Dreaming the Bull (48 page)

Valerius pushed off his cloak and rolled to his feet. It was a matter of pride that he rose first, as it was to find the fires of those who hunted them. They were hunted, there was no doubt of that, and in this the decurion had the better of the warriors he led; he knew intimately the exact danger posed by the hunter, his strengths, his weaknesses and, he believed, his intent.

There was relief in movement. Soundlessly, he crossed the clearing and took a path through the sparse woodland. Behind him, he heard the soft padding of the warriors as they, too, rose and took other routes through the woodland. Soon all he could hear were the noisier strides of the child, Cunomar, who had been too long in Rome and had not yet learned to walk silently.

The river was high after ten days of rain and ran turgid with mud. He found a leaf-stirred eddy at the side in which to relieve himself and then moved upstream to check the horses and splash his face in cleaner water. He felt better for that, the wine-deprived thickness in his head and tongue less than they had been. The bank led south and west to a place where the river widened and the torrent slowed. He crossed on greasy, treacherous stepping stones, taking each one slowly and testing the footing. On the southern bank, a deer path led through thorn scrub and round a sunken, grassy dell that rose on its far side in a steeply wooded slope. He
climbed up, using the angled trunks of the scrub thorn as handholds. Shed beech leaves, shiny as beaten bronze, crisped beneath his feet. On the thorns, the berries were crinkled for winter, holding the damp in heavy drops that drizzled his thighs and wept coldly onto his cheeks.

Reaching the crest of the slope, he squirmed forward under low branches until he had a clear view out over a broad stretch of water meadow to a cluster of oak and beech beyond. Smoke rose faintly over the canopy. Marullus, centurion of the second cohort of the Praetorian Guard, had never learned the art of smokeless burning, or perhaps he was intent on signalling his presence, a warning sent by a Father to one of his many sons, one under the blessed cloak of Mithras, set on opposing sides by ill-fortune and an oath carelessly taken. They were not yet in conflict and might never be. The god, one hoped, would prevent it.

Valerius lay still under the thorns for a while, letting brisk air and the relief of solitude work a measure of healing. Presently, as the inner and outer mists thinned, he saw what he was looking for: a handful of men moving jerkily amongst the trees, readying horses for travel, and the one who lay in the deep cover opposite, watching.

“They’re playing with us. They know we’re here.”

Valerius jumped. The speed of it bludgeoned the delicate parts of his brain as he turned. A bubble of pure, easy rage rose to his head and burst. Almost, he struck out. A decade’s training as an officer stopped him, and the oath to his god.

If the girl Cygfa saw the danger and its passing, she showed no fear. She had come up behind him silently and sat, as silently, watching. More than Caradoc with his frigid scorn, or the child Cunomar with his all-consuming
loathing, Cygfa unnerved Valerius. She spoke little and never willingly to him and yet he had never once moved apart from the others but she was there on cat’s feet, following. She crouched now in a hidden space between the thorns, staring at him with her father’s eyes.

Some time in the journey, she had begun to braid her hair in the way of the warrior—an act forbidden in Rome—and overnight she had found three crow feathers and woven them into the left side. They hung damply in the mist and her face, thus framed, was that of sexless, androgynous youth so that Valerius, biting his lower lip, had to repeat aloud in his mind the single fact that this was a woman, not a man, and that the god would never return Caradoc to him cleared of age and all betrayal, or those who had been lost to his treachery.
Amminios was lying … What would you have done if you had known Breaca was still alive…?

Enough. Stop now. He knows.

The decurion held himself still and believed he showed nothing.

Cygfa raised a familiar, mocking brow. “Do you not intend to slay these men as you did their tracker?”

She asked it to goad him, not because she was interested in his answer. Early in their flight, two days out of Rome, he had left his charges for half an evening to hunt down and cut the throat of the single Dacian tribesman who followed their trail. He had said nothing to the others but Cygfa, following, had witnessed it and word had spread amongst the others of the man’s death and, perhaps, of the needlessness of it; the tracker had lost their trail when he died. If he had been confronted, Valerius could have countered with his argument that the group would travel faster without the
need for secrecy and that one dead tracker was one fewer enemy wielding a blade against them later, but the question had never come and he had not chosen to raise it himself.

