Dreaming the Serpent Spear (64 page)

“That doesn’t mean that you can go where it goes or do what—”

It was impossible to speak longer. The hare felt him then, as he felt it. It rose up on its hind legs and snuffed the air. Nemain stretched through him, striving to reach to it. Too much of himself was in the way, caught up with the trappings of responsibility and care.

He faltered, and tried again and was joined by others, tenuously. He knew Airmid by the sense of Breaca within her, and Efnís for the vast chorus of Mona that touched the edge of what he sent; the profound resonance of Bellos he knew for himself alone.

None of them touched him consistently, and none of them could reach the child or the hare except through him. He had no idea why; he was closest, perhaps, or
shared her blood, however distantly. Nothing in that told him how to reach Graine, only that he needed urgently to do so.

Cygfa was still there. Longinus had moved silently to his other side and both of them should have been safe on the left side of the battle lines, away from the cavalry wedge that Valerius had so carefully built on the right.

Civilis and his Batavians waited behind him as the iron-hard point of that wedge, with Madb and Huw and three hundred hand-picked warriors of Mona on their flanks. All of them had fought with him either in the charge against the IXth or on Mona and in the battles since; they trusted him as he trusted them, and understood how much rested on the success of their charge.

Longinus and Cygfa trusted him equally, if not more, but they were too precious to risk in a wedge. He wanted to tell both of them to leave, and could not find the shapes of the words.

Longinus said, “You have no way to send us back. Enjoy that we are here and do what you must with the hare. It matters now more than anything.”

The hare did matter more than anything. She was running, and the hounds had been loosed. Valerius felt the beginning of her indecision and the need to reach her consumed him. Lacking the time or will to argue, he closed his eyes and gathered to him all those whom he had tried before to reach and did all that he could to stretch forward to the child and so the beast on the plain.

There had been a hunt, once, and the hare had come to her for sanctuary and she had failed it. When all Graine’s other
dreams had gone, the memory of that had haunted her sleep, not fully a dream and not fully a memory.

Every part of it came back in full as she stood alone on the plain: the crisp sharpness of Mona’s dawn light, the lift of the hare’s head at the strange scent on the wind, her own movement that sent Stone, in his prime, coursing forward, to hunt and hunt and turn and turn the hare until it doubled back to her, desperate for life, and she had been powerless to save it.

She was not powerless now, only that she did not know what to do, except to hold the whispering hare-song in her mind as this new hare lopped erratically forward and paused to nibble grass in the broad plain between the armies.

The war host recognized what she was trying to do before the legions; word passed like wind in corn. The enemy saw it after, and some understood. In ones and twos, they began to strike the pommels of their swords on their shields, taking it up along the rows, thinking that the thunder would drive the hare back in an omen of abject retreat.

The hare paused and rose up on her hind legs and surveyed the source of the noise.

Across the plain, the governor’s two coursing hounds saw her and came tight on the leash. The Atrebatan hound-boy wound the leather round his wrists and leaned back against a double pull that threatened to haul him off his feet.

The hounds belled musically, a semitone apart. Their hides were the blue of fire-fresh iron, heads narrow as snakes, with sleek pelts and ears laid flat in their baying hysteria and long whiplash tails. They reared on their hind legs like bad-mannered colts, and the Atrebatan traitor held them on pain of death if they broke loose too early.

The hare turned and looked at Graine, who did not know what to do. Once, she had sent a hound against a hare. Never had she imagined she would send a hare against two hounds. She did so now, hurling her own hope and the yearning for victory along the fine thread of the hare-song.

If she had thrown a spear, it could not have gone so hard, or so fast, or so straight towards the enemy. Seeing it, the governor gave an order. The hound-boy loosed his leashes and the hounds came fast as missiles towards the running beast.

There was quiet for the hunt. Once the hounds had been loosed, not one man among the legions dared hammer blade to shield for fear of diverting them.

