Dreaming the Bull

by Manda Scott

  The penalty for revealing the cave’s location had not been made explicit but a man may die in battle for many reasons and profaning another man’s god is not the least of them. They had discussed it, briefly, in the hospital ward before leaving. Longinus had asked, “Are you sure you want me to come?”

  Valerius had paused in dressing. “I am, but if you’d rather not I don’t mind. I don’t believe you would offend the god by your presence, only that men will protect what they feel they own.”

  “No-one owns what is the gods’.”

  “I know.”

  Neither questioned the other’s reason for going; for four years they had fought nothing more taxing than poorly armed men and women, had slaughtered children and pregnant mothers and grandmothers whose best and only weapon was a toothless curse. Faced with their first real battle since the disaster of the Eceni salmon-trap, they were not the only ones from the legions and the auxiliary to seek out a sacred place from which to watch the sunrise. Over the past days, many men had gone out, each to make his peace with his god alone or in the company of the one for whom he cared most. Such a thing was obvious; it was not necessary to speak of it.

  They were both battle-fit and each had grown amongst people for whom moving silently in foreign territory was a skill valued above many others. They climbed through bracken, over rocks, through heather and across mountain streams and the best of the enemy’s scouts would have been hard pressed to find them.

  The cave mouth was narrow and tall and set back a spear’s cast away from a white water river and the waterfall it became, flowing over the edge of a cliff. In his childhood, Valerius had lived within sight of a waterfall less than the height of a child and had thought it infinitely vast. The contrast here would have been laughable were it not so overwhelming. The crash of the torrent numbed the mind almost as much as the sight. Valerius could readily imagine that, heard from inside, magnified by the echoing walls, the sound might easily become the voice of the god. New initiates, fuddled by lack of food and water, heads thick with incense, would be astounded when the blindfold was removed that had also covered their ears. The noise would enhance the brightness of the god’s light, drawing them further out of themselves as the brand-iron pressed in. He would have liked to have been introduced to the god first in a cave. There might have been more chance of meeting him.

  There was light now, from the eastern horizon, enough to see the hazel tree that drooped its nuts across the entrance and to pick out the jars of honey and small sheaves of corn that had been left around the cave mouth. A great many men had come in the last few days to offer gifts directly to the god.

  Longinus said, “It’s darker in there than it is out here. There’s no star light.”

  “I brought one of Theophilus’ dipped-tallow candles. We can light it when we’re out of sight.”

  “You want me to come in?”

  “Unless the god tells us otherwise.”

  A sharp-edged boulder lay across the threshold and must be climbed to reach the entrance. The mouth was narrower than the width of their shoulders so that, having scrambled across the guardian, they had to turn and edge crabwise along the first few paces of a long corridor. Presently, it angled left and opened and they could walk straight and then side by side. The floor sloped downwards and the ceiling came to meet it so that they stooped and then crouched and then crawled and then slid, belly down on rough stone, feeling their way forward in a darkness more absolute than night. It went on longer than any sane man would have wanted. Valerius tried to imagine the grey tribune doing this in the robes of the Father and failed. If the offerings had not been left at the entrance, he might have believed he had the wrong cave.

  Behind him, Longinus said, “I don’t relish going backwards up here if there is no room anywhere to turn round.”

  “There’s room. I can feel air.”

  He felt air and then he felt no floor and no ceiling and had no idea how great was the fall ahead of him. He stopped, sweating. Still crawling, Longinus crashed into his heels. Valerius said, “Stop.”

  “You should light the candle.”

  Valerius lit the candle. It took him longer than it might have done. His hands did not yet answer fully the commands of his mind and the pitched tinder was not completely dry. He knelt, nursing the flame, and so was not first to see what was there to be seen.

  “Julius, look up.” Longinus spoke in Thracian, as he did at night, or in battle or at moments of strain.

  Lifting the flame, Valerius looked. Ten years of responsible leadership and some forewarning of the ways of the god prevented him from dropping it again. With shock-numbed fingers he held it over his head and stared.

