by Manda Scott
He took to walking the perimeter of the horse paddocks alone, armed only with his belt knife. It became his offering and his open challenge to the god. I am here, poorly armed and vulnerable. Protect me if you can.
He walked as if blindfold. Distant fires flared scarlet on the horizon. If he looked at them they left a cast in his eyes so that the night around seemed darker after. The sentries’ torches offered unreliable light, prone to moving just when one needed them most, or simply to burning out. In the absolute dark, Valerius came intimately to know the shadows of the hedgerow and the shapes of standing horses and he could name each one by its outline seen against the grass, without moonlight or starlight, simply black on black. Thus, even on the night of the old moon, a month after the first disarming, when the clouds pressed down on the earth, bleeding grey mist over the red blur of the shield-fires, he knew that the shadow in the third paddock was not that of the Thracian decurion’s second mount alone, but that a man stood beside it.
Drawing his knife, he crouched in the lee of the hedge. The horse was a narrow-boned chestnut gelding; not a mount he would have chosen, but reliable in its way, and it knew him. He pursed his lips and made a hushing noise, like the soft sliding of snow. The beast turned its head and shuffled forwards, too idle to raise a trot. The man-shadow walked at its side, one hand gripping the mane, pacing its footfalls to that of the beast.
Just beyond killing range, it spoke. “If you kill me, the first turma of the Prima Thracum loses its master of horse. Do you want that?”
“Longinus Sdapeze.” Valerius stood up slowly. The knife stayed in his hand. “Why are you here?”
“Tonight, I prefer the company of horses to that of men.” The man took a step sideways and the outline of the gelding divided and became two. Like Valerius, the Thracian chose to walk unarmed and unarmoured. In the dark, still beyond reach of the knife, he saluted, a thing he rarely did these days.
Too formally, he said, “I did not come to disturb your travels. There are paddocks enough for both of us. We need only walk in opposite directions.”
“Thank you. In a moment.” Valerius sheathed his knife. It was a plain one, drawn from the armoury. The hilt was of elm and the pommel of unadorned iron printed with the Capricorn. He had not yet grown used to the feel of it. He kept the heel of his hand on the hilt and rubbed his thumb over the wood. “I heard your decurion hanged a pregnant girl today. Is it true?”
“Yes. I’m amazed only that you heard of it. Amongst all the carnage, I would not have thought the death of one more would reach the ears of Valerius. Unless, like the native dreamers, he knows everything?”
Longinus sounded sour and weary, and angry with himself as much as others. Valerius stepped beyond the shade of the hedge and walked down, as the other must, towards the gap in the hedge where a man could squeeze through but not a horse. As they met, he said, “I know only what men tell me—that your troop entered northern Eceni territory and they met – or created – resistance; that of the thirty-two men who rode out, only eight came back alive and that you were one of them.” Valerius had not asked that, but the man who gave him the information had found it necessary to tell him so repeatedly, as if he might care. “I know that the decurion who gave the order for the execution was one of the first killed, and that you were injured, but not fatally. I wonder, in all of this … carnage, that you mourn a dead girl.”
“Do you? Then you know nothing of Thracian honour. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, not long into womanhood. She had the warrior’s braids, but no kill-feathers. They had killed her lover whose child she carried and she stood over his body as a hound protects the one it loves. It took three men to overwhelm her and one of those died. The decurion ordered her hanged with the warriors. She was pregnant, Valerius, and it made no difference.”
The first woman, the first child. A barrier broken. If Valerius were not so hellish tired, either or both of these might matter more. “Was it that sparked the violence?”
“Yes. The people would not stand and see her die. Were she mine, I would have killed for her, also.” Longinus spat. “Romans! They think women and children are fit sacrifices in war and anything less than crucifixion smacks of leniency. And they call us barbarians.”
You would as well crucify their children.
It may come to that.
The night was thick with fog and frost and unspent dreams. Valerius stared into nothing and waited for anger, or regret, or an understanding of the pain, for the reality of Eceni deaths to overwhelm him. Nothing came but weariness and visions of worse to come. In a while, thinking not of himself, he asked, “Have you daughters?”
“No.” It was said sharply, as if it were an insult to ask. “I have no children. But I have sisters and a younger cousin who was born when I left to join the legions. She would be eight years old now. For any one of them, I would have fought as the Eceni did today, had I their courage. I doubt that I do. They were unarmed; we had taken their swords and broken them, destroyed their spears, burned their shields. They fought us with rocks and brands from the fire and when there was nothing else, they clawed at our faces with their bare hands. And they killed us. If we had not got to our horses and run, the eight of us would not still be alive.”
Longinus rubbed his arm. Rumour reported a burn wound that had cost him an evening in the hospital awaiting treatment. He smelled lightly of goose-grease, which would seem to confirm it.
“According to the decurion, Prasutagos, their leader, was supposed to have sworn fealty to Claudius and been made client king for it. We were told the man was the glove into which Scapula inserted his hand and that, at the governor’s request, he would deliver his people without conflict. I think the “king” forgot to tell his warriors.”
