Dreaming the Bull

by Manda Scott

  Horns wailed along the river bank. Slowly, slowly, the legions advanced. The cavalry took the sides, blocking the routes of escape so that the warriors must go backwards or die where they stood. Many died but more of the legionaries died with them. Amidst the clustering souls of the dead, the majority, by two to one, were foreigners lost in a land not their own, seeking absent gods they had not thought would abandon them.

  The rearmost warriors had reached the barrier. More were already waiting behind it, providing shelter and thrown spears to keep the legions at bay while their shield-mates scaled the outer surface. Ladders on the inside made an easy descent. In the crowded valley, for a moment, the killing stopped. Both sides paused, taking breath and water and eating handfuls of malted grain or strips of dried meat. On the Roman side, raised and tilted standards sent complex messages along the short, dense ranks. The freshest legionaries came to the fore. At the wings, the auxiliaries dismounted. Everything was as it had been in the lands of the Eceni, but on a larger scale. If the governor recognized the trap, he believed himself its equal. On a rocky outcrop, high above the battle, a warrior and a child looked north, seeking sign of three thousand warriors. In the far distance, on the ridge of a mountain, Dubornos saw a single, bare-headed man walking on foot leading a horse. A forewarning of disaster fluttered lightly in his chest.

  Go!

  The command came in Latin, or Eceni, or simply in thought. The echo of it rattled the heights, sprinted the length of the defile. In the pause was an intaken breath and in its exhalation, in the roar of the legions, was a single message: We are the might of Rome, come alive and victorious. None can withstand us!

  In the forest, bears paused in their meanderings, stags halted the battles of the rut. Over the highest peaks, eagles wheeled in flight, facing into a wind not sent by the gods. In the rock-littered valley, legionaries in their thousands beat their blades in thundering cacophony against their shields and, assailed by rocks and spears and sling-stones, the charge to the rampart began.

  They made roofs of their shields and huddled beneath them. They clawed at rocks with their bare hands, hacking at oak beams with their blades. Many died but as many replaced them; in Scapula’s army, one man was another, each of equal worth and weight. With apparent reluctance, the defenders drew back as the sea of infantry began to spill into their valley, first a trickle, then a flood as the dam cracked and opened. The trap was sprung. All it needed now was a hammer to close it. On the far mountainside, a rider mounted, checked the air for the sounds of dying and set off at a canter down the track.

  Boulders were tilted from their seats into the thickest knots of the enemy. Warriors hurled rocks and spears from the heights, then scrambled down to fight. The legions surged into the valley and made it their own. Their back remained exposed and unchallenged but no hammer came. No three thousand spears of the Brigantes and the Selgovae. Venutios did not close the back door to the salmon-trap. Even the scout was lost beyond a mountain’s ridge.

  If Venutios fails, we will kill as many as we may and then leave them.

  Caradoc had said it privately to Breaca and again, frequently, to those who led each of the sections of his force. Every fighting man and woman knew the threefold blast that signalled true retreat, quite different from the wailing horns of the false withdrawals. Dubornos heard it and cursed, his words flapping out over the clashing weapons and the lazy downward spiral of the ravens.

  Cunomar said, “They mustn’t stop now! The messenger is still coming. I can see the horse. It might not be too late.”

  “No. A single rider is not a war host and it’s already too late. Look, the legions are all within the valley. They hold the flat ground and their engineers are already dismantling the rampart, giving them a clear retreat. They are at their strongest when they hold solid ranks as they do here. We can kill them in handfuls, but we are not enough to overwhelm them. Your father is right. It is time for those who remain to retreat. The forests are safe. Better a thousand living warriors to fight another day than so many dead heroes.”

  The singer pushed himself to his feet. Despair weighted his chest, adding to old grief. For the first time in three decades’ living, he felt stiffness in his shoulders and knees. He clicked his fingers for Hail and felt a damp nose touch his wrist.

  “We should leave,” he said. “It’s not beyond Scapula to try to claim the heights, or one of his officers. We should meet your father where we agreed in the woods at the river’s head.”

