CHAPTER 24

The dead man lay facedown in the water. His hair was spread out round his head like the fronds of a sea anemone, pulsing a little with the rock of the waves. It was a dirty yellow, the colour of old straw, which was no help at all in identifying him; he could as easily have been Siluran, a friend whose body should be retrieved and given cleanly to Briga, or one of the Batavian cavalrymen who should perhaps be taken care of with more respect for Corvus’ sake if nothing else, as one of the straw-headed Romans who littered the XXth legion, a product of their time in northern lands. If he were that, then there was no reason he could not be left slowly to sink and feed Manannan’s creatures in thanks for help in the battle.

Graine sat on the end of Mona’s jetty with her feet dangling just above the lap of the water and watched him bump gently against the oak pillar. He wore no armour, but that said nothing; half the legionaries had abandoned their armour on the outward crossing when they saw the anger of the gods’ sea. For men who lived and died by the sword, death by drowning was something to be feared almost as much as death by fire; better to face warriors unarmoured than fall into the hungry water and sink while still living.

An upturned barge nudged at the dead man, as a cow herds her calf, pushing him farther out to sea. The body spun a little, limbs outspread like a starfish. The right arm was missing from the elbow down. Blood leaked out in lazy threads to stain the barnacles and the green-grey weed. There was a tattoo that curled up towards his armpit. It tugged at old memories but not clearly. Nothing came clearly; the horror of battle had brought the workings of her mind to a halt and she had not found a way to start them again. She stared at the water and tried at least to pray. She failed at that, too.

“He’s Batavian. I heard him fall.” Bellos came to sit beside her. He had a staff, which was a new thing; long and twisted and painted. She thought it might be hawthorn but could not be sure. It looked like Luain mac Calma’s work: a gift from before the battle, perhaps. She borrowed it and reached down into the water and used the ram’s horn handle at the end of it to hook the man’s shoulder and turn him over so that his face could be seen. His mouth fell open. His teeth were white and very even. He could still have been Siluran.

Graine said, “How do you know who he was when you can’t see him?”

There was a small gap, time enough for her to realize she had been rude, and that he did not mind, but was concerned about how he should answer. At length, he said, “His ghost is still near.”

She should have known that. The battlefield was crowded with the ghosts of the dead and she knew them only by the deadness blanketing her mind. She said, “I think perhaps I know now what it is to be blind in the land of the sighted.”

Bellos was gentle and easy and tolerant. His day had been better than he could have prayed for; she had watched him stride along the beachhead, directing the dreamers as if he was as sighted as any of them. Only once did she see him stumble and that was because a horse had gone down and its thrashing hooves came too close to his head.

He said, “No, you don’t. But you are perhaps deaf when others can hear. It’s not the same, but it’s not easy. Did you want to know more of him?” He took back his stick and dried the handle on his cloak. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “He was a cavalryman. His horse was killed earlier in the day and Corvus gave him another. He stayed close to the decurion because of it and so lived when the sea came to eat them. One of the legionaries attacked him when Corvus brought his troop across to escort them back to the mainland. He was too far into the dream to know friend from foe.”

“The legionary or the cavalryman?”

“Both. But the cavalry were recovering by the time this one died; they could see enough through the smoke to know land from sea and they were not all caught in the havoc of the nightmares as the legionaries were. Corvus understood what was happening. It was good that your vision in the fire said to leave him alive.”

That was what was wrong. Graine’s stomach twisted in on itself so that she felt sick. She said, “This wasn’t what I saw in the fire. In the fire, the cavalry and all of the legionaries killed each other, to the last one. Not one of them was left alive.”

She looked out across the straits. Far away, near the shores of the mainland, the first of the Roman barges was backing water with the leeward oars, turning broadside to bring wounded and exhausted men as close to the shore as they could safely go so they would not have to disembark in deep water. Corvus had marshalled them and they had left under his command, in something approaching good order. It was nothing like the ending she had woven in the fire.

She said, “The governor only sent half of his men to attack us and half of those have gone back again. In the fire, two legions died on Mona. We should have killed them all.”

This time, Bellos took far longer to answer. Long enough for the nudging barge to herd the Batavian cavalryman out to the wide water of the straits where the currents caught him and began slowly to spin him, and then faster, drawing him down with each revolution until the spiral of straw that was his hair was gone too far beneath the water to see.

