CHAPTER 37

Sun on sun on sun on polished metal, making more sun, blindingly.

Corvus rode south, at noon in the height of hot summer, with two legions of infantry marching in full armour ahead of him and a cloud of flies feeding about his face.

He wanted to bandage his eyes, to take away the glare. He wanted to stuff cotton in his ears to dull the hammer of nailed feet and the clash of harness and the interminable bloody marching chants of the cohorts, forever out of key. He wanted to slay every fly in the province and then drink unceasingly of cold water from mountain streams that splashed down through dim valleys to pools where only moonlight reached. He wanted to be back on the straits by Mona, or in the fortress of the XXth or in Camulodunum, even if it had burned. He wanted to be anywhere, but not on an open road with legionaries marching six abreast in double time ahead of him and a baggage train moving almost, but not quite, as fast, and himself the teeth in the serpent’s tail at the back, to make sure the rear guard could bite when—not if—it was attacked. He regretted ever having devised that strategy, and loathed the man, whosoever he might be, who had told the governor of it and encouraged him to use it now.

The heatwave was in its third day. The memory of the storms was gone from the men and the land. The flies were unspeakable and he chose not to think of them. Almost as bad was the gritty dust that clogged the air and settled on the mane of his bay battle mare and her harness and filtered through into Corvus’ neck and his waist and his groin, abrading them steadily so that already he could feel the ooze of blood where his belt sat over his mail. He checked his saddlecloth for the hundredth time and made himself believe his favourite battle mount was not being similarly damaged.

He drank from his waterskin and poured a little onto his palm and wiped his face, then leaned forward and rubbed his damp hand between the mare’s ears, batting away the flies and murmuring to it all the while. “It’s past noon. The worst is over. Walk steady and all will be well.”

He had taken to talking to the mare for the past two days, since shortly after the governor’s small party, riding north, had met the legions marching south with the remainder of his wing, the Quinta Gallorum, as escort.

The meeting had been welcome on both sides and the reunion joyful, but within a day Corvus had run out of things to say to Sabinius, who carried the standards and had led the wing in his commander’s absence. The mare, on the whole, was more rewarding to talk to. It did not contradict him and rarely answered back while Sabinius was very likely to do both. He had been escorting infantry in hostile territory for nearly twenty years; he knew exactly how long the day was, and that the worst almost certainly was not over.

The standard-bearer grunted now and narrowed his eyes to peer through the shimmering heat haze ahead. He said, “You have never told me how far south we are going to march. If Vespasian’s Bridge and Verulamium are both destroyed, then there is nothing left to reach.”

“That’s because I don’t know. I don’t think Paulinus knows. We can perhaps march to the west of the bridge and find another way across the river but I can’t imagine we’ll reach it. We face a rebel army that best estimates put at fifteen to twenty thousand warriors and we are less than seven thousand strong. Where we meet them is largely academic, I think, only that we must, and that if we march like this, so their scouts can see us from half a day away, without ever needing to come within range, then we will call them to us and won’t have to go looking for them. Paulinus will have his final, glorious battle.”

“And we will all die, gloriously.” Sabinius swiped absently at a horsefly and looked up at the unsullied sky. “As long as someone lives to take word to Rome.”

“Paulinus has pigeons that will fly to Gaul with his report of all those who should be rewarded for their courage. Our names will stand for ever in the annals of the senate.”

“If the dreamers’ falcons don’t pull the birds out of the sky and eat them before they get anywhere close to Gaul.”

“Thank you. Yes. If that.”

This was why Corvus talked to his horse. It was measurably less depressing.

They fell to silence, then. Ahead, the four cohorts of the shrunken XXth legion set up a new marching chant. They were fewer than two thousand and all of them veterans of old campaigns; by sickness and nightmares and the savage waters of the straits had the dreamers of Mona culled out the youths and the less seasoned men. Those left alive, therefore, were the fittest and the best. Sadly they were also those who had spent two decades of winters devising new words to go with the old, settled rhythms of the march.

They began rustily, until the ones who knew the words had passed them on. Surprisingly soon, all two thousand men caught on and built the volume, the better to drown out the competition coming from the XIVth in front.

