Dreaming the Serpent Spear (32 page)

It was too late to argue. The veterans slowed and steadied and made the same decision. The two lines stood for a moment apart in mutual recognition and then, surging equally forward, met in a cacophony of broken bone and buckled armour. Ulla became his shield. They fought together, with Cygfa always on the edge of their vision, bright-haired and brilliant, fighting with Braint for the first time since she was taken as prisoner to Rome.

Partway through, when the dead began visibly to rise, it came to Cunomar that he was not going to die and that this was a thing to celebrate, and that he could only do that fully when the line of veterans was gone and their city rested free under the Boudica’s banner. The shock and numbness left him, and he soared instead on new fear, one that transmuted into true battle fever, and that was the third new thing that came to him on the first day of Camulodunum’s battle.

He fought and killed and was hit and felt nothing and saved Ulla and was saved by her and saw the dead walk all around them and felt each breath in a gift from the gods and each breath out his gift to them of continued living, and of fighting, and of killing, and of friendship.

They came to rest near the timber warehouse, with the winnowed crop of veterans behind them, the fallen made surely dead by a knife-cut to the throat.

Exhaustion lay on them, so that it was impossible to imagine lifting a blade one more time, or raising a shield, or fending off a thrust. Speech was a thing to be imagined, for later. Shield-mates thanked those who had saved them with a nod and a croak. Wounded warriors bound the wounds of others hurt more deeply.

Someone passed round a goatskin of water. It was branded on one side with the serpent-spear and on the other with the heron of the Elder of Mona. Cunomar drank and passed it to his right, where Cygfa was leaning on her shield, laughing breathlessly at something someone else had said. She caught her brother’s eye and sobered a little.

“That was good. We hadn’t thought this would be the first breach. Breaca will be proud of you.”

He had forgotten his mother. There was a time when his own need to be seen would have kept her in his vision through any battle. He turned to look, and so found that the gap in the barricade which had been narrow enough for two men to defend easily had widened and was being made wider by youths from the war host who had organized themselves into teams and were dismantling the barriers far faster than the veterans had erected them.

Somewhere at the back of the milling crowds were horses and somewhere within them was his mother. Breaca had mud smeared across her face so that it looked like a darker version of the she-bear paint. She was gaunt-faced and hollow-eyed but she caught him looking and smiled back and when Cunomar had pushed his way through the gap to reach her, he read in her face the same kind of pride that he had felt for Ulla, and had never truly seen before.

The braids at her left temple had come loose, pulled by the weight of the kill-feathers woven within them. She tugged one free and held it out. It was black, with a gold band about the quill for uncounted numbers of Romans slain.

“You should have this,” she said. “I never tried to make a bear line with four warriors in the face of forty legionaries.”

Cunomar felt himself flush. “You would never have been so foolish as to allow the warriors who followed you to be cornered with no alternative. A good leader sees ahead the dangers that will come.”

She eyed him a long time and smiled a little at the end of it. “A good leader sees the way out of trouble and can make it happen. Perhaps my warriors would have listened to me and gone over the wall when I told them. That will come with time. It can’t be forced. Even so, it was a good idea.”

That was true, and he knew it, and it had been his idea, not Ulla’s. It was harder than he had ever imagined to accept the praise he had yearned for, freely given and deserved. He took the feather and did not try to hide the shake in his hands.

He had no hair at the sides of his temples in which to braid it; he had shaved off an arc above his missing ear, and then again on the other side, for balance. He wove his mother’s feather into the queue that remained at the back. Around him, warriors he had known since childhood stopped to watch. He felt the weight of their experience and remembered what they had known of him in his youth, and regretted it.

“I don’t understand,” he said to his mother. “Why is Braint here, and the warriors of Mona?”

Breaca waited until the feather had been fixed and fell flat against the back of his head. When she spoke, it was
wryly, so that she sounded like Valerius and it was hard to tell if the irony were tinged with humour or frustration.

