CHAPTER 15

The IXth legion is destroyed. The serpent-spear is awakened in the east. The Boudica battles Rome and the gods guide her hand. Freedom is there to be taken. Join us and be part of the taking…

Word spread fast as fire, carried by traders who pushed their dray horses hard to be first at each steading with the news, and by youthful warriors with red-quilled war feathers newly woven into their hair who ran barefoot for home with tales of their own successes and of the deaths in battle—always with honour—of their shield-mates, lovers, cousins and siblings.

The traders returned early from shorter journeys than they had planned, with goods in which they did not normally deal. They drove into the site of the horse fair with iron and salt and wool and hides and more iron, and took less than half their worth in gold or silver or all of it in promises of corn to be paid when the battles were over.

Not to be outdone, the youths returned in their hundreds with other siblings, lovers, cousins, parents and friends and promises of yet more to come when the spring planting was over, or perhaps before then; after all, who needed to plant corn when the granaries of Camulodunum, Caesaromagus, Canovium and Verulamium would soon be broken open and the grain they held returned to those who had worked to harvest it and yet starved for its lack through the cold winters under the heel of Rome?

Others began to gather who were not of the Eceni: Coritani and Votadini from the west and north, Silures and Ordovices from the west, Dumnonii and Durotriges from the far southwestern toe of the land.

Warriors came whose tribes had been enemies for generations, and learned in days not only to share each other’s fires, but to share food and exercise and the teachings of war with a half-wing of Batavian cavalry.

A few shared all these things with the Boudica’s half-Roman brother. Those who could not stomach it chose to train only with her bright-haired son. Efforts were made by those whose business it was to oversee such things to ensure that the war host did not become divided so early in the conflict. They were not wholly successful.

Other matters arose, of greater moment. Rumours began of a second assault by the IXth legion. Very quickly, those who were most competent were despatched to guard the trackways north and west. These killed eight messengers within two days, all of whom bore pleas for urgent help from Petillius Cerialis to the governor of all Britannia. After the head of the eighth man to die was returned in the saddle packs of his horse, no others were sent.

No avenging cohorts marched south, either. Once, it seemed as if a war party of Batavians was going to assault the war host, but the latter’s luck held and there were Batavians guarding the road that day who recognized their former comrades and persuaded them to listen to their petition and so the host gained another one hundred cavalry, who preferred to fight for Civilis against Rome than for Henghes in the name of the emperor.

The rumours changed and said that Petillius Cerialis, legate of the IXth, had withdrawn to his winter quarters and sat watching the sea rise and fall with the tides. In time, they said that he had sacked the Iberian stonemason, but not until the foundations of the baths had been thoroughly waterlogged.

Five or six days after the burning of the watchtowers, a trickle of incomers began to arrive from the south, from the city of Camulodunum. First in ones and twos and then in handfuls, poorly armed and nervous, men and women of the Trinovante walked and rode up to the site of the Eceni horse fair where the war host was massing.

They came first as refugees, fearing the attack that was so plainly coming, driving wagons, carrying sacks with live chickens, herding cattle. Only later did they dare to offer themselves in war. When they did, there were two thousand of them, and they took to battle training faster than those who had not lived as closely in the shadow of Rome.

Before the month’s end, all those who had fallen had been replaced and the number of the war host was once more at five thousand. By the first quarter of the next moon, it had grown by half as much again. Not one of those who arrived bore any news of the Boudica’s younger daughter, although all had heard of her journey to Mona. A child and three warriors, it seemed, had passed through the land unseen. The Coritani were ready to praise the scouting skills of Hawk, who could hide himself in a black cloak on a snowfield and could easily conceal three adults and a child. Others noted that Dubornos and Gunovar had both trained on Mona and that either was completely capable of remaining hidden if they did not choose to be seen. No-one spoke openly or in quiet of the other alternative, which is that all four were dead.

The war host was divided by those who had responsibility for their training. Two thousand of the most able warriors were left with Civilis and his Batavians to keep watch on the routes by which the IXth legion might yet decide to attack. The Boudica, mounted on a bay colt that was a gift from her daughter, led the remaining host south towards the place once named sacred to the war god Camul, later Cunobelin’s dun and most lately Camulodunum, Rome’s capital city in the province of Britannia.

