by Manda Scott
Valerius had time to think exactly that much before his skull exploded into white light and unconsciousness claimed him.
CHAPTER 23
VALERIUS WOKE TO FIRELIGHT AND STARLIGHT AND THE crop of horses, grazing. The hound lay along his side, pressing against his damaged ribs. Its quiet, insistent whining held him awake.
He had forgotten what it was to wake stiff and sore and too afraid to begin to count the damage; his four years as a smith in Hibernia had been peacefully free of the bruises of battle.
He had a system that had always worked in the past and was worth the attempt. Inhaling deeply, he held the breath to test his ribs and decided that none of them was broken. He flexed his legs, just a little, and decided that his knee caps had probably not been cracked, nor his elbows or the parallel bones of his forearms. His skull ached fiercely, but was intact. Exploring beyond the flesh, he found that he was dressed and someone sat nearby holding a broth that smelled of mutton and bay leaves. He sat up, slowly.
A man coughed, not too far away. Another shifted so that his armour chinked. In this way, Valerius’ former troop gave notice that they kept guard around him, without being obtrusive. If they still arranged themselves as he had taught them, four would be asleep and four on watch, spread out in a circle, leaving the officer in the centre to mind the fire.
That much was still true. Longinus sat on a half-log with the bowl of broth clasped in both hands and his hands between his knees. It was not clear if he could see the hound. His eyes were yellow in the firelight but then they would have been yellow in daylight, too; he had always had the gaze of a hawk. That gaze was hard now and incisive and neither felt comfortable for the man on whom it was trained.
Valerius pressed the heels of both hands to his eyes. When the world had gone black and then white again, he removed his hands and said, quietly, “They’ll flay you alive and make you wear a necklace of your eyes. Priscus and the others will die at your side. No officer of any worth takes that kind of risk with his troop.”
“Thank you. I am aware of that.” Longinus still did not smile, which was new; in the past, he had always been cheerful, even after Caradoc’s capture when Valerius had taken refuge in wine and things had soured between them.
The Thracian dipped a finger in the broth and tested it, sucking the drips from his finger. “Did you desecrate the bull-slayer’s cave as you said?”
“It was desecrated when I arrived. I put it back as it was when we first saw it. You wouldn’t have recognized it as it was yesterday, or approved.”
“Possibly not, but then what I think is hardly material. Did the god approve?”
“I believe so, but the new governor won’t when he finds his alterations dismantled.”
“In that case it may be as well that it was not the new governor who ordered them, but the camp prefect of the Twentieth. Who is now dead.”
Valerius blinked. “I see.”
“I’m not sure you do. In this particular legion, the prefect controlled the spies who report on the native councils, particularly those of the Silures. He was killed a month ago by three of their warriors who gave their lives to see him dead.”
“That was not my doing.”
“I didn’t suggest it was. I only mention it because the last of the warriors brought flasks of oil and set fire to them in the prefect’s lodgings and it was some time before the blaze was brought under control. As a result, the records of his agents and their activities are not as complete as they should be.”
Longinus smiled for the first time and it was the old smile, bright and alive and sharp with the challenge of a fine mind. It hurt in ways Valerius had not expected. He took in a slow breath and blew it out through the steeple of his fingers.
Thinking aloud, he said, “Longinus, I’m wanted for treason. Nero signed the order personally on the day he was first hailed emperor. There’s no way round that. You can tell the inquisitors that I’ve spied on every elder council held on Mona since the invasion and fed the details word-perfect to the governor himself and they’ll still crucify you for letting me go.”
“Treason?” Longinus made a show of surprise. “That was careless. I thought you were every emperor’s favourite. Claudius clearly believed the gods walked in your shadow and even Caligula said you brought him luck. Whatever did you do to upset Nero so badly?”
Valerius grinned. Longinus had always cheered him. He said, “I cut the throat of his favourite messenger. And I got Caradoc out of Rome when Claudius asked me to.”
