CHAPTER 4

Valerius stopped the messenger. Breaca killed him.

Sedge grass swayed over the dead man’s face, pushed by the dawn wind. A skein of geese mourned him thinly, forlorn echoes strung across the grey sky. Where he lay at the edge of the marsh, the air was fresh with spring and the hope of freedom. To the east where the watchtowers smouldered, greasy smoke stained the skyline, delivering the smell of charred bodies onto the wind.

Valerius lowered the body down from the horse, taking care not to break the seal on the message pouch. The messenger had been young and his face held no fear; he had believed Valerius a friend, for the red cloak that he wore and the officer’s plume in his helmet and his easy, urbane, soldier’s Latin that had offered security and a better route past the wet fenland with the marsh to one side and forest to the other and only an open unprotected pathway for a man alone to ride through.

He had been terrified because all five of his companions had died to Dubornos’ slingstones and Ardacos’ bear-spears and he was alone and in need of a friendly face. Calling his welcome and his relief, he had not known death was close until it claimed him. His soul had departed quickly, called to freedom by the cries of the geese.

Behind, nearly five thousand warriors of the Eceni, with a smattering of others from as far north as the Caledonii and as far south as the Durotriges, stepped out of the forest. Their line extended from the marsh to the far horizon, a glitter of bright blades and spears and round, painted shields and the occasional shimmer of cavalry mail or legionary armour, stolen from other dead men of Rome.

They were as diverse as any group of warriors: their hair was red-gold and bronze, with the occasional dark throwback to the ancestors, and braided high at the temple and left without ornament to show they had not yet killed in battle. Very few wore helmets; the Boudica did not, and never had done, and they had gathered in her name, answering her call, holding fast to the belief in her immortality, even when the rumours spread of her sickness and closeness to death.

She was not dead. She had killed a man cleanly in sight of them all, reversing in a single stroke their waning hope of the past thirteen days. That stroke may have lacked the brilliance that had always set the Boudica apart from the greater mass of warriors, but there were few amongst those watching who had the experience to understand the distinction between the mundane and the truly great, and fewer still who could see such a thing in the flash of a knife across a man’s throat.

Valerius was one of those few, but he had already seen all that he needed in the brief contest by the gods’ pool. The details of that were something private between them, shared only in outline with those of her closest circle who knew already the reality of what Breaca could do and what she could not, which was the greater part.

The challenge for all of them was to find ways to keep her alive until she could find her way back to who she had been; or it became clear that she would never do so. They had not yet spoken openly of that.

The warriors of the war host, who saw exactly as much as they were shown, stood in silence at first, in honour of the dead, and the gods’ gift of the morning and the shedding of blood that signalled the start of the war for which they had gathered and trained. Then a woman among them raised her blade in one hand and her shield in the other and set up the war chant of the Boudica, that the oldest had heard first on the banks of the great river at the time of the legions’ invasion and the youngest had only heard sung quietly, in secret, through all the years since.

The sound grew and grew and spread out across the marsh, silencing the wind and the geese, and became a roar that might have reached north to the IXth legion and south to the veterans of Camulodunum and west to the Roman governor of Britannia in his assault on Mona and all that was sacred.

Under the wane of it, Breaca said to Valerius, “I should talk to them. Could you find a way to help me mount the horse? It’ll be easier from there.”

The messenger’s horse was a pale strawberry roan, trained to stand where its rider had fallen. It remained steady while Valerius knelt at its side and spread his officer’s cloak wide, and removed his helmet with deliberate ceremony and offered his knee for Breaca to mount so that it looked to the watching warriors as if they had arranged it ahead to show how Rome must kneel before the Boudica’s greater strength.

They cheered for that as well, and gave her time again to catch her breath.

She looked better mounted; she had always fought best on horseback. The morning sun caught the copper of her hair and set light to it so that even sick-grey and slick with the sweat of old fevers, with the mist leaching the colour from the air and a pale-washed horse beneath her, she shone as the watchers expected.

What followed had not been prepared at all, except that each of those who had cared for Breaca had imagined something like this, and had prayed for it, and had come ready to act if the moment allowed.

