Dreaming the Serpent Spear (11 page)

Civilis turned, holding out the halter. “Except that I can also give you this colt. He is the Crow’s grandson and he has some of his fire without all of his hate. He is not a match for the horse that holds your heart, but nor is he as difficult to ride or to handle. If I were your age, I would ride him into battle and feel honoured that he carried me.”

Valerius felt the drain of battle exhaustion, and had not yet fought. Without trying to conceal it, he asked, rawly, “Civilis, I could not have hoped for as much. How can I thank you?”

“You walk with a god at either side of you, Valerius. Ask your question of them, not an old man who craves their company. Rome will brand me traitor, but the gods and my people will know that I have followed in the footsteps of Arminius, a man I admire above all others. What greater glory can there be than that?”

A
T DAWN ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, SIX COHORTS OF THE
IXth legion marched south towards Camulodunum, side on to the salted wind.

Grey, blustery light rebounded off three thousand polished helmets and raked across curls of strip armour kept free of rust by daily attention. Four men abreast, with two javelin-lengths between each row, and twelve between each cohort, the legion marched fast and light, taking neither mules nor carts, but bearing their packs with them, each man burdened with only enough food and equipment for two overnight encampments.

The legion’s eagle and the cohort standards crowded in a scarlet and glittering forest in the early rows, flanked by the officers on their horses with the cavalry, better mounted, just behind. These first ranks departed at dawn. The last of the men, waiting their turn, passed through the eastern gates of the winter fortress around noon. In between was an unbroken snake-line of mounted and unmounted men and the measured tread of their footfalls.

They marched south along the ancestors’ Stone Way, a paved trading route so old that a hundred generations of wagoners had brought their raw iron and salt and copper and enamel along its length from the southern ports of the great river to this sea port with its access to snowbound lands across the sea, and carted the hounds and leather and Nordic amber and walrus ivory and mutton and bales of wool back south to the great river and thence to Gaul, the Germanies, Iberia, Rome and all the rest of the empire. The legions used the trackway, and had repaired it, but it was old when Rome was young and had been a trading artery when the ancestors still used flint to tip their spears.

A full wing of five hundred Batavian horsemen trotted on either side of the leading cohort, hooves hammering on the stone like the roll of distant thunder. They were big, broad-shouldered men, armoured in chain mail and bearing cloaks of undyed lambs’ wool with green checks like studded emeralds woven along the hems. They rode into a possible war unhelmeted, with their gold hair tied up at the right temple and their arms bared to the sun, the better to show off the quantity of armbands in enamelled gold and silver that was their pride and their wealth.

Like their riders, the horses were big and bay and fit, and uniformly harnessed in good oxhide with quantities of silver at the harness mounts. Each mount had its mane pulled newly short and its tail tied up to keep it from providing a handhold for the enemy in any battle. The Batavians were taught from childhood that if they had the ill luck to be unhorsed in battle, they should grab the tail of an enemy horse and swing themselves up by it to unseat the rider and claim the mount for themselves. Twenty years of battle amongst the
tribes of Britannia had not convinced them that the warriors against whom they fought would never dream of grabbing the tail of a passing horse.

Valerius rode at their head with Civilis on one side and Longinus on the other and only the standard-bearers between him and the legate, Petillius Cerialis. His mount was the white-legged almost-black colt with the beautiful neck, whose mane and tail, at his insistence, had been left unpulled and untied.

Civilis had been blind to the vices of a horse he clearly loved, or was sweetening the truth when he made his gift; the beast was not significantly easier to ride than the Crow-horse, who had sired its sire, only younger, and less predictable. It shied and spooked sideways at patches of sunlight or grasses waving alongside the trackway; it napped at every lift of the wind and every crash of armour from the ranks. It had not bucked Valerius off on mounting, but only because he had been warned that it might do, and had the practice of sitting its grandsire.

As the morning progressed, a shifting, treacherous mist drank what was left of the light so that, by noon, they rode as though at dusk. Away from known surroundings, the not-black colt became more wilful, not less, sidling three steps sideways for every one forward. Men on either side gave it clear space, grinning. Valerius bit his lower lip and cursed at it roundly in Hibernian.

