by Manda Scott
When mac Calma had returned sight of a kind, Bellos’ one fear was that he might lose the want of Thorn. In the event, his need had been no less and his joy greater. He could envisage no greater gift than the greeting she gave when he returned, cold and worn, from the great-house and she was waiting for him with a fire lit and her hands chafing his to warm them and the smell of stewed hare in the pot and her voice weaving a magic that brought him back to this world, where he might be blind, but he could reach for her and hold her close and explore the contours of her being with the same wonder as the first day and each day since.
He put the bowls aside, carefully, not to spill what might be left. Thorn came to him, teasingly delicate. She smelled of the sea and of wood gathered from a forest floor and of the pepper-musk that flavoured every part of her. Her skin was smooth as polished stone and her hair spun wool under his fingers. He had no idea what colour it was.
He let her draw him to the pile of horse hides that was their bed and cradle him in her arms as if he were a child. Her breasts and her sex pressed on his back and the feel of both brought him back so that he understood how far into the other-worlds he had gone. He might have been afraid of that, but the urgency of his own need pushed the thought away so that he rolled over and took her face in his hands and kissed it, and waited until her breathing told him that her need was as great as his before he entered her.
Later, as her hound warmed his back and she warmed all that was still warm in him, he said, “I thought you had gone to Hibernia with the rest of the dreamers?”
“I had.” Thorn smiled into the crook of his neck. “I came back. Mac Calma’s dreams showed me here when the legions come.”
Bellos felt the cold in his chest for the third time that night. His fingers halted their combing of her hair. “Do his dreams show you still living when they leave?” he asked.
She bit the edge of his collar bone, reproving. “The dreams don’t yet show anything after the first battle. We have to make the future happen as we want it. That’s why I’m here.”
CHAPTER 10
CYGFA, ELDER DAUGHTER OF THE BOUDICA, MADE THE threefold call of the owl at Valerius’ signal. A relay of hidden warriors passed it on down through the mist and the fringes of the forest to the place at the farthest end of their line where her brother, Cunomar, lay on his belly under the winter-flayed roots of a fallen oak.
Cunomar lay on ground that juddered to the stamp of marching feet. The legionaries of the third cohort of the IXth legion who marched a spear’s length from his face continued to sing the fifteenth stanza of the marching song they had begun when the first ranks passed him by. They did not hear the owl, and if they had, they would not have known what it meant. Cunomar heard it and knew exactly what it meant, and did nothing.
No part of him looked human, nor did he feel it. He was naked but for his knife belt and the king-band on his arm which had been his mother’s last gift to him, in the winter before the procurator’s destruction of their steading. Bear’s grease coated him from the soles of his feet to the line of his brow, tinted with woad to render it densely grey. Bands of white lime ringed his eyes and made skull marks on his cheeks. His hair was stiffened with pig’s fat and white lime, making a pale grey scythe that stood up from his scalp.
In the past day, since the burning of the watchtower, he had discarded even the feathers that marked the kills of his past. That act alone severed him from all that had gone before, setting him apart from his peers more than his bloodline or his missing ear could ever have done. Mist-given and woad-held, he was a warrior without any ties to the living, with nothing to fight for but the battle itself, nothing to sway him but the breath of the gods, nothing to care about but the next breath and the next and the next…
The elders of the Caledonii had taught him the ways of discipline that allowed him to hold his mind still and empty, that he might become a part of the earth. Since dawn, he had held to it, with only the occasional lapse, but the owl’s cry brought with it a memory of the night’s dreaming that would not be shaken off.
Even as he strove for emptiness, Cunomar smelled again the fetid breath of the bear and was back in the nightmare that had woken him the past three nights; this was not a dream of the she-bear, beast of all mystery and glory to whom he had given his soul, but a rank, injured male, which had been hunted into a blind-ended cave and had turned at bay in all its pain and fury, raking out with claws that stretched and stretched and reached past the warrior who came to kill it to the injured child, his sister, who had been sent to the cave for safety and was only now waking and standing, and reaching for her brother, not understanding the danger. In the dream, the bear turned, and rose on its hind legs and smashed a single long-clawed fist down and down and—
Graine! No! Cunomar did not speak the words aloud; his discipline held so much.