All this, he read in Cygfa’s eyes as she watched him watch the watchers. On any other day, Valerius would have walked away, but her choice to braid the kill-feathers had made of her presence a greater challenge and, on this last day, he was tired of challenges. Answering the words, if not their intent, he said, “We can’t attack now. We are too few against their many.”

“And yet they still don’t attack us. We were vulnerable when Cwmfen was lying ill in the wagon, less so now that she is better and can ride,” she said. “Why do they stay back?”

She thought like her father, or like Longinus. It was not good to think of him. Longinus had charge of the wing while his decurion was away. Their parting had not been easy but nothing between them had been easy since Valerius had come back from Rome with the need for wine increased.

Valerius eased back to a place he could sit up without being seen. It might not have been necessary, but there was an integrity in the fiction of concealment. “They are waiting for a signal,” he said. “When they have it, they will attack.”

“Or they wait until Claudius is dead.”

“The two are the same.” Her Latin was stilted, not as fluent as her parents’. Easing himself down the bank to the shallow dip of the dell, Valerius found himself matching the cadence of it. “When Claudius dies and Nero is made emperor, the signal will come. Then they will be safely under Agrippina’s command and can act without the dishonour of treason.”

Cygfa sneered. “So in Roman eyes, it is honourable to kill an infant of fourteen days if the command comes from the woman who is the emperor’s mother, but not if it comes when she is only his wife and his niece?”

The dell was crowded with the debris of the forest. The hollow carcass of a beech trunk lay across it, speckled with bright, toxic droplets of red and orange fungi and old rodent droppings. Valerius jumped onto the top, rocking it rottenly beneath his feet. The action matched the rhythm of the throbbing in his head and soothed it. He thought the girl might walk on alone, but she waited, her eyes still asking the same fatuous question about Roman honour as if anything other than that same honour had kept her alive these past fourteen days.

Bluntly, he asked, “Have you ever slain a man in battle?”

The grey eyes scorned him. She raised a finger to the topmost of her feathers. “You have seen me do so.”

“And they were men, who were once fourteen-day-old infants, yet you killed them without hesitation, am I right?”

“That’s different.”

“Is it so? Is life less precious to the grown man who loves life and understands exactly what he has to lose, than to the infant who knows only the comfort of the womb and the muzzling warmth of his mother’s breast? I think not.” A dog fox had used the log as a marking post. The musk of its scent rose with his rocking, metallic as horse sweat and the tears of the dead. Breathing it in, Valerius said, “This is the reality of war. Thirty years spent living and growing make little difference if the soul you set free is that of an enemy. A child slain today will not grow to be the warrior who drives a blade into your back twenty years hence and that is
what may keep you alive. You are a warrior; you should know that.”

She said, “We would never kill the children of our enemies.”

“I know. That is why you will lose the war and we will win it.”

He jumped down from the log and began to force a way through the scrub beyond. Cygfa’s voice sought him out. “If you despise us so much,” she asked, “why do we yet live?”

In half a month of travel, not one of them had yet suggested he might betray them. Valerius stopped still. Her gaze speared his back. He spun slowly on one heel. “I told you in Rome,” he said. “I took an oath. Before my god, such things are binding.”

“And why was this oath asked of you?”

“I have no idea.” He pushed on away from her, raising his hands to protect his face from the thorns. He lied, of course; he had a very good idea why it had been asked, the crux of which involved Theophilus and Xenophon, two Greek physicians who took their care of the soul as seriously as they did the healing of the body that clothed it. He did not share his thought.

Cygfa followed him along a path that was no path, stretching under the dragging brambles, kicking through thorns and nettle beds. Emerging, Valerius ran across the mud-greased stepping stones; a warriors’ challenge to reach the far bank without falling. Long ago, he had watched three other men run a rain-wet log across a river. Only one of them had fallen and he the one who mattered least.

