by Manda Scott
“Good.”
The governor shoved his chair back from the desk, stood, and rested his hands on the oak table. The clerk, whom Corvus despised, sat in dimness behind, poised to take note of the verdicts.
The governor lifted one of the lamps from the desk in front of him and moved it to a stand at the side, so that the shadows lengthened and the clerk became invisible. Paullinus returned to stand behind his seat and the only sound was the slip of his feet on the slimed rushes of the floor.
Rigid now under a brighter light, it came to Corvus that he did not know this man well enough; that of all the governors he had served, Suetonius Paullinus was the only one he had not taken the time or made the effort to understand.
The governor’s loves were well known: beyond the easy pleasures of the hounds and their boy, Agricola had shared his tent since they first came west. So too were his hates — disorder and inefficiency ruled their lives — and his old campaigns in the Atlas mountains, roof of all the world. The details of these things were common currency in the legions who served under him, but they did not reveal the things that had shaped his childhood and his youth, the men he had admired, those he had scorned, those who still fired his mind, whose approval meant something, whose disapproval would wound.
Too late, the lack of this knowledge became obvious, and that the sharing of it might have saved Corvus’ life. The pressure in his head became quite astonishing. He wondered if he might faint, and if it would change anything if he did.
The governor looked down at his own clasped hands. His fingers were fine as an artist’s, the nails neatly cut and very clean. It took a great deal of effort to achieve that on campaign. Alone of all the officers present, Corvus’ fingernails were similarly clean, but only because he had spent the better part of the day in the sea. It was not a useful thing to remember.
The governor said, “I have described the failure of your assault on Mona to our guest, Velocatos. He is of the opinion that you should not be alive.”
There was relief in having the waiting over. Corvus said, “You have it in your power to make that true.”
“Of course. And I may yet do so. Certainly there are those amongst your peers who would support it.” Paullinus ran his gaze along the line of heads beneath him. Clemens of the IInd coloured. The rest remained commendably silent and still. “My guest, however, would consider that rash. He believes you possessed of extraordinary courage and fortitude, and swears that you must lie under the protection of this island’s gods. The first, of course, is expected of any officer in Rome’s legions. The second is … fortunate in the current circumstances.”
If you are careful, you will meet my son once more in this life…
Corvus felt the air crack and shift. Because he was being exceptionally careful, he did not ask what they knew, or smile, or take in the breath that he needed, but raised a brow and turned to study the blond tribesman, who sat in the only place of any comfort at the end of the table.
He was a broader man than any of those present, built like the Batavians, with a bull neck so that his head seemed set directly onto his shoulders. He had oddly effeminate hair that might have been a true silver-white in daylight, but the lamps had turned the burnished yellow of coltsfoot. It lay loose to his shoulders, falling heavily over a tunic in sharp green with a yellow knotwork at the hem and short sleeves. The gold band coiled above his elbow was richer than any of the southern tribes could afford. The long shape of a mare was laid into it in white gold, with a triangle above.
Velocatos. His name began to mean something; he was not simply a messenger. His placing at the head of the table made more sense than it had. Corvus said, “It is a long time since we were honoured by a messenger of the Brigantes, still less the consort of Cartimandua, their queen.”
The man’s eyes were pale in the lamplight. “It is a long time since the Eceni rebelled. You were a prefect even then, I think, when the governor’s son won his oak leaf at the battle of the Broken Tribes?”
The governor knew the truth of that battle, and he had never encouraged servility in his officers. With faultless courtesy Corvus said, “Is that how it is known in the north? The Eceni call it the battle of the Salmon Trap and celebrate it as a victory. I would not argue with them, except that the reprisals afterwards on their people were savage and they could be said to have lost because of it.”
The younger tribune of the IInd gasped audibly while his peers kept better control. Galenius, legate of the XIVth, who had once been a friend, allowed his gaze to drift right a little, and drooped the lid of one eye.
At the opposite end of the table, the blond tribesman stared, and then stopped staring and reached for his wine. He swirled it in the goblet until his fingers ran red. At length, he said, “There is luck and there is brazen foolishness. It is hard, sometimes, to distinguish the one from the other. Perhaps your actions on the gods’ island today were less courageous than they seemed, and more a failure fully to comprehend the dangers. Do you think reprisals against the Eceni steadings will be enough to recompense the destruction of Camulodunum? Will it stop them from burning everything south of the city, to the far southern ports, where your ships land and your merchants trade?”
Corvus said, “The Eceni alone are not numerous enough for that, nor, I think, would their ambitions drive them so far from their homelands.”
The blond giant smiled. His teeth were thick as pegs, with gaps between. “Then it is unfortunate that they are not alone. The Trinovantes have joined them; how could they not when Camulodunum is under assault? The Catuvellauni may still be loyal to Rome, but the Coritani and Cornovii in the middle lands have sworn allegiance to the Boudica’s standard and half a wing of Batavian cavalry has defected and holds the remains of the Ninth legion penned in its winter strongholds. The combined spears of the Brigantes have not yet joined in the host. My lady keeps those who might do so under a tight rein. If she were to falter, then without question the east is lost to you.” There was pride in his voice, behind the false sorrow.
