by Manda Scott
“Bán! In the name of all the gods, get out of there!”
It was the wrong name spoken in the wrong language and with a depth of care he had not heard for four years. Shock spun the two worlds impossibly far apart. Longinus’ voice followed and could not heal the rift. “Julius! Move yourself, damn you.”
He was already moving. In the faster world, the one in which Valerius’ body moved without the care of his heart, a bull sent by Mithras came to kill him with the speed of a galloping horse. Because he had fought daily for years with a horse that moved with the whip of a snake, his body carried him sideways and down and rolled him like a tumbler to come up on his feet beside Umbricius. As in the best of battles, terror fired him, raising him up. He came to his feet with his sword in his hand and only the presence of Corvus stopped him from burying it in Umbricius. The Gaul saw it and lost the last vestige of colour. Valerius laughed. “Run for the trees. I wager your life against mine that the bull can outrun us both.” They were a spear’s throw from safety. It was not an impossible distance, only improbable. Umbricius ran. Valerius, still caught in two worlds, did not, but backed away slowly.
The bull reached the gate. If the men crowding outside had been calm with it, or had given the youth time to reach it, the beast might have stopped, but the gathered Gauls were afraid and excited and they stabbed at the great head and heaving roan hide with sword-tips and knives and the god that was not a god turned back into the field and charged again.
The youth was running, dragging his blue-pelted hound with him. He tripped on a tree root and let go of the collar. Caught in a field with two men and a rage-filled bull, the hound saw only that the one man it had come so recently to hate was running and could be hunted.
In the pantheon of the god’s beasts, only the hound is faster than the bull. Valerius saw it coming and knew that in this hunt, he was not the prey. In the slow world, in which his mind saw clearly, he saw the death of a Gaul and the death after it, inevitably more slowly, of a hound and a dark-haired youth who had knelt as did the god. In the fast world he stepped sideways and spun hard to his right and his sword sliced, back-handed, across the throat of the running hound.
The bull was only fractionally slower and it did not discriminate between one foe and the other. In the moment of the hound’s death, while his slow heart was seeking the words of a death-rite he had not heard spoken in over twenty years, Valerius saw the sky turn from lilac-grey to red-roan and then to black. In that same slow world, the god for whom that death-rite had no meaning took over his body, filling it. Without any will on his part, Valerius pressed himself flat to the turf and rolled sideways along his length as a child might roll down a snowy slope in winter, for the joy of it.
The god did not fill him with joy, but with splintering light and a unique, inexpressible pain that burned across his back on the side opposite the brand. Spurred by the power of hurt, Valerius thrust his hands down and launched up and forwards and where there had been turf and trees and the calling of crows was a stone wall, over which a god-filled man could vault as easily as he might vault onto a horse in the heart of battle. The bull collided with the wall behind him and knocked the top third of it down. The god kept the stones from striking Valerius’ head. He lay on his back in longer grass and felt the god leave him, taking his breath with it. Lying very still, unable to breathe, fighting to hold his vision clear when the world came at him in tunnels and was dark, what concerned him most was that he could still not remember the words of the death-rite for the hound.
Longinus reached him first. A hawk’s eyes filled the tunnels of light. Ungentle hands grasped his shoulders. A raw voice said, “Breathe, god damn you. Julius, breathe.”
A different voice said, no more gently, “He can’t. The bull smacked him across the back. If he’s lucky, he’s winded. If he’s not lucky, he’s got a back full of broken ribs and he’ll never breathe again. Let me look at him.”
It was into Corvus’ care that he fainted.
CHAPTER 12
They kept him in the cool and the dark for five days. For the first three of those days, in delirium, he grieved over the death of a blue-pelted hound with rounded ears who had not drunk the blood of the bull. In his sleep, he strove endlessly to remember the rite of the battle-dead heard once in childhood and long forgotten. He searched the pathways of the dreams for the one to whom the rite was dedicated and did not find her. He railed against rejection and forgot that that god was not the one to whom he had given his life and dedicated his death. Later, remembering, he hunted the caverns of his soul and the uncertain vessel of his body for the lost light of the god that had so blinded him in the presence of the bull. He did not find that, either.
We ride to kill Caratacus. On the third day, towards evening, he remembered that. The thought levered him up and he would have risen had not a long arm reached out and pushed him back.
“Not yet, I think. Not unless you want Longinus to lose your salary as well as his own.”
“Longinus? What has he—Theophilus? What in the god’s name are you doing here?”
Theophilus had been left behind in Camulodunum. The world was not, then, as Valerius remembered it. He collapsed onto the bed and spent the next several moments striving to breathe again through the hammering pain in his back thus created. His heart smashed into his ribs and the pulse soared in his ears like a high mountain waterfall. Over the noise of it, he could see Theophilus smiling. That was a good sign. Theophilus rarely smiled when death was near.
When he could hear properly, the physician said, “You don’t change, do you? I rode relay horses for a day and a half to get to you. Strangely, I had expected you to thank me, or at least to pay attention to what I might have to say.”
“Thank you.” Valerius could breathe again, if painfully. He pushed himself up on one elbow. “Are you telling me we’re not in Camulodunum?”
