Dreaming the Bull (26 page)

Battle had been a long time coming. For a while, it had seemed to both sides as if the volume of water alone would defeat them and Caradoc’s salmon-trap would never be put into effect. Dubornos, watching, feared that Venutios might come too early and his warriors, particularly the small, undisciplined war bands of the Selgovae, being unable to contain themselves, might hurtle down the mountain at the enemy and betray the plan.

It was only when the Thracian auxiliaries rode in at the rear of the enemy column that he had the first sense of how it might go. From the safety of his god-sworn heights, Dubornos saw first the pied horse, then the rider, and then, impossibly, stunningly, he saw the personal standard fluttering high over his head.

“Briga take him, he’s stolen the sign of the bull.”

Others around the field had seen it. A string of oaths ran north to south and back again amongst dreamers, singers and warriors. If Briga listened that day, she was called on more in the first few moments than at any other time throughout the
battle. If she looked, she would have seen a man sworn to another god who had taken as his personal emblem the mark of the bull as it was first carved by the ancestors of the tribes at the time when the gods were young.

The gods alone know what the symbol meant for them, but for the tribes the marks of the ancestors were sacred to all, so that no one tribe took them for itself but kept them as a sign of honour for all the gods. The bull particularly was beautiful in its simplicity, bulky and bold, full of pride and unyielding vigour. For the enemy blatantly to take it was ultimate sacrilege. For him to mount it in stolen colours made it more so, and this he had done; the background to the pennant was the iron-grey of Mona, and onto it the rounded, flowing shape of the ancestors’ bull-form had been etched in a deep, rich red as if painted directly onto the cloth in newly shed blood. Breaca’s serpent-spear was painted in exactly that ever-living blood and had been since long before Claudius first sent his legions. The two things together, colour and sign, were an unmistakable message from a man who had taken part in the invasion battles and had used the time since to learn his enemy’s strengths, enough to subvert them for his own use. In language anyone could read they said,
What was sacred of yours has become mine. I can turn it to my own will. Stand against me if you dare.

“We dare. Oh, gods, we dare.” Barred from battle and close to weeping with frustration, Dubornos smashed the edge of his balled fist against the rock by his head. “Efnís, wherever you are, come to the water’s edge and direct the slingers against that one. If we get none of the others, his death alone would make this battle worth the while.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

The singer’s mind and heart were in the battle. He had forgotten the child. Cunomar sat cross-legged beside him, Hail’s head on his knee. He was weeping silently but copiously. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “It’s my fault you’re here. If it weren’t for me, you would be there in the fight. You could kill the pied decurion yourself.”

Dubornos had not meant to speak aloud. It was not part of his oath that others should feel in his debt. He turned on one elbow, dragging his eyes from the gathered armies. “That’s not your concern. I am here because I choose to be. There is no fault, no blame.”

“But there is, isn’t there?” At times Breaca’s son displayed a wilful selfishness that bespoke neither of his parents. At others—now—he was entirely his mother. He pursed his lips and the straight line carved between his brows, as hers did. His voice was no longer a child’s, but that of an adult, talking reason.

“Ardacos told me,” he said. “You were cowardly in your first battle and afterwards, out of shame, you forswore the ways of the warrior and became a hunter and maker of harness. Later, when the gods marked you as singer and warrior both, you made an oath to Briga and Nemain to protect my mother’s children, your life for theirs, wherever they went. But I would have been safe on Mona and you could have come here and fought against the decurion on the pied horse, so it’s my fault that you can’t.”

The sun burned from the south-east. In the valley, warriors waded into the water the better to throw their spears. On both sides, the souls of the battle-slain began their journey to the world of the dead. Here, too, they faced
a river, wider and faster flowing than any they had ever met in life. With Briga’s aid, they forded it, some more easily than others, leaving only memories in the land of life. On the heights of the mountain, Dubornos mac Sinochos, singer of Mona, once of the Eceni, remembered his father and another day of fighting. It was not a scene he readily forgot; his mornings woke to it and his days ended with the bitterness of its truth. The child who was the voice of his conscience met his gaze evenly, trading new guilt for old.

The gods demand and it is given to men to offer their souls. Dubornos searched the depths of his and answered with honesty.

“You may be right,” he said. “If you had stayed behind, I might have come here to fight. But I might just as well have stayed on Mona with you, your mother and the new child, in which case it is because of you that I am here at all to witness what is taking place, and gather deeds to fire the songs of later. My oath was freely given, and the gods know best how to use it. I am here because they willed it as much as you. Would you hold the gods at fault?”

Unexpectedly, the child considered this, frowning. “I might, if they destroyed the things I cared for. Or if they kept from me my heart’s wish. Is it true you have loved Airmid since childhood and will take no other lover while she lives?”

