Dreaming the Serpent Spear (56 page)

“And we will all die, gloriously.” Sabinius swiped absently at a horsefly and looked up at the unsullied sky. “As long as someone lives to take word to Rome.”

“Paullinus has pigeons that will fly to Gaul with his report of all those who should be rewarded for their courage. Our names will stand for ever in the annals of the Senate.”

“If the dreamers’ falcons don’t pull the birds out of the sky and eat them before they get anywhere close to Gaul.”

“Thank you. Yes. If that.”

This was why Corvus talked to his horse. It was measurably less depressing.

They fell to silence, then. Ahead, the four cohorts of the shrunken XXth legion set up a new marching chant. They were fewer than two thousand and all of them veterans of old campaigns; by sickness and nightmares and the savage waters of the straits, had the dreamers of Mona culled out the youths and the less seasoned men. Those left alive, therefore, were the fittest and the best. Sadly they were also those who had spent two decades of winters devising new words to go with the old, settled rhythms of the march.

They began rustily, until the ones who knew the words had passed them on. Surprisingly soon, all two thousand men caught on and built the volume, the better to drown out the competition coming from the XIVth in front.

Against his better judgement, Corvus listened to the increasingly coherent snatches that rose up through the billowing dust; a complex triple rhyme involving heat and dust and insurgency and all saved from ruin by the wide brown eyes of a boy from Alexandria.

Even for one jaundiced by nearly thirty years in the legions, it was clever and he grinned the first time he caught it all, and still smiled for the second and third repeats. By the tenth, or perhaps the twentieth, he wanted cotton again for his ears and, lacking it, let his mind drift to Alexandria, which was hotter, certainly, than the land through which he was riding, and dustier and quite definitely more prone to lethal intrigue and insurgency against anyone who attempted to govern the ungovernable.

It had not, in his experience, been saved by the wide brown eyes of any boy, although there had been a man, and his eyes had, indeed, been brown and a great deal of Corvus’ life’s path, if he thought about it, stemmed from that man
and all he had offered, and the result could be considered salvation, if one chose to look at it in that light.

The day was hot and images flowed easily, borne on the beat of marching feet and a scurrilous song that managed to link every officer in both legions and both wings of cavalry by anatomically improbable methods to the brown-eyed Alexandrian youth.

A small bronze statue of Horus took wings from Corvus’ pack and lifted over the mirage of the marching men. Its one jet eye winked at him and became the brown eye of an Alexandrian man, full of wisdom and care and dead so very much too early. The bird soared high. From its height a man’s voice said,
What does it profit a man to serve the gods of two worlds?

He had always spoken thus, setting riddles in his arcane Alexandrian tongue in a voice smooth as quicksilver and sweet as ambrosia. The answers were never to be found where first one sought them.

Determined not to try, Corvus let his mind drift and drift again and, as it always did when drifting, it came eventually to a black-eyed, solemn, thoughtful boy of the Eceni and the painful trail he had walked to become an officer in the Roman cavalry, feared for his ferocity by those who fought on both sides of the conflict in Britannia and named traitor in Rome because he had made the mistake of pledging oath and honour to an emperor in the days before his dying.

He thought of the man that boy had become and the sight of him on a pied horse standing over the procurator of all Britannia with murder in his eyes and something quite different shining from his heart.

To his bay battle mare, Corvus murmured, “But Valerius is given to Mithras, the bull-slayer. He serves only him; a god of the world he has left behind. The gods of the Eceni would not accept him.”

Why not
?

For five paces more, Corvus remained in quiet reverie, then his world broke into shards, as a glass that is thrown at a white marble wall. “Sabinius! Signal alert forward and back!”

He barely recognized his own voice; out of nowhere he had found the spit and crispness of early morning and the certainty of battle command.

Sabinius’ standard flittered in the breeze, twice forward, twice back. A trumpeter in the infantry took up the signal and sent it forward up the line. Another sent it back at a different pitch; every man of the seven thousand up to and including the governor knew whence came the order and so whom to blame if it were wrong.