At a point when his horse had remained parallel with Longinus’ for more than a stride, the Thracian said, “You’re enjoying that.”

Valerius arched a brow. “Not as much as you think. If we get back to the steading alive, you can have him. I’ll go back to the Crow-horse.”

“No thank you. Some of us like to ride without fear for our necks. I’m happy with what I’ve got. It’s better by far than the one I rode in on.”

Longinus rode a bay gift-horse that was indistinguishable from any other in the Batavian cohorts. His only concern, voiced the evening before, was that it would respond to the Batavian battle calls, which were foreign to him, and that he might therefore find himself charging into the enemy at a time not of his choosing. Who or what the enemy might be had not been discussed: the two incomers had been dining as Cerialis’ guests at the time, on wood pigeon roasted in honey with figs and olives and a quantity of good red wine and the only shadow on the evening had been Valerius’ refusal to drink anything stronger than water.

Valerius had plainly not intended insult and made up for it later by acknowledging his position as a sworn Lion of Mithras. He had found himself therefore the highest-ranking initiate of the bull-slayer in the IXth legion, the centurion who had been Father having been swept to the god in an epidemic of pneumonia at mid-winter, and had spent the time between the second and fourth watches, two hours either side of midnight, conducting an initiation in the cellar-shrine beneath the quartermaster’s stores.

Longinus, who preferred the moon-gods of Thrace over the Persian incomer, had not been privy to the underground rites, only seen the new peace in Valerius’ eyes as he had emerged, so that it seemed as if a night of lost sleep might not have been a disaster.

Later, in the grey light before dawn, with the first dew beading the grass and cockerels calling, the pair had walked up into the horse paddocks to another shrine that Civilis
told them of, where the sign of a running mare had been chiselled onto a rock above a spring. Above was a far older mark of a moon, and a hare, and the two men had poured water in libation for their respective gods, and for each other.

They had each poured, too, for Civilis, without either of them being clear what it meant. Thinking of that now, Longinus said, in Thracian, “Your once-brother is old. This is his chance to seal his name in history. You have no need to feel responsible for it if he chooses an honourable death in battle.”

The track passed a small mere. A trio of ducks took flight in a clatter of wings and aggrieved honks. The white-legged colt spun on its hocks, wild-eyed and snorting. Valerius swore in Thracian, Batavian, Gaulish and Latin and fought it back into line. Breathlessly, he said, “I am not responsible for any man’s actions. Civilis’ life is his own to treat as he will. If he endangers what we plan, I will kill him myself, I swear it.”

“I know. I’ve seen the extent of what you will do for the Eceni.” Longinus pushed his horse sideways to avoid a pothole that stretched half the width of the track, cursing idle Roman engineers and the ravages of winter. “What are we going to do if his Batavians don’t follow him as he has said?”

“Fight them, as we thought we must to begin with. If we get that far, which we may not. If you look up ahead, you’ll see the legate has noticed the place where the forest kisses the marsh and the track squeezes through between. I think perhaps he has just remembered the stories he was told as a young tribune of how Arminius slaughtered three legions on the Rhine.”

Petillius Cerialis rode a blue-eyed white gelding with a splash of chestnut on one ear. It stepped high-legged at the
front, and did not look as if it could sustain a man long in battle. Bending, he spoke at some length to the youthful messenger riding at his side, who turned out of line and dropped back to Civilis’ side.

“His excellency wishes to point out to you the potential for ambush ahead where the track is constrained between the forest and the marsh. He requests that you call to your side the most courageous of your Batavian warriors and, taking with you the messenger of Mithras who has the skills of an engineer” — he favoured Valerius with a white-eyed glance — ‘that you ride ahead to the site of the overnight camp, there to hold it secure against possible attack until the advance cohorts of the legion may join you. He further orders that if you are attacked, you are not to await commands but are to act on your own sense of battle, nurtured since the time of the invasion, to repel the enemy. I am to come with you, to learn the tactics of warfare.”

