CHAPTER 45

Gunovar sold her life hard, taking with her the man who had killed her, and the one who stood at his side. She fell forwards, and her body, for a while, blocked the incoming men.

Breaca had no time to grieve, only spoke the three words that took the dead dreamer safe to Briga, and those with little enough breath to spare. Beyond the ones who had killed Gunovar more came; the string of legionaries had become a flood and the horse-warriors of Mona were barely holding them.

They were two, she and Hawk, standing in a crescent of horses and cavalry with armoured men coming in from the front.

Breaca had found a lighter shield and someone had passed her water and she had found that she could breathe again without her throat’s feeling as if it were on fire and she could at least hold her shield arm steady, if not lift it well, and even if death were certain, there was a joy in meeting it openly, in full awareness, in the company of those she loved.

She fought as well as she had ever done; life and care were narrowed to the cut of a blade and the block of a strike and the spray of sweat and blood and the greater picture mattered not at all, nor did she want it to.

There came a moment’s respite, when one man fell dead and others had not yet stepped over the growing clutter of bodies. Hawk was still with her, a sentient shadow.

Breaca said, “Ready?” and he had the strength to grin. She picked a man and stepped forward into a sudden gap and struck at him, and he fell at the first touch, which was entirely surprising, and then Valerius was there, brilliant and savage and furious. He was no longer riding the Crow-horse, but mounted instead on a bay mare that had been her gift once to Graine and Graine’s to Corvus and she had not seen him take it. She spoke Briga’s invocation for Corvus, because he, too, must be dead.

Valerius was as welded to the mare as he had been to the Crow. Together, mare and man reaped their own harvest among the legion. Men fell back, replaced by others, who saw glory in the killing of those in front of them and cared nothing if their lives were the cost.

Even so, his passing created a space where it was possible to think and to realize that it mattered to be mounted, and so to look about for her own white-legged colt, and find that she could no longer see it, nor were any of the growing number of loose horses within reach.

“Up.” Valerius was there, just in front of her, stinking of horse sweat and breathing hard. He pushed the mare across broadside towards her and reached down to take her arm. “Up behind me. Now. Cygfa will take Hawk.”

He was her brother. He was an officer in the Roman cavalry whose orders were not given lightly and had only rarely been ignored. For both these reasons, she did as he asked and grasped his arm at the elbow and made a passable leap to the rump of his horse.

Behind, in the ranks of the legions’ reserves, six legionary trumpets pealed a short, repeating sequence.

“Not now, damn you!”

Valerius spun his new horse on its hocks. Breaca grabbed for his waist with her one good arm and held on. He set the mare to climb the ridge, and they rose for a moment above the field on the parting it created. Spread below on the eastern side was the carnage where the untrained mass of the war host battled the precision of the XIVth legion and were manifestly losing. Unable or unwilling to move to the margins, they were crushed tighter in on themselves, unable to find the space to swing their blades or use their horses or draw back an arm to wield a sling.

West of the ridge was peace and order. Ranks of unsullied blades waited there, held by men who had stood quiet and watched their brethren die, saving themselves until the time when their coming could turn the battle.

That time was now. The trumpets promised and demanded, equally. As Breaca watched, rank upon rank of legionaries detached smoothly from the lines and locked their shields and drew their blades and began the short march to the ridge. They were silver-white in the afternoon sun, a long rippling line of iron and bronze and unwavering intent. The trumpet calls clove them in the centre, separating them out into two moving wings, to make a horned moon of their own, with all the devastation of their weight behind it.

Valerius had already set the bay mare down the ridge. To stay on was a challenge; success and survival one more gift from the gods.

Breaca shouted over his shoulder, “We have to get the warriors out of the way. They need room to regroup.”

Her brother shouted something back, but it was lost in the sudden clash of iron as Cygfa and Hawk came up alongside and then Longinus and Madb and Huw and the others of Mona who bunched around her and broke through the thinning ranks of Corvus’ cavalry and were riding as she had asked, out to the farthest reach of the wagon line, where Graine waited, with Airmid and Bellos and the Greek physician who must, by now, be thinking he had picked the wrong side to support.