She felt a sudden tug in her midriff and a hollowness as of a room made suddenly empty. Because she was angry, she said, “Thorn lived. I saw you say goodbye to her, as if you thought she might not.”

“That was for later.” Bellos was being remarkably patient with her. “No-one lives for ever and there is no harm, ever, in catching the joy of a day while it lasts.”

He leaned over and trailed the tip of his staff in the water, carving a furrow. More seriously, he said, “If we had not spared Corvus, then very likely the legionaries would have killed each other to the last man as they did in your vision. Certainly they were still held in the dream when he got them in the barges and made them leave. He’s a good man with an understanding of the gods, so I’m not sorry that he was left alive, but it may be that we have altered something that will change the futures beyond what you saw.”

She had already thought about that. She said, “I didn’t see Corvus being killed when I looked in the fire. And I did see two legions attack Mona. Today, the governor only sent the Twentieth. He did not hold back the Fourteenth because of us.”

“No. And you saw Valerius and Cygfa lead the charge on the foreshore, but not the Boudica. It seems to me that perhaps you saw two things at once, that part of it was for today and that the rest is to come at some other time. Even if not, we can do nothing to change what has happened, only live with what is given us.”

Bellos stood. His staff came to the top of his head. The ram’s horn was carved in the shape of a crow’s head, with amber for the eyes. Small points of fire, they sparked in the sun. Snakes twisted below, rising and falling along its length.

Graine said, “Mac Calma has marked you for Briga.”

He smiled, gently. “I think the marking was done a long time ago. The Elder has simply made it clear for even me to see. Shall we go before it gets too dark? The legions won’t be back today. Possibly not even tomorrow, and by the day after perhaps we will know why things happened as they did. Or we won’t, and we’ll fight again, but it will be against men beaten once, which is to our advantage, not theirs.”

He extended his hand; an apology for slights that were not his fault, an offering of help, a promise of support.

Graine took it and let him raise her up to her feet and they walked back towards the great-house along paths that he could feel and she could see, where plantain was beginning to spread and the cow parsley to scatter white flowers like frost now that the hawthorn was past, and a curlew rose, piping, from the higher reach of the beach and soared back over the salted grass of the paddocks to the new-growth greens of the heather and birch beyond.

Along the way, she saw a sword on the shoreline and ran back for it, so that, for the first time in her life, she walked in dusk towards the dreamers’ place with a blade in her hand.

Corvus had dropped his sword, and so was unable to fall on it, which was unfortunate, when he had just pledged his life as a sacrifice to the sea.

He waded out of the water and watched his mare sink to her knees and then her side on the hard rock of the mainland. He sank to his own knees beside her and kept a hand on her heart. The beat rose faint to his touch and unsteady, but it was there. That mattered above everything; above Ursus and Sabinius and Flavius and how they had fared on the long, desperate swim back, above the men of the XXth legion who had heeded him through the fog of their nightmares and had brought themselves home across the mile of hungry ocean to safety. Most assuredly above the towering presence of the governor, Suetonius Paulinus, by the emperor’s pleasure, and courtesy of the emperor’s waning patience, governor of all Britannia, charged with the task of subduing the west or dying in the attempt.

The governor had not died in the attempt. Three thousand men had done so, to very little effect. Something close to two thousand others had returned from the battle alive but beaten. The governor, evidently, did not consider this to be any kind of victory and it was well known that he did not tolerate defeat.

He stood on the strand at the margins of the heather and the rock with his hands clasped tightly before him and his face was set as if already carved in monumental marble. Without looking down to where Corvus knelt, he said, “Prefect, you will present yourself.”

Corvus pushed himself to standing. His teeth were chattering and would not stop. His flesh shook like a man with palsy. His hand dropped out of habit to the place where his sword hilt should have hung. With some effort, he remembered that he had unbuckled it and dropped it on the shores of Mona just before he set his mare back into the waves in a place where the currents were clearly lethal and already two barges had overturned.

In a world and at a time when he was certain of nothing from the solidity of the ground beneath his feet to the identities of the men at his side who had begun to take on the shapes of ravens, he had thought dropping the mass of iron bound to his waist a remarkable act of sanity. A part of him thought so still.

“Have you ever seen a decimation?”

The governor’s face was very close. The bloodshot eyes were watering in the wind. Rage, or that same wind, had turned his nose red as a cock’s comb and set it streaming with mucus. He looked like a mummer in a Greek farce.