Doggedly, he set about controlling his breathing. Sweat rolled greasily from his armpits and buttocks. Presently, he was able to hear again the iron clash of the marching legionaries and the newest stanza of their song.
He worked as he had been taught to clear his mind and would not linger on the memory of Graine’s face as the bear fist smashed down to break her, or on his own failure to save her. It was not the first time the dream had come and he did not believe it would be the last; he knew only that he would give his life to protect his sister, and that no bear, in the dream or out of it, would reach her while he lived.
He could not find the silence again, and stopped trying. Freed, his thoughts fell first on Ardacos, the mentor who had shown him what it was to be a ghost-warrior, giving him a mark to aim for that had seemed beyond all possibility to the child he had been.
Ardacos had long since discarded his own kill-feathers. The small Caledonian warrior marked only those kills where the combat had been single-handed against a worthy opponent; for those he bore a band of red ochre round his upper arm. There were three, and he could name all three warriors and the means of their dying, with each act of their life, as if they were heroes. Not one of them had been Roman, although he had slain as many legionaries as any other living warrior.
Cunomar was not certain whom he considered a worthy opponent now that the world had changed. Through all of his youth, he had dreamed of killing a certain decurion of the Thracian cavalry who rode a pied horse and was known as the scourge of the tribes from east coast to west.
For so many reasons, that man’s death would have been worth an ochre stripe. Then Valerius had ridden his pied horse into the steading and crushed the life from the Roman procurator in an act of blinding savagery that had sealed his return to the Eceni. Only afterwards had he declared himself the Boudica’s brother and by then it was already too late to kill him.
Thus, unwilling, Cunomar had set aside ten years of yearning, or at least had left it in abeyance. He had not yet said so aloud in the council circle, but it seemed to him obvious that a man who had changed sides twice in his life might easily choose to do so again. For that, if for no other reason, Valerius was not fit to lead the war host if the Boudica should not prove able. Cygfa, clearly, thought otherwise and she was not alone.
Few had spoken of it openly, but it was there to be read in their eyes: the fear that the Boudica had lost the wildfire and must soon be replaced. Many simply refused to believe it could happen, but, like Cygfa, Cunomar had seen his father broken by Rome and knew the signs.
He had no idea how long it would be before the rest came to see as he saw. He only knew that it was not enough to be the Boudica’s only son; he had to prove to himself, to his sister, to those others who might doubt him, above all to the she-bear and the watching gods, that he was the obvious one — the only one — to whom they could turn in adversity. Then, when Valerius stood against him, he could fight, and he could kill, and the world would come to hear what kind of warrior was the Boudica’s son.
It took a deal of self-control not to move at that thought. Cunomar held himself motionless and was rewarded for it. Ah
ead and a little to his right, in the damp mulch of the forest’s floor where small things crept and a single leaf was large as a round-house, a shrew stalked a thready earthworm. Cunomar breathed out a long, controlled exhalation and the shrew did not stop. Since dawn it had skirted him, wary of the stench and the unexpected warmth of his body. Then the worm had surfaced, and was too good to ignore.
The elders of the Caledonii gave their approval sparingly, but they would have given it now. The ultimate test of their teachings was that the small things — or large — of the forest or heath would come close without fear.
Cunomar breathed more quietly still. His skin itched beneath the layers of grease. A ring of white lime round each eye had dried, pulling the skin into a frown. Small twigs dug into the flesh at his ankles, his hips, his ribs, his chin, all the places where his frame pressed hardest onto the forest floor. Perversely, his throat was dry and craved water at the same time as his bladder began to nag with the need to empty. The flesh of his back ached where the wounds of the flogging had not yet healed. His missing ear burned.
