Dreaming the Serpent Spear (67 page)

“NO!
”

He screamed for the horse, which could make no sound. The Crow-horse lay thrashing in a mindless gallop. Its life blood flooded the earth, whipped to foam by its ending breath.

Life was still in its eyes. Valerius threw himself bodily for its head and lay along it, weeping.

They gave him space for that, the men and women who lived and died around him, because to grieve for a horse mattered more than the battle. Or perhaps they left him for Corvus who had brought his own horse to a standstill and watched, white-faced, above.

There were no words. Corvus said them anyway. “I’m sorry. It will wait for you, as I would have done. It’s better like this. Your war host is losing. The reserves of the Fourteenth have broken them. When the Twentieth are sent, it will be over.”

They had trained together so often in how a mounted man might make a sure kill of the enemy on the ground. Valerius made himself stand, because he would not die lying down. The gods made his world slower, that he might seem to live longer. In a timeless infinity, he saw the beginnings of the sweep that would finish him, and mapped its progress, back and round and down towards his head—

—which was not there, because once, in a long winter on the banks of the Rhine, they had put some effort into finding a counter to this move, and just once, in a thousand times of trying, it had worked.

The gods had slowed the world that Valerius might seem to live longer, and he moved fast within it. In a move
like the warrior’s mount but harder, he threw himself at Corvus’ horse, ducking the arc of the incoming blade and fighting for purchase on a beast that bucked at the new weight, and reaching for a handhold on an armoured man who half knew he was coming, but still could not quite shake him off.

For two strides, he struggled, then instinct and the need to win won over fear and exhaustion and he was riding behind Corvus as he had once done on the banks of the Rhine, except that now he had a blade in his hand, and a reason to use it.

Not a good enough reason. Assailed by a smell he had known all of his adult life, that was least when a man came from the baths and most when he was in battle, or had spent the night in another’s company, Valerius could not make the final strike.

They had tried one more thing, in that long, tedious winter, with the snow hock-deep on the ground and ice over the river thick enough to ride a horse across, and to practise cavalry manoeuvres. Valerius reached up with one arm under Corvus’ armpit and thrust with his knee and twisted with all that was left of his strength and his grief.

“I’m sorry,” he said, as the other man fell. “I will still wait for you, however long it is, and know that you wait for me.”

The mare was Eceni; she knew the words that he spoke to her and answered the nudge of his knee. She turned when he asked, so that he was in time to see a man in a foul wolfskin cape throw himself from his horse and crouch beside the body that lay crooked on the ground.

Corvus might have been breathing. There was room, still, to believe that.

The mare turned away again, and came up when Valerius asked her to, and reared high over the battle so that he saw the whole lie of it, and the emerging pattern, and then found Breaca, who was with Hawk in the heart of a boiling knot of fighting, and losing, as her war host was losing.

He had been wrong. He did, after all, have a reason to live. Valerius set the new horse forward and raised his blade, asking the gods for help to reach his sister.

G
UNOVAR SOLD HER LIFE HARD, TAKING WITH HER THE
man who had killed her, and the one who stood at his side. She fell forwards, and her body, for a while, blocked the incoming men.

Breaca had no time to grieve, only spoke the three words that took the dead dreamer safe to Briga, and those with little enough breath to spare. Beyond the ones who had killed Gunovar more came; the string of legionaries had become a flood and the horse-warriors of Mona were barely holding them.

They were two, she and Hawk, standing in a crescent of horses and cavalry with armoured men coming in from the front.

Breaca had found a lighter shield and someone had passed her water and she had found that she could breathe again without her throat’s feeling as if it were on fire and she could at least hold her shield arm steady, if not lift it well, and even if death were certain, there was a joy in meeting it openly, in full awareness, in the company of those she loved.

She fought as well as she had ever done; life and care were narrowed to the cut of a blade and the block of a strike and the spray of sweat and blood and the greater picture mattered not at all, nor did she want it to.

There came a moment’s respite, when one man fell dead and others had not yet stepped over the growing clutter of bodies. Hawk was still with her, a sentient shadow.