  Ancient heather knotted the track, slowing their passing. Blueberries stained the ground underfoot, marking the trail of two horses and a hound. Dubornos rode ahead with Cunomar a step or two behind. Hail wove between, as quick on three legs as four. Descending from the dreamers’ outcrop, they met a line of dense, hock-deep bracken and turned across it rather than wade through. Shortly after, they met Cygfa and her mother Cwmfen, riding up at an angle from the valley. The girl was stained and filthy, blood oozing from a shallow spear cut on one thigh. Her own spear and shield were gone, and she bore instead a wide, heavy man’s shield made of bull’s hide stretched tight and stained black; a grey falcon took wing on the boss and again on the leather. If she was in pain, or exhausted, neither showed. Life glowed from her as it did from her father in the moments after battle. A crow’s feather fluttered in her hair, braided in haste and not meant to last but a statement in itself.

  Dubornos felt Cunomar stiffen and chose to ignore it. Like first love, the first battle comes only once and should be savoured at its freshest. He gave the salute of one warrior to another and saw it returned, joyfully.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “Eight,” said her mother. In her eyes, pride outshone concern for the day and the lack of Venutios. “Eight clean kills that I saw and as many wounded. Beyond doubt she is a warrior. She has outmatched her father. He killed only three in his first battle and that was considered many.”

  Cunomar’s pony jerked its head against a jabbed mouth. Hail whined, a high, keening note, out of kilter with the day. Dubornos felt surprised delight and let it show. “She has outmatched all of us,” he said, “And all of the champions, going back to Cassivellaunos who defeated Caesar. If you tell me how it was, I’ll make a song of it for the winter fires.”

  “Later.” Cygfa’s mother had an eye for Cunomar, who had seen his chance for fame dismantled. Only in a tight space like the valley, and with the legionaries holding their own lives worthless, could kills in such numbers be assured. Such an opportunity came but once in each generation and he had missed it. Hail keened for him still, giving voice to his pain.

  Cwmfen said, “We must find Caradoc first. If we’re going to meet him at the head of the river, we should go faster.”

  Her horse was tired and nodding lame on a foreleg. She pushed it on towards a small rocky crag that bulged out into the path. Her attention was all on her daughter, on the recent past and the future, too little of it on the present, where a leather thong the thickness of a man’s thumb lay snake-like across the path and was lifted, expertly, to trip her horse. She did not fall, but the peck and stumble threw her off balance and caused a small flurry of confusion in the horses behind.

  Unlike the women, Dubornos was not fatigued from battle. A lifetime’s training in combat and the inner prescience of a singer made him throw his horse sideways even as he drew his sword. The movement saved his life and the club that had aimed for his head struck his left shoulder, numbing his arm. His horse was battle-trained. It completed the full turn to face the danger at his back. An auxiliary stood astride the path, club raised for another strike. Behind him stood a tall, slender man, muddy and blood-streaked from battle but lacking device or helmet plumes that might give ready identification. He wore Roman mail but that meant nothing; half the tribes wore stolen cavalry armour into battle. In the first moment, seeing only the lean outline of the face and the straight, blue-black hair, Dubornos thought it was Luain mac Calma with his hair unbound, unaccountably stripped of his drea
mer’s brow-thong, and raised his hand in greeting. Then, in a gesture the singer had seen three times before, that he had spent half a sweating, weeping day bringing to the forefront of his mind so that his fellow dreamers might know it as intimately, the man he loathed most in the world pursed his lips and touched his thumb to the centre of his chest and, nodding a little, as if to an inner voice, said, simply, “Now.”

  Recognition exploded into action. Dubornos hurled his horse at the club-man, intent on murder. He reined back only as a dozen armed Thracian auxiliaries rose out of the heather before him.

  “Take them,” said the decurion. “The governor wants them all alive.”

