Dreaming the Serpent Spear (12 page)

The Batavians dismounted at the gallop and led their steaming beasts to drink. Valerius, arriving later and more slowly, got down and walked his horse in hand around the margins of the encampment.

The marsh fog was less here, as if it clung to the forest, or was held within the margins of the trees by an outside force. In the dell, a blizzard of snowdrops hung greenly white along the risen edges of the infill where the encircling trenches had once been. Layers of leaf litter drifted against the ridges, and a part-circle of mushrooms rotted near the centre, broken by the greying skeleton of a hind. Her rear hind leg was missing, and her jaw fractured raggedly with claw marks along its length, to show where a bear had struck it.

Longinus kicked at the broken edge of the mandible. “The she-bears will be happy with that.”

Valerius said, “The she-bears left it there. Look at the inner edge of the mandible; it has Cunomar’s mark of the bear paw on it. The rites of the bear will weaken the legionaries,
or so they believe.” He drove a short iron stave into the ground. “Stand here and tell me if I step off the line.”

For ten years, they had done this together: marked out the outer walls of a marching camp. Valerius paced backwards, unwinding a thread of oiled wool from the marker stave. Longinus shut one eye and watched. “You need to go half a pace left,” he said and then, a little later, “Left again. It’s that bloody mad horse; it doesn’t ride straight. You’re leaning right.”

They paced and marked. Near the end, Civilis came to watch. Valerius said, “Have your men start digging. Standard camp, standard size, standard drill. I’ll mark out the tent lines.”

Half a wing of Batavians, cursing amiably, fetched mattocks and shovels from their saddle baggage. Working in pairs, they began to break open the green earth. They were big men, used to war, and still the first of each pair took care to lift the turf with its mesh of snowdrops and set it to one side, to be replaced with equal care in the morning when the camp was taken down.

Elsewhere, grass and moss were turned over as sods to mark the trench lines. Spade load after spade load of friable, much-shovelled soil became, quite soon, ramps within the trenchwork. Following Valerius’ direction, smaller trenches, little less than divots in the turf, were dug within the camp lines to show the incoming legionaries where to place their eight-man tents and the larger, more stately pavilions of their officers. Long before they had finished, the sound of marching rolled to them up the trackway and the gold and scarlet of the standards breasted the mist.

The officers were already dismounting. Behind them, the first four men of the infantry reached the dell and halted. The
Batavians howled insults, cavalry greeting the infantry as they had always done, for being late to camp or battle. Grinning, the infantry hornsman in the front rank lifted his cornu and blew. The sound brayed down the marching column and was repeated back and farther back and on down the line to the last century of the last cohort, where tired men heard it and knew that rest lay safely ahead.

Valerius, who in his guise as engineer had begun the hardest part of the camp-making and thus saved them many hours’ work, raised his skinning knife in salute and hailed the incomers derisively in Latin, Batavian, Thracian, and one of the native dialects, entirely foreign to the men of the IXth legion. They cheered and answered in kind, with friendly obscenities.

From the forest close by, almost lost beneath the sound of marching, and of halting, and of men thrusting their heads into clay-piped water, a lone owl called thrice in daylight.

B
ELLOS THE BLIND KEPT WATCH AGAINST THE LEGIONS OF
Rome from the side of a cold fire pit in the newly deserted great-house on Mona.

Cold kept him awake and his mind sharp when the too-familiar smells of hearth and peat and thatch and the jostling afterthoughts of the departed warriors and dreamers might have lulled him to inattention. So many men and women had lived in the great-house and the settlement around it, so many children had been born, so many of the old and the not-old had died where Bellos now sat. Each had carved something on the roof beams and each had left behind the imprint of thoughts and memories. They were not bad thoughts, nor ugly memories, but they made it harder to focus his attention.

He had trained three full years for this; it was not impossible, only hard. Sightless, he stared at where the fire had once been and stretched his mind past the boundaries of the settlement to the shores of the gods’ island and then out across the treacherous water of the straits towards the
mainland and the wall of iron and sweat and pained horses and bored, frightened, hopeful, angry, determined men who slept in tents in the mountains of the far shore.