Thus, Airmid lifted up the torc of the Eceni, which had been saved from the procurator’s looting, and set it about Breaca’s neck so that it, too, caught the sun and blazed gold, marking her as royal and, more than that, lending her the strength of her lineage. Ardacos gave her a new shield painted with the mark of the serpent-spear in red on Eceni blue and Valerius passed her the blade with the serpent-spear hilt that they had retrieved from beneath Briga’s altar.

“Warriors of the war host, you who have gathered in the name of victory…”

She could not be heard by the full five thousand, no-one expected that, but she sent her words to reach the oath-holders and spear-leaders and clan chiefs who stood as of right in the front lines of the massed host and could be relied on to repeat her message, word for word, to their followers.

“As you know, the legionaries of the Twentieth have been ordered out of Camulodunum and are marching west to aid the governor’s war against Mona. The time is ripe now to attack the city that Rome claims as her capital in our land. We have only to rid ourselves first of the Ninth legion, the legionaries who wait in their fortress to the north and will move swiftly to attack us at the first word of insurrection…”

It was better than Valerius had dared hope. He stepped back from the horse and listened to a woman who was barely fit to fight a full day’s battle nevertheless speak of leading five thousand untrained warriors to war and victory as if these two were certain; who, better than that, was able to reduce to a few, crisp, god-filled sentences the arguments of half the previous night and make them sound as if they were planned policy, as if Cunomar’s act of madness, and the risks that followed from it, were part of a strategy set in motion months, if not years, in advance.

“…my son Cunomar, who had the honour to strike the first blows of this war…”

She stretched out her arm and Cunomar came to stand beside his mother, a tall, lean youth, made taller by the hand’s length of lime-stiffened hair set straight up from his head. He wore only a waist skin held in place by his knife belt and the marks of the she-bear were freshly painted about his body. Even for those who knew the ways of the bear cult, he stood apart as something new and different, or possibly very old, which was worth more.

The loss of his ear was part of that difference. He was no longer beautiful in the way he had been when Valerius knew him in Rome and Gaul. Then, he had been a bitter, clumsy child, living in the shadow of his father’s genius, for ever striving to match the legend, not the reality. His beauty had been of the fragile kind that graced the Roman salons, so that only those who wished the best for him could have said there was a promise of strength at the core.

Valerius had not been one of those, and Cunomar’s growth to adulthood had been the first of several surprises that had greeted his return to the Eceni.

The youth who had faced him in the meetings of the past month, who had returned the night before to the council circle reeking of smoke and victory, was not the child he had so pitied on a beachhead in Gaul. The voice that had spoken against him until dawn was no longer strident with the arrogance of youth, but the clear product of Mona’s training, incised with the clarity of rhetoric. More than that, somewhere in the harsh mountains and caves of the Caledonii, the elders of the she-bear had taught Cunomar patience and a quiet, prideful dignity that had given his words a weight beyond his years.

He stood now beside his mother in front of five thousand warriors, many of them older by a decade, and that same dignity let him bear the disfigurement of his wounds as if they were honour scars; his missing ear flowered in its ugliness at the side of his head and his back was a mess of part-healed wounds that would never knit cleanly and even so, there was not one amongst those watching who did not either wish him as a son or desire him as a lover.

“…we have languished twenty years under Roman rule, forbidden to train our warriors in the arts of battle. Thus we must find ways to confront them that allow the youths amongst us to learn from the battle-hardened. Above all, we must not, yet, face the legions in a full-pitched battle. To give them such an advantage would be to wreak our own destruction and we…”

Valerius closed his eyes and gave thanks to both his gods. That had been the hardest part of the night: to sit in the presence of Cunomar and his smoke-filled victory and say over and over, “The Ninth are behind us, Camulodunum in front. We cannot allow them to come at us from two sides and we cannot, we must not attempt to take them on in full battle. We are not yet fit. We never will be.”

Quietly, Cunomar had said, “We are nearly five thousand, the strength of a legion, and growing daily. Soon we will outnumber them.”