  They fought; it was what they lived for. Cunomar was the most vulnerable and all three warriors knew it. They tried to make a circle holding him at the centre but were too few to achieve it and the boy did nothing to help. From the first, he had counted twenty auxiliaries and seen his chance to win honour greater than his sister’s. More than that, he had within his reach the man whom half a battlefield of proven warriors had tried to kill without success. He flung himself at the hated decurion and the combat, such as it was, lasted exactly as long as it took for a boy on a pony to reach an unmounted man, to be unhorsed with expert precision and held fast with a blade tight at his throat. Cunomar struggled and bit and the man laughed, and then didn’t.

  “Stop!”

  The command came in Latin, from an officer whose word was law and temper short. The man opposite Dubornos hesitated and died for it, his head split from temple to nose. The impact shuddered along the singer’s arm even as he dragged the blade free and turned on the man’s companion.

  “No.” The decurion’s knife flashed. Cunomar screamed aloud. Blood welled from his ear where the lower half of the lobe was suddenly slit. Shouting to be heard, the officer said again, “Stop. Lay down your weapons. The child will die if you don’t.” He said it twice, the second time in passable Ordovician.

  Dubornos raised his blade and turned in to the enemy. Cwmfen spun her horse broadside in front of him, blocking his attack. “Dubornos! Do as he says. He’ll kill Cunomar else.”

  “He’ll kill him anyway. He’ll kill all of us.” The enemy moved around them. Ducking sideways, Dubornos smashed his shield into a man’s face and swung his blade for the retreating head. “You know who this is. Better to die here in battle than hanged at the fort and fed to their hounds.”

  “No!” The decurion’s voice cut through the clash of iron as Dubornos’ blade was turned. “No. I know he is Caradoc’s son. No harm will come to him here by our hand if you give up your weapons. I swear it.”

  For that voice alone, one could kill; for the taunting arrogance of an officer, of victor to vanquished, he should have died a thousand deaths. Cygfa was nearest to him. The battle-rage lived within her and she could have killed him in a stroke. Her sword arm was still, held rigidly so by her mother.

  Cwmfen flung her shield in Dubornos’ face. Anger ran through her as clearly as it did her daughter, but tempered by reason and a vast, unassailable pride. Here, now, one could so easily see why Caradoc had once loved her.

  “You will stop,” she said. “Your oath holds you. If you die, Cunomar dies also. Therefore you are oath-bound to live.”

  It may have been true. All the dreamers of Mona could have taken a month of nights to argue the point in law and constitution. In the moments of decision, it was Cwmfen’s unbending will that swayed him. Hating himself, Dubornos reversed his blade and sheathed it. The decurion spoke once in Latin. Around him, men lowered their weapons. The chaos of combat resolved. Out of murder grew calm, but for the place just beyond the rock where Hail, who spoke no Latin and had no concept of surrender, hurled himself in tooth-bared silence at the nearest auxiliary.

  “Longinus, no!”

  It was the decurion who shouted. He spoiled the attention of both hound and man, but not enough. A blade flashed, once. Impossibly, the old hound who had come unscathed through more battles than most living warriors was caught by the full length of its edge. Iron smashed through living flesh. A dozen ribs disintegrated and the lungs beneath them hissed empty of air. Blood rose like a fountain and rained down, patterning the heather. White-faced, the auxiliary said, “Julius, I’m sorry—” and his words were lost in the noise.

  The scream of a dying beast is no different from that of a warrior. It shattered the day, falling to a rasping moan as the great hound collapsed onto the path and lay writhing on his wounded side, fighting to draw air and live. A dozen men, two women and a boy who had heard the same sound from countless throats throughout the morning heard it now in silence and with appalled regret. The reputation of the Boudica’s war hound had spread among the legions no less widely than the name of the woman at whose side he fought, and the men of Rome were not without honour or respect for a valiant enemy.

  Dubornos slid from his horse and no effort was made to stop him. He had lost his own dagger, thrown in the first moments of fighting and lodged still in the chest of an elderly auxiliary. Kneeling, he reached instead for his blade. A hand on his arm stopped him. He looked up, cursing. Protest dried in his throat.

