CHAPTER 28

Cunomar lay belly down on a mosaic of pink and grey marble, resting his chin on his fist the better to watch the black oak door that was the hidden exit to Claudius’ temple.

Around him was an ornate walled garden that backed onto the slave’s quarters of a centurion’s house. Already the place was overgrown with ivy and a strangling of early bindweed scattered through with white unopened flowers, curled tight as ropes.

The wall was solid and not meant to be climbed; the flints and cob stones that formed it had been bedded too deep to make handholds and it was capped with rounded mortar with sharpened flints along the spine. Nine strikes with a log-splitting axe had broken the lock to the outer gate, letting the she-bears flood in and arrange themselves in battle order amongst the unthrifty olive trees and grape vines and the twinned green marble fountains, on which boy-youths rode dolphins across an endlessly dry sea.

Cunomar lay in the shade of the second of these. On either side, his warriors passed waterskins newly filled from the well in the ruined hospital. All of them were burned or wounded somehow. Cunomar’s groin still ached from the missed thrust of the blade that had nearly cost him his manhood. Ulla, who lay nearest, was burned along the length of one forearm, but otherwise whole.

She passed him a waterskin and he drank and handed it back. The door to the temple remained stubbornly shut. High as a man and five times as wide, it was made of seasoned oak with leather hinges studded with iron to make them less easily cut, designed for function as an escape route, or a secret entry, as if half of Camulodunum had not known it was there from the day it was first built.

The sun moved higher, and the patches of shade grew smaller. Presently, when the flies became too bothersome, those warriors who were not of the she-bear, and so knew less of discipline, began to take bets on who could first pull over one of the green marble fountains.

After a while, they forgot to whisper, and the bets became more serious. Three squared up to the fountain and spat on their hands. Each had shaved the hair on his head in an arc above both ears and set the centre line with lime paint. One had cut off his own ear, or had it done for him. Cunomar did not know the names of any of them. The largest set himself at the marble, hauling so that the veins bulged on muscles that knotted like an ox at the plough. Others shouted encouragement. The marble did not move.

Under cover of the noise, Ulla said, “Your mother left the temple battle early. I saw her let a woman go when she could have killed her.”

“Everyone saw that,” Cunomar said.

“Did she do it so we would see? So that there would be no doubt that she no longer wants to lead us?”

In the midst of the battle, Cunomar’s fear had been exactly that, tainted with the shame of it, and the panic that without his mother the war host would falter. He had missed a clean kill because of it, and had to finish the man later, when the battle had passed over and there was time to come back. Lying now in the shade of an olive tree, he saw it in a better light.

“I think that’s exactly why she did it. By leaving when victory was certain, she made sure no-one would suffer for her loss. And she’s left the way open for her successor to take over in the final parts of the war. The balance in the host is even between Valerius and me. I think she truly does not know which of us to support. She has left us the freedom to prove ourselves in front of the full war host.”

Ulla said, “It must be hard for a woman to choose between her brother and her son.”

“And for Cygfa the same. She admires Valerius for his Crow-horse and how he can fight with it. Both of them need a reason to choose one way or the other. We can give it.” Since the defeat of the IXth, Cunomar had tried to see it like that. Here, now, with the prospect of a quite spectacular victory at hand, it was easiest.

The wiriest of the three youths succeeded in pulling over the marble fountain, by dint of tipping it a little and kicking a stone under the base, to hold it off balance while he swung all his weight on the scalloped green lip of the bowl—which hit the larger grey slabs around it and shattered into shards sharp as knife blades that sprayed out in a wide arc.

Cursing softly, Cunomar leaned to his right, to a lanky Trinovante youth who had known the way to the garden. “Tell them to keep well clear of the broken marble if they don’t want to cut their feet when the door opens. Pass it along the line.”

He watched the flow of the message as head nodded to darker or fairer head and away again. To Ulla, he said, testily, “Valerius would have stopped them pulling the fountain over in the first place.”

“And they would have learned nothing, except to resent him for spoiling their wager. Your way is not necessarily the lesser.”

The message had reached the last of those in range of the scattered razor-stone when a lock was turned in the dark oak door and a bolt jerked back and a beam thrown aside and a hand’s breadth of solid oak, as high as a man and five times as wide, slammed back onto the cob and flint of the garden wall.

Cunomar had time to shout, “Hold the line!” and feel Ulla at his shoulder before havoc flew at him, in the shape of the fiercest battle he had ever imagined.

The veterans who charged from the room behind the door were lean to the point of emaciation, unshaven and filthy with burn marks florid on their faces and forearms, but their leather armour was supple and their blades honed and they had the tight, dense set of men who have known each other for decades, and can trust the surety of each other’s presence.

Like the Spartan heroes of Thermopylae, or the Sacred Band of Thebes, these were men who dedicated themselves to war and never let themselves go. For days, Cunomar had lain on the drying turf above Camulodunum and watched a full century of veterans practise their daily manoeuvres.

When the Trinovante informant had come with news that a certain group met nightly in a hidden shrine at the back of the temple, he had known without question who they were, and how many. All he had needed from her was the location, and the extent to which they had stored their armour in advance.

This he had been given, explicitly: “They will have everything they could want or need. I clean the room for them, and every part of it is hung with racks of armour, except for the length of one wall, which is lined with gravestones, carved to mark their honoured dead.”

The veterans came out in a wedge, aimed at the thickest part of Cunomar’s line. They killed three of the younger Eceni before the door crashed back against the wall. A part-shaved head fell and cracked, severed cleanly by the speed of the men’s passing and the ferocity of the leader’s stroke. A dozen other youths fell back, their war howls croaking to nothing.