“Because Luain mac Calma sent them to us having decided that the war here had more need of trained warriors than his own war in the west. He has the full body of dreamers there, all soaked in the power of the gods’ island, and he has Graine, who has joined him. How could the legions possibly prevail against that?”

S
MOKE CHOKED THEM ALL.

It rose yellow and grey, thick as sheep’s wool and pungent from the smoke pots, and snaked out across the foreshore. Where it met the sea, it spread sideways into the troughs between the waves and was scooped into handfuls by the water. On land, it met the rock and the wind and rose between them, coming up to eye height and hanging there, forming a veil, easily torn, between this world and others, through which the unwary could readily fall.

Corvus’ cavalry had fallen through it, those who had survived the fold in Manannan’s sea. Of the thousand who had left the mainland, over half had drowned. The remainder sat shivering on their horses, staring blindly into smoke that swirled tight as bandages about their eyes. Corvus had not ordered their surrender, but neither had he led them into battle; it seemed unlikely that they could have gathered wit to obey him in either of these if he had.

Even so, the five hundred warriors of Mona had not set about them and there were, as yet, no Roman dead. There
had been many dead in Graine’s fire-weaving. Bellos the Blind, who alone of those at the foreshore was not newly blinded, felt the first faint line of a schism grow between the fire-fancy that Graine had woven and the reality that was building in the half-lands between sea and shore, and it worried him. He wanted to find Luain mac Calma to learn why the change had happened, but greater things were needed of him and the first of those was to fulfil his part in the future that the Boudica’s daughter had built.

Three thousand dreamers stood shoulder to shoulder along the foreshore. Bellos walked in front of them, closer to the line of pots that he and Graine had filled and others had set out. Smoke rose from them in puffs and was denser in patches where the small fires smouldered. After a while, as he came to recognize the pattern of their placing, he held his breath when he was close to them and breathed more deeply of the clearer air in between.

Following his path of the morning, he walked down to the place where Graine had lain. He had noticed nothing special about it then and found nothing different now, but he had seen the place afresh in the fire and there had been an anchoring to it that had mattered and was not found elsewhere. Breathing in a chestful of thinning smoke, he lay down on his belly and tried to root himself against the first whispers of men’s imaginings that came at him from the far side of the straits.

It was not easy now, when it mattered most. Other thoughts crowded where there should have been clarity; Thorn was at the far southerly end of the line, a long way out of reach. She had wanted to hold him, to talk and perhaps more, in the morning and Bellos had chosen to
follow Graine instead. There had been no time to speak to her after, only a hand’s touch in passing and a silence that he could not read.

Graine herself was not far behind the line, with her triad of warrior-dreamers to keep her safe, or to attempt it. Hawk, Dubornos and Gunovar; over the two days since their arrival, Bellos had come to know and respect each of them. He had felt their fears for the child and the degree to which they swamped any concern for their own safety. He had wanted to ease them, and had not known how.

He set them aside, his lover, the warriors, the child they protected, and sought instead the heart-swell of Mona and all that he loved of it. He sought, and found, the dreams of past elders, strong and durable as taproots, that grew down through the generations from the far ancestors who had first built the great-house to the latest, youngest, most vulnerable generation who might yet live to see its destruction, or die very soon before.

Among the leavings of the old and the very old, men and women, grandmothers and grandfathers, he found traces of Luain mac Calma’s passing, brighter and younger than the rest, looping across from one root to the next, building of them a network that formed the core of the gods’ island. Beneath, deeply, lay the undercurrent that was the care of the gods and sustained them all.

Finding that, Bellos brought himself back to the shore, to seaweed and the mewing of gulls, to rich, heady smoke belching from Graine’s fire pots, to the line of dreamers and the calm they held, to the distant, discordant maelstrom that was the oncoming legionaries. Breathing in all of it, Bellos opened his mind as he had once done
by the fireside and sought out the fears of the men who came to kill him.

Fire. Flames. Heat. Death.