  The world inverted. Kneeling opposite him was the decurion of the Thracian cavalry, rider of the pied horse, his face the ugly yellowed white of a man in death-shock. Cunomar, sobbing, had been passed to the auxiliary who had killed Hail. The man looked as if his life had ended. The decurion himself knelt opposite Dubornos without ceremony or protection. On his open hand, reversed to present the hilt, lay his dagger. An arm’s length away, beneath smooth brown skin, the beat of his heart pulsed, too fast, through the great vessels of his neck.

  In his mind, in the forefront of his being, so that only his will held it other, Dubornos lifted the blade and rammed it home, burying the shining sharpness in flesh and blood and spinal bone, snuffing out for ever the life of an enemy whose mere presence was an insult to the gods and to the memories of those he had killed. His oath stopped him, and the low, grief-heavy voice of the other man, speaking Eceni in a way the singer had not heard since childhood, untarnished by the southern and western dialects of the war. Even Breaca no longer spoke so.

  “You’ll have to do it. I can’t remember the words of the invocation.”

  It is not given a singer to read the soul in the way of a dreamer. Even if it were, a full life’s history cannot be seen in a single meeting of eyes, but enough can pass to know and be known, for the moment of recognition, of appalling, blinding horror, for immutable loathing to garner also pity and a measure of terrible understanding.

  Numbly, Dubornos reached for the dagger. The blade was still sticky with Cunomar’s blood. The hilt was of bronze, fashioned in the shape of a falcon, with jet beads for the eyes. One had been lost and reset imperfectly. The singer noticed it with the dreamlike clarity with which everything came to him in that moment. Testing the blade, he found it as keen as the flaying blades of the dreamers, which are daily honed sharp enough to shave with.

  Hail lay stretched on the heather between them, not screaming now, but whimpering his pain. The decurion passed a hand over the old hound’s head, speaking words in a language older than Latin, older than the Eceni tongue of his boyhood. The hound whined as he had on the path, recognizing a scent long missed and not understanding its source. He thrust his muzzle into a known and long-sought palm and was held with care. Dubornos found himself weeping and chose not to stem the tears. Through a throat too tight for steady words, he said, “We need to turn his head to the west.”

  “Help me, then.”

  They turned him together, taking care for his pain, and the hound sighed at the end. Dubornos found his voice again, and his training of decades. The invocation to Briga may be spoken by any, but sung only by those trained on Mona. With his whole being, he sang it, lifting the words high over the mountains so that all those left alive after the battle might hear and know that a great soul passed from this world to the other in the company of the god to whom his life had bee
n given. At the peak, when the song was greatest, Dubornos slid the falcon blade carefully along the great hound’s throat, letting the last bright splash of life-blood spill to the heather. His eyes were on the decurion, who did not see him.

  “You are Caradoc’s brother.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “I am telling you what I will put in the written reports for the governor, that you are brother to the rebel and that this is his wife and both of his children. It is known he has two.”

  “No. Cwmfen is no-one’s wife. Even Scapula must know by now that such a state does not exist. Our women live as they will and love whom they choose. They are not owned by men, nor we by them.”

  They were speaking Latin, which made it easier to forget what had just passed between them, and they were standing apart, which made it less of a farce than it might have been. The majority of the auxiliaries had been assigned the collecting of rocks, to make a burial cairn for the hound. Cwmfen and Cygfa had been disarmed.

  Dubornos had given his weapon personally to the decurion, who had admired the hilt. The officer had recovered his composure. In a knowing parody of the formal introductions of the dreamers, he had said, “I am Julius Valerius Corvus, acting commander of the Ala Prima Thracum. Longinus Sdapeze, duplicarius of the first troop, is the officer who holds the boy. You should be wary of him. His horse was killed beneath him today and he loved it as a brother. We will introduce the others to you later.” And then he had made his statement, which was nonsense.

  The moment of shared understanding, of meeting and possible compassion, had passed. Valerius was the officer again. For the purposes of ambush, he had dispensed with his decurion’s cloak but the glamour of leadership shone from him, as it did from Breaca before battle; the certainty of victory that could slide into arrogance were it not tempered in her so clearly by love. In the man who called himself Julius Valerius, there was no love. Dubornos despised him for it.