A white-legged black colt with the brand of the Batavians on it shoulder came to a halt in the open land near the wagons. Finding no battle around, it dropped its head to graze.

Graine waited for someone to notice and when they did not, she stepped down from the wagon and walked to it, churring quietly as she had heard Valerius do. Stone was with her and all the Batavian horses had grown with hounds from when they were foals. The old hound flopped onto the floor and lay on his side, savouring the sun. The black colt eyed girl and hound equally and chose not to run.

Her palm was heavy with salt sweat. Graine let the beast lick, and then offered the crook of her elbow which was as wet. It tasted her, and she took hold of its bridle and then grew bold, and tried to lead it. It paused a moment, to show that a choice had been made, and then followed to the place behind the wagons where the water was kept. She splashed some into the bowl of an upturned shield and it drank and grazed again and she held on to the looped ends of the reins, and prayed to the ancestor and the elder grandmother that Breaca should look across and see that her daughter had found her horse.

Quite soon after, Airmid walked past and caught a bright red colt bearing the brand of the Eceni and Hawk’s mark of the fire lizard and so it was certain that the gods had sent these two to be with them, and not simply that they had smelled the water, or knew the people on the wagon and had come by half-chance to known faces and voices they trusted.

Cunomar saw the first movement of the legions as he ran up the ridge.

He stopped and raised a hand and hollered a name. Ardacos joined him in moments; his father-in-spirit had never been far away.

Cunomar said, “We could attack them before they reach the ridge.”

“And throw our lives for nothing.” Ardacos was looking north along the ridge’s line, to where the horse-warriors of Mona fought, to where Breaca had been unhorsed and was now, astonishingly, riding doubled with Valerius. As they watched, the pair crested the ridge and down again.

There was no need to speak further; amongst the bear, some things were certain and the first of those was that the need to protect the lives of the Boudica and those who attended her was set before the immediate needs of battle.

Cunomar nodded at a question that had not been asked. Ardacos put his two fingers to his lips and whistled a soaring note that fell away at the end. The pierce of it was sharp as any trumpet. A winter’s training was paid in that one moment. Forty of the she-bears broke away from their killing and came to join him on the ridge. The remaining dozens fought on as if there were no change.

Cunomar led them. Ulla was a lithe shadow at his side. Ardacos and his older warriors held the rear, against possible attack.

Light and unarmoured, in full view of the advancing legionaries, they ran down onto the Roman side of the ridge, and along the free ground, where the fallen dead were fewer, to the far edge of the combat. There, they rose up again, behind the Boudica and those who attacked her.

At the crest of the ridge, Cunomar wiped his palm on his tunic and regripped his knife and raised his hoarse voice in the bear-howl, that the men of Rome might know on whose blade they died before Briga came to take them.

A shining tide of legionaries crested the ridge and flowed down towards the battle. Trumpets moved them, spreading them out as they came, so that half went to one side and half to the other of the massed ranks already fighting.

The two parts joined together neatly, as the hilt fits the pommel of the sword, leaving no gaps. The killing began at once, and was neatly efficient; the legions’ reserves were fit and rested and had drunk water before they marched and had trained for half their lives in the slaughter of untrained men and women.

Graine stood holding the white-legged colt, and watched half-trained youths fall like corn at harvest, and felt sick. Stone began to whine, so that she had to take hold of him with her other hand, to keep him from running into the fray.

“They’re coming.” Airmid said it; the first time she had spoken since Breaca fell from her horse. “He’s bringing her to the horses.”

Graine dragged her gaze from the slaughter and looked instead towards the boiling mass of horse-warriors and cavalry from which burst, galloping, two doubly laden horses and a surrounding guard of Mona.

Urgently and with emphasis, Bellos said, “Airmid, she’s alive,” as if there had been doubt, and might be so still.

Then Theophilus said, “Cunomar’s coming over the ridge, and Ardcaos,” and it was true.

