Dreaming the Serpent Spear (28 page)

The smoke they made was thick and vaporous and stole the minds of those who did not know how to protect against it. Even Graine, who had made it, felt that the roof of her mouth was rising to break through the top of her skull. It loosened her mind, making it easier to push the path of her thoughts out from her body into the land and the sea and the smoke.

She remembered Valerius’ stories of what it took out of the men to swim in full armour, and how hard it was for them to fight on the other side. Into the smoke she wove the certainty that the swim had been the ultimate exertion and the men who reached land were too cold and tired to fight. They came out of the water slowly, dazzled and befuddled. Led by Valerius, the five hundred warriors of Mona met them and slew them where they stood, except for Corvus, who was a friend to them all and did not need to die. Graine asked the gods for his life but did not know if they heard her.

There was respite then, for a while, before more of the living came. In time, they paddled in a wide wave across the water. Hundreds of barges packed with men, each one tight with fear and resolution, not fully understanding what had happened on the island.

Graine whistled. Her mother was no longer there, but Valerius and Cygfa rode like the gods’ hunt to the water’s edge. Their horses were vast, with tags of lightning at their polls and crests and thunder rolling from their feet. They
were three, against three hundred vessels and eight thousand men, but the fire was on their side, and the smoke, and the three thousand dreamers within it, who were well versed in the dream-fears of the men that Bellos had fostered. They wove a web between them of smoke and sea fog and fear and cast it like a net into the water, ensnaring the legionaries before ever they left their barges.

The five hundred warriors were ready to step into the spaces between and kill men as they stumbled ashore but they were barely needed. The dream-web confused the landing men and set them one against the other so that whole cohorts turned face on and set about each other with the ferocity of fear and fury.

Behind them, the five hundred warriors of Mona waited, to take on those left alive. Graine, only true blood-daughter to the Boudica, raised a hand and brought it down again, as she had seen her mother do, setting it all into action.

Somewhere in the background, a low, monotonous voice was still speaking. The contrast with the brilliant colour and action of the fire-dream was laughable.

Graine? Graine?
“Graine?…”

Her name came to her from a long way distant, from outside the great-house, perhaps, or even beyond the island. Cool fingers touched her wrist. Blue eyes the colour of the noon sky came into the line of her sight and Bellos’ hair, framing them, was the dazzle of sheet lightning.

“Graine? It is enough for now. You can stop. Stop. It is enough.”

Her throat hurt. She was croaking like a gannet. Midword, she stopped, and there was silence.

They were silent, all the talking, droning dreamers, watching her and listening as they had been, it seemed, for a long time.

Luain mac Calma was at her side, white with a strain she did not fully understand, as if he had been holding the entire net of the fire-story and all the three thousand dreamers within it and the effort had cost him dearly.

He said, “I’m sorry. We had no way to ask it of you, only to hope it might happen. Bellos is right, it is enough and more than enough. All we need now is to put what you have shown us into action as best we can. What was not clear is what plants you would use in the smoke to befuddle the horses and the riders, and how to know Corvus, that we may do what we can to spare him. If you can tell us those things, you can sleep, or you can go back to Hawk, who is angry with us for using you, and may have good reason.”

Graine stared at him, unable to speak. She felt hungry — ravenously, achingly hungry — and tired, and under those, as the meaning of what he said became apparent, she felt a blind, screaming panic that cut holes in her heart and threatened to choke her.

Someone passed her a waterskin and she drank, dribbling gouts of it down the front of her tunic. Still croaking, she said, “It wasn’t a dreaming. I have had those, and this was not that, only an imagining that anyone could have done.”

“Anyone who is the daughter of the Boudica, whose uncle is Valerius, who shares blood with Cygfa, who can build her fancies in a fire made of yarrow and oak when the rest of us are choking so we can barely speak and the tears are streaming from our eyes. We have few enough of those on Mona.” Luain mac Calma was smiling sadly. “I’m sorry.
We should not have used you like that, but so much has already been sacrificed for this, and now is not a time to set care of a child above the welfare of Mona. You’re right, it wasn’t a dream. This is not your healing, nor even the beginning of it, but you have given us what we need. Can we be grateful for that now and do with it what we may? If you are angry, which you have every right to be, you can tell me of it later and I will make what amends I can. For now, we have an island in peril and must do what we can to protect it.”

