Dreaming the Eagle

by Manda Scott

  “One year from now, our commander on the Rhine believes he will be able to spare us the legions we require to complete the business begun by our honoured predecessor, Gaius Julius Caesar. We will have need of you then, for you are our most reliable guide amongst your people. Today, however, is yours and you should celebrate. I envy you. Love such as this—the truest love that neither betrays nor is betrayed—comes only once in a lifetime. There is no shame in it. Do not feel it base. Equally, do not feel it to excess, for we would not lose you to sleepless nights, either.” He grinned, lewdly. From behind the throne, the Greek freed-man laughed.

  Bán nodded. He was beyond speech. The laughter crawled across his skin. Looking round, he saw it echoed in the eyes of those less favoured, who must, perforce, remain silent in the presence of their emperor. He had heard the same, in the same tone, of the women and boys who sold themselves to the legions and heard in it now the ruin of his pride. If he could have died simply by wishing it, he would have done so.

  Gaius’s eyes flayed the raw pulp of his soul. His emperor, who owned his life, said acidly, “Julius Valerius, you have not been betrayed.”

  “No, my lord.”

  “You may go. Prefect”—he turned to Corvus—“take him home and take care of him. He has been misused by the guards. If you have need of my physician, call him. That is an order. You are dismissed.”

  “Corvus—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t.” Dry lips pressed on his head. A warm voice, full of love and longing, said, “My dear, I’m sorry. We agreed not to speak of it but what else could I do?” They stood in Corvus’s lodgings, in a room that had once aped the opulence of the emperor’s audience room, but from which the glitter had been summarily removed. It was clean and spare and smelled of harness leather and lamp oil and polishing sand. The servant hovering in the doorway had been airily dismissed, leaving them alone.

  Bán stood rigidly where he had been led. Warm arms embraced him. A hand caressed his hair. His flesh crept from the touch. The man he would have trusted with his life—and the certainty of his death—laughed warmly and said, “Julius Valerius, I would not lose you to the flaying knives for the sake of barbarian proprieties. As you heard from the emperor’s own lips, this is no cause for shame in Rome.”

  Corvus ruffled his hair once more. The teasing smile lingered on his lips. Above it, lit by the morning sun, his eyes snarled. In the hidden space between them his free hand sketched the Eceni sign to ward against evil, or the telling of lies. Bán felt the floor sink away from him a second time. He swayed and was caught and held. With genial clarity, in a voice that could pitch across a battlefield, or keep close between the two of them, but was set to carry to the walls, Corvus said, “My dear, my dear, we are private here, as we were last night. We don’t have to keep our distance.”

  “No. I’m sorry.” It was the best he could do. His world was fading at the edges, as if the sunlight bled the colour from it. He swayed again and was helped to sit. He looked afresh round the room. Two arches were screened with hangings. Either one could have led to another room, or an alcove; there was space behind each for a scribe and his parchment. He brought his gaze back to Corvus and made himself smile. “Thank you,” he said. “I would not have asked it of you. But I am truly grateful.”

  “Good.” The relief he saw was real. “Did the guards do you much damage?”

  “I don’t know.” He had not given it thought; it had been nothing compared to what lay ahead, to what may still lie ahead for both of them if he could not learn to act his part in time.

  He had never been required to lie before. With a grimace any watcher could have read, he flexed his arms experimentally and said, “I think they may have opened up the wound on my shoulder.”

  “Have they? Bastards. After all the care we took not to damage it. In that case we will go and see Theophilus before we go to the baths. Everyone knows now. There is no need to hide away and you will feel better after a soaking and the ministrations of a masseur. After that, I think we had best go and see to that mad bastard horse of yours. They have him corralled but he’s wilder than ever. I’m told even Sigimur can’t get near him.” A hand took his good arm at the elbow and raised him into another careful embrace. The lips that brushed his hair chattered nonsense in Latin, and in amongst it, more dryly in Eceni, “And you will need to act better than this, my friend, or we will both hang.”