Ahead, the shrew finished its feed. Round-bellied and wet about the muzzle and breast with the life of the worm, it prodded its way under the leaves and curled to sleep. Cunomar catalogued in turn each of the demands of his body and then, setting them aside, gave a good part of his attention to the pattering heartbeat and small, vicious mouth of the shrew and strove to banish all thoughts of Valerius and everything he represented.
A change in the pounding rhythm of the earth drew his gaze back to the ancestors’ trackway. His eyes were level with the highest point of the road, on the apex of the curve that tipped down at either side to marsh and forest. Close enough for Cunomar to smell the sweat, the sandalled, studded feet of the last ranks of the IXth legion stamped by. Living flesh impacted resonantly on leather and armour. The lungs of a hundred men drew in the thickening fog and exhaled it, rasping. Ten thousand iron studs hammered the stone track and the sound echoed off the trees onto the marsh and was sucked to silence. Marching men became iron-clad, helmeted ghosts, passing out of the bog mist and back into it, visible only for a spear’s throw either side of where the Boudica’s son, at last, prepared himself to move.
Then they were gone; the last men of the last cohort passed by and the mist closed behind and there were no more. The silence ached more than the noise had done.
A night’s waiting, and half of a morning, bore the fruit they had promised. Cunomar moved his hand a hair’s breadth to the left. Leaves shivered where the shrew slept, and were still. Kneeling in the loam, with the night’s dream banished, with his pulse clear and light in his head, and the breath of the she-bear warming his heart, Cunomar put his two thumbs to his lips and made the sound of a bittern, booming.
Ulla joined him, and Scerros, and his girl-cousin of the northern Eceni whose name Cunomar had never learned. They were barely recognizable, hidden behind the skull patterns of white lime on grey woad. Each smiled, a flash of white teeth that proved them not yet ghosts. Full of the she-bear, fired in breath and heartbeat, filled with the promise of honour and the need for vengeance, they stepped into the fog that shrouded the trackway, and were invisible.
After half a morning of lying still, to move at all was an act of will. To run silently across the last spear’s length of forest, onto the trackway and up behind the last four marching legionaries was worthy of a winter’s tale in its own right.
The stench of bear and pig grease warned the rear guard of the IXth that they were under attack, but not soon enough. Four hands caught four helmeted heads and drew them back; four blades cut through fog and skin and cartilage. Four men screamed pain and warnings and death through severed windpipes that transmitted no sound. Like culled cattle, they bellowed soundlessly, and died as fast. Their eyes rolled up in their heads to show the whites beneath and their limbs fell limp.
Blood flowed in blackening cataracts on the grey, cold pavings of the ancestors’ Stone Way. Four ghosts stepped free and were guided fast away by Airmid and Gunovar and Lanis, who joined together to see that the dead of both sides were not left to wander lost in the cold mist; Valerius had asked for that and no-one had spoken against him.
Other warriors came forward from the trees and helped support the bodies and catch the dead men’s shields and their packs so that nothing might clatter onto the stones and alert the legionaries marching ahead to the slaughter behind. With care, the dead were carried aside and propped by the trees and left to be stripped of their weapons by the children and grandmothers later, when it was safe.
Already the cycle had begun again. Four more ghosted warriors had stepped out from their places in the trees and, as greyly, as silently, caught the helmeted heads of the last four men and cut the breath from their throats before they knew they were dying.
The remaining men of the IXth marched on, caught in their own rhythms of flesh on leather and iron on stone. Far to the front, the horns of the first cohort beckoned, promising with each new refrain tents already pitched and cooking fires lit and wineskins broached; the reward offered to those who marched in the rearguard of any column was to arrive in the evening to a camp already built.
Thus enticed, the men of the third cohort marched into a mist that opened three rows in front and closed behind. The forest to their right was as quiet as it had been since they started, and the bog to their left as improbably innocent, and neither was enough to make them break step and look behind.
