by Manda Scott
Valerius was near the front, with Cygfa to one side and Madb, the Hibernian woman with the jackdaw eyes, on the other. Longinus, as ever, covered his back, loyal as any hound. Huw the slinger was somewhere just beyond his left shoulder, with Knife and others who had begun to follow him to the forefront of battle.
Her brother had his own honour guard, and would have denied that they existed, as they would have denied being so, and still have died for him. Breaca watched him kill a veteran and use his shield to shelter Cygfa while she swept backhanded at another. Her daughter’s hair was a dancing flame in the newly unleashed sun, a flicker of almost-white against the bronze door and the smoke that billowed from it. She was the spearhead that held the top of the steps and stopped the flood tide of two hundred veterans and those who sheltered behind them from cascading down the white marble to the courtyard below.
Even Cygfa, who was Caradoc remade as woman, could not hold five hundred alone. Veterans forced past and were met by Madb or Valerius, and then others and others so that very few reached the foot of the steps alive. Then the cluster of bodies underfoot made the fighting more difficult, and because no-one was prepared to fight in towards the temple the warriors began naturally to back away, to make more room, and so more could flood past them.
The woman with the rust-red hair and grey-green eyes came at Breaca from the farthest edge of the steps. She was not a warrior; she did not dance with the song of her spear, or hear the soul-keen of her blade, but she was swift and clear-headed and filled with the rage of the she-boar roused to violence in defence of her young. With the power only of that, she killed the young Coritani who stepped up to meet her and crippled the Eceni girl who came after him.
There were no children running at her heels; Breaca checked that before she stepped forward to block her onward rush. They were caught in a corner of the courtyard with a low wall at one side, which was an insane place for either of them to fight. Stone circled out as the rust-woman came in, harrying her from the side, so that she was pushed against the wall and her shield hampered by it.
Breaca’s blade was hampered also. She stepped out away from the wall to give herself more room. The rust-woman tried to push through the gap, leaving herself open to an angled strike from the side that swept her own blade from her hand and tossed it high over the wall to land in the ash-strewn mud beyond.
Killing was too easy, and there were questions that mattered. Breaca swung her blade in and held it level, at chest height, as a barrier. The woman stopped and stood still, breathing fast and hard. She hissed and spat like a wildcat, but did not make any move that would have made it necessary to kill her.
“Why were you standing in a pigsty?” Breaca asked.
The woman looked down. Her feet were brown to the ankle bone with old, dried ordure. Over the stink of battle, she smelled roundly of pig muck.
Something of that shocked her into moving. She snarled and swung her shield as a weapon so that it was necessary for a moment to block and step back and let Stone come in, but not so close that he might be hurt, and then to corner her again with the low stone wall at her back.
Breaca swung in and, for the second time, her blade ended at the woman’s throat, and did not strike through skin and flesh and bone. She said, “I could kill you now. Or I could tell you that your daughter is alive first. In your place, I would want to know that.”
Only the truly lost can face death without care and no mother who knows her child is alive is ever truly lost. The rust-haired woman stopped trying to fight. She dropped her shield and covered her face with one white-knuckled hand and stood, shaking, as Stone had been shaking, but without the urgency to it, only despair and terror and the grief of untold loss.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“That she is your daughter? She has your hair and eyes.”
There was the barest of nods. Breaca said, “Is that why you had to hide in the sty? Did the mobs come for you? Had you betrayed them to Rome?”
“They said so.” The words came thickly, through muffling fingers.
Breaca moved her blade away and sat on the stone wall. On the steps to the temple, men and women, warriors and Romans died and were injured, or lived and grew bold in their own success. She was left in a bubble of quiet, with Stone standing guard and a broken woman in front of her. She said, “Because your daughter’s father was Roman? Or was it worse than that? Was he one of those who let Claudius into the city?”
The covering hand fell away from the woman’s face. She had been pale before, now she was yellow and shaken by more than only the fear of death. She began the sign to ward off evil and saw herself and stopped, letting her hand fall useless at her side. “Is it written in me?” she asked. “Am I tainted to death and beyond by one mistake?”
“Not you. Your daughter carries his nose, and something of his cast of countenance, but she will live to be more than her father ever was. Was it Heffydd himself? Or one of his sons?”
“Him. He has no living sons. He wanted one. That’s why he … why I…”
There were no words. They could have been alone. Heffydd had been past his prime in Cunobelin’s time. On a day when the world was havoc, the thought that the false dreamer of the Trinovantes, the man who had betrayed his people and his training to Rome, could bring himself to sire a girl now eight was uniquely unpleasant.
Breaca said, “Did he pay you?”
She said it without due thought. In the midst of battle, with death walking through the throng, it was an insult as bad as anything her blade could have inflicted.
The woman stared at her with fixed, wide-open eyes and her head held stiffly high. “And so I am the kind who would sell herself, and to that.”