Against his better judgement, Corvus listened to the increasingly coherent snatches of it that rose up through the billowing dust; a complex triple rhyme involving heat and dust and insurgency and all saved from ruin by the wide brown eyes of a boy from Alexandria.

Even for one jaundiced by nearly thirty years in the legions, it was clever and he grinned the first time he caught it all, and still smiled for the second and third repeats. By the tenth, or perhaps the twentieth, he wanted cotton again for his ears and, lacking it, let his mind drift to Alexandria, which was hotter, certainly, than the land through which he was riding, and dustier and quite definitely more prone to lethal intrigue and insurgency against anyone who attempted to govern the ungovernable.

It had not, in his experience, been saved by the wide brown eyes of any boy, although there had been a man, and his eyes had, indeed, been brown and a great deal of Corvus’ life’s path, if he thought about it, stemmed from that man and all he had offered, and the result could be considered salvation, if one chose to look at it in that light.

The day was hot and images flowed easily, borne on the beat of marching feet and a scurrilous song that managed to link every officer in both legions and both wings of cavalry by anatomically improbable methods to the brown-eyed Alexandrian youth.

A small bronze statue of Horus took wings from Corvus’ pack and lifted over the mirage of the marching men. Its one jet eye winked at him and became the brown eye of an Alexandrian man, full of wisdom and care and dead so very much too early. The bird soared high. From its height a man’s voice said, What does it profit a man to serve the gods of two worlds?

He had always spoken thus, setting riddles in his arcane Alexandrian tongue in a voice smooth as quicksilver and sweet as ambrosia. The answers were never to be found where first one sought them.

Determined not to try, Corvus let his mind drift and drift again and, as it always did when drifting, it came eventually to a black-eyed, solemn, thoughtful boy of the Eceni and the painful trail he had walked to become an officer in the Roman cavalry, feared for his ferocity by those who fought on both sides of the conflict in Britannia and named traitor in Rome because he had made the mistake of pledging oath and honour to an emperor in the days before his dying.

He thought of the man that boy had become and the sight of him on a pied horse standing over the procurator of all Britannia with murder in his eyes and something quite different shining from his heart.

To his bay battle mare, Corvus murmured, “But Valerius is given to Mithras, the bull-slayer. He serves only him; a god of the world he has left behind. The gods of the Eceni would not accept him.”

Why not?

For five paces more, Corvus remained in quiet reverie, then his world broke into shards, as a glass that is thrown at a white marble wall. “Sabinius! Signal alert forward and back!”

He barely recognized his own voice; out of nowhere he had found the spit and crispness of early morning and the certainty of battle command.

Sabinius’ standard flittered in the breeze, twice forward, twice back. A trumpeter in the infantry took up the signal and sent it forward up the line. Another sent it back at a different pitch; every man of the seven thousand up to and including the governor knew whence came the order and so whom to blame if it were wrong.

Corvus looked about. The mirage was gone. Men marched where it had been. Already their chant sank dead in the air. They shifted their packs and loosened their gladii and the lift of their feet in the march was higher and more elastic. Silence hung about them like a shield.

His neck prickled. His palms were wet on the reins. He looked about with different eyes. The road was raised, as they always were. The land about was flat for a spear’s throw on either side and should have been cleared back to the naked turf for three spear-casts beyond that. Once, it might have been; the trees had certainly been felled at least to the start of the rising land, but in the last year, the men of the legions had been occupied with other things than making safe the roads and the land was a havoc of scrubby new growth that could have hidden half the marching men and easily as many warriors.

Both sides were not the same. To the left, the land rose gently to make a small ridge which was covered in scrub. To the right, it fell away more steeply and the trees had been left to grow closer to the road; the engineers did not believe warriors would attack uphill.

Corvus thought they were right. The danger all came from the left. He looked over and through the nettles and flowering thistles and green-berried thorns and the scrub elder and saw nothing, only felt loathing and excitement and the almost-readiness to attack. He drew his own sword and shifted his shield from shoulder to forearm.

Sabinius copied him. “Valerius?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. I think I would know if he were…” Corvus shook his head. “Yes, I would know. He isn’t here. But there is someone…many. Waiting, watching…” Their eyes scoured him. His guts clenched and he thought he might be sick, but he always thought that, riding into ambush. It had never yet been true.

