Dreaming the Serpent Spear (41 page)

Eight warriors stood on the sloping roof, each holding a basket from the pile at their side. Four others held the
edges of the wet hides. Cygfa held aloft a pitch pine torch, that out-blazed the sun.

Valerius gave the order, because the mix in the baskets had been his idea, and it was good that he be seen to be a part of the final battle.

He shouted up and raised his hand and Cygfa grinned and tipped her fire torch in a warrior’s salute and then said something that could not be heard from the ground. The four warriors holding the goatskins pulled them aside. Cygfa spun in a slow circle and eight fire baskets took light, belching flames and dark, tarry smoke. The sound of a man’s panicked shout, and then a cacophony of others, came up through the gap in the roof tiles as the first of the torches was hurled in.

T
HE DEFENDERS BROKE OUT BEFORE THE LAST OF THE
baskets had been thrown down from the roof. No-one expected otherwise; given an open choice, few warriors, or even merchants, tanners, harness makers and magistrates who might become warriors if given a blade to wield, would choose death by burning over death in battle, or the chance of life, if they could fight better than they had ever imagined.

The gods had spoken. There was no chance of life for those who broke out, but they had been locked in the dark and did not know that the sun’s fire had already melted the bronze doors and that they ran onto the waiting blades of warriors who walked with their gods beside them and could not lose, even in death.

Breaca stood apart from the rest, with Stone at her side. She had not intended to be alone; in the beginning Cygfa had been at her shield arm and Valerius at her sword hand and both would have died to protect her. When they were sent away, Cygfa to break in through the roof, Valerius to
assault the doors, there were others: Braint of Mona; Madb of Hibernia who was honour-bound to Valerius; and Cunomar, who alone of all those fighting was not yet sick of the slaughter and led his she-bears with a fervour that bordered on battle madness.

One by one, she had sent them where they were needed: Braint to help Cygfa, Madb to support Valerius when smoke began to thread through an opening crack between the doors; Cunomar to rally the few dozen Trinovantes who kept watch on the hidden exit from the temple, because if anyone was going to break from it, they would do it soon.

Thus, when the doors were flung back, suddenly, by men still able to think and fight, she was alone at the edge of the temple’s courtyard with her crippled war hound and a blade hilt slick with sweat.

Breaca hefted her shield, testing her strength. The night’s talking weighed on her, not only for lack of sleep. The shield felt heavier than it had done in the days before and then it had seemed heavier than ever in her youth; it did not seem likely that she would be able to hold it at battle readiness for the duration of a long skirmish.

She sought the song of her blade and could not hear it, or feel the stabbing ripple in her palm that was the foretaste of the wildfire that had always before sustained her in battle. There had been something of it in the forests of the northern wash, fighting the IXth legion, and she had thought it paltry and insufficient. Now, even that much would have been welcome.

She had seen others fight purely on their wits and skill, and never had to do it herself. Stone pushed against her leg, shuddering; it was impossible to tell if he was aching to fight or to run. She pressed back against him with her knee,
having no hand free to ruffle his mane, and they leaned one against the other, watching the rush of the veterans from the doors down the steps and the ringing clash as they met the waiting warriors. Ordered lines disintegrated soon into the chaos of the battle and neither Breaca nor her hound had any great urge to join it.

Valerius was near the front, with Cygfa to one side and Madb, the Hibernian woman with the jackdaw eyes, on the other. Longinus, as ever, covered his back, loyal as any hound. Huw the slinger was somewhere just beyond his left shoulder, with Knife and others who had begun to follow him to the forefront of battle.

Her brother had his own honour guard, and would have denied that they existed, as they would have denied being so, and still have died for him. Breaca watched him kill a veteran and use his shield to shelter Cygfa while she swept backhanded at another. Her daughter’s hair was a dancing flame in the newly unleashed sun, a flicker of almost-white against the bronze door and the smoke that billowed from it. She was the spearhead that held the top of the steps and stopped the flood tide of two hundred veterans and those who sheltered behind them from cascading down the white marble to the courtyard below.