  Light came at him from too many directions. In the first moments, it was overwhelming, as the god’s light of the cellar should have been but rarely was. With time, his eyes picked out detail amidst the blinding gold; he was facing a still lake, the surface of which spun back the candlelight as if it had been laced with oil and fired. In the walls behind and above, in the soaring roof of the cavern, the sodden, dripping rock gave off a rippling wall of light, brighter than stars. If a priest had spent a lifetime implanting diamonds in the rock, it could not have shone more, and yet there were no diamonds, only water, and the fire of the single flame. As Valerius turned, still staring, so the sheen turned with him, flaring as living light.

  “Mithras…” He breathed the god’s name with true reverence. “He could have been born in a cave such as this.”

  They were too close to the mystery for one not of the god. “I’ll wait outside,” Longinus said.

  Valerius could have argued and did not. He heard the slip of wool on rock and a scuff of boots on the wall of the tunnel and the Thracian was gone.

  Left alone with his god, Valerius was slow to move. The lake spread before him, mirror-still and gilded with fire, and he watched the flowing undulations of his breath as the candlelight spread across it in waves. The dreams of three days still held him and he saw things in the fire-mirror that he had thought only to see in the dark of his own mind. Caradoc, son of Cunobelin, washed ashore on the Eceni coast and this time, as he was hauled from the sea, his hair was a pallid red and his face was that of his brother Amminios and he rose to his feet laughing and drew a sword from the sheath of his own right thigh and, with it, killed the men, women and children who had come to rescue him, ending with a yellow-haired Belgic slave boy named Iccius.

  Because this was not a new dream, and years of repetition had taught Valerius some measure of control over the outcome, the boy Iccius did not rise from the bloody sand and come to kill him, but instead lay where he was and withered to skin and bone as did the bodies of the tribal dead when left on the death platforms for their gods. Because, too, he was awake and not sleeping and he knew Amminios to be dead, Valerius bent his mind to the smiling half-ghost in front of him. He painted out the straggled red hair and replaced it with corn-gold, made the amber eyes the colour of clouds and made less of the nose. Only the smile he could not change, and the affirmation of treachery. In the dreams, the ghosts were voiceless. In the mirrored fire, the voice he loathed most in the world said, We nearly won. Think how different the world would be if none had emerged alive from the valley of the Heron’s Foot.

  “I thought none had.”

  As you were meant to. Would you have joined the legions if you had known your sister lived?

  Valerius was in the place of the god. Here, images sent by the god could ask questions that no man, dead or alive, would have dared ask and he, sworn to the god, must own an answer he would have drunk any amount of wine to avoid.

  “No.”

  So. And you would not have come to Mithras. Is it your loss?

  He was in the place of the god. What could he say? “It is not my loss.”

  Amminios was no longer Amminios, nor even Caradoc. Where he had been, the god knelt on the placid lake with his arms round the neck of the hound. The cape fell about his shoulders, drinking in the
fire and giving it out again, brighter. Elsewhere, in other places, a bull gored the earth and a loose-lipped serpent drank blood that was not yet spilled. The god’s eyes burned him and Valerius knew himself seen; each part of him flayed from the rest and spread open before a gaze that encompassed eternities.

  “I would rather have known she lived,” he said. “Even if I had died trying to reach her, it would have been better.”

  The youth in the cape ran long fingers down the muzzle of the hound, thoughtfully. He smiled a little. Honesty becomes you.

  “I would not lie to you.”

  But only to yourself.

  “Sometimes it is necessary.”

  Perhaps. Do you hate him enough to kill him with your own hand?

  “Who?”

  Caradoc. The one whose death you dream even in the presence of your god.

  “He betrayed me. He betrayed us all. For that I would see him dead, yes, by any means.”

  Only for that?

  “Is it not enough?”

  Perhaps. There was a space, in which all possibilities opened and only some of them closed again. If his death was balanced by your death, so that you died when he died, would you still do it?