The Boudica’s son and the Boudica’s brother arrived together, so that the two parties almost clashed, and swayed back, eyeing each other as if they might be enemy.

Valerius said, “It’s over. We need to get out and back. We have to sound the retreat.” It came almost as a question. He was not the warrior with the heart of a dreamer; he was not yet ready to take command even when he was clearly built by the gods to do so.

Cunomar said, “The she-bears follow where you lead,” and then Breaca, “The battle plan was yours, and the retreat. Do what you must.”

Valerius was a hound released into action. Orders flowed from him without cease. “Hawk, Breaca, mount your horses. Cunomar, Ardacos, call in as many of the she-bears as you can reach. Madb, Cygfa, gather the horse-warriors. We’ll need to make a rear guard to cover those leaving the field. Huw—sound the horn for the retreat.”

Graine passed close to Huw as she brought her mother’s colt to be mounted; for that reason alone, she saw the anguish on his scarred face and understood what was happening.

Huw had borne the horn of Mona for less than a day. For a thousand years, it had sounded attack. This once, at Valerius’ insistence, they had saved it for the one sound every fighting man and woman would recognize and was oath-sworn to obey: the signal to abandon the fight and run, in whatever order they could; to separate and keep on separating, making space and clear ground between them, until the ranks of legionaries had thinned so that the power of their togetherness was lost.

Huw brought the horn up and hesitated. Never had it been used thus.

“Do it!” Valerius snarled at him, savage as any hound. “We’ve lost. If Paulinus calls Henghes’ Batavian cavalry in at the wings, we’ll never live to fight again.”

Huw wet his lips raggedly and blew.

The sound of the horn was the song of the hare, made loud as a bull’s bellow. Thrice and thrice again, it rang silver-strong over the field. Legionaries and warriors hesitated in their bloodshed; the one side because it was a sound they did not know, the other because they knew it intimately, and had not expected to hear it ever, and so were not prepared.

They were not trained, either, in the art of disengagement. Graine watched men and women die who did not know how to walk backwards in battle and live. Those of Cunomar’s she-bears who had been left made a living wall for those they could reach at the far side of the field. Elsewhere, others less skilled made a wall of corpses that had much the same effect.

Unsmoothly, with overwhelming sorrow and astonishing numbers of dead, the warriors of the Boudica’s war host obeyed the command of the horn and abandoned their fight.

The white-legged colt danced on the spot, ready again for battle. Just for a moment, Graine saw Valerius’ soul stand awake in his eyes, purely Eceni, alive with the love of a horse. Then a veil dropped and he was half-Roman again, throwing out brisk orders as if all those around were his cavalrymen and he the officer.

“Mount. Everybody mount. Now.”

They were settling in the saddles when the men of Corvus’ cavalry wing broke through the lines of Mona to reach them; big men, fit and angry and led by a black-haired savage with a stinking wolfskin across his shoulders who screamed his hatred as shrilly as any she-bear. That one came for Valerius and struck at him and would have killed him if Longinus had not been there to block his blade. Graine saw nothing after that but fighting and no sense to be made of any of it.

“Get Graine out!” A man’s voice: Valerius.

Cunomar stuck his knife in a passing horse and saw it fall and then turned at Valerius’ command and went back for his sister. Hawk was already there; his brother, oath-sworn to family. He stood by a flashy grey filly with a brand on its shoulder that said it had won three races. His hands were looped in a hammock for her to mount.

“Graine. Up.” He was like Valerius, giving urgent orders, not understanding her fear of fast horses.

Cunomar said, “Graine, you must take this one. The pony isn’t fast enough. Please. We’ll help you.”

She looked at him, her face a picture of horror, then she opened her mouth and screamed, not at him, but at his brother.

“Hawk!”

The blade missed both of them, but only because of Graine. Hawk rolled and came up without his shield but wielding the blade of the she-bear, Eburovic’s blade, two-handed, as it was made to be used.

The savage with the rancid wolfskin across his shoulders turned his black colt on its hocks and came back again, howling as loud as the she-bear. Hawk shouted, “See to Graine!” and stepped in to meet him.