The king. Never in their history had the Eceni accepted the rule of a king and Prasutagos was not made of kingly stuff. In races, on foot or on horse, he had always come second. In boar-hunts, he was behind the hounds and his spear was always lodged in the chest of a dying beast, never the first one to strike. In war … It was impossible to remember how Prasutagos had been in war. He might have acquitted himself well once, but he had lost an arm in doing so and, if the governor were to be believed, the defect left him sour and weak-willed and easily bought by wine and gold. It was hard to imagine Eceni pride taking orders from such a man as that.
“It may be the king instructed his warriors and they chose not to listen,” Valerius said. “The Eceni have never taken orders from just one individual. Their grandmothers rule their councils and the dreamers rule the grandmothers. It would be a mistake to expect too much of ’Tagos merely because he bows to Rome. He may have gold enough to buy those who care for it, but that doesn’t mean they will listen to him if their dreamers or their own instincts tell them otherwise.”
“Their instincts run to war now, and I don’t blame them.”
As if each had decided it alone, they walked together down towards the river. Valerius said, “Do you regret your place in this?”
Longinus’ face was a blur in the dark. “I would rather be on this side than the other, but yes, I would rather be in the west where they have open, honest warfare than in this mess of pretended peace.”
“We are on the verge of open war here as well. It may be that it has already started. Listen.” Valerius had heard the noise when they left the field, but not been sure of its source. Closer to the river, he heard it clearly: the sound of a horse pushed to its limits, stumbling in the dark over snow-hidden ground. “What would make a man ride that hard at night?”
Longinus said, “He’s under attack?”
“Or his post is. There is a fort in the territory of the northern Eceni. I will bet you a decent salve for your arm against the return of my falcon-headed dagger that the Eceni have risen, that the fort is a heap of burning beams and that we are sent north to stamp out the rebellion.” Valerius turned to Longinus. In a world of many fears, his worst was now realized. As with many things, it was not as bad as
he had thought it might be. The grandmother’s curse had dulled the edge of his fear. To that extent, it was good. Smiling, he said, “Unless you have already lost the dagger to someone else and can’t give it back?”
Five days later, in the lime-washed peace of the hospital, the falcon-headed dagger was returned to him. Valerius sat on the edge of Longinus’ bed, turning it over in his hands. The blade was broken near the tip, leaving a jagged end. The god Horus had taken a dent in the back of the head, loosening one of his eyes.
“It’s your fault. Your mad bloody horse trod on it.” Longinus smiled with the half of his face that was not a fulgent, greening bruise. Pain showed in the creases beside his eyes.
Valerius slid the blade back into its sheath. He was exhausted beyond anything he could ever remember. Not even the two days’ battle of the invasion had left him this worn. He said, “Next time I’ll remember to stop and pick up the dagger before the man.”
“And leave me to your barbarians with their witch-carvings?”
“No. I would take a hammer to your head before I left you to that.”
“Thank you.”
They made a joke of it to cover their fear, but each knew the other was serious. Valerius had killed two men with his lump hammer, neither soon enough. Having been reminded, it was impossible to think of anything else.
Longinus said, “Did you know the first one was there when you rode up the column?”
“Of course not. How could I? I just knew we were walking into an ambush. I wanted to say something to Corvus before the governor’s bloody infantry got us all killed.”
It was not strictly speaking Scapula’s infantry, but that of Marcus Ostorius, his son, and in that young man’s pride, and his presence, lay the fault for a great many deaths and grievous injuries.
The problem had been one of protocol. Scapula had ordered his son, the tribune of the Legio Secunda Augusta, to remain in the east while the reinforcements marched west to the aid of his legion. It was his right and any father’s duty to protect his son from the ravages of the western war, but the boy chafed in the harness, desperate to fight, and anyone with half an eye could see it. When the officers had met to determine their response to the uprising among the Eceni, Marcus Ostorius had first offered to lead the full cohort of the XXth legion on a forced march into the native strongholds. It is not easy to gainsay a tribune, still less a governor’s son who lays his pride so openly on the table. The discussions that followed had been unusually diplomatic. In the end, it had been unanimously agreed that Marcus Ostorius would take two centuries of the legion to assail the Eceni, leaving the remainder to guard the fortress against the possibility of an uprising among the Trinovantes. The two wings of cavalry, one thousand men in all, had been detailed as ‘escort’ for his one hundred and sixty legionaries.
Thus had the disaster unfolded. The cavalry had been forced to ride at the pace of marching men and so a journey that had taken a terrified rider less than half the night took the returning units nearly two days. It was dawn on the second day before they reached the smoking skeleton of the fort that had been attacked. Roman deaths must not go unmarked and so Marcus Ostorius had ordered that they burn the remains to the ground in honour of those who had given their lives in its defence. In the heart of enemy territory a thousand battle-ready men had spent a morning gathering firewood, jumping at shadows and untoward noises, until an entire tent-party of eight legionaries had been injured by their own comrades in a mistaken confrontation and had to be sent back to the fortress under the care of a half-dozen troopers. With their numbers thus reduced, those left had piled the wood around the base of the fort and lit it. The blaze of their labours threw flames to the tops of the highest trees and did nothing to make them feel safer.