As it happened, Corvus had, indeed, seen a decimation. The memory was carefully buried in the far reaches of his mind where it was not likely to emerge without warning and unman him. He was very careful not to think of it now. He said, “No.”

The sea still washed through his ears and throat and sinuses. It juddered in his eyes so that he had trouble focusing, or perhaps that was the aftermath of the dreamers’ smoke; he had not been able to focus clearly on Mona, either.

It was the sea, not the island, that had crippled his senses; his nose and throat had been scoured by the brine leaving only deadness behind. Ursus was close by and Corvus could not smell the Dacian wolfskin. There was a time, less than a day before, when he would have thought that a miracle. Now, it seemed yet one more waystone on the path to disaster. He considered the strangeness of a world without scent and, for a moment, it mattered more than the governor’s threat.

“Corvus…”

Corvus sighed, and took no trouble to hide it. On the lee shore of Mona, he had stared into the eyes and hearts of things worse than death. Luain mac Calma had promised life, not sanity, and his protection had not extended to saving the integrity of Corvus’ mind.

Wearily, he said, “The second governor, Scapula, threatened decimation of the Twentieth at Camulodunum when the Eceni were in revolt. He decided then that he did not have sufficient authority. These men are in the grip of the water and the dreamers. They are too exhausted to walk; most of them can barely stand. Even if they could hear you, I doubt if they are physically capable of drawing lots, and if they did, I don’t think you could find any nine of them fit to lift a club to the tenth. In any case, none of those who have lived through the hell on the shores of Mona is willingly going to slaughter a friend who stood at his side. The Fourteenth could do it, but if you set the men of one legion to kill those of another, you will cause a rift that will last beyond our lifetimes, however long we may live.”

The governor’s gaze darted round the bay and came back to Corvus. He inhaled and clearly regretted it; doubtless Ursus’ wolfskin was close, and wet from the sea, which would not enhance its odour. He said, “I do not consider myself likely to see the luxury of a long old age, and less so after today. We must take this island and wipe out all those who live there, or we die. We may die in the taking, but it will be better than what will happen at Caesar’s hand if we return defeated. Have you no stronger reason why I should not visit the wrath of Rome on the men who have failed me?”

And so Corvus said the rest of what he had understood as he had dragged himself out of the water and realized that bringing half a legion of men back alive from the teeth of Hades was not going to be enough.

Quietly, distinctly, knowing what he did, he said, “You have not earned the right. You were not there to face the enemy with them.”

He saw the blow coming and did nothing to dodge it. The hilt of the governor’s knife took him on the left temple where his helmet might have protected him had he not thrown that, too, onto the shingle of Mona.

He felt the shock and sudden anger that always came when he was hit and then a long, long fall that lasted an aeon and was time enough to see the faces of those he would want to meet when eventually he was allowed to die. He did not think that would be soon, not given the depth of the governor’s temper. He saw Ursus, looking concerned, and was not sure if that was in his mind or not. Then he saw Valerius, riding his mad horse and knew he had fainted and so felt free after Valerius had gone to embrace the dark-haired Alexandrian who had given him the falcon of Horus as a parting gift and never come back. Last, he saw his mother, which surprised him, and then not: he had landed as an enemy on Briga’s land; it was right that a mother should come to see his ending.

The Batavians were celebrating, and somebody had killed a pig.

The sound of drunken singing came and went in a rocking rhythm, more sonorous than the sea. It matched the throbbing pain in his head, focused on the left temple. The smell of gutted swine waxed and waned to the same tempo, and failed entirely to cover the stench of wet wolfskin that lined his nose and his head and his lungs, thick and pungent as month-old fish. Corvus lay still, savouring the ugly mix of flavours, and was grateful that he was not going to have to die without the power of smell to remember the world by.

He lay under cover, which surprised him. An uncertain rain stammered on a tent hide above his head, slurring the Batavians’ choruses. Beneath the rankness of the wolfhide, the air smelled pleasantly damp. He lay on linen and was no longer in his armour. Someone had undressed and washed him; his face felt clear and clean and he no longer tasted brine when he licked his lips. He could not bring himself to open his eyes, but the crisp bite of the air spoke of night.