Corvus looked about. The mirage was gone. Men marched where it had been. Already their chant sank dead in the air. They shifted their packs and loosened their gladii and the lift of their feet in the march was higher and more elastic. Silence hung about them like a shield.

His neck prickled. His palms were wet on the reins. He looked about with different eyes. The road was raised, as they always were. The land about was flat for a spear’s throw on either side and should have been cleared back to the naked turf for three spear-casts beyond that. Once, it might have been; the trees had certainly been felled at least to the start of the rising land, but in the last year, the men of the legions had been occupied with other things than making safe the roads and the land was a havoc of scrubby new
growth that could have hidden half the marching men and easily as many warriors.

Both sides were not the same. To the left, the land rose gently to make a small ridge which was covered in scrub. To the right, it fell away more steeply and the trees had been left to grow closer to the road; the engineers did not believe warriors would attack uphill.

Corvus thought they were right. The danger all came from the left. He looked over and through the nettles and flowering thistles and green-berried thorns and the scrub elder and saw nothing, only felt loathing and excitement and the almost-readiness to attack. He drew his own sword and shifted his shield from shoulder to forearm.

Sabinius copied him. “Valerius?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. I think I would know if he were…” Corvus shook his head. “Yes, I would know. He isn’t here. But there is someone … many. Waiting, watching…”

Their eyes scoured him. His guts clenched and he thought he might be sick, but he always thought that, riding into ambush. It had never yet been true.

Sabinius spat, sending precious water to the road. “They’re going to try to pick us off from back to front as they did with the Ninth.”

“I know. But we’re not led by an idiot. And this serpent has a sting in its tail such as they’ve never encountered.”

There was release in action. The bay battle mare came round in a faultless spin and danced on the spot, perfect and beautiful and ready to fight. Loudly enough for those around to hear, Corvus said to Sabinius, “You have command of the first two troops. At all costs, protect the mules and the baggage; I don’t want to sleep in the open tonight
even if you do. I’m going back to be with Ursus and Flavius at the rear.”

Ursus and Flavius were ready. The former had already deployed the nearest two dozen men as flank riders, setting them in pairs, mostly to the left, staggered out and back so that each outer man protected the side and back of his partner, and each outer pair covered the side and back of those on the inside.

Flavius had command of the archers. Since last autumn, the Quinta Gallorum had retained one dozen Scythian horse-archers, employed at insane expense, who dressed in silks and then complained daily of the cold and the mud and had to be waited on and served hot spiced beef and olives and good wine and given their own private cook and must be set to train in secret, with scouts all around to guard against spies so that now, when they were most needed, they could be brought into action against an unprepared enemy, with all the insanity of money and cosseting proved worthwhile and not a man begrudging them a single olive.

Flavius had been given charge of them, and had come to care for them as the Atrebatan hound-boy cared for the governor’s blue-skinned hounds, and for much the same reason: they set him apart from the rest. He had taken the time to learn their language, which was more than anyone else had done, and he shouted to them clearly, pure as a bell, as Corvus approached.

Like the hounds, the Scythians craved release into action. At the first of Flavius’ calls, they began to string their small, wickedly curved bows and chose arrows from the packs on their horses’ shoulders and nocked them, quietly and unobtrusively, the better to keep secret from the watching warriors.

The rest of the troop rode forward at an even pace, not turning to look at them, or to point or do anything that might attract the enemy’s attention; their orders were unambiguous in this regard. The flank riders covered them, and had orders to die in their defence.

Following his own instructions, Corvus rode past them to the rear without looking. Flavius gave him a queer, half-friendly salute as he passed. Ursus nodded, curtly. He had the same question as Sabinius, only asked with less tact. “Is it Valerius? If it is, he’ll know what we do and how we do it.”

“It’s not Valerius; he isn’t here. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t spent the last half month drilling those who are.”

“What do we do?”

“Out-fight them,” said Corvus, grimly. “And pray that word of the archers has never reached Valerius. Keep them facing the left; that’s where the danger has to be.”