Galenius of the XIVth was of next highest rank to the governor. He pressed his hands flat on the table so that the fingertips blanched. Speaking for the first time, he said, “And our guests from the Second legion report that the Durotriges and Dumnonii of the southwest are less controlled than they were. They too, it seems, have joined the rebellion.”
There was a chair to Corvus’ side. At a nod from Paullinus, Corvus sat down. The governor signalled the clerk who drew the sand box from the side. The surface was already swept flat. The clerk used a stylus to etch the outline of Britannia, with the toe in the west and the backbone curved to the east and the islands of Mona and its greater cousin, Hibernia, off the wild westerly coast. Fastidious in his every move, he laid down the stylus and placed a small coppered eagle on the coastline, opposite Mona.
The governor placed a larger thumbprint in the east, in one movement erasing the memory of Camulodunum. He swept his thumbnail down and angled inwards. “Here,” he said, “along the Thamesis that the natives call the Great River. Clemens believes otherwise, but I say that when they finish burning Camulodunum — which will be in the next three days unless a miracle happens and the veterans can withstand a longer siege — then they will come south to the site of their first defeat, to burn the trading ports along the river to the bridge that Vespasian built. He built it low, that big ships might not pass under it. The port he founded is the biggest on the river and the most likely to hold out against attack. If we can reach the bridge, take it for Rome and organize the local magistrates to hold it, then we have a route by which to reach the southern tribes that have been longest loyal to Rome.”
“Berikos’ Atrebates,” Corvus said.
“Indeed. If we are cut off from all routes to the coast and the sea, we are lost. The bridge is our lifeline and attack is the best defence. The legions move too slowly; it can only be done with cavalry. I need a troop, led by an officer who knows the shores and the tides and the shipmasters w
ho will accompany me. For the price of your life, you will come.”
Corvus stared at him. “To face the entirety of the Eceni? Two of us and one wing of cavalry?” He had not thought the governor the kind to embrace death so willingly.
“Less than one wing — we will not fit that many on the boats. So we must arrive before the Eceni, in the company of riders who can return with orders. A legion can only go as fast as the slowest mule. Two dozen — perhaps only a dozen — horsemen can take ship from the port here to here…”He drew the stylus south and planted it as a flag on the coast, due west of the sea port on the river. “The magistrates will know the nature of the danger, and how close they are to destruction. If we have time to call the legions down, we will do so. If not, we will know what it is we face. In my absence, the legate of the Fourteenth will lead the continued assault on Mona.”
“When do we leave?”
“With the dawn tide. The Eceni won’t wait, or their allies. If we are to live, we must retake Britannia. To do that, we must ride.”
CHAPTER 25
ON MONA, HAWK SAID, “I’M GOING TO TEACH YOU TO FIGHT.” “No,” Graine said. She sat on a stone by the river, where the wagtails hunted. A birch trailed new leaves in the water. Larks chirred over the hill. There was no wind. The blue smoke from the great-house fire spread horizontally, as a layer of cloud beneath the blue of the opening sky. War was a day and a night away, a distant memory, and she did not wish to bring it closer.
Hawk laid down the bundle he was carrying and leaned against the trunk of a birch on the opposite bank, peering at her through the drooping leaves. His hair was damp from swimming in the pool further down. It lay sleek and black down his head like an otter pelt, with the hawk’s feather dangling from the topknot. His skin was already brown from the spring sun, unblemished except for the lizard clan mark winding up his arm and the greening bruise on his lower lip that had come from Valerius’ knife.
That was almost gone now; he could smile without his face distorting. He did so now, disarmingly. “Your grandfather gave his blade into my care to keep near you, and then yesterday you came back from the shore with another,” he said. “I thought perhaps it was time you learned how to use at least one of them.”
“They’re both too big for me.” She eyed Hawk up and down. “You could wield Eburovic’s ancestor-blade; you’re tall enough and there’s no geas against it. And the one I picked up would suit you on horseback if you chose to fight like that.”
Graine offered these not because she expected him to accept them, but in the hope that he might see the heart behind the gift and go away. She wanted him to go away, this lean, ardent, bright-eyed youth who had pledged his life to her without her asking; this man-boy who had followed her across land and sea with her grandfather’s great war blade strapped across his back so that it seemed to grow from his shoulders.
She had wanted him to go and fight the day before, not for her or because he was needed, but because it was better than sitting beside him, feeling the tremors running through his body as he watched dreamers battle against legionaries on the foreshore.
He was a hound kept unfairly back from the hunt, a horse stalled at the start of a race when generations of breeding had made him only for that, and there was no point; she had not asked for the pledge of his life and his care, and did not need it. As he, evidently, did not need her gift of another man’s blade.
“I don’t think so,” Hawk said, mildly. “The blades of your line are for your family, not a stranger from another tribe. In any case, I have my own blade. It was a gift from my father.”
He sat down cross-legged on the moss. Her mother had killed his father. They had never spoken of that. She did not want to now and neither, she thought, did he; she was coming to recognize the stillness that settled on him when he had gone inside beyond reach. He looked politely attentive, which was not a comfortable thing to endure.