Over five thousand warriors made camp in the valley of the Heron’s Foot, at the place where three rivers joined to become one; where, in the days before Rome’s invasion, the boundaries of Eceni, Trinovante and Catuvellauni lands had joined, leaving the valley owned equally by all three tribes and thus by none, which made it the province of the gods; where, nevertheless, a party of Eceni had been attacked on the valley’s sacred soil and seen nearly half their number slain, including Eburovic, father to the Boudica, who was cut down defending his daughter, including also Bán, her younger brother, whose body was stolen from the battlefield so that she believed him dead and mourned him as such for nearly twenty years.

Where, for the first time since ’Tagos died, leaving the world open for rebellion, Breaca took time alone for herself and bathed.

The heron stood at a widening of the river where still waters gathered. An easterly breeze ruffled its reflection. Small fish kissed the surface around it and were ignored.

It blinked, slowly. Breaca lay on her back in the flowing cold and let her hair stream into the weed and watched her own reflection vanish and appear again in the arc of its eye.

A shadow slid up her body and blocked the weak spring sun from her face. Without moving, she said, “Luain mac Calma always seemed to be more heron than man. Has he sent this one to us, do you think?”

“Possibly. I would prefer to think he would send a flesh-and-blood messenger if he needed to pass a message urgently to any of us, but I would never be sure.”

Airmid stood on the bank, a hand’s reach from the bird, which did not move. She was tall as the Elder of Mona, and as lean, but there was nothing of the heron in her. Increasingly, since the procurator’s attack, there was less of the frog that was her dream and more of Nemain, daughter to Briga, god of water and of the moon, of healing and dreams and all that had been lost to Graine.

When she thought of the god now, Breaca thought of Airmid; the two had become inseparable. That, amongst other things, accounted for the new distance between them.

The dreamer came closer and sat down on the soft earth. Pulling a stem of grass to chew, she said, “If he needed to send a message about Graine, he would surely use something more certain, but he has no need of that yet. Word has come from Dubornos and Hawk, sent with a salt trader: Graine and those who went with her are safe.”

…Graine…safe…

The words met Breaca in a slide of cold water, seeping through her bones to her soul. The river washed her face and she wanted to weep and could not; as far as she could remember, she had not wept since the Roman procurator had first ridden into the steading with his veterans at his back.

From the distant place that was the land, Airmid said, “The message was sent from among the southern Ordovices. They’re taking Graine south, to where Gunovar’s people, the Durotriges and the Dumnonii, have control of the land. The Second legion has a fortress there, but they’re under permanent siege and dare not step far beyond its walls; it is as safe as anywhere in Britannia for the Boudica’s daughter. Graine can take ship there for Mona, if there’s any point, or for Hibernia if mac Calma has evacuated the island before she gets there.”

She was talking for the sound of her voice more than the words it contained, as Valerius had done through the days of the fever. Her voice was smoother than his, the quality of love quite different. Even so, it was not as it had been.

After a while, when Breaca floated and said nothing, Airmid fell silent. The river whispered between them. Early bees danced to the catkins hanging over the water. The heron ceased to blink and uncurled its neck. Its beak shattered the surface, fast as any sword thrust. The fish it speared was fat and brown and thrashed the water white before it died. The bird swallowed and became disfigured in the neck and then smooth again. It roused its feathers and blinked and rose from the water and was a spear against the clouds and then gone.

Breaca rolled over until she lay facedown in the water and stayed there until the cold made her cheeks stiff. Surfacing, she swam to the edge and accepted Airmid’s hand to lift her onto the bank. The air seemed hot after the chill water. She scrubbed herself dry with her tunic and slid it on. Her back was a mess of scabs. Some of them broke open as she moved, but the cold had taken away most of the pain and the warm wind had not yet brought it back again.

She sat against a tree and used the frayed end of a twig to clean the grime from beneath her fingernails. It was not possible to talk; too much time had passed with too little said for her to find the words, nor, in honesty, did she want to.

Sometime later, into the cold quiet, Airmid said, “Should I name your fears aloud for you? Would it make them any less?”

“No.” Breaca studied her hands. Resentment made her chest tight. She had not expected intrusion from Airmid, of all people. She said, “I am a warrior who has lost her taste for war. Naming it will not help, nor make it easier to bear.” Her nails were clean. She laid the twig in a circle of sunlight, bounded by shadow, and turned so that, for the first time, she might see and be seen.