  “Yes.” The word was said before he had time to think. Thinking, he found it still true.

  And if the cost instead was the life of one you love, what then?

  He had thought himself beyond panic and was not. “Corvus?”

  A god’s silence is a frightening thing.

  “Longinus?”

  Perhaps. Your love binds more than you allow. Think on that before you kill. Or choose not to.

  The hound was gone, melted into the mirror. The kneeling god became less clear and less clear until all that was left was the flicker of a dying flame on water. At the end, his voice came over the dark. What will fire your life, Valerius, when the flame of vengeance is gone?

  “It is all I have.”

  The god laughed. It rang off stone and came back again, echoing. A bull bellowed, dying. Another voice than the god’s said, Then find more.

  He could have stood for hours, or days. Falling candle wax burned his hand. He flinched and the wilting fire-mirror shattered and spat. Molten light spread across the floor and walls of the cavern and settled back to the lake, which was still again, and only barely lit. It came to him, standing still and cold, that the bull which he had seen die three times over had not been white, but red roan. He did not understand why that should be so.

  A long time ago, Theophilus had warned him against spending too long in worlds beyond his own lest it become impossible to return. The physician had been speaking of the nightmares and the waking dreams, but the danger was as real here as anywhere. The pull of the water was that of a lodestone, with his body the iron. Senses other than sight and sound told him that the lake was not shallow. He could walk in and keep walking and in twenty paces he would have joined the god and would know for himself all possible destinies of those left alive.

  “Valerius?” Longinus’ voice came through the tunnel, warped by distance and the convoluted rock.

  He stepped back from the water’s edge. “Soon. I’ll be out soon.”

  He could not leave yet. Turning his back on the lake, he used the poor light of the candle to explore the remainder of the cavern. On the wall opposite the lake he found the altar, chiselled out of virgin rock, and the place behind it for the nine-fold torches and the incense burners that would make the ceremonies of initiation more than simply rituals held in the dark. Beyond it, in the wall opposite the tunnel, he found a tall, narrow opening. The interior was blacker than the cavern had been. The air flowed from the larger cavern inwards, pushing him forward. Holding the guttering flame ahead of him, Valerius squeezed himself sideways and stepped into the entrance.

  NO.

  The word pressed into his ears from the centre of his head. The breath blocked in his chest and clenched tight at his throat. His heart crashed to a halt and restarted. It was not at all the voice of a kneeling youth.

  He took a step back and could breathe again. The fall of his feet sounded faint. Step by slow step, he backed away until his heels pressed against the wall through which he had first entered. Sometime before he reached it, the candle went out. The tunnel lay to his left and he found it after some searching.

  Too fast for comfort, too slowly for peace, he crawled and crouched and rose and walked into walls and past them and out into a mountain morning where the air was wet with the spray of white water and a buzzard mewed like a gull.

  Longinus was waiting, not far from the entrance. After a while, without moving, he said, “Did you see your own death? Or mine?”

  “No.”

  “Then come with me and sit by the water. Whatever it was, it will pass.”

  Three days later, on the first day of the new moon, the decurion of the first troop, the First Thracian Cavalry, was seen to be riding his pied horse in the exercise yard. His friend, the standard-bearer of the first troop, collected his winnings and was seen to be exceedingly cheerful. On the following morning, a scout’s report was read verbatim to the assembled troops. It described, in detail, the position of the rebel leader, Caratacus, the numbers of his warriors and the reinforcements he might reasonably expect to receive from other tribes.

  The governor, Scapula, added afterwards his own assessment of the likely tactics of the enemy, based on his position and strength. At the end, as Theophilus had predicted, he gave the order to move out, with immediate effect.