The Atrebatan had cast them out cleanly, so that they went together, blue matching blue, silent in their intent. They kept a man’s breadth apart, running straight at the hare, ready to turn if she turned, to drive her from one to the other between them until she tired and was lost. Only Rome used two hounds thus in a hare hunt; the tribes did not think it fair to match more than one against Nemain’s beast.

Calamity came before they reached their quarry. Graine felt the wave of panic as the hare saw the two hounds, and slowed, and did not know which way to turn. She tried to reach the beast and could not; the singing thread that bound them was swamped by the raw, red terror. Worse than that, fear reached back to her, a clawing, panting, annihilation coming so fast and so hard and so—

“Don’t let it touch you.” Breaca was at her one side, Stone on the other. Between them, they held her up. “Graine. Is there anyone else who can help?”

She felt it then, beyond the clamour of the hounds and the soul-destroying fear; Valerius was there, with others behind him, less clear. Like reaching across a broken bridge, she stretched for him and for Nemain, who stood behind. Sensing her, Valerius stretched in return.

They stretched, and could not touch.

The hare faltered. The hounds saw it and increased their speed.

On the ridge, Cygfa reached for Valerius’ hand.

In the core of his mind where Corvus remained, Valerius, who had been Bán, heard a questioning voice …
what you are to Mithras. And now, I think, to Nemain?

The bull-slayer stood on the threshold of his awareness, kept safely distant by the need to be true to Nemain. A hound ran at his heels and a serpent drank the blood of the dying bull.

Valerius saw the moon rise with a bull on her horns, and a bull stand at a gate with the moon lighting its eyes and late, but not too late, he understood. With relief rushing over him, he opened the last gateways to his soul to let the music of both of his gods reach through him equally, and so pass at last unchecked to the child and thus the beast on the plain.

It was over so fast.

Thread-straight, spear-straight, god-straight, the hare ran between the two hounds. They were the best Roman gold could buy; each one turned in tightly, in a perfect arc — and met in the centre line where the hare had been, and slammed one into the other so that the one screamed and the other fell silent as a killed sheep with its neck snapped, to lie lifeless on the turf.

The hare ran straight and true through the Roman ranks, between Roman legs to the debris of their camp behind and not one of those who bent over with grasping hands managed to catch her.

She was gone to freedom, beyond the Roman lines.

A single horse stamped at flies in the silence. Its harness clashed softly. Breaca reached, fumbling, for her daughter’s hand. Graine dared to look and found that she had been right to think her mother wept.

“You should go now,” said the Boudica. “Take Stone to guard you, and you to guard him. Airmid will take care of you both. We’ll meet again at the battle’s end.”

She kissed her daughter lightly, in front of both armies. Graine turned to go. Hawk was there, bringing forward the black colt with the white legs that had been Cygfa’s battle gift to the Boudica.

Graine walked with her crippled hound up the ridge and the war host parted to let her through. As with Airmid, as with Cygfa and Valerius, with Cunomar and Hawk and Ardacos, as long ago with Caradoc, her mother never said goodbye to her before a battle, for the ill-luck of it: never.

The first wave of warriors ran, screaming, over the place she had been.

A
LREADY THEY WERE RIDING. THE RIDGE PASSED IN A JOLT
of hammering hooves and a war howl that wrenched the last crows from the trees. The shocked ranks of legionaries were lifting their javelins; their training was solid, if their belief in victory was not.

From Valerius’ left, and a little behind, Cygfa shouted, “We should drive through where the hare went!”

“We will!”

Wind whipped at his eyes, his blade was level, his shield solid, the Crow-horse was as fit and eager as it had ever been, the hound of his dreaming ran with its head by his knee and he had found balance at last with both gods. Longinus was to his left and Cygfa to his right behind and if they died in the first moments of the wedge, all three together, even so, the world was perfect.

Corvus had not yet unleashed his cavalry against them. He had no doubt it would come, but even that was perfect; they had discovered peace and death offered a re-joining that life had made impossible.

The hare had run more to the centre. Valerius let the Crow-horse veer very slightly to his left, away from the place he had first intended to point his attack.