He was not in pain, that was the second surprise, except for his head, which had been broken open like an egg and was leaking his thoughts out onto the floor in a tumbling mess. That had happened before and Theophilus had treated the headaches that ground him down. He spent some time thinking of Theophilus and how he would take the news that his friend the prefect had been executed for failing in his duty.

Corvus wanted to reach him, to explain the nature of the sacrifice, willingly given, and the nature of obligation. He wanted it known, more widely than only by Theophilus, that the gods accepted such things in the spirit with which they were offered and that there was no dishonour, however it might seem in the eyes of Rome. The needs of his own pride surprised him; through all the years of battle, with death never farther than the thickness of his skin and the blade that might sever it, he had thought that what mattered was life and the manner of its living, not the nature and time of his death. Luain mac Calma, for whom he had an abiding respect, had said something similar: Take the life that is offered and live it well, by your own heart’s truth.

It occurred to him that Luain mac Calma could see things that he, Corvus, could not and that the dreamer had not meant him to give his life to Manannan of the wild seas, for no better reason than to assuage the anger of another man.

In the never-ending dark, he heard the Elder’s voice, with the god’s sea behind it: If you are careful from here forward, you will meet my son at least once more in this life.

He thought he had been careful. He fell asleep, reaching for Theophilus and for the dreamer, to ask them where the carelessness had been. In the place of no-time, he dreamed of a decimation, and what it was to watch an entire legion in which nine out of every ten men clubbed to death the tenth with whom they had until that moment shared life and bread and battle and, in some cases, a bed and passion and love. In his dream, he was able to stop it, which he had not been in life.

When he woke next, someone who knew how clear air helped his headaches had lifted the tent flap behind his head and left it open to the sky. The breeze stroking his face was a kind one, not the cutting wind of Mona, which had carried the wailing of long-dead men and old women and the insidious smoke. The smell of swine and fresh blood had changed to one of roasting pork, which meant, now he came to think of it, that in his absence someone else had ordered the slaughter of the Quinta Gallorum’s only hog.

A rough, tired voice said, “That took you long enough. He didn’t hit you that hard. I was beginning to think the dreamers had stolen your soul and I’d have to send Flavius swimming back to Mona to find it. He’d go, you know, for you. After today’s work, I think he would follow you to Hades and back and not speak against it.”

“Ursus.” Corvus said it flatly, which was unkind, and smiled to take the sting from it. He had blocked a sword blow that otherwise would have decapitated Flavius. It had not been an act of any particular merit and he had not thought anyone else had seen it. Possibly, none had, and Flavius had spoken of it, which was telling of something, if he could only work out what.

He considered sitting up and thought better of it and stared up instead at the tent hide and then sideways to the small flickering soapstone lamp that cast odd-shaped shadows across his chest. He watched them awhile and saw that the rancid wolfskin lay on him as a covering. Never, in the five years he had known Ursus, had he seen the man allow another so much as a finger’s touch of his talisman.

He said, “I am more grateful than I can say, but you shouldn’t be here. After today, I’m not safe to be with.”

Ursus sat by his head. He grinned, and was upside down so that when he winked he became for a moment the monsters of Mona’s beach and Corvus had to close his eyes to be free of them. Against the black of his lids, he heard Ursus say, “Safe enough until Paulinus is finished talking to the messengers, which could be morning, by all accounts. He doesn’t often get sent word for his own ear by royalty.”

“Royalty?” Corvus sat up too quickly and the world became a deep, unpleasant red. He bent his brow to his knees and breathed through his mouth. Muffled, he said, “Which royalty? Have the Eceni sent a messenger to the governor?”

“Hardly. If Sabinius is correct—and he’s been spending an untoward amount of time fixing the haft back on his standard very close to the back of the governor’s tent—then the message comes from Cartimandua, by the emperor’s very great pleasure queen of the Brigantes. But then there’s also the legate, two tribunes and the first two cohorts of the Second come up from the far southwest on their own initiative. They’re bringing the same message, which means it is probably true.”

Corvus cupped his palms over his eyes and wished he could think more clearly. The pattern of his dreams pressed in on the sides of the tent, so that he could hear men screaming, and then the sudden quiet when it all stopped.

He said, “What was the message? What is it that brings the fighting arm of the Second this far north and a messenger from Cartimandua south before the trade routes are fully open?”