“Ah. Was that you? I had wondered. News of that sort doesn’t travel well; men don’t pass on facts that might see them flogged for sedition.” Longinus dipped another finger in the broth and sucked it. “Are you as hungry as you—Yes, clearly you are. Here … eat this and then I’ll see if Priscus is still vain enough to carry a mirror.”
The broth was as good as it smelled. Valerius had forgotten what it was to eat in the company of men he could trust with his life. He was bruised and sore and battle-weary and still he relaxed as he had not done for years. A brittleness fell from him that he had not known he carried. The sensation was not unlike the first wave of peace he used to find in the wine. The pity of it had always been that it never lasted.
Longinus returned, holding a small circle of bronze.
Valerius paused with a spoon full of broth midway to his mouth. “I take it that’s Priscus’ mirror. Apart from admiring the bruises, why would I need it?”
“Because I think you haven’t used one recently. Come nearer the fire and see if you recognize what you see.”
Valerius had seen himself first as a child when the trader Arosted had brought a silver mirror for his mother. That had been fashioned for use as a gateway for the dreaming, as most mirrors were, but three-year-old Bán had stolen a look and had been pleased with what he saw; he was a lot like his mother. He thought his eyes looked the same and his hair was as black, which was good, and the shape of his face was hers far more than his sister’s had ever been.
For months afterwards, he had felt closer to his mother because of it although the mirror had been hidden amongst her secret things and he had not seen himself again until he was a slave in Gaul in a villa owned by a man notorious for his vanity whose residence was famed for the quantity and quality of its mirrors, none of which had been gateways to any dreaming.
Valerius had grown older by then, more than the sum of his years. Without choosing to look, he had seen himself too often. He had been leaner and the sharp angles of his cheeks had been made sharper by the dark thumbprints of exhaustion and despair beneath his eyes, but there had been an innocence, of sorts, as if he still believed that the gods and fate would be kind to him.
The Emperor Claudius had not favoured mirrors, nor had any of the governors, legates or tribunes under whom Valerius had served. Valerius had been in a tavern in Gaul when he had next seen himself and only by the sharp angles of his face and the blue-black of his hair had he recognized the man who stared at him from the smearings of poorly polished metal. He had lost all innocence by then.
He had lost it still, clearly. Priscus’ mirror was no worse than the one in the tavern and if the surface was far from perfect, at least it was not spotted with fly stains. Valerius’ eyes were harder than he remembered them; he no longer expected the gods to make life perfect. Beyond that, the mess of purpling bruises and welts on his face made it impossible to see anything of relevance.
Once more, the only way he recognized the man who stared at him in the fire-licked bronze was by the colour of his hair, which was as blue-black and straight as it had been in his childhood. He had always thought it his mother’s gift, until Luain mac Calma had laid claim to be his father.
On reflection, Valerius realized that he looked a great deal like Luain mac Calma, which, if nothing else, explained a number of incidents in his past. He handed the mirror back to Longinus.
“Your point?” he asked.
“That we who share this fire know you beca
use we spent ten years watching the hurt in your eyes, waiting for your patience to crack; a man remembers the things he’s most afraid of. Only those of us who lived half our lives under the lash of your tongue would have the least idea that the prisoner brought in this morning is the man who was recalled to Rome by Claudius in the month before he was assassinated.
“Even if they guessed that much, there can’t be more than three men in the province who knew you were named traitor by Nero and none of those is in the west. Your name will be in records somewhere, but our new governor, may the gods spit on his soul, is not a man to spend time or money searching through five-year-old papers for the half-ghosts of his predecessor’s pasts.”
“Four,” said Valerius. “It was four years ago.”
Longinus kicked a log into the fire, raising a shower of sparks. The movement carried all the tension he kept from his voice. “Did you listen to anything I just said?”
“Yes. You were afraid of me. I thought you, of all men, knew me better.”
“Gods, man, you ordered me flogged once. Have you forgotten?”