  A three-flamed lamp flickered from the small alcove above the bed. Beside it, a gilded statue of Horus, a palm’s length high, stared at the night with ebony eyes. A copper horse, smaller and with the green patina of age, reared and pawed the night. Bán had not been in Corvus’s sleeping quarters often, but enough to know that these three things, the lamp, the falcon-god and the fighting horse, travelled with him everywhere, as constant as his armour; he had never expected to wake beside them. He lay still, feeling the spring of the bed and the unaccustomed luxury of linen. His shoulder burned, but only if he gave it thought. A tight-lipped Theophilus had dressed it for him. Bán had tried to speak and had had his mouth shut for him by a forefinger levered beneath his chin. The physician had smiled at the muffled indignation that had followed. “Call it raw, unbridled jealousy,” he had said, “but I don’t want to know the details. You can tell me all about it when we are both free of the army—if we are alive to talk of such things.” He had stopped at the sight of Bán’s face, and then, with a soft, surprising anger, had said, “What is it upsets you most? The laughter of Greeks or the fact that you are still in possession of your skin?”

  It had been both, and he would admit to neither. Theophilus had glared at him. “If you live in the army, you will have to get used to being the subject of gossip and laughter. Your pride will suffer daily else. And as to the other—you should not crave a death such as Gaius offers until you have seen it happen. If you want it so badly, I will give you an infusion that will take three days to kill you and you may relish every moment of your dance with pain; but not in public, in front of those who care for you.”

  Bán had said, bitterly, “And would the emperor let you live after that, do you think? Or Corvus?”

  “Do you care?”

  It had not been a question he could answer, nor was it yet. A draught from the doorway caught the lamp, sending tripartite shadows scurrying across the ceiling. He looked up. Corvus stood by the bed. His shape had changed, and the way he stood. The masks of the day had slid from him, leaving only the strain of their weight. He drew a long breath through tight lips. “You can relax,” he said. “It’s over.”

  “What is?”

  “The charade. That was Civilis. He had urgent news that couldn’t wait until morning. He brought his trail-hound with him. It’s not of Hail’s quality, but it is good enough to tell us if the listeners had been replaced.”

  “Was there more than one?”

  “Yes. That was the news, or part of it. One of the emperor’s freedmen left the house next door at the change of watch. Rufus has checked outside. There was one by the window but he left at the same time. The roof is flat and has no room for a man to hide, and there is nowhere else. We are alone now, genuinely so.” Corvus stood awkwardly by the bed. Three flames flickered in each of his eyes, making them impossible to read. “I don’t think you should leave yet, but you can go at dawn and you need not come back. Gaius departs for Rome at noon tomorrow. I doubt he has spies set to report to him on something so trivial as the relationship between the prefect of a cavalry wing and his master of horse.”

  “His what?”

  “Master of horse. That was the other thing Civilis came to report. Gaius decreed it last night. You have been promoted. You are not ranked as high as decurion but you will no longer be required to take guard duty or dig the latrines. More important, it means you will no longer have to share a tent with seven Gauls.” A half-smile flickered across his face, and something that might have been an apology. “After this, that may
be wise.”

  Bán sat up. The bed linen wreathed at his waist. His heart ached. “Gaius will read the spies’ reports come dawn. He may decree something quite different if he thinks he has been deceived. Have you a blade if they come for us?”

  “Yes.” It was a dress dagger, the blade a foot long and sharp on both edges. It had lain on the tiled floor beneath the bed all along. Corvus slid it into view and held it across both palms. “You are free to use it. That has always been so, but we will not need it on Gaius’s account. He waited up for the reports. If he were going to act, he would have done so by now. He is leaving in the morning and he would want to stay to watch; he has never been a man to rush his executions. Civilis would not have come with his hound were he not certain it was safe.”