Urgency gave him a confidence he had once lacked. In the early days of his blindness, three years before, Bellos had prayed to every god he knew that he might be allowed to see again. Lying or walking or, once, running high-legged to avoid another fall, under the ministrations of Luain mac Calma, Elder of all Mona, Bellos had believed that he would be healed. Mac Calma’s skills had been legendary and the blow to the head that had stolen Bellos’ sight had not been hard, barely enough to cause a headache; there had seemed little reason to fear that the light might be banished from his life for ever.

It was only later, looking back, that he could trace the moment when the taste of the infusions he had been given to drink had become less bitter and the stories Mac Calma had sung over the fire had changed from tales of golden-haired Belgic youths riding to victory over their foes to ones of the blind dreamers of the ancestors who had suffered hardship for years in order to learn how to walk in the other-worlds and had thereby saved their people from destruction.

Then, in the days of the ancestors, children of great talent had been chosen young and shown all the wonders of all the worlds and then blinded by hot irons that the sealing of sight in this, the smallest of the worlds, might open them more fully to the visions of all the others.

Luain mac Calma, Bellos came to understand, would never deliberately blind anyone in his charge, however gifted in the dreaming, but if a youth came to him who had lost his sight by accident, and if he suspected that youth might
be possessed of a talent that stretched far beyond anything yet explored, then he considered it his duty as Elder and as a healer to test that youth’s limits.

Even that much had been said slowly, by careful degrees. The turning point had come on a day in the spring, nearly a year after Bellos’ blindness had first struck. He had been sitting outside the small hut with the stream running at his feet and a fire somewhere behind when he felt the tall, lean Elder come to stand by the first stepping stone that crossed the brook. Mac Calma’s dream was the heron and it was easier to think of him as such. In the empty dark of his mind Bellos pictured the angled legs and the stabbing beak and shielded himself against its probing. The Elder turned and walked away, his feet soft on spring turf and the cast leaves of winter. From some distance back, he said, “Where am I?”

He had asked the same thing the past three days in a row, from almost the same spot.

“By the curve in the stream,” Bellos said, wearily, and then, because it was his task for that month to paint clear images in his mind of all the things he could not see, he filled in all that he could imagine of the stream and the canopy of oak and hazel and drooping willow with the furled spring leaves and the first hints of catkins.

He placed the rocks of the crossing place with the moss damp and fresh and the swirling water around and a chaffinch, because it seemed right to him, and then was surprised when his mind filled in the detail of Mac Calma as a man, long and lean, standing with one foot up, holding an unsheathed sword in his left hand. In his mind, the Elder tilted his head to one side and raised a brow.

Piqued, Bellos said, “You have your right foot on the first stepping stone and you carry a blade that was not made for you.”

“Really? Who was it made for?”

The thread of doubt in the Elder’s voice stung Bellos to answer. “Valerius made it for the sake of the making. He had no-one in mind to wield it, but then you came to his forge in Hibernia while he was hammering it with news that his sister was dead and it carries the fears and angers of that day.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard you tap the iron with your finger. How else?”

“If you can tell me how you can hear by the tap of a finger what the smith felt when he made a blade, I will be most interested to learn of it.”

The voice was closer, suddenly. Something shifted in the air, a hush of a foot on stone and a hand moving away from its resting place. In the dark world of Bellos’ blindness, the heron was now, vividly, a man, so that each of the lines on the Elder’s face was clear. This close, it was hard to doubt that Mac Calma had sired Valerius; there was too much that was the same in them.

Hurt, Bellos backed away. He felt his eyes prickle and the skin of his throat flush hot. “I’m not a seer. If the future were open to me, do you think I would have taken a path that led to blindness? I can’t be what you want of me. Why can we not just let it go? Even if I were Roman, you would not torture me like this.”

“Is it torture, Bellos, truly?” Mac Calma had followed him. Cool, callused hands held each side of his face, turning it until the tracking tears, which he might have hidden, were exposed. “Are you in pain still?”