The words fell into quiet, as if the howling chants of the warriors giving and taking life in the valley were less than the sigh of a spring breeze. A thrush sang from the rowan and the high notes pierced Dubornos’ head. He stared at the boy, who stared back. Very carefully, because, for the first time in as long as he chose to remember, his hold on his
temper was not certain, Dubornos said, “Who told you that? Was it Ardacos?”

“No. I heard Braint tell Cygfa. It was while you were talking to Gwyddhien. Anyone could see you were uncomfortable in her company. Cygfa thought you craved Gwyddhien and were sore because she was Airmid’s. Braint said it was the other way round. Efnís told her what happened. He knew you all as children in the Eceni home lands before the invasion, she said. It’s true, isn’t it?”

Dubornos had sworn never again to lie. He had not sworn to expose all of his soul to a child. He said, “If it is, does it matter?”

“It matters to Cygfa. She thinks you don’t notice her and grieves for it.”

A child may see what a man does not, particularly if the latter’s attention is elsewhere. Nevertheless, it was not a conversation Dubornos wished to pursue. “Does she so? That’s strange when she is your father come to life in female form and every other warrior, man and woman, sees it. I think that when your sister is past her long-nights, she will not worry that one man among thousands may not see her in the way that she—What is it?”

Cunomar’s eyes were widely black. The whites flared like those of a startled horse. He pointed down into the cauldron of conflict. “The decurion,” he said. “The one on the pied horse with the red bull banner. He is swimming his mount across the river. His troop are following him across.”

He was right. Some things require a man’s undivided attention and the means by which Scapula’s legions forded the river of the Lame Hind in pursuit of Caratacus was one of them. Dubornos lay on his high ledge and watched as a
troop of Thracian auxiliaries, led by a man he loathed but whose courage he could not question, swam their horses into the torrent and stood broadside to the flow, stringing a rope between them so that the infantry might wade across and not drown as they did so.

The officer on the pied horse stood mid-stream, presenting a ready target to the warriors on the far side. Efnís was there, directing spears and slingers alike. He was joined by over half the dreamers of Mona and the decurion became the target of many warriors. At no time was he hit. Sling-stones and spears carved the white water, legionaries and cavalrymen of other troops died on either side, but the pennant of the red bull remained upright, and the pied horse and his rider beneath it.

Dubornos cursed viciously and knew he was not alone. It was widely believed that, from time to time, Briga sent her emissaries in the shape of enemy warriors to claim the lives of those she had already marked for herself. In those cases, the chosen one could not be killed by normal means but only by a dreamer who was prepared to face Briga’s wrath. It was also possible that Mithras, the bull-slayer, was pleased with this man and had the power to protect him on the field of battle in a land that was not his own. Or he may simply have been lucky; it was best to think so because a man’s luck may be made to change by other men who do not require the intervention of the gods. The efforts to kill him were redoubled without effect.

With the rope in place, the legionaries swarmed across the water. One could not fault their discipline, or the order with which they fought. Their clashes with the warriors were fiercest on the north bank of the river. The principle of the
salmon-trap depended on the legions’ swarming, uncaring, over the rampart into the defile when in all probability the decurion of the Thracians had warned them of the trap. The defending warriors, therefore, must fight as if their lives depended on it, as if the barrier at their backs were a retreat of last resort, as if the war would be won or lost in the rock-cluttered, blood-slick slopes of the mountain. Knowing this, claiming honour and fame with every kill, they fought as savagely as they had ever done.

In the chaos, Caradoc was readily visible, his hair bright beneath the ever-rising sun. Cygfa stayed close to him, both of them blazing beacons in the thickest point of battle. Ardacos’ she-bears could be heard, howling their war songs, and once in a while a circle of them became visible, surrounding a huddle of doomed legionaries. Gwyddhien’s horse-warriors circled the margins, attacking cavalry and infantry alike. Braint held a solid line in the centre, her warriors carving space in the air around them with swords that rose and fell like threshing flails.

On the enemy side, Scapula was surrounded by a century of legionaries and could not be approached. The rest of his men kept to their lines and fought with their shields locked as they had been trained to, stepping forward over the bodies of the slain. The officer on the pied horse was visible only because his men held the ground around the water’s edge. His standard fell once as the bearer’s horse was killed beneath him, but the rider rolled free and it could be seen that the decurion brought him up on the pied horse and called another man forward to hold the standard until the bearer found another mount. Thereafter, fouled and bloody, the red bull could only rarely be picked out from the others. Dubornos held to his
memory of a single moment of hatred and prayed to Briga that the man would die before he could warn his governor of the trap, or simply that he would die.

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.