Sabinius spat, sending precious water to the road. “They’re going to try to pick us off from back to front as they did with the Ninth.”

“I know. But we’re not led by an idiot. And this serpent has a sting in its tail such as they’ve never encountered.” There was release in action. The bay battle mare came round in a faultless spin and danced on the spot perfect and beautiful and ready to fight. Loudly enough for those around to hear, Corvus said to Sabinius, “You have command of the first two troops. At all costs, protect the mules and the baggage; I don’t want to sleep in the open tonight even if you do. I’m going back to be with Ursus and Flavius at the rear.”

Ursus and Flavius were ready. The former had already deployed the nearest two dozen men as flank riders, setting them in pairs, mostly to the left, staggered out and back so that each outer man protected the side and back of his partner, and each outer pair covered the side and back of those on the inside.

Flavius had command of the archers. Since last autumn, the Quinta Gallorum had retained one dozen Scythian horse-archers, employed at insane expense, who dressed in silks and then complained daily of the cold and the mud and had to be waited on and served hot spiced beef and olives and good wine and given their own private cook and must be set to train in secret, with scouts all around to guard against spies so that now, when they were most needed, they could be brought into action against an unprepared enemy, with all the insanity of money and cosseting proved worthwhile and not a man begrudging them a single olive.

Flavius had been given charge of them, and had come to care for them as the Atrebatan hound-boy cared for the governor’s blue-skinned hounds, and for much the same reason: they set him apart from the rest. He had taken the time to learn their language, which was more than anyone else had done, and he shouted to them clearly, pure as a bell, as Corvus approached.

Like the hounds, the Scythians craved release into action. At the first of Flavius’ calls, they began to string their small, wickedly curved bows and chose arrows from the packs on their horses’ shoulders and nocked them, quietly and unobtrusively, the better to keep secret from the watching warriors.

The rest of the troop rode forward at an even pace, not turning to look at them, or to point or do anything that might attract the enemy’s attention; their orders were unambiguous in this regard. The flank riders covered them, and had orders to die in their defence.

Following his own instructions, Corvus rode past them to the rear without looking. Flavius gave him a queer, half-friendly salute as he passed. Ursus nodded, curtly. He had the same question as Sabinius, only asked with less tact. “Is it Valerius? If it is, he’ll know what we do and how we do it.”

“It’s not Valerius; he isn’t here. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t spent the last half month drilling those who are.”

“What do we do?”

“Out-fight them,” said Corvus, grimly. “And pray that word of the archers has never reached Valerius. Keep them facing the left; that’s where the danger has to be.”

“That’s Corvus, whom Valerius saw above Lugdunum. He leads the cavalry. He’s a friend to the Boudica.”

“And was soul-friend once to Valerius. He is known on Mona.”

Cunomar lay with Braint in a patch of head-high nettles within half a spear’s cast of the road. Even attacking the IXth, he had not been so close. He could see the beads of sweat on the faces of the men as they marched, and black runnels of it on the necks of the horses. He could see grit and flies and the dulled eyes of men who had marched fast for days and had more days ahead of them. He heard pounding feet and the inane marching ditties and closed his ears to them so that the sudden blast of the trumpets had shocked him and he had jumped, and cursed and made himself lie still again.

Braint had not jumped, even when Corvus swung his bay mare out to the side within almost-touch of her face. Amongst all the lime-painted, grey-greased warriors of Cunomar’s she-bears, she alone was unpainted and almost unadorned. She wore a single banded feather in her hair from the tail of a peregrine tiercel and two eye teeth of a wildcat hung from a horsehide thong around her neck. She had worked dust and mud into her hair so that it looked like an upturned sod of turf, but for the rest, her skin was brown from a summer of sun and wind and matt from the dust of the marching men and before the first troop of the first cohort of the first century of the XIVth legion had passed, she had become another shadow in many shadows amongst the nettles.

She lay still and silent, and seemed not to notice the flies. Except when he had agreed to attack the legion early, before the remainder of the warriors joined them, Cunomar had never seen her smile.