Her voice was more strained than it had been. Stone moved up to her, and pressed against her leg as he had done Breaca’s. The woman reached down and gripped his mane at the base of his neck where the hair was thickest. When she took her hand away, clots of winter hair came away in her fingers. Absently, she rolled them into a wad, as if she might polish something with it later.
She said, “Heffydd caught me marking my son for Nemain, under the old moon. Rome would kill us for that, me and Gwn and his father if he had not already died in the battle of the Salmon Trap. Heffydd saw something he liked in Gwn, that he was strong and could fight, even at ten years old. He offered us life, and patronage under his care with the best Rome could offer if I would give him a son equally strong.”
“What happened when you gave him a daughter instead?”
“He was dead long before she was born. Briga came for him two days after he set his seed inside me.” The woman bared her teeth, ferally. The canine on one side was broken. “I killed him. They did not thank me for that, those who came in the night with their clubs and their knives and their slow death for those who favoured Rome. They would have killed a seven-year-old girl for the crime of having the wrong father.”
“But the veterans let you send her out to a new beginning, not knowing who she was? I am trying not to think what you threatened her with, to make her come out.”
“I said I would put down the sword they gave me and refuse to fight if she didn’t go, that we would both burn together. I said if she went, I would fight, and promised I would kill before I died, so she would know me already avenged.”
“And you did that; I saw it. What about your son? Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He left three years ago, to go to Mona. I have heard nothing since.”
It could have been lies, but Stone trusted her, and Breaca was inclined to trust him before a mob armed with clubs and knives and a slow death. A decision was necessary, one way or the other; the fighting on the steps and the upper courtyard had become ragged and fallen into knots and too many on either side were spreading out towards them.
Breaca said, “If I leave you alive, will you fight against us, or help those who would?”
“No. You can read every part of me — can you not see that?”
“Who are you?”
“Breaca, mother to Graine, who was raped by Rome. If I could have hidden her in a pigsty, I would have done. I will live the rest of my life regretting that there was not the opportunity to do so. Go over the wall and run. I will do what I can to stop others following you.”
Breaca watched the woman go and only had to stop Knife from jumping the wall to follow her, and then a veteran, who had perhaps understood better what was happening. They fought and the veteran died, because he had eaten badly for two days and had already fought five people before her, and both of them knew that if it had been even, he would have won; in battle, these things are clear, and only the foolhardy ignore them.
At the end, when the temple was empty and burning and the dead were piled inside, Breaca went to the theatre to find Airmid and Theophilus and discovered that both were working with the wounded at a covered area outside the city boundaries where the stench and the threat of spreading sickness was less.
The three girl-children Theophilus had washed and Airmid had fed were in the same place, playing halfhearted knucklebones in the ash and dust, listening to tales told them by a lean Eceni warrior with her forearm bound to her chest and splints along the long bones. She was one of the hundreds now who followed Cunomar, not yet a she-bear, but fighting on the periphery and hoping to be made so. Like the others with whom she fought, she had shaved her head in an arc above each ear, leaving a long scalp lock in rich copper reds which she had whitened with lime and goose fat so that it made a crest, like the keel of a boat.
The three straw-haired girl-children were fascinated by the result, or awed. They sat at her feet forgetting the knucklebones and she fed them stories of battles won against Rome that stopped only when the Boudica came, who had been the hero of the tales, second only to her son.
Breaca stood a little away from the group. The girls were more settled and no longer stank. Still, they stared at her great-eyed and stuffed the backs of their hands in their mouths. One of them squeaked and was stilled by the others. Breaca looked down and saw fresh blood on her tunic and was too tired to try to cover it on their account.
She said, “What happened to the fourth girl? The one with the rust hair and the nose of Cunobelin’s dreamer?”
The young warrior stared at her. Slowly, she said, “Her mother came for her. You sent her, with hair from your hound as proof. She said you had promised her safety and that they could go without harm. We knew it must be true. How else could she have come out of the temple alive?” The girl frowned, confused now. “Were we wrong?”
“No, you weren’t wrong. Only my misunderstanding. I had expected her to stay, but there was no reason she should.”
Except that there was nowhere to go in a city burned to ashes and rubble. Breaca smiled for the warrior and said something right to the children so that they were no longer afraid of the fresh blood on her tunic and the sweat and gore on her face.
When she left them, it was to go once again to search out Airmid and Theophilus, to see to the wounded and find out the cost of the day and to speak, finally, of what could be done to bring leadership back to the leaderless.
By chance, on her way across the short grass eastwards, towards the horse training ring where the wounded were laid, she turned back, to look at the temple.
Noon had passed. Even as she watched, the last sliver of sun passed over the doors and the god fire dulled, leaving the vast plates of bronze featureless in the quieter light.
There was a memory in that, so small that Breaca almost missed it. She stood for a long time watching the dullness until she found it and could name it and bring it clearly to mind.
She did not go, then, to the tents that held the wounded, but skirted the pitched awnings of the horse grounds, and passed south instead along an old track, so that alone, without a Greek physician to offer company, she could return to the past and the company of the dead.