It was a long message, relayed in a voice that cracked near the end with the pressure of responsibility. The youth was high-born Roman, third son of a magistrate, and fired with the service of his emperor. He had been one of those branded with the raven of Mithras in the cellar at midnight and was white still, with smoke-reddened eyes and the simmering fervour of one who has seen the face of his god and may not speak of it except in the clamour of his own heart.

Civilis smiled for him with something of the soft indulgence he had reserved for the horse boy, Arminius, his great-grandson, named for the man who had destroyed three legions of Rome. He said, “Thank you. My men are already chosen. They will do now as the legate orders. May he have long life and the close company of his gods.”

The old man raised a hand. If his salutation was ambiguous, neither the youth nor the legate commented on it. A Batavian in the line behind bore on his spear’s neck a scarlet pennant marked with an oak tree in black. At Civilis’ signal, he lifted it high with one hand and with the other raised a silver-tipped cow’s horn to his lips.

The noise when he blew was not unlike that made by the ducks which had risen from the mere, but longer and louder. Valerius sat very still, waiting for the white-legged colt to explode beneath him, and was pleasantly surprised to feel it prick its ears and settle instead. Immediately behind, two hundred and fifty horsemen, that half of the wing Civilis trusted most highly, peeled away from either side of the column and rode forward, leaving the infantry behind. Moving at a trot, and, soon, at a canter, they steered their horses to the narrow strips of unpaved ground on either side of the trackway, where the turf was springy beneath the feet.

Valerius gave his colt its head and let it take the front, lengthening away from the rest. Longinus caught up with him, laughing. In Thracian, he said, “The Roman message-boy loves you. Am I supplanted?”

At speed, the white-legged colt was being unexpectedly steady. Valerius sat lightly, waiting for that to end. He said, “Only if you want to be, and not by him. I branded him last night in the presence of the god and he thinks that in doing so I called the god to speak to him. He has forgotten that the gods choose freely to whom they will appear and speak, and are not called by those of us who follow them, however carefully we learn the words of the rites.”

Longinus whistled. “Was it wise to be filling the legions
with pious fervour, when we may be fighting against them by the end of the day?”

“It was what the god required of me. I didn’t take the time to ask if it was wise.”

Valerius clicked his tongue and urged his mount to a little more speed and the two gift-horses, both trained by Civilis, responded to the command, stretching out their necks and backs, and the pound of their hooves rolled lightly across the turf, as if on midsummer paddocks.

In the middle of the afternoon, two hundred and fifty Batavian cavalrymen rode at a gallop into the only defensible site suitable for a night camp in the forested part of the ancestors’ Stone Way.

It lay in a natural dell, a broad, shallow scoop where the trackway dipped down to follow the lie of the land and veered at the same time inward, away from the marsh. The forest had been cut back on all sides by the men of the IXth at the time they had used it as an encampment on their first march north. Since then, passing legionaries had kept the area around the camp’s margins clear, leaving chopped wood in piles for fires and for staves, but the ditches and latrines had long since been filled in, and the grass and moss allowed to grow over. The emperor’s peace must be seen to reign in the east and the presence of an active marching camp on the biggest arterial trade route running north from the capital city of Camulodunum did not sit well with that.

The dell smothered the noise of the horses so that they entered into peace. Nearby, water trickled musically within the shelter of the nearer trees. Some time in the past two decades, an engineer with spare time and initiative had dug
a ditch into the marsh and run a series of fire-baked clay pipes under the trackway so that they emptied into glazed troughs of differing sizes set to one side of the dell. Bog water trickled in at a steady rate, and out again from corner lips to drain into wide pebbled soak-aways below, so that horses could drink and men could bathe, albeit coldly, and the ground beneath would not be churned to quagmire by the second morning.

A legionary of rather less imagination than the engineer had carved crude stick images of either horse or man into the side of each trough, lest those who followed be confused by which vessels were for watering the horses and which for bathing.