For Cunomar to set Graine on the horse was the matter of moments. The grey race-filly was battle-trained and stood solid as stone with mayhem around her.

“Go.” Graine whispered it, from the depths of terror. “He needs you.”

Wolfskin was good. At another time, Cunomar might have admired him. He used his horse as a weapon in the ways of the best Eceni. The she-bears were trained to overcome that, but not Hawk, who had only been brought to the edges of what the bear could give.

Even so, Hawk, too, was astonishing in his skill. He stood full on to the oncoming horse wielding the great, broad war blade as if born to it. His hair was woven in a warrior’s knot and crow feathers fluttered damp with his sweat at his left temple. He was Eceni to the roots of his hair and his soul and he fought with a grace that would have left singers weeping as they told of it round the winter fires, were there any left to see it.

There were none, only Cunomar, watching as his brother-in-soul faced down the black colt and made it swerve, slicing for its head and bringing the blade round and up to graze the back of the rider even as he spun and came back for a second pass. Each move was fluid in its economy and Cunomar could believe that he was the only one who saw that Hawk was fighting on the last of his reserves and that each controlled swing of the blade took him closer to an ending beyond which death waited draped in a stinking wolfskin, with no care for the beauty it destroyed.

The end came faster than he had thought. The black colt could turn on one hock and not break stride. Its rider spun it in a curve round Hawk and this time had the measure of the two-handed, two-looped swing. He ducked the first arc and brought his own blade back-handed across the line of its flight, flicking upwards so that his blade caught in a notch that an ancestor of Cunomar’s had created in single-handed combat against a white-haired warrior of the Coritani in a dispute over a boundary line.

Cunomar had never heard who won that fight, so many generations ago. Now, the fault in the blade cost Hawk his life, or seemed to. The great blade leaped from his hand like a salmon at spawning, and sailed high, spiralling, to come to rest three strides from where he stood.

Three strides, and it might as well have been three days’ ride. He stood unarmed before the wolf-caped rider and smiled at him, as a true warrior smiles facing death. He drew his knife, which was a brave thing, and pointless; even the she-bears would have had trouble against such as this.

He threw a smile at Cunomar, said, “Take care of Graine for me!” and stepped in to face his end.

Three strides. The blade was within Cunomar’s reach. He had almost taken it up, for the ease of it, and the chance to give it back to Hawk, that he might at least die with his brother beside him and the ancester-blade in his hand.

The shade of Eburovic stopped him, solid as the earth, as the sky, as the sweating, blowing colt and the black-bearded man who rode it. His grandfather stood before him, so close that Cunomar could see every wrinkle and line in his skin, could see the brown eyes and their care for him, could feel the eternal cold that wrapped him, could hear again the words that had been cut into Cunomar’s soul since before he returned to his homeland. If my grandchild ever wields my blade, know that the death of the Eceni will follow, and then, newly, Is one man’s life, even your brother’s, worth so much loss? The she-bear is your god and my dream. In her name, I ask you not to do this.

There was nothing he could do. His oath was to the bear, his soul given into her care in the caves of the Caledonii. The binding was complete and for life and there was nothing and no-one who could over-ride it.

He was caught in the living reality of his nightmare, but that it was Hawk who was under attack and by a wolf-man, not a bear. He could still fight, though. He had his knife and his courage and his brother had need of him. Cunomar turned, ready to help, and found that he was already too late, and that the nightmare was made complete.

“Hawk!”

No-one heard her shout this time; the noise of battle was too great. Graine watched her brother’s blade fly high from his hand and gouge a line in the earth less than a spear’s length from the back of her horse. Dubornos had been sworn to her, and she had let him die, because he wanted it. Hawk was sworn to her before all the others and so she to him and he manifestly did not want to die; he had said so to the deer-elders on the night of the horned moon.

The grey race-filly stood still as stone. Graine slid to the ground and was running even as Cunomar was running. He might have reached the blade before her, but he faltered and she did not.