He remembered stories his mother had told of Braint as a girl on Mona and later in the battles of the invasion, of her grief at the death of her boy-cousin and her vitality as she came out of it, and her fearlessness so that she had lured an entire troop of Gaulish cavalrymen to their deaths, using her own body as bait. The fire of that was still there to be seen, but grief and joy had burned away equally in its heat, leaving her unyielding as iron. She was unquestionably a good warrior, even excellent. Cunomar was coming slowly to the view that, next to his own family, she might be the best he had ever met.

Now, from his left, without moving, she said, “Mac Calma was right. They do have archers. Look.”

For the time it took four ranks of the wing to ride past, Cunomar looked and saw nothing. Then he saw the flicker of a scarlet fletching and from that traced the outline of an arrow and so a bow and the brown-skinned, hawk-nosed man who bore it. Once seen, it was easier to find the others. “Twelve,” he said. “They’re all here.”

Braint had told him of the hidden danger the evening before, when the fires of the legions had been hot sparks on the horizon. Their own fire had been three barely red lumps of charcoal in a pit. Leaning into it, so he could see the red on her face, she had said, “Luan mac Calma has three informers among the Siluran scouts used by the legions. They report to him only in exceptional circumstances and then only through an intermediary. If the truth has reached us cleanly, they have been keeping watch on a dozen brown-skinned archers who can shoot a dove from the sky and the hawk that is following it and then turn and kill a hunted hare and the hound when both are going the opposite way. They can do all this standing or sitting or on horseback and in any direction.”

“How far can they shoot?” Cunomar had asked.

“Two spear-casts accurately. Three if they are aiming for a target as big as a warrior.”

“Then if we don’t have more warriors than they have arrows, we are finished, and all the lives wasted.”

“No. Mac Calma has sent us five slingers. All we have to do is to keep them alive while they target the archers. Can your she-bears do that, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he had said. “Against mounted cavalry we are at a disadvantage. We can run in and cut the heel-strings of the horses but that’s costly in lives. We can throw spears, but the archers will be faster. We can run at them, but we have not enough in numbers to overwhelm them. We could try to attack at night, but they are well fortified and they have sentries at every second pace who change eight times overnight and are alert. What do you suggest?”

Braint had turned her head at last and looked at him. Warmed only by the embers, her gaze was long and cool and dispassionate. It was like being regarded by a hound; he had never enjoyed that. Eventually, she had said, “I suggest that you ask the bear for help and do as she advises.”

He had asked the bear. The answer had not been distinct. He had danced to her under the first rise of the horned moon until exhaustion and the soft rhythm of palms pounded on the earth—they had not dared use the skull drums this close to the enemy—had lifted him out of himself and into the savage care of the beast to whom he was sworn. He had smelled the hot meatiness of her breath and felt the brush of her hair against his face and seen a thousand bears set against a thousand cavalry horses, ripping them asunder, leaving three dead. Somewhere in the chaos, a deer calf had died twice, and a serpent had coiled on itself and struck at the back of his head so that he could feel the puncture of its teeth in his scalp. Afterwards, he had retold it all to those who had pounded the earth, hoping one of them might see some clarity.

It was Ulla who had said, “The slingers don’t need much time, only long enough to see and kill the archers. We can do this, if Braint can direct the slingers. We have the horned god of the hunt to guide us, and half a night to make real the dreams of the bear.”

Cunomar had not been sure then. He was not sure now. He wanted glory and the death of Rome, not the annihilation of the she-bears brought about because he had failed in his first duty as a leader to protect his warriors.

The time for doubt was past. The end of the column was eight horses away. The outriders were stepping within an arm’s reach of his head.

He offered his soul to the bear, knowing the value of it, and that all life was a lesson, to be mined for all it could give, even if—particularly if—that mining ended in death.

“Let’s go,” he said, and reached for the spear haft that lay across the ground in front of him.

Corvus said, “There! In the nettles! Something moved!”

All twelve of the archers fired. Arrows whistled, silk stripped fast on silk, and embedded solidly in meat and bone.

Someone, or something, died, twitching. Afterwards, the jangle of harness and pound of feet sounded as nothing, so that the air was filled with silence, and two words of congratulatory Scythian spoken by Flavius.