Valerius reached the far bank with dry feet. Success rallied him. He said, “To find why the oath was asked, you
would have to ask the emperor, who may be dead. Perhaps Dubornos can ask him for you. He seems to have friends amongst those who have already joined the gods. I do not.”

“No. In the realms of the dead, there are those who merely hate you and those who will wait for eternity to greet your death and avenge their own. Anyone can see it.”

“Indeed?” He heard his own voice brittle. “Are you a dreamer that you can see the souls of the dead?”

“Hardly. I don’t need to be. Any child can see those that circle you.”

He walked away, leaving her on the far bank with the stones ahead of her, and did not wait to see how she fared.

He came to the clearing alone. The rest of the group were ready and waiting. Cwmfen had Math bundled against her chest, ready to ride. The child was growing hair, fuzzily, and his eyes were less vacant. His mother had made good progress under Philonikos’ care; for the past three days, she had begun to take an active part in the journey where before she had lain in a wagon and all her strength had been taken simply to live.

Today, she had spread the fire and doused it, covering the ash with the turf cut the previous night and scattering old leaves over that. The centurion and his party might find their campsite, but only by diligent searching, and the very act of looking for it would lose them time. It might not matter when their destination was so obvious, but, again, there was a warrior’s integrity in concealment and none would willingly break it.

The men had been similarly busy; at the margins of the clearing, the horses were gathered and unhobbled. The wagon mules had been abandoned long since and a mare
bought for Cwmfen so that all of them rode horses of good blood, but for Cunomar who had been given a small, cobby gelding. The child was there now, standing by his mount, breaking his fast with his father on the cold roasted saddle of a hare which Dubornos had caught the night before. The singer claimed to have sung it into his hand, a conceit Valerius did not believe. The man looked up and waved in ready friendship. Valerius stopped, staring, and then heard Cygfa’s soft tread behind him and the sibilant Ordovician greeting.

She would have walked past, but he intercepted her and, so that the others might hear, said, “We will reach Gesoriacum this afternoon. You will have to either unbraid your hair or cover it if you do not wish to be arrested for sedition. I suggest you take that seriously. Tomorrow is the Ides of October and the last chance for a ship to sail. If Claudius can live two more days, you will be safe and I can return to my unit. When I am free of this oath, we will see which side is stronger.”

Caradoc’s daughter grinned at him, baring her teeth as uncounted others had done on uncounted battlefields, and she spoke the words that every man and woman who had opposed him had said, in one form or another. “I will greet the day with delight. Your head will look good mounted on a spear at the roundhouse on Mona.”

Of all the things she had said that morning, Valerius considered that last most often in the long day’s ride towards the coast. In the days when he had been Bán of the Eceni, his people would not have kept the heads of their enemies as trophies. The bodies of even the most reviled foes had been given intact to the carrion eaters and the gods of the forest.

*

Gesoriacum, port and civic centre, had changed little in the sixteen years since the youthful Caligula had ordered the great pinnacle of the lighthouse built and sailed his flagship
Euridyke
out onto the ocean to accept Amminios’ surrender, claiming as he did so victory over both Neptune and Britannia.

For Valerius, return flayed to the white bone a mind already laid open by the journey. In Britannia, new memories overlaid the old and it was possible to forget what had been. Here, too much was too familiar. The land around the town was quieter than he had known it, lacking two legions camped on its margins, but the brisk, sharp smell of the sea made his eyes water as it had always done and brought on the vague nausea that had dogged his every voyage. The wind tore the words from his mouth and the circling seabirds cried with the voices of the dead and he was glad, then, that Cygfa could hear them as well as he could.

They reached the walls in the late afternoon, dipping down into the valley of a small stream and walking the horses up a meandering path to the southern gate. On the far side of the town, a fishing boat had put into the harbour, drawing its blizzard of screaming gulls behind. The noise of them was crippling. Valerius’ morning headache, lacking the medication of wine or Philonikos’ spirits, had increased with the passing miles so that, as they approached the town, he rode forward blindly, letting his mare pick her own route. His helmet bound tight along his brow, as if the metal had shrunk or his head swollen, and the pressure of it crushed his mind.