There was no subtlety to Ursus. The news was bubbling out of him before he spoke, washing him with its greatness, and the implications, both personal and political. As a man offering a gift of great value, he said, “The east is in revolt. The Eceni have risen again and are storming Camulodunum. It will be in ashes by now, and after it Canovium, Londinium, Verulamium. Without any legions to stop them, they have a clear run through all the towns south of the river down into the Berikos’ lands that border the sea.”

It was impossible. It was inevitable. These two raced together into his mind and clashed agonizingly in his left temple. “What happened to the Ninth? They hold the east. They could stop any revolt before it began.”

“Not anymore. The Ninth is broken. The Eceni used Arminius’ tactic from the Rhine and cut them to ribbons. What’s left, which is not much, is under siege in the fortress on the eastern coast. Petillius Cerialis is alive, but I don’t imagine he will be for long. If he has any sense at all, he’ll fall on his sword.”

Ursus dismissed it, as if the loss of a legion were a small thing, to ruin only one man, not an event to bring down emperors and the men who served them. Striking back to the track of his heart, he said, “Flavius thinks the woman we freed was the Boudica. It’s lucky you saved his life today, he’d be reporting by now to the governor else, with you and me and Sabinius dead men on the back of it. Paulinus might forgive you for calling him a coward when there was nobody about to hear it. He won’t forgive you for freeing a rebel who has lit the tinder in the pitch pot of the eastern tribes and—Are you listening?”

The Ninth is broken. The Eceni used Arminius’ tactic…Not the Eceni: Valerius. No-one else could have betrayed Rome in the way Arminius did. Seeing him on his insane horse in the Eceni steading, with the procurator at his feet, Corvus had understood that Valerius was going to join his sister, if she lived, if the rest of the Eceni nation would have him and not stone him from their thresholds.

Viewed from a distance, with hindsight and the understanding of the tribes, it was possible to see that Valerius’ whole life had been shaped by the gods just for this, if one wished to believe in the gods and their shaping of men. At that moment, Corvus very badly wanted to believe in something that shaped a life and all that came after it. All things are possible in death, as in the dream…He wanted to believe that, too.

Through the blackness of a sudden, knifing loss, he heard his own voice say, “Of course. I always listen to you. If you had any sense, you’d turn me in yourself.”

He waited for an answer in kind and was met by silence. He took his palms from his face. The flame from the small soapstone lamp was too bright.

Ursus was staring at him, shaking his head. “You’re not listening. Flavius is unstable. He’ll talk because his mouth will run away with him and think of the reasons afterwards. I thought you were going to deal with it, but you didn’t. You could have let him die there on the foreshore with no harm done. No-one else would have known.”

“Perhaps.” The smell of roast pork reached Corvus’ belly and his head at the same time. Hunger and nausea gnawed at him equally, making him salivate. Sometimes eating helped. He considered it and regretted the thought.

Through a rising gorge he said, “I’m a condemned man. The governor can have me hanged in the morning for leading the retreat on Mona, or for freeing Breaca of the Eceni from the procurator’s crucifixion. Either way, or both, I can only die once. You and Sabinius have life still ahead of you. I prefer to think Flavius is his own worst enemy and will kill himself before he kills anyone else, but if you two think he’s a problem, you can decide what to do about him tomorrow, or whenever it is that he forgets I saved his life. In the meantime, if you don’t want me to be sick all over your wolfskin, do you think you could twist some favours out of the Batavians and get me some pork?”

A voice from beyond the door flap said, “I have it. And I may be my own worst enemy, but I won’t forget what you did.”

The air in the tent grew suddenly sour. The smell of the pork was overpoweringly rich and still did not come close to obscuring the stench of wet wolfskin. Corvus shut his eyes and opened them. He said, “I’m sorry,” and the word dropped into the open abyss at his feet. It was not—could never be—enough.

Flavius stood by the door flap to the tent, not quite inside. He shook his head, flatly. “You said what you believed, and he said what he believed before it. It may be he was right. If I had not seen you block the centurion’s sword today, I might be talking to the governor now. And I might tomorrow, whether I remember it or not. But then, I may be too late, and may die with you. I am not the only one who knows what you did; there were twenty of us rode with you into the Eceni steading to face down the procurator and I can’t be the only one who has worked out whom we saved. If you think I am alone in wanting to buy my own life with information, you are more of a fool than I took you for.”