Hoarsely, Ursus said, “Gods, that was close. They could touch the horses, almost, from there.”

Corvus had to swallow to speak. “If we have not just shot a sleeping hog.”

“Hogs don’t lie sleeping while two legions march by.” Ursus waited and waited and then said, “Do they?”

Corvus said, “They might do, if they have been fed the right plants by the dreamers. Something feels wrong. I think—Move! Cover the archers!”

The slingstone passed by his face. He felt the wind of it. In the sudden slowing of his mind, he believed that he could see the black paint that coated it. His soul shrank from the threat.

An archer died. A second was knocked in the shoulder.

“Right! They’re on the right!”

Corvus screamed it. A trumpeter—outstandingly courageous—sounded it clearly to the troop and the infantry ahead. By that act alone, the man made himself a target. He died for it, to a thrown spear, not a slingstone, at the same time as the third of the twelve archers.

There was time to shout his name, and the promise of honours, so that his departing ghost and the men of his tent party might hear it, so that someone might survive and remember, and then there was mayhem and the howling of bear-warriors up the line as far as Corvus could see and the screaming of horses and of men and women so that no single voice had any chance to be heard and only the trumpets and the standards kept discipline and order.

Corvus killed a woman with red hair and brown skin and did not pause to see if he knew her. He ducked a stone and pushed his shield to cover Ursus, who had moved his own shield to cover Corvus. They each thrust and hit flesh and bone and tasted blood that was not their own and their world shrank to the immediacy of survival, except that they had a duty to protect the infantry and Corvus had to think also about that.

There were warriors on the left now, as well as the right. Corvus looked about and saw another trumpeter close to the knot of surviving archers who were firing from behind a human shield of cavalry, and scoring hit after hit, earning with each shot the gold and effort and tedium of their keep.

“The trumpeter…” Corvus mouthed it to Ursus, who nodded. They fought closer until the man saw them and fought back so that they were joined in an island of relative calm with death and wounding all about.

“Sound the two-serpent strike.”

The man stared at him, and grinned, and sounded his trumpet so that the notes flew high and pure as larks over the fighting men. They had drilled and drilled until men and mounts equally knew what to do to the sound of that, and a horse would take its own part even if its rider were dead or beyond control.

The bay mare knew it as well as the rest. Corvus felt the bunching of muscles beneath him and the straining for air and the kick of acceleration as it saw a gap and went for it. He made himself sleek and lay tight to the mane with his blade in one hand and his shield covering the horse as much as his own body and let it carry him to relative safety.

Ursus was behind him, and the trumpeter, and a growing band of his men. He swung round and felt the judder as the mare jumped off the road and began the curve that would strike at the backs of the attacking warriors. Ursus peeled away from him and rode the other way, to the right. Every second man followed him round.

For a moment, all Corvus had to do was ride. He did so, and ignored the still, small voice in the deeper part of his mind that wanted to know what it was the archers had first killed that might not have been a sleeping hog, but he dearly hoped was not human.

There were fewer warriors on the left side and they were not experienced against horses. They died without fuss. Corvus saw a movement in the shrubs to his left and directed his horse towards it. The trumpeter followed, sending silver lark-notes cascading behind. Flavius and two of the archers abandoned formation and came with him.

The deer calf had died only once, when Cunomar threw his knife into its chest.

The wound had been small, easily stuffed with dried grass and moss so that there was no smell of fresh blood that might alert passing horses. He had sewn shut its anus and prepuce with sinews so that they did not leak and similarly give it away. He broke its forelegs and worked them until they moved through the death-stiffness. Braint had found and woven the birch bark to make ropes long enough and strong enough to reach and not to break.

Pegging it in position without crushing the nettles had taken half the night so that the sky was pale and the sun roaring red on the eastern horizon by the time they backed away, laying the bark ropes along cleared lines so that a stone would not cut or block them. They had time for a single test, with Braint on the roadway and Cunomar in the far elder scrub, watching as much to see if he could be seen when he tugged on his end of the spear haft as whether the movement it made was enough to catch the eyes of passing horsemen.

So much had hung on it. So much had succeeded. So much was so close to failure.