Even Cygfa, who was Caradoc remade as woman, could not hold five hundred alone. Veterans forced past and were met by Madb or Valerius, and then others and others so that very few reached the foot of the steps alive. Then the cluster of bodies underfoot made the fighting more difficult, and because no-one was prepared to fight in towards the temple the warriors began naturally to back away, to make more room, and so more could flood past them.

The woman with the rust-red hair and grey-green eyes came at Breaca from the farthest edge of the steps. She was not a warrior; she did not dance with the song of her spear, or hear the soul-keen of her blade, but she was swift and clear-headed and filled with the rage of the she-boar roused to violence in defence of her young. With the power only of that, she killed the young Coritani who stepped up to meet her and crippled the Eceni girl who came after him.

There were no children running at her heels; Breaca checked that before she stepped forward to block her onward rush. They were caught in a corner of the courtyard with a low wall at one side, which was an insane place for either of them to fight. Stone circled out as the rust-woman came in, harrying her from the side, so that she was pushed against the wall and her shield hampered by it.

Breaca’s blade was hampered also. She stepped out away from the wall to give herself more room. The rust-woman tried to push through the gap, leaving herself open to an angled strike from the side that swept her own blade from her hand and tossed it high over the wall to land in the ash-strewn mud beyond.

Killing was too easy, and there were questions that mattered. Breaca swung her blade in and held it level, at chest height, as a barrier. The woman stopped and stood still, breathing fast and hard. She hissed and spat like a wildcat, but did not make any move that would have made it necessary to kill her.

“Why were you standing in a pigsty?” Breaca asked.

The woman looked down. Her feet were brown to the ankle bone with old, dried ordure. Over the stink of battle, she smelled roundly of pig muck.

Something of that shocked her into moving. She snarled and swung her shield as a weapon so that it was necessary for a moment to block and step back and let Stone come in, but not so close that he might be hurt, and then to corner her again with the low stone wall at her back.

Breaca swung in and, for the second time, her blade ended at the woman’s throat, and did not strike through skin and flesh and bone. She said, “I could kill you now. Or I could tell you that your daughter is alive first. In your place, I would want to know that.”

Only the truly lost can face death without care and no mother who knows her child is alive is ever truly lost. The rust-haired woman stopped trying to fight. She dropped her shield and covered her face with one white-knuckled hand and stood, shaking, as Stone had been shaking, but without the urgency to it, only despair and terror and the grief of untold loss.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“That she is your daughter? She has your hair and eyes.”

There was the barest of nods. Breaca said, “Is that why you had to hide in the sty? Did the mobs come for you? Had you betrayed them to Rome?”

“They said so.” The words came thickly, through muffling fingers.

Breaca moved her blade away and sat on the stone wall. On the steps to the temple, men and women, warriors and Romans died and were injured, or lived and grew bold in their own success. She was left in a bubble of quiet, with Stone standing guard and a broken woman in front of her. She said, “Because your daughter’s father was Roman? Or was it worse than that? Was he one of those who let Claudius into the city?”

The covering hand fell away from the woman’s face.
She had been pale before, now she was yellow and shaken by more than only the fear of death. She began the sign to ward off evil and saw herself and stopped, letting her hand fall useless at her side. “Is it written in me?” she asked. “Am I tainted to death and beyond by one mistake?”

“Not you. Your daughter carries his nose, and something of his cast of countenance, but she will live to be more than her father ever was. Was it Heffydd himself? Or one of his sons?”

“Him. He has no living sons. He wanted one. That’s why he … why I…”

There were no words. They could have been alone. Heffydd had been past his prime in Cunobelin’s time. On a day when the world was havoc, the thought that the false dreamer of the Trinovantes, the man who had betrayed his people and his training to Rome, could bring himself to sire a girl now eight was uniquely unpleasant.

Breaca said, “Did he pay you?”