“Did I?” Valerius had not thought he had lost so much to the wine. A memory returned, unsought, and others after. He found the fire required all his attention. Because it was easier than remembering, he said, “I’m sure you deserved it.”
Valerius heard a breath sucked in tightly and waited for the explosion of its release. It never came. After a while, when nothing had happened, he looked up. The man who had shared his life, his bed and parts of his soul for nearly half a decade sat opposite with frustration and a desperate, sharp-edged irony painted in equal shades on his face. “I don’t think I did,” Longinus said eventually.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“No. It’s too long ago and if you truly don’t remember, we should leave it that way. Now, all I want is for you to find your way to a boat that will carry you to Hibernia where you will be safe so that I can go back to the fortress and continue to take my place in the governor’s planning meetings and strategy meetings and quartermasters’ meetings and armourers’ meetings and all the other godforsaken meetings that are supposedly required to organize to the last iron boot stud and catapult bolt the new governor’s invasion of Mona and the destruction of every dreamer left on the island. The governor will not be going back to Camulodunum for winter. Which other governor in your experience has spurned the hot baths and marble floors of the colony for a winter in a legionary fortress? He will attack as soon as the reserves arrive from the Rhine, and when he does, he won’t stop until Mona is his.”
Longinus held Valerius’ gaze through every word of the most blatant act of treason either of them had ever encountered—and never countenanced.
At the end, shamed in ways he could not name by the amber eyes, and the care and the flickering firelight within them, Valerius dropped his gaze to his hands. Words rolled over him, cold and unforgiving as a winter sea. The governor will not be going back to Camulodunum for winter. He will attack … and when he does, he won’t stop until Mona is his. The destruction of every dreamer left on the island.
He closed his eyes. Within, the crowded god-space in his heart became a still, reflective sea, across which a hundred small boats sailed to freedom. Nemain held him, and Mithras stood at his shoulder, and both gave certainty to the vision, and the need for Luain mac Calma to hear of it.
Longinus was not a god, and had never sought to undermine Rome’s advance. Dry-mouthed, Valerius asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
The Thracian’s smile was unreadable. His stag-red hair shone as copper in the firelight. “Because I know you better than you think. Because you’re the most stubborn, obstinate, mulish man in existence. Because I absolutely don’t want to wade out of the sea on the headlands of Mona on the first day of next spring and find that I am fighting against you, and just at this moment I am very afraid that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
“I couldn’t kill you, Longinus. I’m not your decurion anylonger.”
“No, you fool, I know that. My decurion would not have let himself be taken by four pasty-faced children late out of swaddling. you’re a mess and I hope you are happy with it.”
“Then why …”
“Because I don’t want to have to kill a man I still love. Now will you shut up and finish eating and we can think how best to get you and your half-hound to the coast in a way that will leave us all living?”
CHAPTER 24
THE AIR SMELLED OF WHITE LIME AND BEAR GREASE and cut pine and fear. It was heavy with smoke and sweat and an aching desperation.
Cunomar mac Caradoc, son of the Boudica, first of the Eceni ever to give himself to the she-bear, stood in the doorway of the great-house he had built on the site of the spring and autumn horse fairs and defended it against attack.
Fifty-three times, a youth of the Eceni came at him. Fifty-three times, he raised the blade his mother had made for him and, in direct contravention of the laws of Rome, engaged in battle with the express intent of bringing a youth through the threshold to adulthood.
They did not fight to the death, but to first blood, which was his, so that the youths who came at him wielding sword-blades passed on as warriors, with their first battle cut on shoulders or chest. Four who dropped their guard early, the sooner to have it over, he struck on the upper arm with the flat of his blade and sent back out into the night. They came back later—much later—having passed again the earlier barriers held by Breaca and Ardacos.
If we had five hundred like you … even fifty … Breaca had said it in spring, wishing aloud on the bodies of the slain Coritani slave sellers, and then had spent the summer making the smaller wish real.