Flavius’ gaze raked the length of Corvus’ body from the scars at his ankles taken on shipboard past the knotted spear-thrust beneath his ribs to the new throbbing bruise on the side of his face. Something flickered in his eyes that could have been grief or spite or contempt or the promise of retribution, saved for later. He said, “The governor wishes to speak to you in his tent. He has called a tribunal. You should dress first.”

He had brought a board, with three slices of hot meat laid on it and a cluster of olives at the side. The meat was perfect, running a little to pink at the middle. The crackling was brown-edged and fine. The olives had been stoned and were arranged all in a ring, pointing outward. He laid his gift down at the tent’s threshold and stepped back into the unclouded night. He turned to leave and went three paces and turned back and the grief on his face was plain working from his throat to his mouth.

Thick-voiced, Flavius said, “I had thought better of you.”

It had been the risk from the start. From the moment Corvus had ridden into the Eceni steading with the twenty men of his personal retinue at his back and seen a woman he knew on the ground beneath a whipping post; from before that, when he had seen a hawk-scout of the Coritani with a knife wound to his lip and recognized something of the wildness in his eye; from before that, when he had seen a youth of the Eceni in a horse fair in Gaul and recognized more than simply the wildness of him…

Tracing back the lines of intent was pointless. Boundaries had been crossed and trust breached and at each step Corvus had created justifications for himself: that he was not betraying his emperor or his standard or his oath to his general; that he understood the complexities of tribal life and was well placed—possibly best placed—to judge how things might be rescued from the calamities of others’ actions; that he could act out of honour, and that it enhanced the honour of his race and his office.

Walking the short distance across heather and the beginnings of mud to the governor’s tent, he considered saying as much to the tribunal waiting inside but the words warped in his mouth and he abandoned them, unspoken. He was not going to lie, to taint the life that was left. He had learned that much. He thought of what he could say: I did it because a woman once offered me her blade, when I needed it, and I did not understand, then, the depth of what she gave me. Or, A child gave me her horse, as from a sister to a brother, and in my ignorance I thought then that I did understand what she gave, and did not until I rode it today in the straits and found the greatness of it. Or simply, It seemed only honourable.

The last sounded hollow. It was also the only one any of those inside might hope to understand. On the whole, he considered it might be easier to remain silent; he did not imagine it would make any difference to the outcome.

He reached the tent. The glow of braziers made reddened patches on the hide. He could feel the warmth and damp and sweat and fug of burning charcoal from beyond the door, and then smell them. He himself still smelled of wet wolfhide, which was unfortunate and could not be changed.

He breathed in the air and savoured the heather and the sea and the sharpness of a spring night’s cold and then scratched on the door flap and heard the clerk inside step up to open it, and to announce him to those who would judge all that he had been.

It was not a tribunal, but something greater. The legate and tribunes of the IInd legion were there, and the same of the XIVth. Two of the three senior officers of the XXth had died in the day, leaving only the junior tribune to lead his legion.

Eight officers, therefore, sat at the desk made for four, shoulder to shoulder, crowded, with lamps lit in front of them, so that the lines of dark and flame made bands up their faces. A ninth man, bulkier than the others and with white-blond hair, sat at the table’s end, with room to breathe and move and stretch to wrap his thick fingers about his goblet of wine. Thrice three, the number of Jupiter; a full military court.

The rushes on the floor had been cut wet, and had begun to rot. Corvus felt them slip away from his feet as he walked. Time yawned for him, so that the distance from the door to the standing place, where the lamps all shed light, was as long as the swim out to Mona had been. He knew all of the officers who faced him, some better than others. Galenius, legate of the XIVth, had been a friend in his teens; Agricola, tribune of the XXth, shared the governor’s tent. Clemens, senior tribune of the IInd, had quartered in Camulodunum for a winter, and shared baths, wine and dinner too often to count.

None of these men met his eye, or showed any sign that they knew him. It was left to the white-blond Briton to turn and study him, from head to feet and back again, and then to say, “So this is the man you would see dead? He does not have the look of one who would face the gods and live long, in the sea or out of it.”

He spoke Latin, with the accent of the north. No-one chose to respond; in a military court, by consent and order of the emperor, those present deferred to the officer of highest rank, who was the governor. A man of the tribes, even a messenger sent by a loyal queen, was a barbarian, and so excused his ignorance of protocol.