Corvus rode directly at him. Braint came up to a crouch. Without any sign of urgency, she picked a stone from her pouch and fitted it in her sling. Cunomar had not known she used that. He regretted never having learned it himself. For no clear reason, he said, “He loves Valerius, and is loved by him.”

She smiled, thinly. “I know.”

They were close enough to smell the horses. She stood and drew back her arm.

A brown-skinned man in red silk moved with the same certain speed.

Frozen, Cunomar said, “Archers! He has two archers!”

For the rest of his life, however short or long, Cunomar would remember the pain in her face as Braint picked one target from the three that were possible, and the startling accuracy of the stone, and the venom with which it was sent, as if by killing the man who posed most danger she might damage the others whom she hated most.

She died, not knowing if she had succeeded.

Cunomar would also never forget the impersonal death of an arrow, of three arrows, sent with such speed that they might all have come from the same bowshot, so that there was not time for her parting soul to dally or consider the life that had been lived. She was alive, and then she was dead and the only reason Cunomar was not likewise was that Ulla had thrown a spear and three others of the she-bears had come from the other side and none of them was a slinger, but one was lucky and knocked the remaining archer from his horse, so that the immediate threat was over and he could reach for the bear and fail to find her and still drag his spear clear of the birch ropes and leap from the elder, and fight, and try not to die, and not have to think yet, at all, about how he was going to break the news of Braint’s death to Cygfa.

He saw a flash of movement on the edge of his vision; in a moment of bear-inspired madness, he hurled his spear.

Corvus watched the second slingstone pass his face and did not need to look to see if this one was painted black, the better to send his soul to utter annihilation, he could feel the hatred in it as it passed. He heard the impact and the slump of a man falling and jinked the bay mare sideways in case there were more slingers and swung with his sword for a warrior who came at him.

He missed, and missed again, and saw Breaca’s son leap from cover and knew he had been recognized. A spear passed him, harmlessly, and he pushed the bay mare forward into the melting maelstrom of warriors.

He had more men and more horses and they were, with all due modesty, manifestly better drilled than any native warriors. Even so, lesser men, more poorly drilled, had won against odds in the past and horses are only valuable against infantry if those on the ground are afraid of horses, and do not know them. The Eceni against whom he fought now lived and died and took their first steps on horseback. He fought, moreover, the warriors of the she-bear who did not care about living, but only death in the embrace of the bear, and honour afterwards for the life lived complete.

As if in proof, the Boudica’s son broke through the guards round the archers and drove his knife into the chest of one of the horses. Corvus watched him leap onto the back of the falling beast and take its rider down with him. Cunomar’s blade flashed red. His face was frozen in a scream of pain and triumph that no sane man could stand against. No officer would ask it of those who trusted their lives to him.

Except that there was a way, for men who had drilled to perfection and who trusted their commander.

Corvus shouted to the trumpeter, “Line! Call for a line! Back here. Form on me!”

Silvered larksong burst high over the carnage—and ceased.

The trumpeter curled up like a leaf, clutching his right shoulder from which a thrown knife protruded. His trumpet hung from the thong on his forearm. Corvus hacked once more at the shrieking banshee that assailed him—he thought it was a woman but did not stop to look—and pushed the bay battle mare forward to the man’s side. He used his own blade to cut the cords and was grateful that he kept it sharper than was necessary and that the kills of the day had not blunted its edge, more grateful still that he had learned the skills of sounding the horn, and the basic tunes of command.

Half of his men had heard him shout in any case. They were already grouping into pairs and then threes and then sixes and eights to form the line that would sweep the flat ground and trample into the earth those who thought to stand against them.

Corvus wet his lips and lifted the shining weight of the trumpet and drew breath and sought the first note, shakily—and was drowned by the brasher, louder sound of ten horns braying in unison from the front of the column.

“No! Gods curse you, no…”

He could have wept. The trumpet call was redundant. His men were on either side of him, only six were straggling to catch up, one of those wounded, two assailed on both sides and unlikely to live. Eighteen men were with him and they could have swept the broad, flat land from one end of the column to the other.

“We could still do it.”