They were not like him, these desperate, terrified, hopeful children with their hair woven tight into warrior’s braids and bear grease and the white lime bear-paint swirling across their beautiful, unmarked bodies; they had not spent nine days alone in a midwinter cave with a sleeping she-bear learning the texture of their own silence as Cunomar had done, nor hunted, with only a knife, a bear known to kill men for sport, nor lived under the searing knives of the elders for three days afterwards, learning how unending, unendurable pain might open their souls.
More importantly, they had not spent nine months in solitary tuition, taught by the dozen finest minds of the Caledonii; such a luxury was not theirs to have in the lands of the Eceni, but they had spent two months of days building a great-house after the manner of their ancestors and of nights learning the ways of spear and blade as their parents had done and they themselves had never been allowed to do. In that was the beginning of their warrior’s path.
A dark-haired girl came at him, her braid working loose and her lime paint smeared by sweat and exertion. Her eyes were white-rimmed and her nostrils flaring. She had a bruise on her right arm, up high, near the shoulder. If he tried, Cunomar could remember putting it there some time, long ago, at the beginning of the night.
If he thought about that, she would strike past his guard and cut him, which must not happen. He shifted his grip on his blade and raised it to block her strike and then cut past and blocked again and cut and moved into the rhythm of strikes he had taught her, waiting for the stillness to settle on her mind so that she might find the speed and surety to break out of the rhythm and put in a real attack.
The girl cut at his leg, and then the other, and then, as he raised his blade to match hers, she reversed her grip and used the hilt to strike his forearm. Pain made him grunt and he saw satisfaction and laughter flicker across her face but he had already moved to one side and used his elbow to shove her guard down and struck sideways, flicking his wrist so that the tip of his blade cut across her chest, high up, near the collarbone, in a long, slicing wound. She gasped aloud and stepped back and he saw on her face the same mix of pain and exultation he had seen on half a dozen of the others. These few were exceptional; the rest had shown pain and shock and a quieter satisfaction. If there were ever to be an eli
te within his honour guard, this girl and the handful like her would be it.
Unagh. Her name was Unagh, from the northern Wash, which had once been Efnís’ home. Cunomar remembered it even as he lowered his blade and smeared the sweat from his palms and stepped aside saying, “Warrior of the Eceni, you may pass.”
He thought she was the last, but was not certain. Tired, he leaned on the doorpost to the great-house, feeling newly planed wood smooth on his shoulder. Once, the building of such a place would have been planned ten years in advance, with the oaks that would make it marked and trained straight and the willow staves to bind the walls grown in place so that their roots would hold them secure and the reeds and straw for the thatch collected and dried in the height of summer.
Cunomar and his followers had made do with oak scavenged from the deeper forest and willow that must take root of its own accord later and more straw than reed for the thatch and most of that damp. It had survived the autumn gales and he wanted to believe it would survive the snows of winter, but was not certain.
There was snow in the air now; with the warriors gone he could smell it. He stretched an arm beyond the overhang of thatch at the doorway and felt the first feather touch of wetness, gone to nothing in a heartbeat on the heat of his hand.
Firelight from within caught the flash of a blade ahead of him. Straightening, he raised his own blade to guard. From the night, Breaca said, amused, “If we are to fight, it should be in front of the elders. They would not want to miss that; the bear against the Boudica, they would talk of it for years, especially if one of us was hurt,” and then, coming close enough for him to see her, “Did they all pass?”
“All.”
“Good. Then we can set them the spear-trial and hope they don’t let the presence of their elders confuse them. You lead. This is your night. Ours comes after.”
The spear-trial of those who would join Cunomar’s honour guard was held after the manner of the ancestors: indoors, sending the spears over thirty paces at targets of straw lit only by torchlight. The elders were drawn from their steadings and those nearby. Over a hundred had come; more than had gathered in the forest’s heart two years before to determine the Boudica’s future amongst the Eceni.