“And we could be ten thousand, or twenty, and we would still lose. We are not the strength of a legion, we are five thousand poorly armed, untrained warriors fighting on tales of past glory. This is what Rome does best. This is what the legions are for; they train for it from the first day of their recruitment until the last day before they retire; to stand in line with their shields locked and their gladii in the fine gaps between and walk through and past and over the bodies of those foolish enough to think they can break a Roman shield wall. Even when they have civil war, their generals do everything they can to avoid setting one legion against another. To attack them with anything less is suicide. While I live, I will not see it happen.”

Valerius had been tired, still caught in the feeling of the gods’ pool, or he would not have said that last. Cunomar had not challenged him on it, or offered combat to the death, only stared impassively from the far side of the fire, and touched a single finger to his missing ear. Even if Graine had not spoken of it earlier, Valerius would have known him in that moment as an enemy, and would have regretted it as deeply.

There was no time, then, to remake and mend a relationship gone sour, and no time either, now, before the war host, to question the wisdom of the Boudica as she stretched out her other arm saying, “…such a thing can only be done by my brother, Valerius, who was once Bán, son to Luain mac Calma, Elder of Mona, who sent him back to us to be our aid against Rome.”

He had no choice but to go to her side, to stand there with his Roman helmet on his arm and his Roman chain mail bright in the sun and let the gathered warriors make what they would of the contrast between the Boudica’s son in all the naked glory of his wounding and her once-enemy brother who, almost alone of her council, was whole and unharmed by Rome’s assaults.

Nobody threw a spear at him; that much was good. A great many turned openly to spit against the wind and more made the sign against evil. He might have stepped back, but that Cygfa came uninvited to his side, and the mood of the host changed again at the sight of her; even more than the Boudica’s son, the Boudica’s elder daughter was known to them all, and what had been done to her.

She smiled at him with evident warmth, as if he were a trusted friend, which was an entirely new experience. Through it, she said, “Do as I do,” and began to unfasten her belt.

Caught, he did so, and hid his surprise when, in a gesture as laden with meaning as any that morning, Cygfa swept off her sword and handed it to him, exchanging her weapon for his.

The crowd approved that, if not rapturously, then at least without the frigid mistrust of before.

It was enough. They stepped apart and Cunomar was there, this time, to find a graceful way to help his mother dismount.

Left alone with Cygfa and the eyes of the host elsewhere, Valerius said, “Why did you do that? You have as much reason to loathe me as Cunomar does.”

“But I don’t want to lead the war host. And I do want it to be led by someone who understands what it is we face. I love my brother, and respect him as a warrior, but he is not yet fit to lead us to victory against the legions.”

Valerius said, “Breaca will do that.”

“Perhaps.”

Cygfa was daughter to Caradoc, and bore his stamp far more than Cunomar. Her hair was the colour of the noon-sky sun and her eyes the grey of new iron. Nothing was hidden in them. She was in pain and had been and would continue to be; and it was overridden entirely by the strength of her hate.

She said, “I saw you fight on the beachhead in Gaul,” as if that answered more than it asked.

Gaul: the land where her father lived in exile; the land from which Valerius had fled, taking Caradoc’s place on the boat.

He said, “I think Gaul is best forgotten.”

“Which is why it never will be.” Her gaze was not kind. “You were half drunk and rotten to the core with self-hate. Half the time you were riding a horse you had never seen before and you had a child clinging on to your back and you still fought as if the gods inspired your blade. Breaca fights like that, when she has the heart for it. My father might have done once, before the emperor’s inquisitors broke him. I have never seen it in anybody else. They say you are a dreamer, given to Nemain, but I think you are a warrior first and that you were born for this. You have lived with the legions and know them as no-one else does, and now you are here, bringing all of that knowledge to us that we may use it against them.”

“You trust me not to betray you,” he said, in wonder. “There are very few others amongst the war host who do.”

“I have seen the lengths to which you will go to keep an oath. That, too, was a part of Gaul.”

Her horse was there, the bay colt he had begun to help her train. She mounted it neatly and swung it round to face him.

“If we did not need you so very badly, I might hate you, but Rome takes up all of my hating. I will do what I must, support whom I must, to rid my land of that evil. Afterwards, maybe, I can hate you. If I am alive to do the hating. If you are alive to take it.”