Corvus looked to his left. Flavius was there, flushed and breathing hard and caught on a wave of victory. Their eyes met. Flavius grinned and did not hate him. He said, “We didn’t hear it. The horns are too far. We can only hear you. Tell us to charge.”

Eighteen men wanted to believe that. Not one of them would have spoken against him later. Even the governor would have acknowledged that in battle not all commands can be heard. The deified Caesar had once failed to call back his men and had sent instead a second signal for luck when he knew they had run on to victory against his command. Against such a precedent, what general could discipline men who had fought and prevailed?

Corvus lifted the trumpet to his lips. He had no need to call the line, they were already with him, drilled to perfection, sweeping round the fulcrum that he made, turning like the arm of a wheel to face south, so that they could run parallel to the road. The warriors were scattering. Two more had died. The Boudica’s son was calling, calling, to no avail…

The horns brayed again, louder. The great bull-horn of the governor’s own cavalry contingent, that took two men to carry it, sounded a single, long, earth-shuddering note. The standards of both legions and the Quinta Gallorum swung hard to left and right.

“No, damn you! Not now!” Corvus hurled the trumpet at the hard ground. It bounced and his bay mare shied and he cursed again and kicked it, which was unforgivable. His men swept about him, hard-faced, protecting him in the depth of his folly, when he was too lost in rage to guard against the slingers or spear throwers who still assailed them.

He cursed again and closed his eyes and swallowed and brought himself back into balance. Never in his life had he lost his temper in the field. He did so now, and turned the battle mare and swung his arm for want of a standard and, with a bitterness that stayed with him for the whole of the fast, hard ride back to the column, led his men away from victory to follow the governor and protect the rear of the now-running legions wherever they might lead.

“They’re gone,” said Ulla. “Why?”

“The governor’s horns called them back in a way they couldn’t ignore. Why that should have happened is anyone’s guess. Maybe Valerius has arrived early and attacked the front of the column and they see him as more of a threat than us and need their better troops to set against him. We can’t catch them on foot. They must know that.”

Cunomar knelt by Braint’s corpse. His own body was lacerated with cuts and bruised all down one side where a horse had fallen on him. He felt nothing. He leaned over Braint and put a hand to her throat to feel her pulse as if she might still be alive, which was ridiculous, but he did it all the same.

The arrows had passed into her chest in front and out again at the back, only lodged by their scarlet and black fletchings. Like that, she was unable to lie flat, but was arced, as if in agony, with her chest reaching to the sky.

She had not stiffened yet. Gently, Cunomar lifted her to sitting and propped her against his knee. He broke each of the arrows at the haft and laid her back again to rest. With his thumbs, he closed her eyes and held them shut for a while, that she might not stare so at the evening sky. Numbly, “She was Warrior of Mona. We should take her with us. Those she led will want to mourn her.”

Ulla said, “Cygfa will want to mourn her.”

“If she comes back. She went with the Boudica and we have heard nothing. It may be they are not coming back.” The thought rose unbidden from the formless fears of Cunomar’s mind and was spoken before he could force it down.

Ulla stared at him and opened her mouth and closed it again. She said, “She will come back and the Boudica will come back, and then we have the legions trapped. Valerius isn’t ahead of us; he’d have sent word with the scouts if he were. The legions aren’t running towards war, they’re running for safety, to somewhere they can defend better than an open road. All we need to do is wait for Valerius to bring up his sworn spears and we have them trapped like sheep in a fold. Tomorrow, we will set the war host on them and by evening, the land will be free of two more legions.”

Tomorrow…

Unheralded, the old nightmare returned to Cunomar, of the bear turned at bay in its den, ready to savage the first fumbling fool who came near. This time, he was in no doubt that the she-bear had sent him the image, with all its portents of danger.

Afraid to name it aloud, Cunomar made himself smile for Ulla. “Tomorrow is too far to think of. First, we need to take the wounded back to the meeting place and hope that Valerius has reached it. He has Theophilus with him who can look to the injuries. When that’s done, we need to build a pyre for Braint that will show everyone how great she was. Will you help me carry her?”

Ulla put the flat of her thumb across his mouth and smoothed away the false smile. Her gaze peeled away the layers of his falsehoods. “Of course; I’ll always help you. Why do you have to ask?”