CHAPTER 28
CUNOMAR LAY BELLY DOWN ON A MOSAIC OF PINK AND grey marble, resting his chin on his fist the better to watch the black oak door that was the hidden exit to Claudius’ temple.
Around him was an ornate walled garden that backed onto the slave’s quarters of a centurion’s house. Already the place was overgrown with ivy and a strangling of early bindweed scattered through with white unopened flowers, curled tight as ropes.
The wall was solid and not meant to be climbed; the flints and cob stones that formed it had been bedded too deep to make handholds and it was capped with rounded mortar with sharpened flints along the spine. Nine strikes with a log-splitting axe had broken the lock to the outer gate, letting the she-bear flood in and arrange themselves in battle order amongst the unthrifty olive trees and grape vines and the twinned green marble fountains, on which boy-youths rode dolphins across an endlessly dry sea.
Cunomar lay in the shade of the second of these. On either side, his warriors passed waterskins newly filled from the well in the ruined hospital. All of them were burned or wounded somehow. Cunomar’s groin still ached from the missed thrust of the blade that had nearly cost him his manhood. Ulla, who lay nearest, was burned along the length of one forearm, but otherwise whole.
She passed him a waterskin and he drank and handed it back. The door to the temple remained stubbornly shut. High as a man and five times as wide, it was made of seasoned oak with leather hinges studded with iron to make them less easily cut, designed for function as an escape route, or a secret entry, as if half of Camulodunum had not known it was there from the day it was first built.
The sun moved higher, and the patches of shade grew smaller. Presently, when the flies became too bothersome, those warriors who were not yet of the she-bear, and so knew less of discipline, began to take bets on who could first pull over one of the green marble fountains.
After a while, they forgot to whisper, and the bets became more serious. Three squared up to the fountain and spat on their hands. Each had shaved the hair on his head in an arc above both ears and set the centre line with lime paint. One had cut off his own ear, or had it done for him. Cunomar did not know the names of any of them. The largest set himself at the marble, hauling so that the veins bulged on muscles that knotted like an ox at the plough. Others shouted encouragement. The marble did not move.
Under cover of the noise, Ulla said, “Your mother left the temple battle early. I saw her let a woman go when she could have killed her.”
“Everyone saw that,” Cunomar said.
“Did she do it so we would see? So that there would be no doubt that she no longer wants to lead us?”
In the midst of the battle, Cunomar’s fear had been exactly that, tainted with the shame of it, and the panic that without his mother the war host would falter. He had missed a clean kill because of it, and had to finish the man later, when the battle had passed over and there was time to come back. Lying now in the shade of an olive tree, he saw it in a better light.
“I think that’s exactly why she did it. By leaving when victory was certain, she made sure no-one would suffer for her loss. And she’s left the way open for her successor to take over in the final parts of the war. The balance in the host is even between Valerius and me. I think she truly does not know which of us to support. She has left us the freedom to prove ourselves in front of the full host.”
Ulla said, “It must be hard for a woman to choose between her brother and her son.”
“And for Cygfa the same. She admires Valerius for his Crow-horse and how he can fight with it. Both of them need a reason to choose one way or the other. We can give it.” Since the defeat of the Ninth, Cunomar had tried to see it like that. Here, now, with the prospect of a quite spectacular victory at hand, it was easiest.
The wiriest of the three youths succeeded in pulling over the marble fountain, by dint of tipping it a little and kicking a stone under the base, to hol
d it off balance while he swung all his weight on the scalloped green lip of the bowl — which hit the larger grey slabs around it and shattered into shards sharp as knife blades that sprayed out in a wide arc.
Cursing softly, Cunomar leaned to his right, to a lanky Trinovante youth who had known the way to the garden. “Tell them to keep well clear of the broken marble if they don’t want to cut their feet when the door opens. Pass it along the line.”
He watched the flow of the message as head nodded to darker or fairer head and away again. To Ulla, he said, testily, “Valerius would have stopped them pulling the fountain over in the first place.”
“And they would have learned nothing, except to resent him for spoiling their wager. Your way is not necessarily the lesser.”
The message had reached the last of those in range of the scattered razor-stone when a lock was turned in the dark oak door and a bolt jerked back and a beam thrown aside and a hand’s breadth of solid oak, as high as a man and five times as wide, slammed back onto the cob and flint of the garden wall.
Cunomar had time to shout, “Hold the line!” and feel Ulla at his shoulder before havoc flew at him, in the shape of the fiercest battle he had ever imagined.
The veterans who charged from the room behind the door were lean to the point of emaciation, unshaven and filthy with burn marks florid on their faces and forearms, but their leather armour was supple and their blades honed and they had the tight, dense set of men who have known each other for decades, and can trust the surety of each other’s presence.
Like the Spartan heroes of Thermopylae, or the Sacred Band of Thebes, these were men who dedicated themselves to war and never let themselves go. For days, Cunomar had lain on the drying turf above Camulodunum and watched a full century of veterans practise their daily manoeuvres.