“I
CAN SEE MOVEMENT IN THE TREES OVER THERE.”
Corvus, prefect of the Fifth Gaulish cavalry unit, halted his bay mare carefully upwind of his second decurion and the poorly cured Dacian wolfskin that he wore slung about his shoulders. If nothing else could be said of Ursus, at least these days one knew always where he was.

Other things could be said of him, of course: he had burned the southernmost of the two jetties efficiently enough, or at least had given the orders to have it done and seen them promptly carried out; he had organized the supply chain that had kept the horses and men fed for the half-month while the barges were being built; he had had the forethought to mark out the place for the Batavian wing to make camp some distance from their own tents so that it had been ready when at last the huge Germanic horsemen had ridden in at dusk three nights late, still green from their vomiting and diarrhoea and wearing fetishes that reeked far more strongly than Ursus’ wolfskin had ever done, even when it was newly bought. For such small grace as this, amidst the mist and the
thankless cold, Corvus gave thanks to whatever god chose to look over him.

Now, following the line of Ursus’ gaze across the water, he said, “There has been movement over there since before dawn, but this is in a different place and there are more of them, and they’ve got smoke pots, which doesn’t bode well. There’s nothing we can do; they could hardly be expected not to notice that we’re about to launch a flotilla against them.”

“We could delay, so it is less obvious that it’s today. They’re building fires over there. The smoke’s already too thick to see through.”

“I know, but the Batavians are as ready as they have been or are ever likely to be. This is it. If we wait another half-day, a cloud of the wrong shape will slide over the sun or the moon will show a red halo, or a sparrowhawk will chase a cock redbreast across a rock of a certain hue and the entire Batavian cavalry wing will retreat to its tents and sacrifice another mare and make neckbands of her innards wound round with tail hair and the arm bones of a newborn infant girl. So if you could—”

He stopped. Ursus was staring at him, with nostrils so tightly flared they were white at the rims. He said, “Tell me you made that up.”

It occurred to Corvus that Ursus’ sense of humour was improving and that he could give thanks for that, too, when surrounded by Batavians with no humour at all. He grinned. “All right, if you insist, I made it up — some of it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And the principle stands. We get them ready, as sober as may be and in the water before noon, or the crossing will never happen. If the governor gets here
and the cavalry haven’t forced and held a bridgehead so his precious boats can land in safety, we’re all dead men.”

“I thought we were going to provide an escort for the barges as they sailed?”

“No, that’s what I came to tell you. Paullinus has listened at last to the advice of his cavalry commanders. A messenger has just come with a change in the orders. They’ve seen the warriors and dreamers gathering on the island and they don’t want to land the barges against opposition. The governor wants us to take and hold a bridgehead to give them safe landing. He wants us to go now. If we go fast, we’ll make it across before the tide turns. It’s time to muster the men.”

A pair of small black and white birds carved a path across the tops of the waves. They flew parallel with the headland for a wingbeat or two and then turned west, direct for Mona. Both men watched them go. Reflectively, Ursus said, “You’ve lived amongst these people. Is it true that the dreamers can send their souls as birds to spy on their enemies?”

Corvus grimaced. “I hope not. And if they can, I would prefer to believe that they can’t understand Latin.”

“Hold that bloody horse or I’ll kill you myself!”

Ursus shouted himself hoarse and he may as well have whispered. On the headland, horsemen who had been riding before they could walk were having trouble holding horses who had been schooled and drilled to instant obedience and had bits in their mouths severe enough to puncture their hard palates if they should forget their years of training and force their riders to be hard with their hands.

They had forgotten it, and the savagery of the bits made no difference.