The hilt swamped her hands. The blade had its own balance in the way the practice blades on Mona had never done. The feeding bear on the pommel offered its own weight and its own momentum. It dipped down, so that the long sweep of blued iron that was the blade rose without effort; and all she had to do was let her hands be the balance point between the two.

The ease of it was uncanny, so that she stared at the blade and the old marks made by the ancestors, and the new ones hacked by Hawk in his endeavours and—

“Graine!” Someone screamed her name, from beyond the end of the blade. She looked up, remembering the battle. Wolfskin came at her, grinning, and another man at his side.

She heard the wolf-caped one shout, “Flavius! This one’s mine! Her life for Corvus!” and the earth rolled with the hammer of their horses and their blades sang for her life and somewhere the elder grandmother said, Now is the time of choosing. Which matters most, your line or your land? which made no sense even as she saw Cunomar leap for the man, Flavius, with his blade bared and Hawk at his side and together they might reach him, but that still left Wolfskin, who had proved himself in battle, and now came directly for her, grinning, with his blade swept back.

She tasted death and tried not to be afraid and failed.

Then her mother was there, throwing the white-legged colt forward in all her terrible fury, and Stone was at her side, where he had wanted to be all through the battle.

The grandmother smiled and said, Good, and the world was made right.

She felt her father close.

He had been there from the moment she had slithered from the back of Valerius’ horse; a silent presence, watching. He was not alone. The grandmother was there, and the ancestor-dreamer and the Sun Hound and his lineage, they stood all around, these ancestors of her line, in the place where their children’s children lived or died. She listened for the deep bell-note of Briga’s crow and did not hear it any louder than it tolled for all the other dead.

Hawk fought brilliantly. Even as she saw him lose the blade, she knew that she had seen something exceptional and that others had seen it, enough to be sure the memory of it lived on after his death. She began the keening to Briga as the blade fell from his hands, and then stopped, because Cunomar had stepped close and she heard her own father, as clearly as she had first heard him, saying, If my grandchild ever wields my blade, know that the death of the Eceni will follow. I trust you to see it does not happen.

Cunomar heard him too. She saw him stop, and put his hand to his face and turn away from the blade and draw his knife instead. Relief left her weak, and not looking beyond so that it was too late when she shouted.

“Graine! No!”

I trust you to see it does not happen.

Far, far too late. The world hung on a blade’s edge and was falling to destruction. Graine, slim, slight, fragile and as recognizable as her mother, had walked onto the field of battle with a blade in her hand, and was about to die for it. Distantly, she heard Venutios set his question again. If it comes to the choosing, which matters more, your line or your land?

She had no idea if it had come to the choosing, only that Graine must not die. There was a poor spear’s throw between the oncoming cavalrymen and the child who carried all hope for a future in the light of her smile.

Two men came at once, each seeking the glory of having slain the Boudica’s daughter. Her two sons dealt with the incomer, Flavius, and killed him. The gods gave her the other, the wolf-caped savage, as their gift. She set the white-legged colt into a leap that halved the distance and brought him up alongside. Stone came from the other side, running almost as sound as he had done through his youth. Her heart leaped to see him.

The wolf-man did not swerve. He saw the woman, the horse and the hound and deemed them no threat. His blade was within reach of Graine.

He was right; she was too far away to stop him, except there was a move that her father had taught her, lifetimes ago, when the names of the heroes were still sung by the fire, and the ways they had died in the certain saving of others. She had never practised it; even in play-fights, the risk had always seemed too great. She set the parts one by the other in her mind now, and they were perfect.

She had less than a horse’s length to set herself ready, to leap for the neck of the oncoming horse, cutting up for its throat even while her weight pulled down and round as a bear does in the kill, so that it stumbled and fell and she heard the crack of its neck and the scintillating havoc of an armoured body slamming into the ground at a speed that must surely be fatal, before she let herself know that a sword blade had already hit her, quite hard, somewhere under her bad arm. That was always the risk: the heroes always died making this move; it was why they were heroes.

She heard Graine, and Valerius, and her father, all say her name. Somewhere nearby, Stone howled, and Hail with him.

The world closed into black.