Civilis, Madb, Huw and the combined eight hundred of the cavalry wedge followed him. The legions raised their javelins to shoulder height, long, light needles of death, ready for the command to throw. Valerius could see the trembling of the ends and the slight tilt in the cross wind. He raised his shield and held it to cover his horse and himself. Behind, eight hundred warriors did the same.

They were in reach. He knew a moment’s pain that he had come to find his soul’s peace so late, and had so little time to savour it, but such time as he did have was a gods’ gift and he treasured it. At the last, just before they came within javelin-strike, he raised his voice in a wild, open-hearted paean to both of his gods and all they had given him, and heard his honour guard echo it, joyfully.

He saw the trench too late, as he passed its end.

It was dug at an angle across the plain, coming obliquely in from the valley’s end to narrow its mouth; if he had led his wedge as he had first intended, swinging wider from the right, he would have run his horse straight at the centre and would have died, and all eight hundred who followed him.

The hare had shown him a path to safety, but not those on his right, in the wider wing of the wedge, who hurled themselves across treacherous turf that gave way without warning to reveal a ditch as wide as six men, with rocks and stakes in its base that broke limbs and necks and pierced flesh and guts and chests and broke apart the perfect instrument of his wedge.

Horses and warriors fell, screaming, in a havoc of rending flesh and breaking bone and unsheathed swords that impaled the warriors who held them, or those who tumbled onto them afterwards.

Half of the eight hundred fell and the rest could not stop, pushed on by their own momentum. They were slowing, with Valerius at the lead, when he heard the light whickering wind that every legionary knew to his marrow, and feared; the javelins had started.

Hail fell, of hard, penetrating iron. It stuck in shields and made them useless; it pierced leather armour and iron and skin and flesh and bone. Men and women died by the dozen.

“Valerius!”

By a miracle, Civilis was still alive. Half of his band were still with him, riding to Valerius’ right. The old warrior raised his blade to the sky and his voice to the heavens.

“Go left! We are your shields!”

Valerius felt wind graze his skin, but no iron. He would have argued, but there was no time, and the offer was there and it was right.

On an instinct that was as deep-drilled as the legions’ raising of their weapons, he swung the Crow-horse hard to his left. For three suicidal strides, he veered broadside across the line of the legions, and waited for the moment’s shock of impact, and did not feel it, because Civilis was there, and his men after him, a solid wall of flesh and bone and iron that took the first impact of the javelins and held it fast, in front of the men with whom they had so recently served.

Five hundred Batavians found death in blazing glory and their horses with them, that the rest of the wedge might have life and fight on.

“Civilis!
”

Valerius shouted it as a battle cry and a thanks and an outpouring of grief for which there was no more time. The Crow-horse kept him safe, turning tight as a coursing hound, to race back over the place they had come, where the hare had gone before him; the only place on the battlefield they could be sure was solid earth.

The ranks upon ranks of Breaca’s warriors who had followed the wedge came forward still. He spun sideways, to give them room, and made the Crow-horse slow and turned it back to face the legions and found that Cygfa was with him and Longinus, and Huw and Madb and Knife and two-thirds of the warriors of Mona, for which he should have been grateful, but was not; he had lost Civilis and his entire wing of Batavians, and the battle had not yet fully started.

He could have wept, but there was not time for it. Panting, high-coloured, Cygfa said, “Did Corvus do this?”

“I don’t know.” He had asked that of the gods in the first moments and not found the answer. “It must have been done before our scouts found the valley, which means the engineers and pathfinders did it when they first came here, and laid out the camp later. If he didn’t do it, he knew of it.”

“And said nothing.” She would have killed him for that.

“This is war. Why would he?” He said it aloud and his heart keened and did not believe it.
To me, he should have said something.

Cygfa thought the same; it was etched into her face. She said, “What do we do now?”

“Fight where we stand. Try not to die. Keep the right flank safe as we planned. This is not the end.”

Cunomar felt the shock of the breaking wedge from the far side of the field.