Dreaming the Serpent Spear (7 page)

He touched the vellum that lay drying on his knee. “The message says what we need it to say. I’ve copied the best flourishes of the original. Listen—”

Valerius smoothed out the perfect, unblemished kid-skin, best of the emperor’s office, and read,
“From Titus Aquilla, primus pilus of the Twentieth legion, in the governor’s absence acting commander of the colony of Camulodunum, site of the temple to the deified Claudius, site of our unblemished victory over the native Trinovantes
— et cetera et cetera. A man promoted above his abilities and certain of it, clearly —
to Quintus Petillius Cerialis Caesius Rufus, legate, the Ninth legion. Greetings.

“War is upon us. A watchtower is burning even as I write, the men within it dead and defiled. The emperor’s procurator of taxes is missing and our veterans fear for his life. The Eceni king is dead, and his people remember who they were in the times before we blessed them with peace. We are not in a position to remind them of their folly. Camulodunum is stripped of its defences and its men. I have less than one century of acting legionaries, and three thousand veterans whose courage is beyond reproach but who are no longer young men, fit for
sustained battle. If it please you to remember the emperor’s justice, we will offer whatever aid we can.”

With cautious optimism, Valerius said, “The legate of the Ninth is known across the empire for his impetuosity. Men say he prays daily for the chance to march his men into battle. He’ll weep tears of raw frankincense when he reads this. He’ll offer his worldly goods to the gods as a mark of his gratitude. He’ll have the Ninth legion at muster and marching down the ancestors’ Stone Way before they have time to kiss goodbye to their lovers. All we have to do is contrive some visible injuries so that I look as if I’ve fought for my life. Could you bring yourself to hit me, do you think?”

I
T WAS RAINING, AND THE MULE WAS STUCK.

The beast was young and had never been in a pack train before. Broken to harness at the end of autumn, it had spent the winter in the store paddocks at Camulodunum, knee deep in mud and snow, and fed on musty hay, with no exercise to keep it fit.

The recruits who drove it were every bit as raw and as green and they, too, were on their first campaign. They had no real experience of how to load the packs and the mule was lame on one hind leg and had open sores along its back where a pad had been badly placed.

To Titus Aelius Ursus, decurion of the second troop, the Fifth Gaulish cavalry wing, assigned to care of the men and their mules for the entirety of their month-long journey west to join the governor’s campaign against Mona, all of these things were regrettable, but inevitable. None of them explained why the beast had planted its feet on the first planks of the bridge and was refusing to move.

“Hit the bloody thing. What are you waiting for?”

Ursus shouted it from half a cohort away, urging his horse past the muttering mass of men spreading out along the river bank. They were glad of the rest, and had broken formation, dropping their packs without orders. The indiscipline of it was terrifying; they were young and had been recruited straight from the back streets of Rome, which was a relatively safe place to live, and had trained in the east of Britannia, which was almost as safe, and had no notion of what it was to march through land held by unconquered tribes, where the bones of legionary dead lay thick as pebbles among the heather.

A battle-served centurion stood on the far side of the river, marshalling the forty men who had already crossed. Tardily, he put his hand to his mouth and called back to the rest of his century: “Get back in formation! I will personally flog any man who steps out of line!”

Men shuffled and cursed and picked up their packs and were no more ready to meet the enemy than they had been before.

Ursus was tired and saddle-sore and thick-headed from lack of wine. He had ridden for thirteen days in the wind and pissing rain, with poor food and his bedding rolls damp through the night and not able to drink into warmth and forgetting because his bastard of a prefect had forbidden them to touch the wine supplies from the moment they rode out of the winter quarters. He wanted either to be in battle or out of it; safe in Camulodunum or committed to the western wars, not babysitting a cohort of helpless, hopeless children, half of whom would be dead by the month’s end.

He reached the bridge and let fly at the nearest of them. “If you don’t get that bloody beast moving, I’ll have you carrying its pack for the rest of the journey west.”