Breaca said, “Ready?” and he had the strength to grin. She picked a man and stepped forward into a sudden gap and struck at him, and he fell at the first touch, which was entirely surprising, and then Valerius was there, brilliant and savage and furious. He was no longer riding the Crow-horse, but mounted instead on a bay mare that had been her gift once to Graine and Graine’s to Corvus and she had not seen him take it. She spoke Briga’s invocation for Corvus, because he, too, must be dead, even if she could not see him.

Valerius was as welded to the mare as he had been to the Crow. Together, mare and man reaped their own harvest among the legion. Men fell back, replaced by others, who saw glory in the killing of those in front of them and cared nothing if their lives were the cost.

Even so, his passing created a space where it was possible to think and to realize that it mattered to be mounted, and so to look about for her own white-legged colt, and find that she could no longer see it, nor were any of the growing number of loose horses within reach.

“Up.” Valerius was there, just in front of her, stinking of horse sweat and breathing hard. He pushed the mare across broadside towards her and reached down to take her arm. “Up behind me. Now. Cygfa will take Hawk.”

He was her brother. He was an officer in the Roman cavalry whose orders were not given lightly and had only rarely been ignored. For both these reasons, she did as he asked and grasped his arm at the elbow and made a passable leap to the rump of his horse.

Behind, in the ranks of the legions’ reserves, six legionary trumpets pealed a short, repeating sequence.

“Not now, damn you!”

Valerius spun his new horse on its hocks. Breaca grabbed for his waist with her one good arm and held on. He set the mare to climb the ridge, and they rose for a moment above the field on the parting it created. Spread below on the eastern side was the carnage where the untrained mass of the war host battled the precision of the XIVth legion and were manifestly losing. Unable or unwilling to move to the margins, they were crushed tighter in on themselves, unable to find the space to swing their blades or use their horses or draw back an arm to wield a sling.

West of the ridge was peace and order. Ranks of unsullied blades waited there, held by men who had stood quiet and watched their brethren die, saving themselves until the time when their coming could turn the battle.

That time was now. The trumpets promised and demanded, equally. As Breaca watched, rank upon rank of legionaries detached smoothly from the lines and locked their shields and drew their blades and began the short march to the ridge. They were silver-white in the afternoon sun, a long rippling line of iron and bronze and unwavering intent. The trumpet calls clove them in the centre, separating them out into two moving wings, to make a horned moon of their own, with all the devastation of their weight behind it.

Valerius had already set the bay mare down the ridge. To stay on was a challenge; success and survival one more gift from the gods.

Breaca shouted over his shoulder, “We have to get the warriors out of the way. They need room to regroup.”

Her brother shouted something back, but it was lost in the sudden clash of iron as Cygfa and Hawk came up alongside and then Longinus and Madb and Huw and the others of Mona who bunched around her and broke through the thinning ranks of Corvus’ cavalry and were riding as she had asked, out to the farthest reach of the wagon line, where Graine waited, with Airmid and Bellos and the Greek physician who must, by now, be thinking he had picked the wrong side to support.

A white-legged black colt with the brand of the Batavians on its shoulder came to a halt in the open land near the wagons. Finding no battle around, it dropped its head to graze.

Graine waited for someone to notice and when they did not, she stepped down from the wagon and walked to it, churring quietly as she had heard Valerius do. Stone was with her and all the Batavian horses had grown with hounds from when they were foals. The old hound flopped onto the floor and lay on his side, savouring the sun. The black colt eyed girl and hound equally and chose not to run.

Her palm was heavy with salt sweat. Graine let the beast lick, and then offered the crook of her elbow which was as wet. It tasted her, and she took hold of its bridle and then grew bold, and tried to lead it. It paused a moment, to show that a choice had been made, and then followed to the place behind the wagons where the water was kept. She splashed
some into the bowl of an upturned shield and it drank and grazed again and she held on to the looped ends of the reins, and prayed to the ancestor and the elder grandmother that Breaca should look across and see that her daughter had found her horse.