  Corvus crossed to the window and pushed open the shutters, letting in the cold, misted air of the night. The lamp spread soft light across his back, showing the sunburst scar beneath his ribs where the Pannonian spear had nearly taken his life in the summer before the shipwreck. Other scars laced across it, none of them as deep. When he spoke, it was without turning round.

  “Bán, you—”

  “Not Julius Valerius?”

  “Hardly. He’s a creation of Gaius. He is not the Eceni horseman who rides a horse whose name means ‘Death.’” They were talking Gaulish. They had slipped into it from the Latin as Corvus opened the shutters and Bán had not noticed.

  “How did you know that ‘crow’ means ‘death’?”

  “Your sister told me.”

  “Ah.” He had not thought of Breaca since before they left the Rhine. It took time to build the image of her face in his mind. The colour of her eyes eluded him.

  Corvus abandoned the window. When he sat on the edge of the bed, the lamp no longer masked him.

  Bán pulled the covers tighter around his shoulders. His nerves were frayed beyond anything Amminios had achieved and he was long past making sense of what he thought or felt. He was offered friendship and he was not certain, any longer, that it was enough. Nor did he know what he wanted instead.

  Because it was simplest, he said, “You were going to ask me something?”

  The prefect laid the knife on the sheet. The lamplight warmed it. “I was going to say that you gave me a blade once, an escape from the dreamer’s death. I had thought to avoid that for you, but it is here if you feel the need of it.”

  It was an apology, masked in details of the past and still not enough. “There are things worse than death, however it comes. Ask Iccius.”

  “Bán?” Corvus stood, abruptly. The Horus rocked in its alcove. “Have I offended you? Dishonoured you in any way?”

  “You told Gaius—”

  “I told Gaius what he and every other man in the legions believed already to be true. And is it so bad that you would rather die over two days than have your name attached to it? Really?” Corvus spun on one heel and took himself back to the window. Anger made him animated where fear and relief had not. “When I told the emperor it was a cause for shame amongst your people I believed that I lied. I spent a winter in the men’s house and it did not seem a great cause for shame amongst those I shared with. And here—” He gestured out into the mist. “If you read the scholars, they will tell you that in the Germanic tribes it is a capital offence, that they press such men facedown into marshes under wicker hurdles and tread on them until they are dead. Does it seem like that to you? Does it?”

  Unwillingly, Bán smiled. “If it is, someone should warn Civilis.”

  “Exactly. Thank you. So then why—why—” He was by the bed again. The shutter banged behind him. The knife lay flat on his palm. “Why is this better?”

  “I’m not afraid to die.”

  “No, I should say not. You’re obsessed with it. You have been so since Iccius was killed. I had hoped we might give you reason to live.”

  “By lying?”

  “Dear God, what did you want me to do? Tell him you brained Amminios with a rock and he should crucify you for it?” Corvus stopped, breathing hard. “Bán, listen to me. Titus Pompeius has never been on a battlefield and the Second has a cohort of new recruits who haven’t worked out how to bribe their way out of sentry duty yet. Were it not for that, you would have got your slow death and there would have been nothing we could do about it. The colt had his blood-frenzy, but he was smashing a body already dead. The killing blow to the head was not made by a horse. No man who has fought against cavalry—no man who lived through the Chatti attack last month and saw the bodies after—would make the mistake they made. The watchmen of the Second saw what they wanted to see and Gaius was not in a hurry to have it checked. He had no need of Amminios and he has you in his debt. All he needed was a reason to let you go. I gave it to him.”

  “And so I am in your debt, as well as his.”

  It was this that hurt, more than anything. He did not care about Gaius, but he very badly did not want to be in debt to the man who sat now on the edge of the bed, who stretched out two hands and stopped just short of touching and withdrew them again, clenching and unclenching the fingers; the man who said, “Oh, gods, Bán, do you have to be so very stubborn? You owe me nothing. You never have, you never will. Even had you not given me the knife when we thought Caradoc brought news of the dreamer’s death, you would still owe me nothing. This is not about debt and the tally of favours, this is about caring. I love you. Do you not know that?”

