Dreaming the Serpent-Spear

by Manda Scott

  Valerius had plainly not intended insult and made up for it later by acknowledging his position as a sworn Lion of Mithras. He had found himself therefore the highest-ranking initiate of the bull-slayer in the IXth legion, the centurion who had been Father having been swept to the god in an epidemic of pneumonia at midwinter, and had spent the time between the second and fourth watches, two hours either side of midnight, conducting an initiation in the cellar-shrine beneath the quartermaster’s stores.

  Longinus, who preferred the moon-gods of Thrace over the Persian incomer, had not been privy to the underground rites, only seen the new peace in Valerius’ eyes as he had emerged, so that it seemed as if a night of lost sleep might not have been a disaster.

  Later, in the grey light before dawn, with the first dew beading the grass and cockerels calling, the pair had walked up into the horse paddocks to another shrine that Civilis told them of, where the sign of a running mare had been chiselled onto a rock above a spring. Above was a far older mark of a moon, and a hare, and the two men had poured water in libation for their respective gods, and for each other.

  They had each poured, too, for Civilis, without either of them being clear what it meant. Thinking of that now, Longinus said, in Thracian, “Your once-brother is old. This is his chance to seal his name in history. You have no need to feel responsible for it if he chooses an honourable death in battle.”

  The track passed a small mere. A trio of ducks took flight in a clatter of wings and aggrieved honks. The white-legged colt spun on its hocks, wild-eyed and snorting. Valerius swore in Thracian, Batavian, Gaulish and Latin and fought it back into line. Breathlessly, he said, “I am not responsible for any man’s actions. Civilis’ life is his own to treat as he will. If he endangers what we plan, I will kill him myself, I swear it.”

  “I know. I’ve seen the extent of what you will do for the Eceni.” Longinus pushed his horse sideways to avoid a pothole that stretched half the width of the track, cursing idle Roman engineers and the ravages of winter. “What are we going to do if his Batavians don’t follow him as he has said?”

  “Fight them, as we thought we must to begin with. If we get that far, which we may not. If you look up ahead, you’ll see the legate has noticed the place ahead where the forest kisses the marsh and the track squeezes through between. I think perhaps he has just remembered the stories he was told as a young tribune of how Arminius slaughtered three legions on the Rhine.”

  Petillius Cerialis rode a blue-eyed white gelding with a splash of chestnut on one ear. It stepped high-legged at the front, and did not look as if it could sustain a man long in battle. Bending, he spoke at some length to the youthful messenger riding at his side, who turned out of line and dropped back to Civilis’ side.

  “His excellency wishes to point out to you the potential for ambush ahead where the track is constrained between the forest and the marsh. He requests that you call to your side the most courageous of your Batavian warriors and, taking with you the messenger of Mithras who has the skills of an enginee—” he favoured Valerius with a white-eyed glance—“that you ride ahead to the site of the overnight camp, there to hold it secure against possible attack until the advance cohorts of the legion may join you. He further orders that if you are attacked, you are not to await commands but are to act on your own sense of battle, nurtured since the time of the invasion, to repel the enemy. I am to come with you, to learn the tactics of warfare.”

  It was a long message, relayed in a voice that cracked near the end with the pressure of responsibility. The youth was high-born Roman, third son of a magistrate, and fired with the service of his emperor. He had been one of those branded with the raven of Mithras in the cellar at midnight and was white still, with smoke-reddened eyes and the simmering fervour of one who has seen the face of his god and may not speak of it except in the clamour of his own heart.

  Civilis smiled for him with something of the soft indulgence he had reserved for the horse boy, Arminius, his great-grandson, named for the man who had destroyed three legions of Rome. He said, “Thank you. My men are already chosen. They will do now as the legate orders. May he have long life and the close company of his gods.”

  The old man raised a hand. If his salutation was ambiguous, neither the youth nor the legate commented on it. A Batavian in the line behind bore on his spear’s neck a scarlet pennant marked with an oak tree in black. At Civilis’ signal, he lifted it high with one hand and with the other raised a silver-tipped cow’s horn to his lips.

