to indicate old age, but a residual stiffness and the silver of his hair. His gaze flickered over Longinus and returned to linger on Valerius. His brows were entirely white. The blue-grey eyes beneath seemed paler than they had, and sharp enough to strip a man to honesty.

“Tell me, you who are named for a dead emperor whom every man came to despise before his death, if you listen to the noises outside, what do you hear?”

Valerius leaned back on the nearest oak upright. The shaking had passed, for which he was grateful. He turned
over one hand and studied the broken edge of a nail. He had played the board game of Warrior’s Dance with lesser men than Civilis of the Batavians and, rarely, with greater.

The question was not a hard one to answer. The sound outside was one he had known from his teens, a noise unique to the legions that only thousands upon thousands of men can make, in their ordered urgency, preparing for war: the clash of armour and the random shouts of excited men and the holler of horses who feel the beginnings of battle fever that might, if everyone were lucky, last the duration of a march and into the battle beyond. The subtle nuances were unique to each cohort and each legion, but the broad press of it reached into parts of Valerius he had thought long dead, so that his hand came unasked to rest on the hilt of his blade and his blood thrilled freshly through his veins.

As much for that as for any instinct for the game, Valerius offered the truth, unadorned.

Looking the old man directly in the eye for the first time, he said, “I hear horses eating hay that have been well cared for and know themselves safe. I hear harness being readied by men who know their horses as brothers and who savour battle. I hear part of a legion, but not all of it, preparing to march under a man who has kept it too keen for too long, so that the men have gone sour and cannot tell the real thing from a drill.”

“Indeed. You are at least part of what you say, then.”

“Am I?”

They were no longer playing. Each man of the three had lived this long because he knew the difference between threats and reality; because, in his gut, he responded to one
and not the other. A pace further down the aisle, Longinus had not moved. Nothing about him had changed, and everything; his smile was as open, his yellow hawk’s eyes as genial, his balance as good — and he could kill now, effortlessly, where before it had been only a thought.

Valerius had clear priorities: Longinus must not die, and the IXth must march down the ancestors’ Stone Way into ambush; these two things mattered more than the life of an old man, however honoured in the past.

Rehearsing in his head the lies that would be necessary afterwards, Valerius judged the distance from himself to Civilis, and the moves it would take to grasp his head and twist until the sinewed neck had broken. Already, he felt regret at a needless death. He took a small step sideways, to find a place of better balance.

“Ha!” Civilis laughed aloud. With studied nonchalance, he leaned back on the stall and hooked his thumbs in his belt, then crossed his feet at the ankles. “Gods, man, do I look like a fool? If I don’t walk out of this barn first and free, both of you are dead men, in ways you have never yet dreamed of. The Batavians have their own honour, and while I may be retired in Rome’s eyes, I am first rider until my death for my countrymen. Petillius Cerialis knows that. He needs us. As you need me — Valerius of the Eceni.”

The silence into which that fell would have brought lesser men to their knees. Down both sides of the line, horses stamped, restlessly. The white-legged colt with the moon and spear on its black brow kicked the sides of its stall, scattering splinters across the floor. Longinus caught Valerius’ eye and stepped back three more paces, giving them both space in which to move. The quiet was broken by the
whisper of iron on fat-softened leather as he drew his blade from its sheath.

“No. Longinus, put up. He isn’t going to betray us yet.” A grain sack lay near Valerius’ feet. He kicked it closer and sat down. Very carefully, he cupped his palms to his face, pressing the tips of his fingers to his closed eyes. When he was as certain as he could be that the turmoil inside did not show on his face, he let drop his hands and faced the older man.

“When did you know?” he asked.

The old man’s smile held a hint of sadness. “Son of my soul, how could I not know from the start? For twenty years, you were the son I never had, the younger brother of my fighting days. It grieves me to the core that you believe I could forget. I knew you from the moment I saw you ride that flea-bitten donkey of a messenger’s horse up the hill. It was already foundering and you held it up for the last dozen strides.”

Civilis reached for Valerius’ hands and opened the palms and read the scars there as if they told him as much as Corvus’ letters. There was pity in his eyes when he raised them. “You forget, the first time I saw you, you were riding the Crow-horse and he was trying to kill you. It is a good thing for a man to remember, particularly at the end of his days when the moments of true glory have been few and are to be cherished.”

“You do me great honour.”

What else to say? Valerius had come expecting physical danger, and had prepared for it. There was no preparing for this.

“Yes?” Civilis barked a short laugh. “It would count for more if you had the decency to be honest and tell me that I am right in what my heart craves.”

“Which is what?”

“That you plan to destroy Cerialis and the Ninth legion in the way my kinsman, the hero Arminius, destroyed Augustus’ three legions in the forests and marshlands east of the Rhine.”

It was exactly what he planned. Valerius said, “Your heart craves the destruction of the legion you are sworn to serve?”

“I serve him who gives me gold to fight, that I may come to greater glory in battle. When the son of my soul returns to my life and is Arminius come to life again, gold is as nothing, or the legions’ oaths. My ancestor, too, was sworn to the legions. He is not heralded in our winter halls as a traitor, but as one who outwitted Rome. I am old. I have lived through too many battles. Each winter, I fear the coughing fever and the loss of more teeth and the slow death of a body that has survived too long. For the past five years, I have prayed to the horse-gods at mid-summer that they send me one last, glorious battle, by which my name might be measured amongst the heroes. This year, they have answered. They have sent me you.”

Tears stood proud in his eyes as he spoke. With a terrible dignity, he said, “I beg you, from the floor of my heart, let me come with you, to join in that which you plan.”

Valerius picked a straw from the floor, flattened it and folded it across and across. Studying the result, rather than the man, he said, “I am not Arminius and this is not the Rhine. I have delivered an urgent message from Camulodunum, which suggests a route the legate might take to reach the city in time to relieve it. As a result, if and when it is asked of me, I will lead Petillius Cerialis
and however many cohorts of the Ninth he can muster at short notice back down the ancestors’ Stone Way towards the place where the watchtower was burned two nights ago. The track passes for half a day’s ride between the forest and the marsh. If the legate is so foolish as to march his men down there without adequate protection, and if the Eceni warriors are waiting, with the she-bears and the newly sworn spears among them, then it may be that the Ninth legion will, indeed, be destroyed in the way that your greatgrandfather’s cousin destroyed Augustus’ three legions.”

His gaze came up then, to meet the other man’s, and the regret there was laid over other things, more complex. “I will do everything in my power to make that happen. The future of this land is at stake, and all that comes after it for all generations. I will not let an old man, even one who rightly names me brother, put that in danger.”

“Am I a danger?”

“You may be. If you come, then the entire wing of Batavians will come with you. How many of those will agree with you that their oath to serve the legions is as nothing compared to a glorious death in battle?”

There was a pause, and time to reflect, then, “Follow me,” Civilis said.

Pained joints cracked as the old man pushed himself to standing. He walked down the horse line to the white-legged descendant of the Crow. It did not pin its ears at him, nor threaten to bite. He lifted a soft leather rope from a nail and twisted it into a halter. The horse nodded its head to let him slip it over its ears.

The love with which the old man rubbed his age-twisted hands down the beast’s face was displayed without shame.
After a while, hoarsely, he said, “The Batavian squadrons will ride with the Ninth anyway, whether I join you or not. You’re right, I am old and they honour me, but at least half are blood-sworn to my nephew Henghes who is given wholly to Rome and cares nothing for the names of his ancestors. The other half, I think, will follow me. They would not fight against their fellows, but they would fight against the legions in support of your warriors if they saw me doing the same. It is not what I would want, but it’s the best I can give you.”