Airmid was close. She smelled of hawthorn smoke and lanolin and, beneath that, of herself. Side on, her face was strong in the river light, perfect, unscarred and beautiful; and her lashes were wet.

Breaca said, “What is it?”

“Should I name my fears aloud for you?” Airmid smiled wryly. “Everything. Nothing. War. Graine. You. You’re gone and I don’t know how to reach you. Naming that doesn’t help it, either.”

Breaca’s hand lay quiet by the cleaning stick. She moved it, just enough. After a moment, long, clever fingers intertwined with her own. A hand that knew every part of her better than she knew herself eased the muscles on her shoulder, avoiding the worst of the scars.

The voice that was the bedrock of her life was cracked, which was not something she had ever expected to hear.

Through faster tears, Airmid said, “You are the Boudica. You do what you are born to do. The rest of us support you as we may, which is what we were born to do. And we have failed. You are not healed.”

She had not expected this, was not ready for it. Baldly, she said, “You’ve done everything you can, you and Valerius both.”

“But it’s not enough.”

With care, Breaca leaned back and put her shoulders to the tree. She untwined her fingers and used both hands to rub her face free of the anger that had moulded it. She was tired more than angry, and grief weighed at her, for the loss of Graine, for the loss of the self she had been.

“Perhaps it’s as much as can be done. I’m alive; I can wield a blade. I can ride now, at the speed needed for battle. I can be present, and can perhaps not die, at least while the war host grows and until either it comes to recognize in Valerius the leader they need and want, or Cunomar grows into himself and shows the leadership he has within him. If one of these happens soon, it will be enough.”

“Enough to let you die, Breaca? Is that what you want? It seems like it to those of us who care for you.”

She had not expected that, either. A lone bee wove a random path through the catkins and came to settle near her knee. When it rose again, she said, “I don’t know. I want not to have to pretend to be what I was, and am no longer. Perhaps death is the way to do that.”

She reached blindly for Airmid’s hand and traced the lines on the palm with her thumb. “Do you think death is an ending? That’s not what the Elders of Mona teach. For them, the fish is gone but only in this life and this world. In other times and other lives, it will be the heron and the heron will be the fish, or both, or neither. You speak all the time with the elder grandmother, who died on the day I left childhood. Would she say that death was an ending?”

“She might say that there was a right time, and that leaving early for self-pity was not the act of the woman she delivered to adulthood.”

Breaca had not expected sharpness, when she had set aside her own anger. There was a moment when it would have been possible to fall back to that again, to find escape into fury.

She shook her head. “Don’t. I don’t want to fight with you. We have little enough time together as it is.”

“We’re not together. I can’t reach you. I don’t know how.”

“Then perhaps I should try to reach you.”

They were still too far apart. Breaca took hold of Airmid’s fingers and, turning, found that she was neither as stiff nor as sore as she had thought. After a while, she turned again and lay down with her head cushioned on Airmid’s knee, so that it was possible to look up at her without straining her neck.

She had forgotten what it was simply to lie together in peace, without need, or pressing urgencies. Airmid’s fingers combed her hair dry. Airmid’s pulse beat under her ear. Above, Airmid’s necklace of silvered frog bones sparked against Airmid’s skin. It had been broken in two places by the procurator’s men. Someone with skill had mended it. Breaca traced the line with her finger, and then the skin beneath, and thought, but did not say, how much easier it was to heal silver than flesh and bone and the soul beneath, but then silver had no soul and was destined for ever to be silver when flesh and blood were long gone and the soul had moved to other things.

After a while, thoughtfully, she said, “If we go into this war fearing death, death will come seeking us; that’s always the way in battle. If we die early, the war will fail and generations after us will live under Roman rule, cursing our names. If we succeed, we’ll die anyway, in time. I would rather go to Briga leaving the land free behind me, if I have the ability to choose. I’m not sure that I do, and I’ve never been unsure before. That’s more terrifying than anything.”

She stopped then, because it was more than she had meant to say; more than she had thought since the moment of waking from the fever.