“We are not. We’re in the fortress of the Twentieth legion in the shadow of Caratacus’ mountains, guests of the legate and of his eminence, the Governor Scapula, who has also, as I understand it, placed a significant quantity of gold on your speedy recovery. More important from your point of view, he holds the army awaiting your presence. That’s not the official reason, of course. They say they are waiting until Caratacus has committed himself to a single mountain pass for his trap, but I strongly suspect that the day you can mount your Crow-horse, we will find Caratacus also has committed. You are considered lucky by the men. Even the Gauls will fight better in your presence, however much money they have lost by your being there. No commander will march leaving his luck behind if he can avoid it.”
The quality of the light told him it was evening. No longer searching for the god, Valerius mapped out the physical margins of his body and the pain it held. He breathed in deeply and exhaled with vigour. Neither was unbearable and, with some testing, he found that if he did it slowly, the world did not come at him through a tunnel. We ride to kill Caratacus. He slid his legs to the side of the bed.
“I can ride now. We should be moving. The longer we wait, the more likely they are to draw other warriors to their cause.”
“No. That is, perhaps, yes, you will fight better than you might otherwise have done, but no, you are not yet fit to ride.”
“I may be bruised, Theophilus, but I have no broken ribs. I can ride with a bruised back. I won’t notice it once the fighting starts, I promise you.”
“I’m sure you won’t. I never cease to be amazed at the wounds men can bear in battle, but you are not here alone in the legate’s private lodgings simply to care for the state of your back.”
The physician pulled a stool to the bed. Exhaustion showed in the lines around his eyes and the cracked and reddened skin about his nose. Theophilus always developed a head cold when he had been working too hard. The old caduceus in apple wood hung from his neck; he had lost the gold one soon after it had been given him. He stroked the rising snakes a moment, thinking, and then stretched to the foot of the
bed and brought up a beaker. “Drink this.”
“Not if it’s poppy. I don’t want that.”
“And I wouldn’t give it to you. Where you have been, poppy would be a hindrance, not a help.”
“But this will help?” The infusion smelled of plantain and cow parsley. He drank a little. His tongue shrivelled. It was more bitter, by far, than the poppy. He remembered something like it from his youth. He had slept for a day and a night then. “What will this do that time and rest will not?”
“It may keep you from talking in your sleep.”
“Ah.” That had not happened for a very long time. “In Latin?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes in Thracian. Most often not. Some of the time, when you speak Latin, you talk of the god, or to the god. It’s not something the men should hear.”
“No. Thank you.” He may have been considered lucky for his actions with the bull but an officer who raves to and of his god in his sleep can become its opposite very quickly. An unlucky decurion was a liability who was likely to find himself dead in the thick of battle with no-one afterwards able to say who struck the blow.
He drank the rest of the draught, feeling the bitterness drag at his cheeks and his tongue. The after-taste was more of elder and not unpleasant. Slowly, the fog in his mind cleared, leaving isolated memories as rocks in a placid sea: Longinus and his raw concern, a boy grieving a slain hound, Corvus.
Corvus, who had called a name in a language both men should have forgotten.
Valerius asked, “Who brought me here, away from the men?”
He had been silent longer than he thought. Theophilus was half asleep, leaning on one elbow, his eyes fixed elsewhere, his breathing thick through his fuddled sinuses. His head came round slowly, like an owl’s, and, owl-like, he blinked. Presently he said, “As I understand it, the prefect of the Gaulish horse gave the order that you be brought here. One assumes that he consulted with the legate and the governor first. Longinus Sdapeze is the one who carried you in, as he is also the one who has sat with you throughout. I think it is safe to say he heard all that you said and not all of it was of the god. Sleep opens you. You speak to those for whom you care most. They are not always the same as those who care most for you. I sent your friend away to sleep when I got here, else he would be here still.”
Your friend. At what cost to them both? “I should thank him.”
“You should. At the very least, you should accede to the timetable on which he has gambled both your salaries.”
“Both our … oh, bloody hell. He’ll be betting against the Gauls, I suppose? Yes, I thought so. What has he said I will do?”
“The Gauls believe it will be a good half a month before you can ride. Your Thracian friend believes you will be on your horse by the first day of the new moon.” The physician dragged a hand down the length of his face. It rearranged his sleeplessness. “You have three days in which to mend. I strongly suggest you petition your god to give you some peace and between us we can have you fit to fight your nemesis.”
It was not Mithras that disturbed Valerius’ peace, but his lack. For a further night and a day, he lay on the pillows searching within for the places the god had touched. Sleep came and went and he spoke less in it, Theophilus said, and more often in Latin or Thracian than the languages of his youth. In the waking times, he drank and ate what he was given and lay still, feeling dry and hollow and empty with nothing remaining of the high whine in his ear or the scintillating light that had so blinded him in the presence of the bull, but only the dullness of old pain that spread out with the blackened bruise across his back.