Loyal Trinovantian scouts had been sent out when the fort was first found, and two of five returned to the pyre with news of Eceni warriors massing to the north-west. The track along which they guided the troops that afternoon was no more than two horses wide and led into thicker forest than any they had so far passed. Mounted again, the cavalry rode in battle formation with their swords unsheathed and their shields ready on their arms, but at walking pace so as not to outrun the infantry who accompanied them. A man could have grown tired of waiting if he stood in one place for the length of time it took the entire column to pass. A different man could see it as a gift from his gods in the planning of an ambush.
Valerius rode at the rear of his troop with Sabinius at his side. It was Corvus’ battle plan and both wings adhered to it: the second in command of each troop rode last in the column so that, if the snake were to have its head cut off in ambush, the tail could yet turn and bare its fangs at the enemy, led by an officer with some experience of command. Valerius had no experience of command in combat, but he had three years’ practice at giving orders and had listened often enough to Corvus’ descriptions of battles past to trust his own judgement. His judgement now told him that he was riding into an ambush and that nothing he could do would stop it.
To Sabinius, Valerius said, “If we are attacked from the sides, get off your horse and put your back to mine. Keep your horse on your shield side as protection and be ready to mount and ride south for safety if I am killed. Someone should survive to get word to the governor; it may as well be you.”
“You have thought of this already?”
“Before we ever left the fort.”
Soon after, a command from the tribune halted the column and Valerius was called to the front. He smelled the blood and the void urine as he cantered to the head of the line, a common enough smell in the past month, but not here where the disarming had not yet begun. The sound of retching and the acidity of vomit reached him as he approached the first ranks.
The leading officers were gathered at the margins of a small clearing in the centre of which an ancient yew spread boughs over black loam; neither snow nor sun penetrated here. Dismounting, Valerius noticed first that Corvus had used his dagger, that its hilt and his right arm were stickily black. With the care of habit, he noted that Corvus had not been sick, but was close to it; that he had not wanted to call on Valerius but had been forced to by circumstances or the order of the tribune; and that already he regretted it.
Only after that did Valerius look beyond to see what the milling horses had hidden. The body of a naked man hung suspended by one heel from a bough. It turned slowly, back and forth, spun by a non-existent wind. Flaps of skin had been flayed from the back and hung down like wings. At the front, black blood had flowed down from the mutilated groin to drip onto the earth beneath. The throat had been cut some time after the genitals and all that was left of the man’s blood had flooded out onto the hungry loam. It was impossible to see the face.
“One of the Trinovantes?” Valerius asked.
“Who else?” Corvus’ lips were a pale, straight line. “There are markings carved on the chest. The upper one is the running horse of the Eceni—the same as the one we saw on the walls of the burned fort. The others are new. We have not seen them now or during the invasion. It may help us if you could identify them.”
The clearing was very still; in this place the gods themselves held their breaths. The one god was not present, this was not his domain. Feeling his absence, Valerius walked up to the body. The man’s testes had been severed and stuffed into the jaws, the just punishment for a man who aids his enemies. Crouching, he found that the eyes had been gouged out and placed on the forest floor so that one watched forward and one backward. That, too, was just under tribal law; the man had been a scout, he had sold his eyes to Rome and they had been given back to the gods. Both were submerged beneath the tide of fresh blood that had spilled from the scout’s severed throat. Touching it, Valerius found his fingers slid wetly on his thumb; here, there was no sign of clotting. The chill on his neck became a stave of ice. Unwilling, he turned to Corvus, who had recently used his knife.
“This is freshly spilled. Was he still alive when you found him?”
> “Yes.”
“God.” Always before, the men had been dead before the cuts were made. Even in the invasion when the anger of the tribes was at its height, the throats had been cut, or the men had died in combat and the mutilations had been visited on them afterwards. The gods demanded just penance, but they had never previously required a man to suffer for it as this one had. The Trinovantian scout had been gone half the morning but his body hung less than a thousand paces from the burning fort. None of his wounds was fatal. Had the auxiliaries taken a different path, he could have hung there, living, for the rest of the day and into the night.
Valerius pressed a shuddering hand to his eyes and waited until his guts settled. “They’re learning from us,” he said. “A slow death spreads fear to those who have seen it happen.”
Only by the change in the quality of the silence did he know he had spoken aloud.
Corvus said, “The marks carved on his chest are not the serpent-spear. We need to know what we face.”
“And meanwhile half of the Eceni nation is surrounding this clearing with intent to hang us all by our heels.” Marcus Ostorius was nervous and let it show, which did nothing to stiffen the courage of his troops. “We need to move quickly while we have daylight and there is a chance we can ride out of this accursed forest. Read the markings and be done with it. We should not be here.”
Valerius had already seen them. The understanding of what they meant had churned at his guts before the rest. With his eyes on Corvus, he said, “The mark beneath the horse is a fox. See, here … this single line flows from the nose to the tail and here … above the nose are the two ears and beneath it the forepaws. Its position below the running horse means it is the personal mark of whoever’s leading the warriors.”
“And who is that? Who has the fox as their dreaming?”