Airmid’s hands lay loose in her lap. She looked down at them, at the broken, reddened skin with white engrained in the creases from making an ointment or a paste. She said, “I think you are living now as everyone else has lived; knowing your own mortality. Can you fight like that and keep living?”

“I don’t know. I can try.”

There was more peace in that uncertainty than there had been. The day was quiet and the spring sun shone for them and the world was not yet openly at war. It was not the same as it had once been, but they sat, and then lay, together at the river’s edge and for a while each found solace, and some healing of grief, in the other.

Later, nearer to dusk, Breaca went in search of her brother.

She followed the drifting smoke and the scents of the cooking fires and the sound of almost-battle and found him in the centre of the horse fair’s clearing, surrounded by youths in their dozens, possibly hundreds, armed with sword blades, shields and spears. There were less of them than there had been; each day more learned who he was and what he had been and left him to train with Cunomar, or Ardacos, or any of the other spear-leaders with experience of war.

Those who had not heard, or were able to see beyond the past, stood in rows, blade against blade, spear against blade, blade against spear, and clashed with muted enthusiasm while Valerius watched and encouraged and tried to keep them from injury. Seeing Breaca, he gave his place to Cygfa, and stepped to the side.

His eyes probed her much as Airmid’s had done. He said, “You have heard news of Graine?” and Breaca was not certain if she should be grateful that he could read her so well, or disappointed that she was so open to be read.

“Dubornos sent word with a salt trader. She’s alive and safe.” Even now, the newness of that had not yet worn off. She looked past him to where a half-line of young warriors had stepped back on Cygfa’s order and were resetting their shields on their arms. She said, “Are they safe yet?”

He laughed, shortly, shaking his head. “They might handle a siege, if we could persuade them to listen to us, but for a full-out attack against the veterans of the Twentieth, fighting through the streets of Camulodunum, no, they would be butchered where they stood. But they’re better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better than today. It’s the best we can hope for. Although we have a new problem.” He pulled a wry face. “Most of them were born in the years after the invasion, and they all have the same name. I shout it once and half a hundred step forward.”

He was eyeing her sideways, in a way that she knew. Wearily, she asked, “Breaca?”

“Indeed. And the boys, of course, are all Caradoc. Slightly under three dozen at the last count. But not only you two. There are thirteen Machas, upwards of a dozen Cygfas and at least five named after Ardacos, although they say it differently here which makes it marginally less confusing. It’s still a nightmare if we hold a mock battle.”

“And will be fatal in the real thing. What are you going to do?”

“Cygfa has asked them all to pick a new name. They’re going to hold a ceremony later, at the rise of the moon. Each of them has to choose something distinct, that sounds different.”

“We had better delay the assault, then—you could be here for days arguing. Do you need to be part of it?”

Valerius ran a hand through his hair. “That would be unwise. Most of them still spit against the wind or make the sign to ward off evil when I pass. They listen to what I say if I give them a good enough reason, but it would be fair to say they are not yet given to me heart and soul as they would need to be to let me name them.”

He was hurt by that; she knew him well enough to see it. She said, “They’ll learn when they see who can best keep them alive,” and then, because there was no avoiding it and she had already delayed too long, “When were you last inside Camulodunum?”

Valerius’ face froze. His lips made a fine white line. A great many memories passed between them, few of them good.

Bleakly, he said, “I was there about a month before Caradoc’s capture. I imagine it will have been sometime around Graine’s birth.”

“Eight years, then. Nearly nine.” It was not easy to meet his eye then, but necessary. She said, “I’ve been there more recently, but things will have changed; wells will have been dug, walls built, the theatre and the temple completed. If we’re to make a proper battle plan, somebody with an eye for strategy really should go in and look before we attack.”

“And? There needs to be a better reason than that. Men have been assaulting cities they half knew for a thousand years without the need to go into them first.”

“And I want to talk to Theophilus to see if he can be persuaded to leave before the fighting starts. His apprentices came with the last wagonload of refugees, but he’s wedded to his hospital and thinks he can’t leave. He sent us warning of the procurator’s coming; without him we’d have lost the full war host. The Eceni have never abandoned their friends in times of war. I don’t want to start now.”

He was beginning to read her as she could read him. The planes of his face softened. “Could you tolerate company or must you go alone?”

“Why else am I here?” Unexpectedly, she found herself smiling. “I would welcome your company if it were offered.”