The pink-faced boy who should have been across the bridge and halfway into the valley beyond raised the rod in his hand and the mule flinched and set its ears back and brayed as it had been doing for far too long, and Ursus finally came close enough to see the welts on its back and haunches where it had been hit often and hard, and so to recognize that hitting it more was not going to make any difference.

Cursing, he threw himself from his horse. “Leave it. There’s no point.” A junior officer stood close by, old enough at least to be shaving. To him, Ursus said, “Has it done this before?”

“Never. We’ve never had any trouble. It’s the bridge: it doesn’t like it.”

Ursus rolled his eyes and sighed, pointedly. “Obviously. They never do. Nobody with any sense walks onto a strip of swaying planks stretched over a twenty foot drop with rocks and running water below, and mules have their own weight in common sense. That’s why you’re here to—”

He stopped. Sweat pricked sharply along his neck. A horse was coming along the river bank at speed, from the left. He knew the sound of it as he knew the sound of his own heartbeat.

Without turning, Ursus said stonily, “Stand to attention. That’s the prefect. How he knows we’ve stopped is beyond me but you can pray now to whoever you like that his mood has improved since last night.”

Behind him, the incoming horse drew to a halt, almost within reach. A quiet voice observed, “You’ve stopped.”

Quintus Valerius Corvus, prefect of the Fifth Gaulish cavalry, could cut a man’s soul with the knife of his voice if he chose to do so, and he chose it now. Quietly, with balanced
precision, the words were at once a question and an accusation and an assessment of worth, or its lack. Faintly, there was disappointment, which was hardest to bear.

“It’s the mule. It won’t…” Ursus abandoned the sentence, unwilling to state the obvious: that he was in enemy territory with a full cohort of untested legionaries and he had allowed a new-broken mule to halt the progress of his unit. He felt the prickle of sweat run to a scalding flush and hated himself and everyone who saw it, including — particularly — the prefect.

“Yes, I saw.”

Corvus had dismounted and was examining the mule. The godforsaken beast had stopped braying, as if it were indecorous to holler in the prefect’s presence. It stood mutely, watching with everyone else as the company’s most senior officer knelt in the oozing mud at the edge of the bridge and, laying his cheek flat, peered along the planks, then under them. Corvus sat back on his heels, ignoring the filth on his knees, nodded to something unseen in the damp air and then turned to Ursus.

“Find a man with a head for heights and have him look underneath the bridge, about a third of the way along. Keep him well roped. I don’t want to lose anyone now. And get the rest of your men into armed formation. This place is an ambush waiting to happen.”

“Sir.”

When he tried, Ursus could make things happen fast. When his own men, the cavalrymen of the second troop, with whom he shared the shepherding of the legionary recruits, understood that his honour was at stake, they gave him their hearts and were glad of it. It was this that had won him promotion to decurion and might keep him that post now.

Flavius was there, the troop’s standard-bearer, with two other junior officers. They had heard the prefect’s order and knew how to bring their men most swiftly to battle formation. At Ursus’ nod, each gave orders, quietly and crisply. Booted feet rocked the morning. The loose rabble of polished iron and helmet-bronze that had been their cohort became a shining line, not one man out of place.

Abruptly, the rain stopped and it was possible to believe that the gods approved of what had been done. The men certainly thought so; in the stillness of the lines, small hand-fuls of corn meal were scattered as offerings to Jupiter, Mars, Mithras and the more minor gods of hearth and home. Murmured sacraments hung like smoke in the air.

The danger of ambush became noticeably less. The three officers conferred and, soon, a dark-skinned lad of seventeen with curled, Hispanic hair and tendons that stood out on his forearms like pulleys had tied a rope round his waist and then pulled himself along under the bridge and back again. Standing to attention in front of Ursus and Corvus, he was white, and not from the height or the officers’ presence.

“Someone’s cut the bindings. The hide holding the planks has frayed almost to nothing. The ones who got across were lucky. If the mule had gone over, it would have fallen to its death and taken anyone else on the bridge with it.”

Corvus had seen it. Ursus should have done. The only grace was that it had been obvious from the moment the prefect spoke and Ursus had already thought through what to do. “I have engineers,” he said. “We can abandon this bridge and build a new one. It will take less than half a day.”