The true she-bears had faced a wedge at the watchtower and knew how to deal with it. They had Valerius to thank for that; he had made them practise through the winter. Remembering, those who knew found each other in the throng and made pairs or threes or fives and pressed their shoulders together so they could act as one.

They stepped sideways, beyond the sweep of the wedge, and threw spears and then fragments of broken marble the size of fists at the legs of the leading men. A handful tripped and were killed as their shields sagged. One ran straight into Cunomar’s spear, swung horizontally, like a staff, so that the haft broke his neck.

The Romans had been a century; a full eighty men. In that first charge, they were reduced by less than a dozen. The remainder abandoned their fallen and split into their tent parties as readily as if they still slept each night in marching camp, not in their gilt-roofed villas.

They made squares, two to a side, facing outward, with shields held as impenetrable barriers and swords poking through. Unlike the men of the IXth, they did not stand still inviting attack, but came on, holding their squares, killing more of Cunomar’s warriors as they did so.

“We need slingers!” Ulla shouted it, running from the path of the oncoming death. She paused to hurl a fist-sized piece of marble. It bounced uselessly off a shield.

They had no slingers, who were all with Valerius, paired with the better slingers of Mona, picking off defenders inside the vast space of the temple.

Cunomar shouted, “Don’t let them get to the gate!” He had said that before, as they lay planning in the grey dusk. “If they get out of the garden, they’ll come at the temple from behind. We’ll lose hundreds before they’re stopped.”

His followers had listened to him then. Faced with the ferocity of the veterans’ onslaught, very few heard him now.

Ulla was close, and Scerros and a scattering of others who had fought with them at the barriers on the first day of the city’s assault. Cunomar raised his knife and howled his mother’s name. More struggled to join him, perhaps twenty in all.

“The gate!”

He ran without waiting to see if they followed. By the skip of their shadows ahead of him he knew that they had, and that two, at least, had been too slow and had fallen.

Fifteen lived to reach the gate.

“Spread out! Make two lines!”

Cunomar swept his arms wide. His warriors were slow, white-eyed and panting. Those who had fought at the barriers without fear found themselves undone now by the veterans and their methodical brutality.

Still, the days of drilling above the city worked. Fifteen made two lines, and blocked the gate.

Cunomar shouted, “Ulla! Scerros! Go out through the gate. Close it and wedge it. Find Valerius, bring him back to help.”

They turned to leave. A part of him exulted that his leadership at last carried sway and the need to obey him overrode the need to stay. A greater part of him broke apart at the loss. He wanted to say something and there was no time: three tent parties of veterans had already formed an opposite line and were advancing at a shuffling run. He could smell the sourness of ill-fed breath, and the unwash of their bodies and the sleek, new oil on their leather armour.

Shadows came and went as the gate opened and shut behind him. Something close to gratitude let Cunomar focus his intent on the veteran’s leader, who advanced in the centre, opposite him. The man’s teeth were foul, and he had shaved with something rough, so that the skin was blotchily red on his chin and cheeks. Between, patches of black hair sprouted through. He could not have eaten a proper meal in three days at least, but he danced on the balls of his feet and when he raised his blade it was with a certainty of killing that Cunomar had never met before, except perhaps in Valerius, and then it had not been directed at him.

The man coming at him grinned. The air became fetid with old and new sweat. Cunomar spoke the ninth name of the she-bear and set his intent entirely on his enemy. Free of fear, he raised his shield and rammed it onto the incoming blade, twisting, to make a gap in the shield wall opposite. His own knife curved in an arc that should have ended in the other man’s bowels—

And did not, because Ulla was there with her spear and had stabbed at a white flash of face beneath the helmet. Her scream or his split the air.

“Ulla!” Cunomar’s howl soared louder. “Get out! Find Valerius!”

“Don’t…need to.” Ulla was still alive. She danced back, leaving her spear. “…already here.”

He had no time to look up, or around. The fighting was as fierce as he had ever seen or imagined. The twenty-four men of the veteran line fought on for the gate as if their honour and lives depended on it. They failed to reach it, but each took at least one of the war host with him as he died.

Slowly, amidst the miracle of his own continued survival, Cunomar came to notice that there were far more warriors in the garden than had come with him, and that a smaller proportion of them had shaved their heads in an arc above the ears, or pasted white lime in their hair.

When a slingstone passed him, and killed the man who most immediately threatened his life, his battle-slowed mind realized why. As he fought forward, away from the gate, and heard it opened, and tasted clean air in the stifling heat, and felt bodies slide past him on into the garden, and then caught a glimpse of the black oak door and saw yet more warriors pouring through that, he knew both relief and frustration, equally, which was not a new feeling, and far less worthy than the sweet, unhampered clarity of battle.

The fighting slowed, and it became clear to Cunomar that he was no longer needed; fresher arms than his took on the last two dozen Romans and forced them back against the wall and began the slow, dangerous task of killing.

He was leaning against the second of the two marble fountains when a cool voice he knew and loathed said, loudly enough for others to hear, “That was well done, son of the Boudica. It would have gone hard for all of us if they had broken out and come into the temple at our backs.”

“Valerius.” Cunomar turned slowly. His whole body shuddered with exertion and the aftershocks of combat. “Has my mother returned to the field of battle?”

“Would I be here if she had?” Valerius, too, was grey and slow. A wound on his forearm bled freely and he had a shining blood-bruise the size of a fist on the opposite elbow with the flesh already swelling on either side of it.

“So we need to talk.” They had always known it would come to this, or to more than this.

“Evidently.” Valerius smiled, crookedly. “I would suggest we had better go elsewhere, where fewer ears are listening. Shall we see what the veterans kept on the other side of their black oak door?”