He thought of Corvus and, because of that, of Caratacus; love and hate were too easily entwined. Time fragmented and when it came together, he was on a headland in a storm and two men were washed up by the sea. In his dreaming, it was impossible to tell which was loved and which hated. He wanted to kill both for their separate betrayals and could not. He planned a battle in which the one was killed and the other’s life saved by the actions of a decurion on a pied horse and knew that at least one part of that had happened already and the world was no different for it. He tried to think of other things.
When Theophilus came to feed him, he asked, “Did they kill the bull?”
“No. They might have done if you had died but the legate here is anxious to keep the natives sweet and you had already slain their hound. In any case—don’t look at me like that, I know why you did it—in any case, the first centurion of the Twentieth is branded for the god, and the Mithraists among the men would not have seen it die, not after you had spoken the god’s name in its presence and were seen to lay your hand on its brow before you performed the bull-leap to escape it.”
“Did I do that?”
“Longinus says not, but the myth that surrounds your life says that you did and those of us who care for you are not inclined publicly to deny it. The senior tribune of the Twentieth wishes to speak to you on matters concerning the bull and the infinite sun. I have told him you are still with the god. If you are well enough, I could tell him otherwise.”
The tribune of the XXth was Valerius’ current Father under the Sun, the highest rank before the god in the province. Only the governor would have been higher and the governor was not given to the god. The tribune was grey and dry and had spent altogether too much time in the company of humourless men, so that the life had leached out of him. The staff and a sickle were inked on his wrists as open proclamation of his rank before the god. Valerius should have been honoured by his presence.
“I am honoured,” he said.
The tribune had tight, grey lips. He pressed them together. “No. You were honoured three days ago by the touch of the god; we merely act to show our recognition of it. I am come to tell you that you are now ranked Lion under the Sun and that the necessary rites have been spoken in your name. When you are well enough, you may offer your own prayers at the altar. Meanwhile know that the god is well pleased with his son.”
He was not sure of that. The god, having blinded him, had departed utterly and showed no inclination to return. Without his presence, Valerius’ rank and grade within the temple were tokens only, a means to advance a career that had already reached its zenith. He was already foremost decurion of his wing. It had long ago been made clear that he would never be raised to the rank of prefect; that was reserved for equestrians of Roman birth. Unless Valerius wished to leave the cavalry for the legions—which he did not—there was no higher rank he could attain. Somewhere in the jumble of his memories he heard his younger self and then Corvus.
I believed it would be constructive in the development of my career.
I’m sure it will.
He had believed it then, or told himself so. Now, he knew only that there were three men permitted to hold the grade of Lion within the temples of the province and that for him to rise to that position now meant that one of them was dead. He wondered, briefly and without interest, which it was who had met his end and how. It was possible he was expected to ask. Certainly, the tribune was awaiting something.
Valerius nodded, attempting a measure of grace. “Thank you. If it’s possible, I would spend time with the god before we ride to battle. I was told there is a cave here that is the god’s, not a cellar. Is it true?”
“It is. The mountain is like a sponge for holes and caves. The god showed one as his own.”
“May I go to it? Alone?”
It was not a usual question. The tribune reflected, touching his tattoos. “You may.” He gave, in brief, directions as to how it might be found.
Valerius inclined his head. “Once again, I am honoured.”
“The god honours us all.”
The tribune left. Someone else took his place at the bedside. Expecting Theophilus, Valerius said, “I need to go out. If I walk on my own two feet, will Longinus still hold his bet?”
“I will.”
The Thracian stood at the foot of the bed. He was more rested than Theophilus, but not by muc
h. His stag-brown hair had been washed and he had shaved too close; the skin of his cheeks was unusually pink and a thread of blood marred his throat. He moved as if he might step forward and then stopped, cautiously. He was not usually a cautious man.
Valerius’ thoughts were still with the grey tribune. He pulled them back. Between him and the man at the foot of the bed was a gulf which threatened to become unbridgeable. It was harder to smile than he had thought it would be. He made the effort. “I could spend the rest of my life thanking you for bringing me here and apologizing for whatever I said in the worlds beyond sleep. I will do it if you want, but I think you would tire of it quickly.”
“I might, but then a life is a long time.” The Thracian rubbed the side of his nose. His hands rested lightly on the bed end, the nails pared back to fighting length. He looked down at them and then up again. “Were you thinking to try?”
“Not from this distance.” The hesitancy affected them both. Valerius reached out a hand. The relief he felt when it was grasped was greater than he had expected.
It was, after all, only two steps from the end of the bed to its head, not an insurmountable space. Longinus crossed them and stood at his side, still holding his hand. A little light-headed, Valerius said, “I don’t break, I think, if touched.”
“Do you not? Theophilus seemed to think you might. If he’s right, we lose both our salaries.”
“Then we had better be careful.”
Longinus was not Corvus, but it was, after all, overwhelmingly good to see him. They were careful. Valerius did not break. The night was not exceptional, but it was good.
CHAPTER 13
The god’s cave was partway up a mountain steeper than any Valerius had ever climbed. He walked up with Longinus before dawn, in the darkest part of the night. Taking no torch, they found their way by the thin light of the stars and a Thracian facility for navigation in the dark. They climbed the paths slowly, as hunters might, or scouts spying on enemy lines, taking care that they were neither followed nor overlooked.