She gave the salute of the warrior so that all watching could see it and spun her horse away from him. Valerius watched the place where she had been for a long time before he broke the seal on the messenger’s satchel and read the message from Camulodunum to the legate of the IXth legion. Presently, when no-one came to disturb him, he searched for and found the spare vellum and ink that was always kept in a messenger’s pouch, knelt on a patch of clean turf and began to write.

The messenger lay at the edge of the path, stripped naked now, as the gods had made him. Cunomar and a girl warrior of his she-bear strapped stones to his elbows, knees and belly and lifted him up and swung him sideways. The marsh took his body, sucking it down to a cold and quiet rest.

Valerius listened for help in the soft sounds of the death-wash and offered the necessary prayers to both his gods, that carried in the wake of the dead, and might be more easily heard.

A horse shifted restively behind him. A shadow crossed his path. Without turning he said to his sister, “That was well done. They’re different when you’re with them. If I don’t return—”

“You said there was no risk.” There was a thread of fear in the bluntness of that.

He stilled the flutterings in his own belly. For Breaca, if for no-one else, he could be confident. “There has to be some risk or your warriors will not believe I have offered my life in their cause. But I don’t intend to die, I swear it; in you, in this war, I have found a reason to live that outweighs everything. The Ninth legion must be brought south by a route that leaves it vulnerable. That won’t happen unless they are led into it by someone they trust.”

“And if they don’t trust you? If they recognize you and crucify you for twice-treachery? What then?”

She had asked the same, with the same urgency, in the counsels of the night. The answer was no more easily found now than then. Valerius touched the crook of his thumb to the brand on his sternum that was his first link to the bull-god. He felt no warning there, nor any intimations of death approaching unseen. The gods did not always show such things, but there was a measure of expectation which needed him to act with courage to sway the order of things.

To Breaca, quite reasonably, he said, “You’ve just finished explaining to the war host how much honour this brings on your family. They’d tie me to a tree and throw spears at me for cowardice if I backed out now. For that alone, I can’t. And I truly do think I am safe. Petillius Cerialis is legate of the Ninth and he has been in Britannia less than a year; he knows nothing of a decurion who once served in the Thracian cavalry. The men he leads have been stationed north of here since the invasion, keeping watch equally on the Eceni and on the northern tribes; they don’t know any more than he does of the politics of Camulodunum and the west. I am nothing to them, just a messenger.”

He touched the vellum that lay drying on his knee. “The message says what we need it to say. I’ve copied the best flourishes of the original. Listen—”

Valerius smoothed out the perfect, unblemished kidskin, best of the Emperor’s office, and read, “From Titus Aquilla, primus pilus of the Twentieth legion, in the governor’s absence acting commander of the colony of Camulodunum, site of the temple to the deified Claudius, site of our unblemished victory over the native Trinovantes—et cetera et cetera. A man promoted above his abilities and certain of it, clearly—to Quintus Petillius Cerialis Caesius Rufus, legate, the Ninth legion. Greetings.

“War is upon us. A watchtower is burning even as I write, the men within it dead and defiled. The emperor’s procurator of taxes is missing and our veterans fear for his life. The Eceni king is dead, and his people remember who they were in the times before we blessed them with peace. We are not in a position to remind them of their folly. Camulodunum is stripped of its defences and its men. I have less than one century of acting legionaries, and three thousand veterans whose courage is beyond reproach but who are no longer young men, fit for sustained battle. If it please you to remember the emperor’s justice, we will offer whatever aid we can.”

With cautious optimism, Valerius said, “The legate of the Ninth is known across the empire for his impetuosity. Men say he prays daily for the chance to march his men into battle. He’ll weep tears of raw frankincense when he reads this. He’ll offer his worldly goods to the gods as a mark of his gratitude. He’ll have the Ninth legion at muster and marching down the ancestors’ Stone Way before they have time to kiss goodbye to their lovers. All we have to do is contrive some visible injuries so that I look as if I’ve fought for my life. Could you bring yourself to hit me, do you think?”