  The noise when he blew was not unlike that made by the ducks which had risen from the mere, but longer and louder. Valerius sat very still, waiting for the white-legged colt to explode beneath him, and was pleasantly surprised to feel it prick its ears and settle instead. Immediately behind, two hundred and fifty horsemen, that half of the wing Civilis trusted most highly, peeled away from either side of the column and rode forward, leaving the infantry behind. Moving at a trot, and, soon, at a canter, they steered their horses to the narrow strips of unpaved ground on either side of the trackway, where the turf was springy beneath the feet.

  Valerius gave his colt its head and let it take the front, lengthening away from the rest. Longinus caught up with him, laughing. In Thracian, he said, “The Roman message-boy loves you. Am I supplanted?”

  At speed, the white-legged colt was being unexpectedly steady. Valerius sat lightly, waiting for that to end. He said, “Only if you want to be, and not by him. I branded him last night in the presence of the god and he thinks that in doing so I called the god to speak to him. He has forgotten that the gods choose freely to whom they will appear and speak, and are not called by those of us who follow them, however carefully we learn the words of the rites.”

  Longinus whistled. “Was it wise to be filling the legions with pious fervour, when we may be fighting against them by the end of the day?”

  “It was what the god required of me. I didn’t take the time to ask if it was wise.”

  Valerius clicked his tongue and urged his mount to a little more speed and the two gift-horses, both trained by Civilis, responded to the command, stretching out their necks and backs, and the pound of their hooves rolled lightly across the turf, as if on midsummer paddocks.

  In the middle of the afternoon, two hundred and fifty Batavian cavalrymen rode at a gallop into the only defensible site suitable for a night camp in the forested part of the ancestors’ Stone Way.

  It lay in a natural dell, a broad, shallow scoop where the trackway dipped down to follow the lie of the land and veered at the same time inward, away from the marsh. The forest had been cut back on all sides by the men of the IXth at the time they had used it as an encampment on their first march north. Since then, passing legionaries had kept the area around the camp’s margins clear, leaving chopped wood in piles for fires and for staves, but the ditches and latrines had long since been filled in, and the grass and moss allowed to grow over. The emperor’s peace must be seen to reign in the east, and the presence of an active marching camp on the biggest arterial trade route running north from the capital city of Camulodunum did not sit well with that.

  The dell smothered the noise of the horses so that they entered into peace. Nearby, water trickled musically within the shelter of the nearer trees. Sometime in the past two decades, an engineer with spare time and initiative had dug a ditch into the marsh and run a series of fire-baked clay pipes under the trackway so that they emptied into glazed troughs of differing sizes set to one side of the dell. Bog water trickled in at a steady rate, and out again from corner lips to drain into wide pebbled soak-aways below, so that horses could drink and men could bathe, albeit coldly, and the ground beneath would not be churned to quagmire by the second morning.

  A legionary of rather less imagination than the engineer had carved crude stick images of either horse or man into the side of each trough, lest those who followed be confused by which vessels were for watering the horses and which for bathing.

  The Batav
ians dismounted at the gallop and led their steaming beasts to drink. Valerius, arriving later and more slowly, got down and walked his horse in hand around the margins of the encampment.

  The marsh fog was less here, as if it clung to the forest, or was held within the margins of the trees by an outside force. In the dell, a blizzard of snowdrops hung greenly white along the risen edges of the infill where the encircling trenches had once been. Layers of leaf litter drifted against the ridges, and a part-circle of mushrooms rotted near the centre, broken by the greying skeleton of a hind. Her rear hind leg was missing, and her jaw fractured raggedly with claw marks along its length, to show where a bear had struck it.

  Longinus kicked at the broken edge of the mandible. “The she-bears will be happy with that.”

  Valerius said, “The she-bears left it there. Look at the inner edge of the mandible, it has Cunomar’s mark of the bear paw on it. The rites of the bear will weaken the legionaries, or so they believe.” He drove a short iron stave into the ground. “Stand here and tell me if I step off the line.”