Corvus finally reached, and halted before, the governor. The man at whose favour he might or might not be allowed to live looked up eventually from the two slate-blue running hounds who had held all of his attention. Paulinus was composed again; the rage of earlier had gone, replaced by the familiar dry, acerbic curiosity.

Corvus had seen him condemn men while in exactly that frame of mind. He met the open, brown gaze as evenly as his throbbing head allowed, and waited. It was possible to believe that the men who would judge him could not hear the beat of his heart in his chest. It was less possible that they could not see the shudder it sent through his frame with each spasm. He pressed the tips of his fingers lightly at his sides, to steady his hands.

Eventually, “You have rested and eaten?” the governor asked.

“Yes.” It was a lie; one small untruth of little moment compared to the great well of deceit that Flavius, or one of the others, might choose to open. Of the twenty who had ridden with him into the Eceni steading, eight had died to the sea or the dreamers. He had trusted the others with his life, and they him. He tried not to think who else might betray him; these things showed too clearly on a man’s face.

“Good.”

The governor shoved his chair back from the desk, stood, and rested his hands on the oak table. The clerk, whom Corvus despised, sat in dimness behind, poised to take note of the verdicts.

The governor lifted one of the lamps from the desk in front of him and moved it to a stand at the side, so that the shadows lengthened and the clerk became invisible. Paulinus returned to stand behind his seat and the only sound was the slip of his feet on the slimed rushes of the floor.

Rigid now under a brighter light, it came to Corvus that he did not know this man well enough; that of all the governors he had served, Suetonius Paulinus was the only one he had not taken the time or made the effort to understand.

The governor’s loves were well known: beyond the easy pleasures of the hounds and their boy, Agricola had shared his tent since they first came west. So too were his hates—disorder and inefficiency ruled their lives—and his old campaigns in the Atlas Mountains, roof of all the world. The details of these things were common currency in the legions who served under him, but they did not reveal the things that had shaped his childhood and his youth, the men he had admired, those he had scorned, those who still fired his mind, whose approval meant something, whose disapproval would wound.

Too late, the lack of this knowledge became obvious, and that the sharing of it might have saved Corvus’ life. The pressure in his head became quite astonishing. He wondered if he might faint, and if it would change anything if he did.

The governor looked down at his own clasped hands. His fingers were fine as an artist’s, the nails neatly cut and very clean. It took a great deal of effort to achieve that on campaign. Alone of all the officers present, Corvus’ fingernails were similarly clean, but only because he had spent the better part of the day in the sea. It was not a useful thing to remember.

The governor said, “I have described the failure of your assault on Mona to our guest, Velocatos. He is of the opinion that you should not be alive.”

There was relief in having the waiting over. Corvus said, “You have it in your power to make that true.”

“Of course. And I may yet do so. Certainly there are those amongst your peers who would support it.” Paulinus ran his gaze along the line of heads beneath him. Clemens of the IInd coloured. The rest remained commendably silent and still. “My guest, however, would consider that rash. He believes you possessed of extraordinary courage and fortitude, and swears that you must lie under the protection of this island’s gods. The first, of course, is expected of any officer in Rome’s legions. The second is…fortunate in the current circumstances.”

If you are careful, you will meet my son once more in this life…

Corvus felt the air crack and shift. Because he was being exceptionally careful, he did not ask what they knew, or smile, or take in the breath that he needed, but raised a brow and turned to study the blond tribesman, who sat in the only place of any comfort at the end of the table.

He was a broader man than any of those present, built like the Batavians, with a bull neck so that his head seemed set directly onto his shoulders. He had oddly effeminate hair that might have been a true silver-white in daylight, but the lamps had turned the burnished yellow of coltsfoot. It lay loose to his shoulders, falling heavily over a tunic in sharp green with a yellow knotwork at the hem and short sleeves. The gold band coiled above his elbow was richer than any of the southern tribes could afford. The long shape of a mare was laid into it in white gold, with a triangle above.

Velocatos. His name began to mean something; he was not simply a messenger. His placing at the head of the table made more sense than it had. Corvus said, “It is a long time since we were honoured by a messenger of the Brigantes, still less the consort of Cartimandua, their queen.”

The man’s eyes were pale in the lamplight. “It is a long time since the Eceni rebelled. You were a prefect even then, I think, when the governor’s son won his oak leaf at the battle of the Broken Tribes?”