“That’s Corvus, whom Valerius saw above Lugdunum. He leads the cavalry. He’s a friend to the Boudica.”

“And was soul-friend once to Valerius. He is known on Mona.”

Cunomar lay with Braint in a patch of head-high nettles within half a spear’s cast of the road. Even attacking the Ninth, he had not been so close. He could see the beads of sweat on the faces of the men as they marched, and black runnels of it on the necks of the horses. He could see grit and flies and the dulled eyes of men who had marched fast for days and had more days ahead of them. He heard pounding feet and the inane marching ditties and closed his ears to them so that the sudden blast of the trumpets had
shocked him and he had jumped, and cursed and made himself lie still again.

Braint had not jumped, even when Corvus swung his bay mare out to the side within almost-touch of her face. Amongst all the lime-painted, grey-greased warriors of Cunomar’s she-bear, she alone was unpainted and almost unadorned. She wore a single banded feather in her hair from the tail of a peregrine tiercel and two eye teeth of a wildcat hung from a horsehide thong round her neck. She had worked dust and mud into her hair so that it looked like an upturned sod of turf, but for the rest, her skin was brown from a summer of sun and wind and matt from the dust of the marching men and before the first troop of the first cohort of the first century of the XIVth legion had passed, she had become another shadow in many shadows amongst the nettles.

She lay still and silent, and seemed not to notice the flies. Except when he had agreed to attack the legion early, before the remainder of the warriors joined them, Cunomar had never seen her smile.

He remembered stories his mother had told of Braint as a girl on Mona and later in the battles of the invasion, of her grief at the death of her boy-cousin and her vitality as she came out of it, and her fearlessness so that she had lured an entire troop of Gaulish cavalrymen to their deaths, using her own body as bait.

The fire of that was still there to be seen, but grief and joy had burned away equally in its heat, leaving her unyielding as iron. She was unquestionably a good warrior, even excellent. Cunomar was coming slowly to the view that, next to his own family, she might be the best he had ever met.

Now, from his left, without moving, she said, “Mac Calma was right. They do have archers. Look.”

For the time it took four ranks of the wing to ride past, Cunomar looked and saw nothing. Then he saw the flicker of a scarlet fletching and from that traced the outline of an arrow and so a bow and the brown-skinned, hawk-nosed man who bore it. Once seen, it was easier to find the others.“They’re all here.”

Braint had told him of the hidden danger the evening before, when the fires of the legions had been hot sparks on the horizon. Their own fire had been three barely red lumps of charcoal in a pit. Leaning into it, so he could see the red on her face, she had said, “Luain mac Calma has three informers among the Siluran scouts used by the legions. They report to him only in exceptional circumstances and then only through an intermediary. If the truth has reached us cleanly, they have been keeping watch on a dozen brown-skinned archers who can shoot a dove from the sky and the hawk that is following it and then turn and kill a hunted hare and the hound when both are going the opposite way. They can do all this standing or sitting or on horseback and in any direction.”

“How far can they shoot?” Cunomar had asked.

“Two spear-casts accurately. Three if they are aiming for a target as big as a warrior.”

“Then if we don’t have more warriors than they have arrows, we are finished, and all the lives wasted.”

“No. Mac Calma has sent us with five slingers. All we have to do is to keep them alive while they target the archers. Can your she-bears do that, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he had said. “Against mounted cavalry we are at a disadvantage. We can run in and cut the heel-strings
of the horses but that’s costly in lives. We can throw spears, but the archers will be faster. We can run at them, but we have not enough in numbers to overwhelm them. We could try to attack at night, but they are well fortified and have sentries at every second pace who change eight times overnight and are alert. What do you suggest?”

Braint had turned her head at last and looked at him. Warmed only by the embers, her gaze was long and cool and dispassionate. It was like being regarded by a hound; he had never enjoyed that. Eventually, she had said, “I suggest that you ask the bear for help and do as she advises.”