“It’s the dreamers! They’re bewitching the horses!” A Batavian screamed it, from a horse that stood vertically on its hind legs and appeared to be trying to climb to the sky. Once, it had been grey. Now it was black with running sweat and its eyes bulged whitely. Its mouth ran with blood in the frothing saliva and it screamed with the need to escape. Around it, mounted and unmounted horses spun uncontrollably, fed by its fear.

From Ursus’ left, Corvus said quietly, “Archers, kill that man’s mount.”

There was a hiss and a feathered whine and the dull slam of iron in flesh. The Batavian whose horse died under him had the presence of mind to throw himself clear as it fell. He rolled and came up against a rock where he sat for a moment, shocked, then bent his head to his knees and howled in anguish. More than the Gauls or the Thracians, the Batavians loved their horses.

Corvus did not have to raise his voice greatly to send it above the still air and the sudden, bruising quiet.

“Listen to me! I have lived among these people and I tell you now that they may enter the minds of men and send you nightmares; they may make mist to confound you on a battlefield; they will certainly take your bodies and mutilate them, even before you are dead — you know this and have seen it. But they would not, never have and never will, enter into the minds of beasts who have not made the choice to be here, nor have any power of their own to leave; their gods would not allow it.

“If your horses are panicked, there is a good reason for it, one we can find and change. Look at them! See the way they are all looking in the same direction, towards the barges? They have the scent of something they hate. Ursus, set your
men to search the boats. Grannus, get your Batavians to back their horses off to the far end of the beach. I have a young black colt newly trained for war. It’s in the second corral, with the Eye of Horus branded on its left shoulder, for luck. Give it to the man whose mount was shot.”

They had been going to kill him; Ursus felt it even as the first arrows were airborne: the flicker of shock and the anger that had followed it through the entire Batavian wing. He had thought Gauls were difficult and overly emotional until he met the Batavians with their bluster and thin-skinned arrogance and the waves of weeping that came whenever the wine was passed too freely, and the sore-headed fury that came afterwards and was only barely held in check by a semblance of military discipline.

In the officers’ quarters at Camulodunum, it was said you could flog a Batavian and he would stand at the post in silence and grin at you afterwards, but for the rest of your life you had to make sure he was never near your back in battle. Not many of them were flogged and not ever by anyone but their own officers.

No-one, to the best of Ursus’ knowledge, had ever ordered a Batavian’s horse shot out from under its rider. He was surprised, therefore, to feel the anger recede at the gift of the black colt and, even as he was giving the orders to search the boats, prayed that there was something to find in them that would prove Corvus right. That was the one advantage to their astonishing superstition: if they thought a man lucky they would do whatever it took to keep him alive. Corvus badly needed to be seen to be lucky.

Ursus’ men had heard the command and needed only to know how he wished them to split up. He sent them in tent
parties along the shore to examine the lines of bobbing boats. It did not take long for Corvus to be proved very lucky indeed.

“Pigskin? They were scared of a pigskin? I thought Batavian horses rode into battle with the rotting flesh of their enemies’ heads tied to the saddle posts?” Flavius snorted and spat. The bundle had been found in the closest of the boats, and tipped out onto the shore.

Ursus said, “Horses hate pigs, and from the smell of things there is more here than only the rotting hide of a wild boar.”

He prodded the bundle with one foot and discovered that the stench outdid his wolfskin, which surprised him. Holding his breath, he bent and cut the thong that bound it. The bundle fell open, revealing the hair-side of a rotting boarhide, scoured almost smooth by the sea. As he tipped it over, a thick armful of herbs rolled out, held by their own thong. On the beach a good spear’s throw away, horses jerked in panic.

“What’s in there? It’s the herbs the horses hate, not the boarskin.”

“Fescue, wild oats, battlewort. Nothing that a horse should be afraid of.” Corvus was beside them. He knelt upwind and stirred the contents with a piece of driftwood. “Unless…” He poked the stick into the thicket of herbs. “Cut this open, will you? Don’t get close. You may have to ride later today if we can ever get this invasion started and I want you to be able to mount your horse without driving it mad.”