The governor knew the truth of that battle, and he had never encouraged servility in his officers. With faultless courtesy Corvus said, “Is that how it is known in the north? The Eceni call it the battle of the Salmon Trap and celebrate it as a victory. I would not argue with them, except that the reprisals afterwards on their people were savage and they could be said to have lost because of it.”

The younger tribune of the IInd gasped audibly while his peers kept better control. Galenius, legate of the XIVth, who had once been a friend, allowed his gaze to drift right a little, and drooped the lid of one eye.

At the opposite end of the table, the blond tribesman stared, and then stopped staring and reached for his wine. He swirled it in the goblet until his fingers ran red. At length, he said, “There is luck and there is brazen foolishness. It is hard, sometimes, to distinguish the one from the other. Perhaps your actions on the gods’ island today were less courageous than they seemed, and more a failure fully to comprehend the dangers. Do you think reprisals against the Eceni steadings will be enough to recompense the destruction of Camulodunum? Will it stop them from burning everything south of the city, to the far southern ports, where your ships land and your merchants trade?”

Corvus said, “The Eceni alone are not numerous enough for that, nor, I think, would their ambitions drive them so far from their homelands.”

The blond giant smiled. His teeth were thick as pegs, with gaps between. “Then it is unfortunate that they are not alone. The Trinovantes have joined them; how could they not when Camulodunum is under assault? The Catuvellauni may still be loyal to Rome, but the Coritani and Cornovii in the middle lands have sworn allegiance to the Boudica’s standard and half a wing of Batavian cavalry has defected and holds the Ninth legion penned in its winter strongholds. The combined spears of the Brigantes have not yet joined in the host. My lady keeps those who might do so under a tight rein. If she were to falter, then without question the east is lost to you.” There was pride in his voice, behind the false sorrow.

Galenius of the XIVth was of next highest rank to the governor. He pressed his hands flat on the table so that the fingertips blanched. Speaking for the first time, he said, “And our guests from the Second legion report that the Durotriges and Dumnonii of the southwest are less controlled than they were. They too, it seems, have joined the rebellion.”

There was a chair to Corvus’ side. At a nod from Paulinus, Corvus sat down. The governor signalled the clerk, who drew the sandbox from the side. The surface was already swept flat. The clerk used a stylus to etch the outline of Britannia, with the toe in the west and the backbone curved to the east and the islands of Mona and its greater cousin, Hibernia, off the wild westerly coast. Fastidious in his every move, he laid down the stylus and placed a small coppered eagle on the coastline, opposite Mona.

The governor placed a larger thumbprint in the east, in one movement erasing the memory of Camulodunum. He swept his thumbnail down and angled inwards. “Here,” he said, “along the Thamesis that the natives call the Great River. Clemens believes otherwise, but I say that when they finish burning Camulodunum—which will be in the next three days unless a miracle happens and the veterans can withstand a longer siege—then they will come south to the site of their first defeat, to burn the trading ports along the river to the bridge that Vespasian built. He built it low, that big ships might not pass under it. The port he founded is the biggest on the river and the most likely to hold out against attack. If we can reach the bridge, take it for Rome and organize the local magistrates to hold it, then we have a route by which to reach the southern tribes that have been longest loyal to Rome.”

“Berikos’ Atrebates,” Corvus said.

“Indeed. If we are cut off from all routes to the coast and the sea, we are lost. The bridge is our lifeline and attack is the best defence. The legions move too slowly; it can only be done with cavalry. I need a troop, led by an officer who knows the shores and the tides and the shipmasters who will accompany me. For the price of your life, you will come.”

Corvus stared at him. “To face the entirety of the Eceni? Two of us and one wing of cavalry?” He had not thought the governor the kind to embrace death so willingly.

“Less than one wing—we will not fit that many on the boats. So we must arrive before the Eceni, in the company of riders who can return with orders. A legion can only go as fast as the slowest mule. Two dozen—perhaps only a dozen—horsemen can take ship from the port here to here…” He drew the stylus south and planted it as a flag on the coast, due west of the sea port on the river. “The magistrates will know the nature of the danger, and how close they are to destruction. If we have time to call the legions down, we will do so. If not, we will know what it is we face. In my absence, the legate of the Fourteenth will lead the continued assault on Mona.”

“When do we leave?”

“With the dawn tide. The Eceni won’t wait, or their allies. If we are to live, we must retake Britannia. To do that, we must ride.”