She said it without due thought. In the midst of battle, with death walking through the throng, it was an insult as bad as anything her blade could have inflicted.

The woman stared at her with fixed, wide-open eyes and her head held stiffly high. “And so I am the kind who would sell herself, and to
that.”

Her voice was more strained than it had been. Stone moved up to her, and pressed against her leg as he had done Breaca’s. The woman reached down and gripped his mane at the base of his neck where the hair was thickest. When she took her hand away, clots of winter hair came away in her fingers. Absently, she rolled them into a wad, as if she might polish something with it later.

She said, “Heffydd caught me marking my son for Nemain, under the old moon. Rome would kill us for that, me and Gwn and his father if he had not already died in the battle of the Salmon Trap. Heffydd saw something he liked in Gwn, that he was strong and could fight, even at ten years old. He offered us life, and patronage under his care with the best Rome could offer if I would give him a son equally strong.”

“What happened when you gave him a daughter instead?”

“He was dead long before she was born. Briga came for him two days after he set his seed inside me.” The woman bared her teeth, ferally. The canine on one side was broken. “I killed him. They did not thank me for that, those who came in the night with their clubs and their knives and their slow death for those who favoured Rome. They would have killed a seven-year-old girl for the crime of having the wrong father.”

“But the veterans let you send her out to a new beginning, not knowing who she was? I am trying not to think what you threatened her with, to make her come out.”

“I said I would put down the sword they gave me and refuse to fight if she didn’t go, that we would both burn together. I said if she went, I would fight, and promised I would kill before I died, so she would know me already avenged.”

“And you did that; I saw it. What about your son? Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He left three years ago, to go to Mona. I have heard nothing since.”

It could have been lies, but Stone trusted her, and Breaca was inclined to trust him before a mob armed with clubs
and knives and a slow death. A decision was necessary, one way or the other; the fighting on the steps and the upper courtyard had become ragged and fallen into knots and too many on either side were spreading out towards them.

Breaca said, “If I leave you alive, will you fight against us, or help those who would?”

“No. You can read every part of me — can you not see that?”

“I would like to believe so. Go to Airmid and Lanis at the theatre. They have the girls there. Tell them I sent you.”

“Who are you?”

“Breaca, mother to Graine, who was raped by Rome. If I could have hidden her in a pigsty, I would have done. I will live the rest of my life regretting that there was not the opportunity to do so. Go over the wall and run. I will do what I can to stop others following you.”

Breaca watched the woman go and only had to stop Knife from jumping the wall to follow her, and then a veteran, who had perhaps understood better what was happening. They fought and the veteran died, because he had eaten badly for two days and had already fought five people before her, and both of them knew that if it had been even, he would have won; in battle, these things are clear, and only the foolhardy ignore them.

At the end, when the temple was empty and burning and the dead were piled inside, Breaca went to the theatre to find Airmid and Theophilus and discovered that both were working with the wounded at a covered area outside the city boundaries where the stench and the threat of spreading sickness was less.

The three girl-children Theophilus had washed and Airmid had fed were in the same place, playing halfhearted knucklebones in the ash and dust, listening to tales told them by a lean Eceni warrior with her forearm bound to her chest and splints along the long bones. She was one of the hundreds now who followed Cunomar, not yet a she-bear, but fighting on the periphery and hoping to be made so. Like the others with whom she fought, she had shaved her head in an arc above each ear, leaving a long scalp lock in rich copper reds which she had whitened with lime and goose fat so that it made a crest, like the keel of a boat.

The three straw-haired girl-children were fascinated by the result, or awed. They sat at her feet forgetting the knucklebones and she fed them stories of battles won against Rome that stopped only when the Boudica came, who had been the hero of the tales, second only to her son.

Breaca stood a little away from the group. The girls were more settled and no longer stank. Still, they stared at her great-eyed and stuffed the backs of their hands in their mouths. One of them squeaked and was stilled by the others. Breaca looked down and saw fresh blood on her tunic and was too tired to try to cover it on their account.