Quite soon after, Airmid walked past and caught a bright red colt bearing the brand of the Eceni and Hawk’s mark of the fire lizard and so it was certain that the gods had sent these two to be with them, and not simply that they had smelled the water, or knew the people on the wagon and had come by half-chance to known faces and voices they trusted.

Cunomar saw the first movement of the legions as he ran up the ridge.

He stopped and raised a hand and hollered a name. Ardacos joined him in moments; his father-in-spirit had never been far away.

Cunomar said, “We could attack them before they reach the ridge.”

“And throw our lives for nothing.” Ardacos was looking north along the ridge’s line, to where the horse-warriors of Mona fought, to where Breaca had been unhorsed and was now, astonishingly, riding doubled with Valerius. As they watched, the pair crested the ridge and down again.

There was no need to speak further; amongst the bear, some things were certain and the first of those was that the need to protect the lives of the Boudica and those who attended her was set before the immediate needs of battle.

Cunomar nodded at a question that had not been asked. Ardacos put his two fingers to his lips and whistled a soaring note that fell away at the end. The pierce of it was sharp as
any trumpet. A winter’s training was paid in that one moment. Forty of the she-bear broke away from their killing and came to join him on the ridge. The remaining dozens fought on as if there were no change.

Cunomar led them. Ulla was a lithe shadow at his side. Ardacos and his older warriors held the rear, against possible attack.

Light and unarmoured, in full view of the advancing legionaries, they ran down onto the Roman side of the ridge, and along the free ground, where the fallen dead were fewer, to the far edge of the combat. There, they rose up again, behind the Boudica and those who attacked her.

At the crest of the ridge, Cunomar wiped his palm on his tunic and regripped his knife and raised his hoarse voice in the bear-howl, that the men of Rome might know on whose blade they died before Briga came to take them.

A shining tide of legionaries crested the ridge and flowed down towards the battle. Trumpets moved them, spreading them out as they came, so that half went to one side and half to the other of the massed ranks already fighting.

The two parts joined together neatly, as the hilt fits the pommel of the sword, leaving no gaps. The killing began at once, and was neatly efficient; the legions’ reserves were fit and rested and had drunk water before they marched and had trained for half their lives in the slaughter of untrained men and women.

Graine stood holding the white-legged colt, and watched half-trained youths fall like corn at harvest, and felt sick. Stone began to whine, so that she had to take hold of him with her other hand, to keep him from running into the fray.

“They’re coming.” Airmid said it; the first time she had spoken since Breaca fell from her horse. “He’s bringing her to the horses.”

Graine dragged her gaze from the slaughter and looked instead towards the boiling mass of horse-warriors and cavalry from which burst, galloping, two doubly laden horses and a surrounding guard of Mona.

Urgently and with emphasis, Bellos said, “Airmid, she’s alive,” as if there had been doubt, and might be so still.

Then Theophilus said, “Cunomar’s coming over the ridge, and Ardacos,” and it was true.

The Boudica’s son and the Boudica’s brother arrived together, so that the two parties almost clashed, and swayed back, eyeing each other as if they might be enemy.

Valerius said, “It’s over. We need to get out and back. We have to sound the retreat.” It came almost as a question, as if he was still unsure of his right to give commands.

Cunomar said, “The she-bear follow where you lead,” and then Breaca, “The battle plan was yours, and the retreat. Do what you must.”

Valerius nodded his thanks. Orders flowed from him without cease. “Hawk, Breaca, mount your horses. Cunomar, Ardacos, call in as many of the she-bear as you can reach. Madb, Cygfa, gather the horse-warriors. We’ll need to make a rear guard to cover those leaving the field. Huw — sound the horn for the retreat.”

Graine passed close to Huw as she brought her mother’s colt to be mounted; for that reason alone, she saw the anguish on his scarred face and understood what was happening.

Huw had borne the horn of Mona for less than a day. For a thousand years, it had sounded attack. This once, at
Valerius’ insistence, they had saved it for the one sound every fighting man and woman would recognize and was oath-sworn to obey: the signal to abandon the fight and run, in whatever order they could; to separate and keep on separating, making space and clear ground between them, until the ranks of legionaries had thinned so that the power of their togetherness was lost.