  CHAPTER 14

  The harvest in the western mountains and on Mona was gathered more speedily that year than any of the eight that had come before it. At the end, the granaries of the tribes were not full—too few had been present for sowing and fewer had been spared in the intervening months to weed—but there was sufficient to ensure that none among the people should starve, whatever the outcome of the war. In the days after, children began to gather cob nuts and field fungi and small, bitter crab apples that would sweeten by spring. The elderly ground woad into powder and mixed it with the juice of pulped bramble berries for dye and brewed ale that would keep them warm through the winter. Warriors ate and slept and loved and honed their weapons in the company of their children. The dreamers sought the word of the gods. Scouts reported the arrival of Scapula in the fortress of the XXth legion and his departure, several days later, with one and a half legions and two wings of cavalry. Their progress north was monitored and harried lightly from the sides and rear. No-one of significance was slain on either side. It was not expected that they would be, yet.

  On the fourth night of the new moon, under a black, frosted sky, the healed and rested warriors of Mona joined with the massed spears of the Ordovices, Silures, Cornovii and Durotriges. Those who had fought for freedom these last eight years were joined in their thousands by the young men and women newly come to adulthood who chose war above servitude. In all, they were nearly ten thousand, a number to match two legions.

  Against the tribes marched the men most responsible, in the eyes of the gods and of the dreamers, for the death by hanging of two entire Eceni villages, down to and including a three-year-old girl, plus the appalling repression of the Trinovantes that still continued. The forthcoming battle was for retribution as much as it was for freedom.

  Following Caradoc’s prediction, the river of the Lame Hind formed a boundary between the two armies. Fires burned through the night on the slopes on either side of its widest point. This once, there was no need for the tribes to hide their presence or position. As he had done once before, Caradoc had ordered more fires lit than there were warriors, so that the legions, seeing them, might believe they faced overwhelming numbers and lose heart. In the river valley, white water reflected star points of light and the greater orange bloom of flame. A long, narrow defile ran north-west away from the two encampments, the only route out of the valley. Passage through it was blocked by a solid rampart of oak logs and boulders the height of a man and half as m
uch again; the barricade of the salmon-trap, reproduced in larger scale from Dubornos’ original. Caradoc had learned a lesson from the reports of the earlier battle; no horses would jump the rampart this time to wreak havoc among the tribes caught behind it.

  Both sides settled for the night. The dreamers built their own fire apart on a rocky outcrop just below the mountain’s peak. A stunted rowan drooped berries by the handful over the vertiginous fall of the slope beneath. On the flat stone at the lip of the outcrop, a vast blaze of beech wood, apple and hawthorn cracked sparks high into the night.

  Two hundred singers and dreamers gathered round it. Never since the invasion had so many of those trained by Mona come together, nor with such focused intent. If it were given them, they would see the death of Scapula before the fire was lit again. Of those with greatest power, whose dialogue with the gods was most direct, only Airmid was missing. Her place was on Mona with the Boudica and the new child. Breaca had not been alone in dreaming Graine as key to the future of the tribes and the infant’s early days were guarded by all the known means. Thus Airmid’s absence was accepted, even while she was missed.

  Dubornos felt her lack as he would the loss of his shield in battle. He did not work closely with her; months could go by without their exchanging a word, but he knew her presence and absence as surely as he knew light and dark, heat and cold, love and loss. It did not make his part impossible to play, but it made it immeasurably harder.

  On the night before a battle that was bigger than any he had seen since the invasion, he stood before the fire with the others with whom he shared the great-house on Mona; with Maroc the Elder and Luain mac Calma, once of Hibernia, and Efnís who had been foremost amongst the dreamers of the northern Eceni until the hangings began and it was no longer safe for him to remain there. These three were the greatest: the bear, the heron, the falcon—hunters all, with the insight that gave to their dreaming. At their sides were a hundred others who had lived and trained with them for ten years or more and were accustomed to working together. Joining them for the first time in battle were the dreamers of the western tribes, those men and women who had remained to hold safe the heart of their people in a time of ceaseless war. They came together in groups of like kind and alliances were formed or re-formed that gave strength to each that was greater than they could dream of when working in the relative isolation of the tribes.