In the world of others’ fears, he met a wall of ravening, insatiable flames that ate men for the joy of it. Heat devoured him, roasting his skin to flaking black, boiling his blood, reaching down into his lungs to suck his soul from his body. If he could have run, he would have done, but his limbs would not answer his call. He lay face down in the damp shingle and sweat streamed from his brow as it had once done in the heat of Valerius’ forge. His face burned. He tried to breathe and every inhalation was painful. He choked, and felt blackness closing at the edges of his mind that was quite different from the dark of his un-sight.

Somewhere, mac Calma spoke, cool as a winter’s kiss.
Remember that this world is an illusion.
He had forgotten. He drank in the words and remembered. Steam rose within his chest where they settled. Calm followed slowly and a separating of the flames so that he could begin to see the men behind them and the weave of their thinking.

“Why fire?” Mac Calma was there in person, kneeling at his side with a dry hand on his brow.

Bellos strained to find an answer. Thoughts slipped like eels through his grasp, too fast to be caught. He drew back and watched the patterns they made.

“The legions saw the smoke before they set out,” he said eventually. “They believe that on Mona men are burned alive. They fear it above everything else.”

“But not enough to make them turn back?”

“No. It makes them angry. They want to kill everyone who might otherwise burn them.”

“Can you find more, beneath the fire, that will undermine the rage and weaken them? Or confuse them, so that one man fights his brothers; that would be best.”

“I can try.”

Bellos might have believed himself an apprentice again, learning his way, but that the wind was on his face and the smoke teased his mind from its moorings and Thorn faced men who would kill without compunction and all of Mona faced a ruin that was real.

Quietly, the Elder of Mona said, “You were born for this. You can do what we need, Bellos of Briga.”

It was not meant to terrify him, but it did. Never before had he been named for a god and he had not known how much he wanted it — or that he had wanted this god above all of the others: the all-mother, bringer of life and keeper of death, guardian of the final river and all that lies in the lands beyond life.

He was offered a gift to surpass all gifts and was not certain he deserved it. The hopes and fears of a generation, of all the generations, balanced on his ability to see beyond his own blindness. For that moment, fear of his own failure swamped him so that he was a child again, lost without hope or future in the brothels of a Gaulish sea port. He thought of Valerius, and felt the confusion he always felt when he remembered the man who had bought him and why it was done and then, because of that, he remembered what it had been to see and that the god had taken sight from him, to bring other sight, and even that might not be enough. Four years of held anger cascaded over him.

Luain mac Calma said, “Bellos. Think.”

It was enough. Confusion and anger and fear and doubt were a part of him, and would always be so, but he knew now how to set them aside, and did so.

He breathed in the last wisps of Graine’s smoke and let it rise through the roof of his mouth and loosen his mind in its moorings. Clarity came, and the weavings of the elder-roots and the ancestors’ dreams and the bright spark that was Luain mac Calma uniting them all and then the god was there, whom he had always felt and never named, and Bellos was a part of that weaving, and then rose over it, lifted up to skim over the web, freely.

Flames parted and let him through. Fear came at him split in two; half from the sea where men were afraid of the forthcoming battle, half from the mainland where they were afraid they would miss it. Aloud, Bellos said, “Paullinus has not committed them all, only the Twentieth. The Fourteenth is held in reserve. This is not as it was in Graine’s fire-making.”

“It’s enough. The rest may come later. Today, we need only fight those who come against us now.”

It was more than enough. Five thousand men came at them in barges, paddling against the current. Bellos steadied himself, and cast the net of his mind wide to take them all in and then, one at a time, began to pick the leaping, writhing fear-fish from it, and bring them back for those who could best make use of them.

In the world of flesh and earth, he pushed his palms to the rock and stood up. Under his feet, stone became shingle, became sand. Around him, a line of three thousand dreamers faced twelve thousand legionaries and he could feel the sparks of each one, and name them and the colours
that they brought to the world, and how the futures would change with their dying.