Six months of silence broke apart without warning. Weeping openly, Bellos sank to sit on the stone. “Does pain have to be of the body to be real? I want to
see
again, to see the ocean and the trees and the great-house, even now that it’s empty and a travesty of what it once was. I want to see the sun set and the moon rise and the storm clouds cover the stars. I want to see the small things: the scratch on the side of the beaker I drink from in the morning, the wren that feeds from my hand, a leaf fall from a tree on a day without wind. I want to see a hound at a distance and know its colour, to see the look in a horse’s eye and know if Valerius trained it and, if so, whether it is safe to ride; I want to see the first look of a lamb when it stands after birthing. I feel as if someone has wrapped a bandage round my eyes as a bad joke and I want them to take it off. I want
you
to take it off.”

Bellos was in blackness again, and thought mac Calma had left him. He sat on the stone and turned his face into the wind and heard nothing, and wondered if he had gone deaf, too, which would have been the end of living. He jumped as lean fingers settled on his shoulder and mac Calma’s voice, stripped of all taunting, said, “Bellos, I’m so sorry. In all the planning, I forget what it is to be young and powerless and in pain…”

The fingers moved down Bellos’ arm, firm healer’s hands that knew what they were about. Unresisting, he let his right hand be smoothed out flat and felt the hilt of the sword that had been forged by Valerius press into his palm. Confused, he gripped it, feeling foolish for his lack of warrior’s skill. Even so, the familiarity of it coursed through him, bright as a Hibernian morning.

He had never held that blade before, but he knew without effort its balance and weight and the ridges on the grip. As if they were his own, he could feel the fear and pain and anger that had coursed through Valerius as he had beaten the last part of it to shape on his anvil.

The anger took hold of him, matching his own pain and sending it on to its natural conclusion. Before he could arrest the thought, Bellos saw himself dead, in the Roman way, fallen forward onto the blade so that the length of it entered his chest in the front and came out again, wet, at the back.

Shocked, he dropped the thing and heard iron bite into turf. Imagined blood splashed out in rivers across the green grass and he could not make it disappear. He looked up and saw a heron take flight and yet knew that in the world of his blindness, mac Calma had not moved.

Something split apart in Bellos’ head and he saw the heron circle in over the stream and felt mac Calma’s half-smile and watched his own ghost greet Briga, who ruled death, and take the first steps to the lands beyond life before it faded into a future that would never happen.

He would not let it happen. If his first prophecy were proved false, it would be his last; no-one asks for visions from a failed seer. Bellos sat on the ground and breathed slowly and the knifing pain behind his temples became less. He said, “I am not going to fall on that blade, now or ever. Whatever is happening is not the future. I really don’t want to be a seer.”

“Which is fortunate because you would need to train for twenty years to come close, and even then it is not always easy to interpret which dreams show futures that may happen only if every condition is met and which are certain.”

“Are there any of those?”

“Very few, in my experience. And there are more that are purely born of unspoken anxieties. Your vision of yourself dying was a fear, not a future. The two are quite different.”

Mac Calma bent to pick up the blade. Bellos could feel its shine, not as the moving of air, but as a raw awareness that let him feel the essence of the blade and the man who had made it overlaid with the heron-soul of the Elder who held it out across his palms.

Mac Calma said, “The blind dreamers of the ancestors rarely chose to become seers. Their skills were better used in other ways. As yours will be.”

“What other ways?”

They were facing each other now, with the stream alongside. The water chuckled and mumbled over smooth stones. The shapes of it made sculptures that formed and melted in Bellos’ mind in a way that was quite different from his mind-made imaginings, as if a door had opened and the land beyond it were not clouded in blindness. He clasped his hands about his knees. “I don’t understand how seeing fear and anger could be useful.”

“Do you not? It will not only be fear or anger you can see, but all strong feeling. Even so, suppose an enemy army were to come to battle and you were to know the hopes and fears of the men who fought in it. Could you see how that might benefit our warriors? Or our dreamers? It is not a simple thing to send dreams into clouded minds. Easier to pick up the threads of those fears that already exist and weave them into something stronger. Men who fight afraid, die afraid. If we face overwhelming numbers, making more of their fears may be our best — our only — hope.”