The third row died, and the fourth. The warriors who had carried away the bodies of the first legionaries sped forward to make kills of their own, running barefooted on the paving slabs, slick with bear grease, protected from the curses of ghosts and the iron cuts of living men by woad and the power of the she-bear.
Twenty marching rows were taken in silence. Eighty men died, and there were still thousands marching. The entirety of the she-bear, all forty-seven warriors, were up and running on the road, pushing their luck with each footfall, taking greater risks with each cut of the knife.
Bloodily wet in his coating of woad grease Cunomar propped a body against a tree and ran forward between two dying men. Ulla was on his left, the girl-cousin on his right. Scerros, a little late lowering his man to the earth, caught up as they reached the next row of marching legionaries.
Breathless, a little flustered, not quite riding the power of the bear, Scerros fumbled his hold. His knife scored flesh and the edge of one pumping vessel, but not the ridged pipe of the trachea. The legionary screeched like a throttled hen and his death was neither neat nor fast.
The three men of his row were too late to profit from the warning, but the ones in front had time to call out an alarm and draw their short stabbing swords and shoulder their shields and turn at least halfway to face the mob of grey-slaked phantoms who came howling at them from the mist, all pretence at secrecy abandoned.
The rearmost four men died messily, inflicting wounds before they did so. The next four achieved a kill, cutting the number of the she-bear to forty-six. In the time between, Cunomar put his bloodied fingers to his lips, filled his lungs with bog air and let out a single, mind-numbing whistle that reached at least to the head of the cohort. Lest it be misconstrued, or unheard, he took from his belt a cow’s horn lipped in copper, and brayed a note, harsh as a legionary mule, that rocked the mere and silenced the crows gathering on the margins of the forest. That done, he paused to wipe his knife blade free of the gobbets of flesh that had clung to it, and, howling the name of the newly dead she-bear as a fresh battle cry, hurled himself joyfully into battle.
The Boudica, and those waiting for her, heard a whistle and then an ox-horn pierce the fog. At that signal, four axes finished what they had begun before the legion’s march. The oak that fell across the trackway as the last note sounded was broad as a man is long and thickly branched. It killed three of the four men passing under it and crushed the legs of the fourth, so that he was an easy target for a slingstone.
Breaca sent the sto
ne, aiming for the soft part of his skull where the bones met above the ear. There had been a time when she could split a held hair at fifty paces. That time was not now, but half a morning’s practice had restored enough of the old skill to hit a trapped man less than a spear’s length away. Among a clatter of thrown spears and slung stones, hers hit close enough to where it was sent and she made her second kill in two days and heard it cheered by the youths around her as if it were a victory in itself.
Dubornos was at her side. He, too, had once been whole, until the ravages of Rome had reduced him to the sling and the knife.
She felt his hand on her shoulder. “It’ll come with time,” he said, quietly. “For now, what we do doesn’t have to be glorious or honourable, only enough to teach warriors who have held their first blade for less than a month how to fight.”
Valerius had said exactly that in the council meetings of the night and Breaca had repeated it to the war host: this battle is a training ground; don’t expect heroism, only do your best to survive.
It was Longinus who had said: “Even if you cut off the rear part of the legion, it won’t be easy. The centurions of the Ninth have all seen action in the Germanies; they know how to fight. As soon as they realize they’re on their own, they’ll take command and try to hold order until help arrives. Don’t expect them to give their lives away.”
Longinus had impressed Breaca more each time she met him. Her brother’s soul-friend was quiet and thoughtful and when he spoke, which was rarely, it was to good effect.
With his warning in her ears, she had watched the glitter of mounted officers riding at the head of the column, and marked the harder, more knowing faces of the centurions as they passed. These were the men who had recognized the possibility of ambush long before it came, and might have seen the part-cut trees swaying at intervals along the margins of the trackway ready to fall with two more blows of the axe.