The morning was too good to be spoiled. She sat opposite him and withdrew into herself and waited.
In a while, when all they had heard was the river and the distant larks, Hawk leaned over and unfolded the two ends of the sheepskin so that it lay flat on the river bank with the skin side down and the wool up. The tanner had left the two ears on it, and the beginnings of the tail, so that the pattern of white and mud-brown mottles could be imagined as they had been on the back of the she-lamb that had run in the paddocks by the great-house through the last summer when it was alive.
Across the mottles and within them, lying part buried in the wool so that little could be seen but the matt sheen of blued iron, lay a sword and a knife of a size to suit a nine-year-old girl.
Graine said again, “I don’t want to learn to fight.”
Hawk lifted the sword. A running hare in bronze made the hilt, with its head as the pommel and the curve of its body set to fit a small hand. The hind legs stretched out and wound round themselves and flowed into the blade so that the join was a fluid thing, as if the hare emerged from water, or the moon. Down the length of the iron, sigils were inlaid in copper and silver. They swam before Graine’s eyes, whispering words she could not hear. She looked away.
Hawk said, “Valerius made these for you. Your mother gave them to me before we left. She asked me not to give them to you until you were ready to use them.”
There were tadpoles in the river. Someone had thrown the end of a jugged hare’s haunch into the shallows at the side and it was fringed with small, bulbous eel-shapes, like a voracious black-petalled flower.
Graine dabbed her toe in the water, making rings, and watched the writhing blackness scatter into fragments and come together again. Not looking up, she said, “Give them to someone who wants them. There are plenty of half-grown youths in Hibernia who would give their souls for the battle blade of an Eceni smith. If you don’t tell them who made it, they won’t disdain to use it.”
“Do you? I thought you liked Valerius.”
“I do.” Minnows came, between the tadpoles. A water boatman skimmed across the surface where her toe had been. She said, “That is, I don’t dislike him. My mother loves him; he matters for that. I don’t disdain his blade, I just don’t want to be a warrior.”
Hawk laughed, so that she looked up in surprise. Shaking his head, he uncrossed his legs and stood up and leaned his shoulder again on the tree.
With the mirth still dancing in his eyes, he said, “Graine, dreamer-of-miracles, if I wanted to make you a warrior, you and I would spend the rest of our lives in the teaching and end in old age with both of us frustrated. I couldn’t make you a warrior if I wanted, and I don’t want to. I just want to make you safe.”
“I am safe. I have you and Dubornos and Gunovar. I can’t move a step without one or all of you being there. You are among the best warriors in the war host, everyone knows that. If you three are killed, my having a blade will make no difference.”
“Yes, Graine. Yes, it will.” He was suddenly serious, not closed as he had been, but with the life in his eyes that she had seen once or twice before, when things mattered. He opened his mouth to speak and thought better of it and sank instead to a crouch and hugged his knees and tucked his chin on his folded forearms and studied her, thinking. Fronds of birch trailed about his face, framing the width of his eyes.
When he had arranged the right words in his head, he said, “In battle, men kill those who threaten them. If we three are dead, then Mona is lost and you are lost with it. I think all of us would rather you died then, and crossed the river to Briga in our company, than were left alive for the legions to … do other things.”
He pursed his lips, watching her to see if the words had done damage. Less tensely, he said, “I am not going to teach you to kill legionaries, Graine of the grey eyes, I am going to teach you to look dangerous, so that death will come faster and you will never have to live through what you did before. Will you allow that much of me, with the blades your uncle has made?”
For no-one else would she have done it. Fo
r Hawk, for the starkness of his honesty and for the solemnity in his face and the humour that could be brought back again, and because she did not always want him to go away, she took the hand he offered across the river and took the two blades he gave her, the long one for the left, because she worked better with that hand, and the knife for the right.
She felt the balance of each, and how different it was from carrying Corvus’ blade, or her mother’s. The writing on the blade danced through the hare and into her arm and she felt a whisper in her bones that made her want to weep and throw them down. She gritted her teeth and grimaced and saw that Hawk had seen it, and the pity that came after, which was not what she wanted at all.
She made herself smile and when he asked it of her, she took up the stance she had seen every day since her birth and never thought to emulate, and began the first slow movements of the warrior’s dance, knowing that she would never have to kill with it, only learn to look dangerous.
CHAPTER 26
IN THE BURNED CITY OF CAMULODUNUM, NOTHING WAS LEFT living but the rats and the crows and the warriors who waited in silent, layered rings about the temple to Claudius, once-emperor, protector of his people, and the five hundred who waited equally silently inside, praying for the protection of a god in whom they had never truly believed.
Breaca wiped her palm on the front of her tunic and then the hilt of her sword in the sleeve at the crook of her elbow. A thousand warriors stood to either side with her behind the small stone wall to the temple’s courtyard and none of them was any easier with the waiting. Along the length of their line, in the depths of their ranks, was a silence greater and more tense than the one that had awaited the men of the IXth legion as they marched down the ancestors’ way to oblivion.