“I know. Thank you. Sadly we don’t have half a day. The governor needs us with all speed for his assault on Mona and we have no remit to repair bridges that have been sabotaged by the enemy.”

Corvus was a compact man, slim and fine-skinned with no spare flesh or hanging jowls and only a salting of white at his temples and along the parting of his hair to show that he had aged since the first years of the occupation. There was an air of difference about him so that even now, under the mud and the stains of travel, with his officer’s cloak hanging wet about his armour and his greaves polished to blind the sun, he did not look fully Roman. His nose was more Greek, or perhaps Alexandrian, and his eyes were wider and could hold the world. For nearly two decades, Ursus had felt himself drown in them daily and, daily, had levered himself out again, cursing.

Ursus was broad and tall and his hair was a very un-Roman pale brown, a legacy from a maternal great-grandfather who had been Batavian and had earned his citizenship fighting under the deified Caesar. He had survived a brief revolt by the Eceni in the east soon after the invasion and twenty years of savage resistance by the tribes of the west and was as good a field commander as any man of his rank. He could take anything the enemy warriors chose to throw at him; it was his prefect’s opinion that made or broke his days.

“What then?” he asked, too shortly.

Corvus smiled and raised a brow. “The next bridge is four miles downstream. It’s intact; my troop and their legionaries are crossing now. Bring your men down and follow us. Keep to the rear; the snake will need teeth in its tail.”

It was an offering, of a sort. Corvus led all his own patrols in person, but he put his second most competent officer at the rear, so that the snake of his line, if cut, might yet strike fast and hard at any enemy coming from behind. It was a place of implicit trust, and assumed the good initiative of the officer placed there, who might well have to act alone.

Once, Valerius had been there. It was Valerius who had destroyed whatever little of the prefect’s good humour had survived the winter in Camulodunum. Ursus hated him for both of these, but not enough to reject the gift that was offered.

“Thank you.” He bowed, as if in the governor’s presence. Ahead of him, a horse shifted, restlessly. When he raised his head again, Corvus had already gone.

“Why did he do it?”

The shame of the mule was a passing shadow, almost forgotten in the routines of a night-time camp. Ursus lay on his back and asked the question of the tent roof above his head. Rain fell steadily, so that the words slipped into the drumming of the goat hide and were lost.

To his left, Flavius, his standard-bearer, shifted a little, making his camp bed creak. He laughed, sourly. “Who, Corvus? Because you’d have lost two days building a bridge fit for the emperor himself and the governor would have flogged you afterwards for bringing his much-needed reserves late to war.”

From the dark, an older, wise voice said, “He’s not asking about that. He’s asking about what happened a half-month back that has left his favourite prefect in a foul temper. He’s
asking about Valerius and the procurator. About why we lost half a day on private business that will see us all crucified if the governor ever gets to hear of it. He’s asking why Corvus stopped the emperor’s tax collector from collecting the emperor’s taxes. Actually, if any one of us is honest, he’s asking why did he commit treason?”

Sabinius, the third of the party, was nearly two decades older than his tentmates. He had been with Corvus from the first days of the Fifth Gauls, and was nearing retirement. His hair was greyer than the prefect’s and his face more lined, but he carried less care.

As standard-bearer to the first troop, he was the most senior officer of the wing, under Corvus. He could have slept in a tent of his own with slaves to light the fires and keep his bedding rolls dry. That he preferred the company of his own kind on campaign created a patina of respect amongst the men that drew from them the extra effort required in war.

Sabinius, too, lay on his back with his fingers laced behind his head and his face turned to the rain-sodden hide of the roof. “You’re asking the wrong question,” he said mildly. “It’s not why did he do it; that’s obvious. What matters is why did we let him? And why did we not and are we not going to report him to the governor?”

There was quiet, and some thinking.

“Are we not?” asked Flavius, thoughtfully. “There’s still time. It might save our lives.”

Ursus said, “We’re not. He’d be given his sword and an eye’s blink to fall on it, and if he paused long enough to commend his spirit to the gods, they’d crucify him in front of the camp as a traitor and a coward.”