  For ten years, they had done this together: marked out the outer walls of a marching camp. Valerius paced backwards, unwinding a thread of oiled wool from the marker stave. Longinus shut one eye and watched. “You need to go half a pace left,” he said and then, a little later, “Left again. It’s that bloody mad horse, it doesn’t ride straight. You’re leaning right.”

  They paced and marked. Near the end, Civilis came to watch. Valerius said, “Have your men start digging. Standard camp, standard size, standard drill. I’ll mark out the tent lines.”

  Half a wing of Batavians, cursing amiably, fetched mattocks and shovels from their saddle baggage. Working in pairs, they began to break open the green earth. They were big men, used to war, and still the first of each pair took care to lift the turf with its mesh of snowdrops and set it to one side, to be replaced with equal care in the morning when the camp was taken down.

  Elsewhere, grass and moss were turned over as sods to mark the trench lines. Spade load after spade load of friable, much-shovelled soil became, quite soon, ramps within the trenchwork. Following Valerius’ direction, smaller trenches, little less than divots in the turf, were dug within the camp lines to show the incoming legionaries where to place their eight-man tents and the larger, more stately pavilions of their officers. Long before they had finished, the sound of marching rolled to them up the trackway and the gold and scarlet of the standards breasted the mist.

  The officers were already dismounting. Behind them, the first four men of the infantry reached the dell and halted. The Batavians howled insults, cavalry greeting the infantry as they had always done, for being late to camp or battle. Grinning, the infantry hornsman in the front rank lifted his corniculus and blew. The sound brayed down the marching column and was repeated back and farther back and on down the line to the last century of the last cohort, where tired men heard it and knew that rest lay safely ahead.

  Valerius, who in his guise as engineer had begun the hardest part of the camp-making and thus saved them many hours’ work, raised his skinning knife in salute and hailed the incomers derisively in Latin, Batavian, Thracian, and one of the native dialects, entirely foreign to the men of the IXth legion. They cheered and answered in kind, with friendly obscenities.

  From the forest close by, almost lost beneath the sound of marching, and of halting, and of men thrusting their heads into clay-piped water, a lone owl called thrice in daylight.

  CHAPTER 9

  Bellos the Blind kept watch against the legions of Rome from the side of an unlit fire pit in the newly deserted great-house on Mona.

  Cold kept him awake and his mind sharp when the too-familiar smells of hearth and peat and thatch and the jostling afterthoughts of the departed warriors and dreamers might have lulled him to inattention. So many men and women had lived in the great-house and the settlement around it, so many children had been born, so many of the old and the not-old had died where Bellos now sat. Each had carved something on the roof beams and each had left behind the imprint of thoughts and memories. They were not bad thoughts, nor ugly memories, but they made it harder to focus his attention.

  He had trained three full years for this; it was not impossible, only hard. Sightless, he stared at where the fire had once been and stretched his mind past the boundaries of the settlement to the shores of the gods’ island and then out across the treacherous water of the straits towards the mainland and the wall of iron and sweat and pained horses and bored, frightened, hopeful, angry, determined men who slept in tents in the mountains of the far shore.

  Urgency gave him a confidence he had once lacked. In the early days of his blindness, three years before, Bellos had prayed to every god he knew that he might be allowed to see again. Lying or walking or, once, running high-legged to avoid another fall, under the ministrations of Luain mac Calma, Elder of all Mona, Bellos had believed that he would be healed. Mac Calma’s skills had been legendary and the blow to the head that had stolen Bellos’ sight had not been hard, barely enough to cause a headache; there had seemed little reason to fear that the light might be banished from his life for ever

  It was only later, looking back, that he could trace the moment when the taste of the infusions he had been given to drink had become less bitter and the stories mac Calma had sung over the fire had changed from tales of golden-haired Belgic youths riding to victory over their foes to ones of the blind dreamers of the ancestors who had suffered hardship for years in order to learn how to walk in the other-worlds and had thereby saved their people from destruction.