  Bán sat still, not daring to move. Like mist rising with the dawn, the fog in his mind lifted to reveal only the thing he had felt, but not seen, when Theophilus first asked his question.

  Do you care?

  Yes, very much. But I don’t know if that care is returned.

  And so he had covered it with injured pride and old anger and the last dregs of a need to die, fearing that to abandon this last would be the ultimate betrayal of the dead. He felt for Iccius now and could not find him, but felt no rejection in his place.

  The quiet stretched on. Bán felt a touch on his good shoulder and did not flinch away from it. Presently, he stretched out his own hand and met another, surprisingly cool where his own was slick with sweat. They held together for a moment, then he was squeezed and quietly left, and when he was joined again the hand held a wineglass and he found he could sit up and take it and drink without spilling. The wine was the best, the emperor’s own. The glass was green with a long stem and his fingers left prints on it. The drink rushed to his head, making his ears sing. Through the noise, he heard Corvus, speaking carefully in the measured, thoughtful tones he used before manoeuvres.

  “… don’t have to stay. I won’t push for what you can’t give. I know what it is to be loved and not to love in return. You may stay in the legion and we will be as we were before. Or, if, knowing this, you can’t bear to be even that close, I can get you a boat to take you home. It will be hard and we will have to invent a reason, but it’s not impossible…”

  He wasn’t listening. He didn’t want to listen. He shook his head. His heart battered against the cage of his breast and the pain was unbearable.

  Corvus said, “Bán, look at me.”

  He was looking. His eyes were wide open. He could see nothing through a blur of tears. He dashed them away with the back of his hand.

  “Bán, what is it? Have I—”

  “Don’t, just…will you stop being the prefect for a moment and hold me? Please?”

  He woke again in daylight with fingers of sun parting the mist. Corvus lay beside him, already awake. The Horus gazed over them, wide-eyed in the sun. Bán reached up and stroked the dome of its head.

  “He watches over you,” he said.

  “Over us. Yes.”

  “He was a gift? And the horse. Horus to protect and the horse to fight.” An image formed in his mind, of a fair head lying in the place of his own, of a leaner, older face. “What was his name, the one who gave them?”

  “Marcus. Marcus Aemilius. He died in Pannonia.”

  “When you got this.”
He touched the sunburst scar. The skin around it was more sensitive than that elsewhere. In the night he had run his lips across it, exploring the knots and purpled pits, tracing the outline from ribs to spine and back again. He brushed his finger across it now and watched what it did. The name did not matter, nor what he had been. The past was what built them and brought them to this. He smoothed his palm out and down and heard a breath caught and held.

  “Should I stop?”

  “Not for me. Do you want to?”

  “No. Never.” He smiled, remembering things of the night. “Perhaps now it’s light we could manage not to spill the wine?”

  The morning moved on. Outside, men’s voices roamed back and forth, preparing for the emperor’s departure. In the fastness of the bed, Bán leaned into the arms that held him. “If we can hear them,” he said, “they can hear us.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “No. Not unless they think we’re still acting.”

  “Hardly that.” A kiss stole the laughter from them. “Don’t ever volunteer to act. You’d be the death of us both.”

  “I know. You carried the weight alone and I knew it and let you. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You did what you could. It was enough.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Terrified. Could you not tell? I’d rather have fought the Chatti single-handed. It is one thing to die in battle but quite another to live for a day and a night for Gaius’s entertainment.” Fingers lifted strands of his hair and spread them out above his head. “And I thought I’d lost you, what little I had. You should have seen your face in the audience room. I thought you hated me for it.”

  “I didn’t hate you. I hated Gaius for the way he smiled, and his freedman for how he laughed, but not you. It was a shock. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “You should have been. Everyone else was.”

  “Maybe, but the dead love only each other; they have no room for the living. I wanted so much to be with Iccius, I didn’t notice anything else.”