  Then, in the days of the ancestors, children of great talent had been chosen young and shown all the wonders of all the worlds and then blinded by hot irons that the sealing of sight in this, the smallest of the worlds, might open them more fully to the visions of all the others.

  Luain mac Calma, Bellos came to understand, would never deliberately blind anyone in his charge, however gifted in the dreaming, but if a youth came to him who had lost his sight by accident, and if he suspected that youth might be possessed of a talent that stretched far beyond anything yet explored, then he considered it his duty as Elder and a healer to test that youth’s limits.

  Even that much had been said slowly, by careful degrees. The turning point had come on a day in the spring, nearly a year after Bellos’ blindness had first struck. He had been sitting outside the small hut with the stream running at his feet and a fire somewhere behind when he felt the tall, lean Elder come to stand by the first stepping stone that crossed the brook. Mac Calma’s dream was the heron and it was easier to think of him as such. In the empty dark of his mind Bellos pictured the angled legs and the stabbing beak and shielded himself against its probing. The Elder turned and walked away, his feet soft on spring turf and the cast leaves of winter. From some distance back, he said, “Where am I?”

  He had asked the same thing the past three days in a row, from almost the same spot.

  “By the curve in the stream,” Bellos said, wearily, and then, because it was his task for that month to paint clear images in his mind of all the things he could not see, he filled in all that he could imagine of the stream and the canopy of oak and hazel and drooping willow with the furled spring leaves and the first hints of catkins.

  He placed the rocks of the crossing place with the moss damp and fresh and the swirling water around and a chaffinch, because it seemed right to him, and then was surprised when his mind filled in the detail of mac Calma as a man, long and lean, standing with one foot up, holding an unsheathed sword in his left hand. In his mind, the Elder tilted his head to one side and raised a brow.

  Piqued, Bellos said, “You have your right foot on the first stepping stone and you carry a blade that was not made for you.”

  “Really? Who was it made for?”

  The thread of doubt in the Elder’s voice stung Bellos to answer. “Valerius made it for the sake of the making. He had no-one in mind to wield it, but then you c
ame to his forge in Hibernia while he was hammering it with news that his sister was dead and it carries the fears and angers of that day.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I heard you tap the iron with your finger. How else?”

  “If you can tell me the means by which you can hear by the tap of a finger what the smith felt when he made a blade, I will be most interested to learn of it.”

  The voice was closer, suddenly. Something shifted in the air, a hush of a foot on stone and a hand moving away from its resting place. In the dark world of Bellos’ blindness, the heron was now, vividly, a man, so that each of the lines of the Elder’s face was clear. This close, it was hard to doubt that mac Calma had sired Valerius; there was too much that was the same in them.

  Hurt, Bellos backed away. He felt his eyes prickle and the skin of his throat flush hot. “I’m not a seer. If the future were open to me, do you think I would have taken a path that led to blindness? I can’t be what you want of me. Why can we not just let it go? Even if I were Roman, you would not torture me like this.”

  “Is it torture, Bellos, truly?” Mac Calma had followed him. Cool, calloused hands held each side of his face, turning it until the tracking tears, which he might have hidden, were exposed. “Are you in pain still?”

  Six months of silence broke apart without warning. Weeping openly, Bellos sank to sit on the stone. “Does pain have to be of the body to be real? I want to see again, to see the ocean and the trees and the great-house, even now that it’s empty and a travesty of what it once was. I want to see the sun set and the moon rise and the storm clouds cover the stars. I want to see the small things: the scratch on the side of the beaker I drink from in the morning, the wren that feeds from my hand, a leaf fall from a tree on a day without wind. I want to see a hound at a distance and know its colour, to see the look in a horse’s eye and know if Valerius trained it and, if so, whether it is safe to ride; I want to see the first look of a lamb when it stands after birthing. I feel as if someone has wrapped a bandage round my eyes as a bad joke and I want them to take it off. I want you to take it off.”